German search engine Ecosia is replacing Mistral with open-weight AI models, including Chinese-developed Qwen, GLM and Kimi, through a partnership with German AI platform Melious. Founder and CEO Christian Kroll said the switch had roughly halved costs while improving quality and performance.

Here is the report: Targeted and Ignored. Sexualised Deepfakes of Women MEPs and the Failure of Platform Responses (pdf)

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An Austrian MEP has spoken out about her experience of being “stripped naked” online without her consent and has urged the EU to take action, as a report found that one in six female MEPs had been targeted by sexualised AI-generated content.

Lena Schilling of the Green party said she had learned last month about nude deepfakes of herself circulating online. When she opened the links, she found herself staring at images from one of her first ever press conferences – but the images had been digitally altered to remove her clothing.

It was a shocking twist on a defining moment of her career. “I felt disgusted,” she said. “I remember how nervous I was and how much I had prepared for the press conference. And then to see someone using this image in a way aimed at harming and humiliating me was really hard to grasp.”

Schilling is one of 50 MEPs – 46 of them women – who have been targeted by sexualised deepfakes, according to a report by Agora Digitale Transformation (ADT).

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11960652

At first glance, China appears well placed to dominate the deployment of artificial intelligence on the factory floor. The country is the world’s manufacturing powerhouse. Its AI systems are close to matching the performance of leading US rivals. And the leadership in Beijing has made industrial AI a national priority to boost economic growth.

Europe has other ideas. The continent’s old industrial conglomerates are also trying to harness AI so they can dominate the next phase of factory automation. With an ocean of production data to draw upon, companies such as Siemens, ABB and Schneider Electric are hoping the continent can corner this lucrative area of AI development after failing to produce world-leading chatbots like DeepSeek or Claude.

Success would allow those venerable companies to supply the next generation of data-driven factories and make it harder for upstart, tech-focused rivals to steal their customers. It would also help to limit Europe’s technological and economic dependence on the US and China.

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China produces around 30% of the world’s goods, worth $4.7 trillion a year, and Beijing has vowed to use AI to modernize the country’s manufacturing base. Chinese companies installed almost 60% of the world’s new industrial robots last year, according to the International Federation of Robotics, and the government is prioritizing the wide-scale deployment of AI with its “AI + manufacturing” program.

But China’s role as the world’s workshop is a relatively recent phenomenon, the quality of its factories varies widely and many facilities still rely heavily on manual labor. Europe has been installing robots and digitizing manufacturing for longer because it was a way to address the region’s relatively high labor costs. And a lot of the equipment installed in factories worldwide was made in Europe. Germany’s Siemens, for example, says it supplied one in every three factory controls deployed across the globe.

This means European companies have a lot of the data that’s needed to build the best AI-driven industrial systems. They are particularly adept at using it to predict equipment failures, improve product quality and make existing machinery more efficient, according to Antonia Hmaidi of the Mercator Institute for China Studies.

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cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/73463122

One potential candidate is the new ID Unyx 09, an electric saloon co-developed with VW's Chinese partner Xpeng, while the 4.8-metre-long ID Aura T6 SUV could sit above the smaller ID Tiguan in Europe, giving Volkswagen a Volvo EX60 rival.

• EU leaders have asked the European Commission to develop a proposal by the end of the year for the new powers, which would be deployed in an extreme case where a rival was seen as attacking the EU's economy.
• The commission is also evaluating trade data to consider replicating a cap on hybrid car imports in other sectors where shipments from China may be surging, including chemicals and machinery.

The European Union is preparing to create new trade powers that could completely shut off access to its single market as part of a dramatic new push to cut the trade deficit with China. EU leaders meeting in Brussels Thursday asked the European Commission, which handles trade matters for the bloc, to develop a proposal by the end of the year, according to people familiar with the matter. The powers would be deployed in an extreme case where a rival, such as China, was seen as attacking the EU’s economy. “If China engages in certain unfair trade practices, we could restrict the entry of Chinese products into the European market, including a complete closure of our market,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda told reporters on the sidelines of the summit. “That would be an extreme measure, a drastic instrument.”

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As part of a rapidly expanding arsenal of trade powers, the commission has also begun evaluating trade data as a first step toward replicating a cap on hybrid car imports in other sectors where shipments from China — or other countries — may be surging, said a separate person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

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The instrument that could be used to shut off access to the EU’s single market is seen as a so-called second-strike measure, the people familiar with the plans said. Its existence is intended to deter rivals from using unfair policies to weaken European companies or from starting a trade war against the EU with retaliatory measures.

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The Netherlands’ digital infrastructure inspectorate, the Rijksinspectie Digitale Infrastructuur, says a faulty update or cyberattack on manufacturer and aggregator platforms could switch enough inverters, home batteries, heat pumps and EV chargers at once to destabilize the grid. It argues in a recently published position paper that the EU Cyber Resilience Act and NIS2 directive only partly cover the companies behind those platforms.

The biggest risk sits not in individual devices but in the backend systems of manufacturers, energy management system providers and aggregators, and in the cloud platforms they use, according to the inspectorate. Because large groups of devices connect to the same backend, a single point of entry can control many of them.

A sudden imbalance between supply and demand of 3 GW or more can disrupt the grid, the regulator says, citing research by SolarPower Europe. It says the number of heat pumps and EV chargers in the Netherlands grew fivefold between 2019 and 2024.

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A European Commission expert group recommended in a report this month that solar inverters be classified as important class II products under the CRA, alongside restrictions on high-risk suppliers. The group said its analysis did not cover EV chargers, heat pumps or battery storage systems, which it could assess later.

At a cybersecurity forum in Brussels on Oct. 8, researchers from the European Network for Cyber Security (ENCS) showed how a compromised smart-home device could be used to send commands to a residential inverter or home battery on the same network.

“More high-power IoT devices are being deployed every day, and vulnerabilities in some of these devices have already been exploited and could be exploited again to disrupt the electricity grid,” said Harm van den Brink, a security researcher at ENCS. “In the short term, we need independent security testing, prioritized according to the amount of power potentially affected, combined with vulnerability management by manufacturers.”

The inspectorate presented its paper at the ONE Conference in The Hague, where researchers from Modat and the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre also reported 8,547 internet-facing systems at European solar and wind sites that should not be reachable online.

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More than half a million people demonstrated in France on Saturday in a nationwide day of protest against the high cost of living that saw hundreds of arrests.

Israeli settlers on Saturday attacked a convoy carrying a European delegation in the occupied West Bank, beating up a 78-year-old French mayor. While Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who is just days from a crucial election – described the incident as a "smear" campaign against Israeli settlers, France's top diplomat urged Israel to "urgently halt criminal violence".

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11959837

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Every month Chinese AI developers such as DeepSeek and Xiaomi dispatch the latest versions of their “open-weight” models that allow users to take the core software and use it without paying an expensive ongoing licence.

In Britain, we love cheap Chinese kit, usually setting aside any concerns about how it was made and who by.

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Beijing has huge surveillance capabilities, using AI to capture images of its citizens and monitor their activities if they need to.

Don’t think it means Chinese people are under virtual house arrest. They can go about their daily lives, gathering in the street for an impromptu dance or to discuss how their local region might be better run. But serious dissidents? They are rooted out and sidelined, re-educated or punished.

For the central committee, AI is a blessing. While the financial constraints from having to please a domestic audience have not entirely disappeared, Beijing’s leaders can concentrate on the threats they face from the rest of the world.

Not that it wants to invade countries in the same manner as Russia. China’s reinvigorated belt and road initiative creates permanent channels for trade less obviously than the previous iteration, allowing Beijing to turn states into clients who depend for the basics of life on Chinese technology.

Where Russia is using AI to enhance cyber-attacks on European government agencies and businesses to create chaos, China wants merely to widen the circle of friends that consume its goods without asking awkward questions.

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As Ross Burley says, Chinese AI comes with extra baggage. Burley is director of the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), an independent, non-profit group dedicated to, among other things, exposing human rights abuses and countering disinformation.

He says DeepSeek cannot access the properly isolated use of its software, “but that addresses just part of the risk. Running a model on your own servers doesn’t automatically remove any political censorship. Or indeed repair weaknesses in any security defences.”

"We should be deeply concerned about embedding Beijing’s political restrictions into systems that businesses and public services rely on for information and decisions,” he says.

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Michael Wooldridge, a professor of AI at the University of Oxford, says it is not unreasonable to assume data inputted into the chatbot could be shared with the Chinese state.

The consequences for policymaking are profound. The UK should reject the lure of cheap Chinese AI and seek to better tame US AI while supporting domestic and EU suppliers.

Relying on Chinese tech, from cars to AI, is going to hollow out industry and undermine the security of our data.

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cross-posted from: https://feddit.online/c/euro@feddit.online/p/2035244/the-maga-campaign-in-europe-against-regulation-of-big-tech-is-based-on-far-fetched-clai

An analysis about how US money, X’s reach and ultraconservative religious legal expertise converge against EU platform regulation

A good article which covers a lot of aspects, including what happened technically, which software flaws were exploited, that the problem affected refrigerators which did not have updated firmware. It also mentions the EU cyber resiliency act, which has the specific goal to avoid such events.

Making industrial systems secure will be many years of work, since many are decades old and software and protocols were not designed with security in mind. This also affects consumer "smart home" systems and things like "smart TVs", which are often not designed to have needed updates.

Worth mentioning that the effects of systematic attacks could be far worse - they can take out electricity, energy, and water infrastructure, payment systems, and bring things like chemical plants into an catastrophically unsafe state. The thriller "Blackout - Tomorrow will be too late" by Marc Elsberg describes such a (fictional) scenario with hacks targeting smart meters and industrial control systems for power plants, and it is in parts more realistic than one would wish. IIRC there have been such hacks targeting the oil company Saudi Aramco.

About why the "NOT FOR EU" labels on food packaging exists, how Nordern Ireland stores import from EU rather than Britain, and how new agreements could make the "not for EU" label unnecessary in the future.

Investment in Greece has rebounded significantly after years of contraction during the previous decade, reaching 18% of gross domestic product (GDP)

Greece is well placed to build on the significant progress made in recent years