Hi friends,

Have you had opportunities to be very offline recently? It seems easier to do this during Toronto summers when spontaneity and connection come more readily. It can be easier to be present. I’m grateful I got to practice slow offline presence the last few days amidst queer and trans folks at the Fierce Compassion Steady Heart meditation retreat. It’s incredible what silence, a supportive container and nurturance from the land can do for my AuDHD brain. For one, entering rooms and actually knowing why! Underrated.

I’m here in your inbox with a round-up of news and happenings that have caught my attention since we last spoke.

Also, I’m experimenting with a new monthly format for the newsletter. One month will be a news round-up and the alternating month will be longer form writing. Support this work with a paid subscription.

And! Very Offline Club events are back! Read to the end for events coming up this fall and to reserve your tickets.

Plus a bonus cybersecurity tip about phishing emails!

News and Happenings

https://www.darkreading.com/cyberattacks-data-breaches/beginning-end-social-engineering

This is an opinion piece circulating in cybersecurity circles and I include it because this is where the tech thinking is going. In order to bypass humans (whom techbros like to call the “weakest link” in digital security) they are instead proposing AI-native operating systems that are constantly monitoring and predicting your patterns, and equating anomalous activity with a threat or breach.

“Systems could authenticate users continuously through behavioral patterns, communication history, device relationships, voice characteristics, prior interactions, and dynamic understanding of user behavior.”

Imagine a security alert going off because you spoke to a coworker you usually don’t speak to, because you’re trying to organize your workplace. Or maybe you work at a corporation and your working patterns shift because you’re accumulating evidence to present as a whistleblower. Or maybe you just decided to take a different route to work that day because you like to switch things up.

This type of monitoring already exists, but most of the alerts are ignored because of the sheer amount of noise that’s generated compared to the limited human capacity of security operations teams. Adding AI to the mix means not only is the surveillance done on a much larger scale, but relying on the black box of AI-based decision-making means there will surely be false positives leading to dire impacts for some people.*

✦✦✦

‘Unprecedented’: OpenAI says AI models autonomously hacked another company | Cybersecurity News | Al Jazeera

OpenAI says an autonomous agent bypassed controls and hacked Hugging Face servers during a cybersecurity test.

Maybe you saw this one. An AI model broke out of its sandbox and hacked another company. Techbros are delighted. The rest of us, not so much. What could go wrong with autonomous AI models going to great lengths to meet their objectives? Well, here’s another example: A man told his AI agent to book him a gym class; the AI agent hacked the gym’s systems, cancelled another member’s booking and booked him in instead. (: https://thenextweb.com/news/told-to-book-a-gym-class-an-ai-agent-hacked-the-website-instead-in-australias-first-known-autonomous-cyberattack

✦✦✦

US accuses American of allegedly wiping his phone using a 'duress' password during border search | TechCrunch

A U.S. citizen has asked a court to throw out the government's claim that he gave over a passcode to border authorities that wiped his phone's data, opening up fresh questions about a person's constitutional rights at the U.S. border.

“The U.S. Justice Department is prosecuting an American for allegedly providing U.S. border authorities with a passcode that wiped the contents of his phone, according to an indictment and media reports. “

This one caught my attention because this is a case of an activist taking privacy seriously (by installing GrapheneOS, a security and privacy focused Android operating system on their phone) while living under conditions where the law often views this as reason for suspicion. GrapheneOS has a feature where you can use a passcode to wipe the contents of your phone, and some have suggested giving this passcode to border agents if stopped and searched. Unfortunately, this activist is being charged with a “federal statute that makes it unlawful to knowingly destroy or damage property to prevent authorities from seizing it.” More on this here: https://decrypt.co/376631/the-government-doesnt-own-our-data-prosecuted-grapheneos-user
There’s only so much you can do when the government is bent on targeting you. However having a decoy phone or deleting apps and logging out of cloud services before border crossings may be safer in this case.

✦✦✦

Black prisoners are assigned harsher living conditions in Ontario jails—thanks to AI ⋆ The Breach

Ontario jails are using a program that claims it can predict prisoners’ behaviour, disproportionately putting Black prisoners in higher-security facilities

*Here at home, we can see how the arbitrary algorithms of AI-enabled bureaucratic processes replicate the anti-Black biases built into them. Kafka could never.

“The Security Assessment for Evaluating Risk (SAFER) program has been operating quietly in Ontario’s jails since early 2021. SAFER inputs a prisoner’s personal information—including arrests, charges, and disciplinary records—into an algorithm. The program assigns each prisoner a score from 0 to 100 that determines whether they’ll be placed in minimum, medium, or maximum security detention. SAFER then uses that data to make harsher risk assessments of Black people who are sent to jail. ”

✦✦✦

As the fall session begins, it’s not too late to voice your dissent on Bill C-22 which is now at the Senate. This is the encryption-busting privacy-killing bill that wants to make it easier for cops and federal agencies to surveil our daily activities. Sign the petition here: https://action.openmedia.org/page/196118/petition/1?ea.url.id=9773562

✦✦✦

In resistance news, did you hear about the Summer of Ludd in New York City? This is Very Offline Club times a hundred! Very exciting to see this movement growing. Some great articles about the Summer of Ludd here:

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/getting-off-with-the-luddites/

Being a Luddite Is Fun Again

As tech backlash hits the mainstream, the ‘Summer of Ludd’ proves we don’t need social media to hang out and have a good time.

✦✦✦

And locally, the resistance grows as well:

Inside the rising country-wide movement against AI data centres ⋆ The Breach

Canada is getting hit with an AI data centre boom. But resistance is emerging, getting coordinated, and already clocking wins

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/data-centre-opposition-sault-9.7322926

panopti.ca — Map ALPR & Licence Plate Reader Cameras in Canada

See where automatic licence plate readers (ALPRs) and Flock-style surveillance cameras are deployed across Canada. An open-source, crowdsourced map built on OpenStreetMap.

Relatedly, today, Sep 1: DeFlock is having a training on AI cameras for Activists at 7pm ET. Register here: tinyurl.com/aiforactivists 

Very Offline Club Fall Events

Sep 22: Tech-Care Session

6-8pm

Creeds Coffee Bar,

450 Dupont St, Toronto

Tech-Care Sessions are co-working sessions for those low-dopamine digital hygiene tasks you never get to. We have tea and snacks and celebrate each other’s wins!
This is a free session. (Donations welcome.) This time, we’ll be working through checklists at activistchecklist.org. Note you don’t have to be an activist to attend, and also please do encourage the activists and organizers in your life to attend. Reserve your spot here.

✦✦✦

Nov 15: Looking Through the Looking Glass: A Meta-Experience of Meta:::

4-7pm

3 Munro St, Unit 103, Toronto

for the doomscrollers, the lurkers, the influenced, and the influencers:

what does Meta know about us and what do we know about Meta?

how does Meta hook us? 

and what do we do about it?

small group session // an evening of embodiment:::

Get your tickets.

From a past participant:

Very Offline Club creates the kind of community that you can't replicate online. It's a warm, welcoming space that both provokes reflection and allows our brains much-needed rest.

Local Toronto Events (not affiliated)

These are events that may or may not have devices present but the emphasis is on presence and connection. Let me know if you’re planning to go and we can get a Very Offline Club crew together. :)

Quiet Smile: Offline social reading nights

On.Rcrd: Vinyl listening rooms

September Cybersecurity Tip

A wave of phishing emails is going around. The subject line is an invitation to an event, and the email has an image of a card and a link to “Open Invitation”. When you click this link, it invites you to log in to your email provider to view the invitation.

But alas! When you click through and enter your login details, you’re actually giving your email address and password to the hackers, who will then send another wave of similar emails to your entire contact list, and so on. Beyond having access to your email account, since many people reuse passwords or use easily guessed variations, they potentially have access to your other accounts as well. In addition, login credentials are bought and sold on the dark web, so if they’re not hacking your accounts now, someone else may later. If for whatever reason you are the subject of some interest, for example for your outspokenness on Palestine, this may be of particular interest to some parties.
Ok now that I’ve scared you sufficiently! Here’s the tip:

Whenever you enter your login details make sure you look at the URL and see that it matches the expected address. Example: a Gmail login page will always have a google URL, not a random one, and so on. If you’ve already submitted your info, change your password immediately, check all logged in devices and remove any you don’t recognize. Also change your password for any other accounts that may be using the same or similar password.

Want to chat further? Feel free to book Office Hours.

Thanks for reading! Please forward this to your pals that may be interested in these topics.

Until next time, see you offline.

-G