If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Digital scams have become increasingly sophisticated and Google’s latest innovation offers a promising defense mechanism. But, like with all things Google promotes as progress, how it impacts lives and the implications of the technology could become a major civil liberties issue – especially anti-privacy EU officials are likely salivating at the idea of the technology. Announced at the I/O developer conference, the company is testing a new call monitoring feature designed to protect Android users from phone scams. This feature leverages Gemini Nano, a streamlined version of Google’s Gemini large language model, which can run locally on devices to detect fraudulent language and patterns during calls, alerting users in real time. While this development is a significant step forward in combating scams, it also raises crucial questions about privacy and the potential for broader applications that could infringe on personal freedoms. Gemini Nano: A Powerful Tool Against Scams Google’s new feature utilizes advanced AI to scan for signs of scamming behavior, such as requests for personal information, urgent money transfers, and payments via gift cards. By operating entirely on-device, Gemini Nano ensures that conversations remain private and supposedly (and in theory) do not need to be sent to external servers for processing. The EU’s Perspective: From Child Safety to Potential Overreach The European Union has been at the forefront of legislative efforts to regulate the online world, particularly in protecting children from sexual abuse material – or at least using that as an excuse to erode privacy. The EU’s “Chat Control” proposal, for instance, has sparked significant debate due to its implications for privacy and encryption. Initially, the proposal mandated that tech companies implement client-side scanning (CSS) (that’s on-device scanning) to detect bad content before it is encrypted and sent, which many critics argue could lead to mass surveillance, weaken end-to-end encryption, and ultimately be used to monitor and detect whistleblowers, dissidents, or anyone else a government would want to surveil. While Google’s new scam detection feature is focused on phone calls, it sets a precedent for the use of advanced AI in real-time content monitoring. Some tech companies have pushed back against such invasive anti-privacy proposals. But now that Google has decided to implement this to detect scams, the floodgates could open to other forms of on-device scanning. Now that the technology exists and is being used anyway, this development could embolden the EU to extend similar requirements to other forms of communication, such as emails, chats, and social media interactions, under the guise of preventing various types of harmful content, including “misinformation,” “hate speech,” and other activities. Today it’s scams, tomorrow it’s dissent. It hints at a future when it’s not just the cloud that people need to be concerned about when it comes to surveillance and the monitoring of speech, they’ll also have to contend with whether they ultimately have privacy on their devices themselves. Privacy Concerns and the Slippery Slope The potential for such technology to be expanded beyond its initial purpose raises significant privacy concerns. If the EU were to mandate the use of client-side scanning for a broader range of content, it could lead to a scenario where all forms of digital communication are subject to constant monitoring. This could effectively dismantle the privacy protections afforded by end-to-end encryption, as all messages would need to be scanned for illegal content before being encrypted. Critics argue that this approach could create a surveillance state, where personal communications are continuously scrutinized by AI algorithms, as mandated by governments. The risk of false positives, where legitimate content is incorrectly flagged as harmful, is another serious concern. Such errors could ultimately lead to unwarranted scrutiny of innocent individuals and chilling effects on free speech where even your own device isn’t safe from dissent monitoring. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Google’s New Conversation-Listening Tech Could Embolden Governments To Mandate On-Device Speech Scanning appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

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Recent years have seen some studies challenge the assumed gender roles of hunter-gatherer societies, arguing that women are often integral to hunting and aren't solely berry-picking gatherers. However, a new study was weighed into the debate and suggested that some of this research may have overblown their claims. Last year, an influential study looked at data on 63 modern-day foraging societies from around the world, including Indigenous peoples from North and South America, Africa, Australia, Asia, and Oceania.They concluded that women actively hunt in 79 percent of these societies. Furthermore, in societies where hunting was considered the most important subsistence approach, women actively participated 100 percent of the time.In the latest study, a group of researchers strike back against the 2023 study, arguing their conclusions were based on methodological flaws and selection bias.They attempted to replicate the 2023 study, but came to a totally different conclusion: women hunters were very much the exception rather than the rule.The researchers contend that the previous study drew upon an ethnographic database where "explicit" information about hunting was available, which created a selection bias and a misleading conclusion. They also identified "numerous coding errors", which they say undermined the paper's conclusions“As a diverse group of hunter-gatherer experts, we find that claims that foraging societies lack or have weak gendered divisions of labor are contradicted by empirical evidence,” the study authors write. “Gendered divisions of labor are a feature of every known contemporary hunter-gatherer (forager) society. While gender roles are certainly flexible, and prominent and well-studied cases of female hunting do exist, it is more often men who hunt,” they added. Nevertheless, the researchers maintain that it is important to dispel the outdated notion that women in hunter-gatherer societies never hunt, arguing that men’s dominance in hunting has likely been overstated in the past.Over the past few years, several studies have suggested that women hunted in many prehistoric hunter-gatherer cultures. Most prominently, a 2020 study into a 9,000-year-old burial site in the Andean highlands of Peru suggested that a “nontrivial” number of females were proud hunters of big-game. Women were frequently buried with a big-game hunting toolkit that included stone projectile points, such as sharpened weapons and tide-scraping tools, indicating that big-game hunting was an integral part of their lives.Whether this was the norm, however, is up for debate.This latest study believes that it is vital to constantly reassess the world to see how bygone ideas may have shaped our previous conclusions. Likewise, though, we should be wary that today’s mindsets will likely cloud our perceptions too.“We caution against ethnographic revisionism that projects Westernized conceptions of labor and its value onto foraging societies,” the study authors write. The new study is published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

Not everyone has an inner monologue – it turns out that between 5 and 10 percent of the population don’t experience near-constant internal dialogue with themselves. According to new research, this group may find certain problem-solving tasks more difficult, particularly those involving verbal memory.Lack of an inner voice, or anendophasia as it’s been coined in the recent study, is still a bit of a mystery. We have ideas of what it's like to live with, but much less of a clue as to what the implications of it may be. In fact, this research is, to the team's best knowledge, “the first to conduct a systematic investigation of whether differences in inner speech have behavioral consequences”.And it just so happens that they do. The new findings suggest that having no inner voice may negatively impact a person’s verbal working memory and ability to judge rhymes – although it doesn’t seem to affect task-switching or perceptual discrimination capabilities.In a series of experiments, the researchers tested the impact of having or not having an inner monologue on these four things. The tests involved 46 people who reported low levels of inner speech and 47 people who reported high levels.The first experiment required them to remember words that were spelled similarly or sound alike, such as “bought”, “caught”, “taut”, and “wart”. If you have inner speech, you might repeat the words inside your head to help remember them, but if you don’t, it might be more difficult, the authors theorized.“[T]his hypothesis turned out to be true: The participants without an inner voice were significantly worse at remembering the words,” study co-author, linguist Dr Johanne Nedergård from the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement.The same was true in the second experiment, which asked participants to determine whether a pair of pictures contained words that rhyme (e.g. sock/clock). Those with less inner speech performed worse when identifying the rhymes. “Here, too, it is crucial to be able to repeat the words in order to compare their sounds and thus determine whether they rhyme,” Nedergård added.In the other two experiments, which focused on switching quickly between different tasks and distinguishing between similar figures, people’s success seemed to be unrelated to differences in inner speech.“Taken together, our experiments suggest that there are real behavioral consequences of experiencing less or more inner speech,” the team concludes, adding that “these differences may often be masked because people with anendophasia use alternate strategies to achieve similar overall performance.”For example, some reported tapping with their index finger during one type of task and with their middle finger during another, Nedergård explained. As for how significant these observed impacts are in practice, we’re not yet sure. “The short answer is that we just don't know because we have only just begun to study it,” said Nedergård, though she suspects it may be important for how people respond to different types of therapy.Although the study was small, it still provides much-needed insight into anendophasia and will hopefully act as a springboard for future research to help answer some of the many remaining questions around it.The study is published in the journal Psychological Science.

Since 2020, a concerning trend has emerged in the Strait of Gibraltar area off the coast of Spain, where a pod of killer whales has been displaying aggressive behavior towards boats and yachts. The motivation behind this unusual behavior among killer whales remains a mystery. Typically, these marine mammals exhibit neutral behavior towards humans in the wild, refraining from aggressive encounters. One theory suggests that an individual orca named Gladys may have been injured following a collision with an unidentified vessel. Subsequently, Gladys and her pod initiated a series of attacks on yachts, potentially as a form of retaliation against humans. Reports indicate that Gladys, along with her pod of approximately 15 individuals, has been observed engaging in aggressive behavior towards ships in the vicinity of Gibraltar. It is presumed that they were responsible for the collision with and subsequent sinking of a yacht on May 12th. While killer whale attacks on boats are not uncommon, the severity of the incidents has escalated in this region. Over the span of four years, there have been around 700 documented attacks on boats and yachts, resulting in only a few sinkings. Unfortunately, individuals in this area have experienced particularly unfortunate encounters. According to Reuters, the sailing yacht “Alboran Cognac,” measuring 15 meters in length and manned by two crew members, sustained damage during one of these encounters. The crew members reported feeling significant impacts on the vessel’s side and near the steering wheel around 9 a.m. local time, followed by the onset of flooding within the interior. Promptly issuing a distress signal, the crew members were fortunate to receive assistance from an oil tanker in the vicinity, which facilitated their rescue from the stricken yacht. Shortly thereafter, the abandoned vessel succumbed to the sea and sank. The post Killer whales deliberately rammed and sank a yacht in the Strait of Gibraltar appeared first on Anomalien.com.