Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Government


PETLP: A Privacy-by-Design Pipeline for Social Media Data in AI Research

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce PETLP (Privacy-by-design Extract, Transform, Load, and Present), a compliance framework that embeds legal safeguards directly into extended ETL pipelines. Central to PETLP is treating Data Protection Impact Assessments as living documents that evolve from preregistration through dissemination. Through systematic Red-dit analysis, we demonstrate how extraction rights fundamentally differ between qualifying research organisations (who can invoke DSM Article 3 to override platform restrictions) and commercial entities (bound by terms of service), whilst GDPR obligations apply universally. We demonstrate why true anonymisation remains unachievable for social media data and expose the legal gap between permitted dataset creation and uncertain model distribution. By structuring compliance decisions into practical workflows and simplifying institutional data management plans, PETLP enables researchers to navigate regulatory complexity with confidence, bridging the gap between legal requirements and research practice.


Adversarial Defence without Adversarial Defence: Enhancing Language Model Robustness via Instance-level Principal Component Removal

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have driven substantial progress in natural language processing but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, raising concerns about their robustness in real-world applications. Previous studies have sought to mitigate the impact of adversarial attacks by introducing adversarial perturbations into the training process, either implicitly or explicitly. While both strategies enhance robustness, they often incur high computational costs. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective add-on module that enhances the adversarial robustness of PLMs by removing instance-level principal components, without relying on conventional adversarial defences or perturbing the original training data. Our approach transforms the embedding space to approximate Gaussian properties, thereby reducing its susceptibility to adversarial perturbations while preserving semantic relationships. This transformation aligns embedding distributions in a way that minimises the impact of adversarial noise on decision boundaries, enhancing robustness without requiring adversarial examples or costly training-time augmentation. Evaluations on eight benchmark datasets show that our approach improves adversarial robustness while maintaining comparable before-attack accuracy to baselines, achieving a balanced trade-off between robustness and generalisation.


Defense lawyer for man charged with igniting deadly Palisades fire calls case thin and labels it scapegoating

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Among the evidence collected from the digital devices of Jonathan Rinderknecht of Florida, who was arrested in the Palisades fire, were images he generated on ChatGPT depicting a burning city, said acting U.S. Atty. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Jonathan Rinderknecht, 29, a one-time L.A. Uber driver and now Florida resident, was arrested by the FBI on Oct. 7 and charged with destruction of property for allegedly starting a Jan. 1 blaze known as the Lachman fire that smoldered for six days until it became the most destructive wildfire in Los Angeles history.


Why the F5 Hack Created an 'Imminent Threat' for Thousands of Networks

WIRED

Why the F5 Hack Created an'Imminent Threat' for Thousands of Networks Networking software company F5 disclosed a long-term breach of its systems this week. The fallout could be severe. Thousands of networks--many of them operated by the US government and Fortune 500 companies--face an "imminent threat" of being breached by a nation-state hacking group following the breach of a major maker of software, the federal government warned on Wednesday. F5, a Seattle-based maker of networking software, disclosed the breach on Wednesday. F5 said a "sophisticated" threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its network over a "long term."


Trump says he will meet Putin in Hungary for Ukraine talks after 'very productive' call

BBC News

Trump says he will meet Putin in Hungary for Ukraine talks after'very productive' call US President Donald Trump says great progress was made during a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, with the pair agreeing to face-to-face talks in Hungary. He said the call, the first with Putin since mid-August, was very productive, adding that teams from Washington and Moscow will meet next week. Trump did not confirm a date for his meeting with Putin in Budapest. The Kremlin said work on the summit would begin immediately after the extremely frank and trustful call. The talks came a day before Ukraine's President Zelensky was to visit the White House, and with Trump weighing whether to arm Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles capable of striking deep into Russia.


Adiós, AirPods

The Atlantic - Technology

Apple promises to put an AI interpreter in everyone's ears. It couldn't even help me order tamales. Earlier this week, I stopped for breakfast in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a largely Hispanic neighborhood where street vendors sell tamales and rice pudding out of orange Gatorade coolers. I speak some Spanish, but I wanted to test out Apple's new "Live Translation" feature, which has been advertised as a sort of interpreter in your ears. I popped in my AirPods, pulled up the Translate app, and approached.


EU sets 2027 target for anti-drone system to defend against Russia

BBC News

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has said a new anti-drone system should be fully operational by the end of 2027, as part of a drive to toughen defences against Russia and be fully prepared for possible conflict by 2030. Drones are already redefining warfare. Having drone defences is no longer optional for anyone, Kallas said, referring to Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine and fears that Moscow may attack the EU. The European Commission's defence roadmap also proposes strengthening the EU's eastern borders and building air and space shields. Several EU nations have faced Russian incursions into their airspace and US President Donald Trump has urged the bloc to do more to defend itself.


Major UK rare earths refinery scrapped in favour of US

BBC News

Plans for a groundbreaking rare earths refinery in East Yorkshire have been abandoned, after the company behind the project decided to seek investment in the United States instead. Pensana has spent the past seven years developing a rare earths mine in Angola. The $268m (£185m) project, one of the largest of its kind in the world, will begin delivering raw materials in 2027. The company had planned to build a refinery at the Saltend Chemicals Plant near Hull, which would have processed the raw materials into metals used to create powerful magnets. These magnets would then be used in high-tech applications such as motors for electric vehicles, wind turbines and robotics.


India casts doubt on Trump's claim Modi will stop buying Russian oil

BBC News

India casts doubt on Trump's claim Modi will stop buying Russian oil India's foreign ministry has said it is not aware of a phone call in which US President Donald Trump claimed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to stop purchasing Russian oil. On Wednesday, Trump said his Indian counterpart had assured me today that it would end Russian oil imports, a move the US has pushed for in a bid to increase economic pressure on the Kremlin to end the war in Ukraine. But asked about the call on Thursday, an Indian government spokesman cast doubt on Trump's account, saying he was not aware of any conversation between the two leaders taking place the previous day. The Indian government had earlier said discussions were still ongoing with the US over its Russian oil purchases. India has become a key energy customer for Russia since the outbreak of the war, partly allowing the Kremlin to withstand the impact of Ukrainian allies slashing oil and gas imports, the country's biggest export market.


Israel's exploding robots still terrorise Gaza neighbourhoods

Al Jazeera

Will Hamas agree to hand over its weapons? Has another Nakba been averted? 'When the bombs in Gaza stop, the true pain starts' The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas brought thousands of people back to their homes in Gaza City, to assess the damage, see what can be salvaged, and start to rebuild. In Jabalia, Sheikh Radwan, Abu Iskandar and beyond, people returned to flattened neighbourhoods, and to the knowledge that, still among the rubble, some of the explosive robots that had caused it sat, silent and undetonated. The "robots" had become a common fear in northern Gaza since the Israeli army first used them on Jabalia refugee camp in May 2024.