This article caught my attention for several reasons. Firstly, Russia’s surprising absence from the AI race. Secondly, there is the strategic positioning of Middle Eastern players, such as the UAE, who are using their immense investment capabilities to manoeuvre between superpowers. Thirdly, this is not just about AI; it’s also about broader digital sovereignty. Unlike (…)
This article is interesting because it links digital trust to systemic AI dangers—not just small tech glitches. It predicts how in 2026 AI might spread lies, spy on people, or disrupt jobs and markets faster than today’s content‑moderation and governance mechanisms can manage. This leaves us to question who should control key AI technology.
How do our institutions and the trust they are built on evolve in a digital world? Interview of Imad Aad, project manager at the Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) at EPFL.
I find this article interesting because it puts a spotlight on how the technical limits and product decisions of LLMs can shape, and sometimes distort, people’s perception of real-world events. It’s striking to see the same news prompt produce authoritative, up-to-date answers from some models and a blunt, incorrect denial from others, simply because of (…)
I found this article particularly interesting because it highlights how major European companies like Airbus are now treating cloud sovereignty as a strategic criterion in their procurement processes. By explicitly requiring ‘a European provider’ in their tenders, they set an important precedent for other enterprises and even governments across Europe. This move reinforces the idea (…)
C4DT Focus #10, entitled “Swiss democracy faces its digital crossroads”, by C4DT, in collaboration with Gregory Wicky. Fake signature collection, fake ID scandals, and a razor-thin vote on the new federal e-ID have presented the country with an uncomfortable question: how do our institutions and the trust they are built on evolve in a digital world? (…)
Although the target audience of this legal analysis from noyb of the European Commission’s ‘Digital Omnibus’ proposal is clearly lawyers, it still gives the layperson a good overview of the proposed changes to the GDPR and their practical implications.
AI is often anthropomorphized, with terms like ‘hallucinations’ having entered technical jargon. All the more striking that when the capabilities of popular models today are discussed, ‘intelligence’ is reduced to one set of benchmarks or another, but seldom considered in a holistic way. I liked this article for putting the human, and not the machine, (…)
Improvements in agentic AI and increasing competency of hackers are driving more sophisticated cyber attacks, from mere AI-augmented intrusions to ever more autonomous operations. While this is deeply concerning, such efforts can only succeed when infrastructure is vulnerable. Investing in the cybersecurity of our infrastructures has never been more pressing.
In this paper, Mélanie Kolbe-Guyot, Head of Data Governance and Compliance at Statistisches Amt Basel-Stadt, and formerly C4DT’s Head of Policy, examines the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in Swiss public administration and provides recommendations for its responsible, trustworthy and effective use.
The number of AI-generated images of child sex abuses is rapidly increasing. But thanks to a new UK law, tech companies and child safety agencies are joining forces and being given legal testing permission, allowing experts or audit models to proactively screen for CSAM risk rather than wait for illegal content to appear. The law (…)
The ‘hacker paragraph’ in Germany is a law saying that you are not allowed to break into foreign IT systems, not even for research, nor as a white hat hacker who discloses their findings responsibly. The development or distribution of such software is also prohibited. For researchers and white hat hackers alike, this is of (…)
Although written from the point of view of the U.S. healthcare system, quite a few of the issues raised in this essay are universal. I appreciated this in-depth discussion of the impact of AI on the healthcare system because it not only points out the detrimental consequences these technologies have, but also puts these consequences (…)
Bubble or no bubble? In this interview, the president of Signal shares her analysis: dominant AI is not just a neutral technological advance, but the result of an economic model of platforms that concentrate data and computing power among a few giants, creating monopolies, geopolitical and security risks—and requiring strict regulation (e.g., enforcement of the (…)
I really appreciate Jimmy Wales’s insistence that sticking to Wikipedia’s core principals of neutrality, factuality and fostering a diverse community around the globe will eventually prevail in today’s polarized digital landscape. As a nerd myself I also relate very strongly to his enthusiasm of working on Wikipedia for the sake of doing something interesting over (…)
I found Simon Willison’s blog post interesting because he self-critically builds on his lethal trifecta concept. He clearly explains why prompt injection remains an unsolved risk for AI agents and highlights the practical “Rule of Two” for safer design (proposed by Meta AI). He also discusses new research showing that technical defenses consistently fail. His (…)
Here is another post-quantum implementation of a popular protocol: Signal announced the addition of a quantum-safe algorithm to increase the protection of the messages sent between two Signal users. Like other quantum-safe algorithms, it doesn’t replace the currently used cryptographic base, but rather enhances it. Interestingly, the biggest hurdle was the size of the new (…)
One of the increasingly popular paradigms for managing the growing size and complexity of modern ML models is the adoption of collaborative and decentralized approaches. While this has enabled new possibilities in privacy-preserving and scalable frameworks for distributed data analytics and model training over large-scale real-world models, current approaches often assume a uniform trust-levels among (…)
State-of-the-art architectures in many software applications and critical infrastructures are based on deep learning models. These models have been shown to be quite vulnerable to very small and carefully crafted perturbations, which pose fundamental questions in terms of safety, security, or performance guarantees at large. Several defense mechanisms have been developed in the last years (…)
noyb’s latest victory may sound like a technicality – who is responsible for complying with the GDPR – but it is actually very important, because if no one knows who is responsible, no one really is responsible. All the more important that the ruling clearly holds Microsoft U.S. as the company actually selling the product (…)
With our conference on “Assessing the Disruptions by AI Agents” in mind, I found this article compelling because it documents the alarming acceleration of cyberattack capabilities thanks to AI agents. This raises the critical question of whether we are approaching a tipping point at which defence becomes structurally impossible. However, the authors offer cautious optimism, (…)
Many countries are investing in “sovereign” AI to compensate for the linguistic, cultural, and security shortcomings of American and Chinese models. Examples include SEA-LION in Singapore, ILMUchat in Malaysia, and Apertus in Switzerland, which are designed for local uses and characteristics. However, these initiatives face major obstacles: very high costs, massive computing power and talent (…)
An important part of digital trust is being in charge of your own data. Unfortunately, nowadays this is not at all the case. Some of your data resides in the cloud, e.g., with cloud-drives like Google Drive, directly accessible to you. But most of your data is hidden from you, saved on the servers of (…)
This long portrait of one of the leading authorities in the world on AI touches only lightly on concepts that those focused on safe and trustworthy AI prioritize, like explainability. But I think the key take-away from this article is that ‘it is hard, in the current AI race, to separate out purely intellectual inquiry (…)
