Weekly output: 5G platforms, AI in financial services, AI and supply chains, Kamala Harris on AI, AI infrastructure, Gmail’s AI calendar integration, Android 16, AI and information security
It’s a rare week when my work doesn’t touch on AI at all, but moderating panels at a conference devoted to that subject–and writing up two other talks there–helped ensure that AI figured in all but two of the items below.
3/10/2025: Practical means profitable: Telco talk about building services on 5G’s framework, Light Reading
My MWC Barcelona coverage for outside clients closed out with this writeup for this trade-pub client–my first there in a few months–of a panel in which telco executives talked about how they were building new lines of business on their 5G platforms.
Patreon readers, however, got one more post about MWC in which I shared three other highlights from the show.
3/10/2025: Banking on AI for personalized customer experiences, HumanX
The first panel I did at this conference–in Las Vegas for its first year, moving to San Francisco next year–had me quizzing Better.com’s Vishal Garg, Clearcover’s Kyle Nakatsuji, Honeybook’s Colleen Stauffer, Sunrise AI’s Deepak Shrivastava and S&P Global’s Bhavesh Dayalji about how they see AI changing customer service.
3/10/2025: AI-powered supply chains: From farm to table and beyond, HumanX
Since this panel–featuring Altana’s Peter Swartz, Fusion Fund’s Lu Zhang and Choco AI’s Daniel Khachab–focused on agriculture, I opened it by telling the audience that I found the subject particularly interesting because I eat food.
3/11/2025: Kamala Harris Urges Those Working on AI to Consider Trust, Empathy, PCMag
The former vice president–whom I last saw in person in October from much farther away–was a late addition to the conference agenda. I hustled to get from the airport to the conference hotel, check in, drop by bag and get over to the event in time to get a seat in the third row for the Sunday-evening program that ended with Harris.
3/11/2025: Rethinking infrastructure: Custom solutions for the AI era, HumanX
My big takeaway from the conversation I had onstage with Sid Sheth of d-Matrix and Ami Badani of Arm: Industry hype about AGI (“artificial general intelligence” that could replicate a human brain) is a distraction, and not a particularly helpful one at that.
3/11/2025: Gmail Gets AI Calendar Feature That Apple Added to Its Mail App in 2007, PCMag
I missed this Google announcement Monday but had to write about it once I realized that the feature Google touts as an AI advancement is something that Apple delivered with plain old software in Mac OS X Leopard 18 years ago.
3/13/2025: Android 16 Inches Toward a Launch With Accessibility-Focused Third Beta Release, PCMag
Google PR gave me an advance on the news of third beta release of Android 16.
3/14/2025: Ex-Facebook CISO Warns: 95% of Bugs in Your AI System Haven’t Been Invented Yet, PCMag
I always learn something when Alex Stamos talks about information security, and I was happy to share that with PCMag readers.
#5G #AI #AIInfrastructure #AlexStamos #Android16 #AppleDataDetectors #Barcelona #customerService #cx #dataCenters #GoogleGemini #HumanX #informationSecurity #infosec #KamalaHarris #LasVegas #MacOSXLeopard #MWC #MWC2025 #supplyChains #Vegas
#AlexStamos, the fmr #Facebook chief #security officer who founded the #Internet Observatory 5 yrs ago, moved into an advisory role in Nov. Observatory #research manager Renée DiResta’s contract was not renewed in recent wks.
The collapse of the 5-yr-old Observatory is the latest & largest of a series of setbacks to the community of #researchers who try to detect #propaganda & explain how #FalseNarratives are manufactured, gather momentum & become accepted by various groups.
"It is just much harder for a volunteer-run, distributed system to roll out protections like E2EE than a centralized company."
#AlexStamos, #SaraShah, #StanfordInternetObservatory, 2023
https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/common-abuses-mastodon-primer
Explain the logic underlying that conclusion. Counterexample, the Matrix network. A distributed system, much of which is volunteer-run.
"Mastodon users probably aren’t aware of CSAM on the platform unless it leaks into their federated timelines. This can happen when a fellow user on their instance follows an account posting CSAM. Ways to handle this problem are few. Though users who follow CSAM-disseminating accounts can be suspended from an instance by administrators, they can easily set up a new account on another..."
#AlexStamos, #SaraShah, #StanfordInternetObservatory, 2023
https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/common-abuses-mastodon-primer
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"While large platforms with robust trust & safety teams are able to be more discerning in their moderation..."
#AlexStamos, #SaraShah, #StanfordInternetObservatory, 2023
https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/common-abuses-mastodon-primer
Are they though?
Centralised moderation teams often lack the context to know what they're looking at. Fediverse admins each take care of a small, well-defined bit of overall moderation; the bit that affects accounts on their server. They know what's acceptable in their community.
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Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) op-ed at @CNN: “When it comes to TikTok, the US is blind” — waging proxy war on China via TikTok will make the USA & “The West” more *like* China
Personally, I am outright terrified of how people will interpret Alex saying:
It turns out that there is no US law clearly governing the access that Beijing or Moscow-based employees of any tech or social media company have to the personal data of US citizens that use their services.
…because damn we don’t need NOFORN to become a private-sector employment issue in the tech industry. I broadly agree with Alex… but then I know Alex, and also I possess the nuance to read his:
The US and our allies also need to seriously engage in the information war, both by protecting and supporting journalists who are able to operate independently of any government, and by building civil society coalitions that create public resiliency against the Chinese-style censorship that is invading countries such as India and Turkey.
…as a call for supporting the transparent and open internet, rather than (as others in Government might interpret) a call for “us” to match “them” in terms of investment in propaganda. In other words: I didn’t stop reading after the first comma.
Links
The Op-Ed is here:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/23/opinions/tiktok-data-privacy-china-stamos/index.html
…but it’s a regrettably painful experience to view on mobile; if you’re stuck there’s a copy at:
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