Meta's ad transparency tools will soon reveal another treasure trove of data: advertiser targeting choices for political, election-related, and social issue spots.

Meta said it plans to add the targeting data into its Facebook Open Research and Transparency (FORT) environment for academic researchers at the end of May.

The move comes a day after Meta's reputation as a bad data custodian resurfaced with news of a lawsuit filed in Washington DC against CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Yesterday's filing alleges Zuckerberg built a company culture of mishandling data, leading directly to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The suit seeks to hold Zuckerberg responsible for the incident, which saw millions of users' data harvested and used to influence the 2016 US presidential election.

Jeff King, Meta's VP of business integrity, said that FORT would allow researchers to look at detailed targeting information for social issue, electoral and political ads.

"This data will be provided for each individual ad and will include information like the interest categories chosen by advertisers," King said. Prior to this announcement, data for social, electoral, and political ads in the run-up to the 2020 election was available as part of a pilot program. This new release will expand the pilot and add data from all ads in those categories run globally since 2020, King said.

The non-academic public has to wait until July to get their hands on that data in Facebook's Ad Library, and when released it will be in a summarized form. Included in the update will be data on total number of social, electoral, and political ads ran on a page using particular targeting data, percentage spent on the different issues, and whether the page uses a custom or lookalike audience.

King said that Meta hopes the release will "help people better understand the practices used to reach potential voters on our technologies," and emphasized yet again that Meta is "committed to providing meaningful transparency, while also protecting people's privacy." 

In addition to Zuckerberg's personal legal woes, Meta is also facing legal challenges in the US and abroad related to its advertising practices. The European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA) both take aim at big tech companies, of which Meta is an archetypal example. 

The DMA focuses on preventing companies from abusing market power, while the DSA targets advertising directly. The DSA places particularly strict requirements on advertising transparency, which Meta's announcement today addresses. US legislators have also recently introduced a bill that would crack down on large advertisers like Facebook and Google.

Big tech has been under the spotlight for how it handles advertising. Meta, in particular, was caught last year kicking transparency researchers from New York University's Ad Observatory Project off its platforms – not the first time it's done something similar.

It is hopeful to expect all of the regulation and investigation will keep Meta from these practices. For instance, less than a month ago, a study found that a Meta tracking script was harvesting data from students filing for federal aid via the US Department of Education's StudentAid.gov website, apparently a violation of the site's privacy policy. ®

Opinion Making a call on the quality of a new idea in tech can be hard. But if you ask me, not in the case of Lonestar Data Holdings, whose plan to build datacenters on the Moon is literal lunacy.

Every detail of the roadmap, from tentative tiny proofs of concept to massive underground server farms built and tended by Moon robots, is priceless nonsense. From Apollo onward, every spacecraft has had data storage and network access. We have retrieved data held in New Horizon's 16GB filing system from Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth, 16 thousand times more distant than the Moon. Concept bloody well proved.

As for building bit lairs in lava pipes by robot, nobody's built a datacenter by robot on Earth yet. And nobody seems minded to try.

Who, Me? A reminder of the devastation a simple DROP can do and that backups truly are a DBA's best friend in this morning's "there but for the grace of..." Who, Me?

"Stephen" is the author of today's confession and was faced with what should have been a simple case of applying an update to an Estimating and Invoicing system.

The system ran on a PostgreSQL-database and was, in his words, "Software that I don't touch save when there's an issue, needs rebooting, etc."

The land of the rising sun has fallen to the United States’ supercomputing might. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) newly minted Frontier supercomputer has ousted Japan’s Arm-based Fugaku for the top spot on the Top500 rankings of the world's most-powerful publicly known systems.

Frontier’s lead over Japan’s A64X-based Fujitsu machine is by no means a narrow one either. The cluster achieved peak performance of 1.1 exaflops according to the Linpack benchmark, which has been the standard by which supercomputers have been ranked since the mid-1990s.

Frontier marks the first publicly benchmarked exascale computer by quite a margin. The ORNL system is well ahead of Fugaku’s 442 petaflops of performance, which was a strong enough showing to keep Fugaku in the top spot for two years.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has backtracked on advice about how best to secure the "Aadhaar" national identity cards that enable access to a range of government and financial serivces.

UIDAI promotes the cards as "a single source offline/online identity verification" for tasks ranging from passport applications, accessing social welfare schemes, opening a bank account, dispersing pensions, filing taxes or buying insurance.

Although Bill Gates has lauded Aadhaar cards for improving access to services, the scheme has been the subject of many security-related scares as inappropriate access to personal information has sometimes been possible, UIDAI's infosec has sometimes been lax, and the biometrics captured to create citizens' records have sometimes been used for multiple individuals. Privacy concerns have also been raised over whether biometric data is properly secured stored and secured, if surveillance of individuals is made possible through Aadhaar, and and possible data mining of the schemes' massive data store.

China’s largest city, Shanghai, will this week all-but end its COVID-19 lockdowns on Wednesday, and by doing so may smooth some of the kinks in the world’s technology supply chains.

Limited lockdowns commenced in Shanghai during mid-March, before April escalations imposed city-wide restrictions that have remained in place ever since.

Shanghai is a major manufacturing hub, so the lockdowns have caused considerable pain. Cisco, for example, Cisco warned of disruption to supplies of parts it needs for power supplies. The likes of Foxconn, Tesla, and Toyota, have all ceased or slowed production. Chinese chipmaker SMIC kept production ticking over by having staff move either into its plants, or into a COVID-free zone around its plants.

Eleven significant tech-aligned industry associations from around the world have reportedly written to India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) to call for revision of the nation’s new infosec reporting and data retention rules, which they criticise as inconsistent, onerous, unlikely to improve security within India, and possibly harmful to the nations economy.

The rules were introduced in late April and are extraordinarily broad. For example, operators of datacenters, clouds, and VPNs, are required to register customers’ names, dates on which services were used, and even customer IP addresses, and store that data for five years.

Another requirement is to report over 20 types of infosec incident, even port scanning or attempted phishing, within six hours of detection. Among the reportable incidents are “malicious/suspicious activities” directed towards almost any type of IT infrastructure or equipment, without explanation of where to draw the line between malicious and suspicious activity.

In brief Somerset County, New Jersey, was hit by a ransomware attack this week that hobbled its ability to conduct business, and also cut off access to essential data.

"Services that depend on access to county databases are temporarily unavailable, such as land records, vital statistics, and probate records. Title searches are possible only on paper records dated before 1977," the county said in a statement.

The attack, which happened on Tuesday, took down email services for county government departments as well as leaving the county clerk's office "unable to provide most services which are reliant on internet access." Somerset County residents were asked to contact government offices via Gmail addresses set up for various departments, or via phone. 

Researchers in the Netherlands have shown they can transmit quantum information via an intermediary node, a feature necessary to make the so-called quantum internet possible.

In recent years, scientists have argued that the quantum internet presents a more desirable network for transferring secure data, in addition to being necessary when connecting multiple quantum systems. All of this has been attracting investment from the US government, among others.

Despite the promise, there are still vital elements missing for the creation of a functional quantum internet.

Chinese academics have christened an ocean research vessel that has a twist: it will sail the seas with a complement of aerial and ocean-going drones and no human crew.

The Zhu Hai Yun, or Zhuhai Cloud, launched in Guangzhou after a year of construction. The 290-foot-long mothership can hit a top speed of 18 knots (about 20 miles per hour) and will carry 50 flying, surface, and submersible drones that launch and self-recover autonomously. 

According to this blurb from the shipbuilder behind its construction, the Cloud will also be equipped with a variety of additional observational instruments "which can be deployed in batches in the target sea area, and carry out task-oriented adaptive networking to achieve three-dimensional view of specific targets." Most of the ship is an open deck where flying drones can land and be stored. The ship is also equipped with launch and recovery equipment for its aquatic craft. 

In-brief Governments around the world should pass intellectual property laws that grant rights to AI systems, two academics at the University of New South Wales in Australia argued.

Alexandra George, and Toby Walsh, professors of law and AI, respectively, believe failing to recognize machines as inventors could have long-lasting impacts on economies and societies. 

"If courts and governments decide that AI-made inventions cannot be patented, the implications could be huge," they wrote in a comment article published in Nature. "Funders and businesses would be less incentivized to pursue useful research using AI inventors when a return on their investment could be limited. Society could miss out on the development of worthwhile and life-saving inventions."

More papers describing the orders and messages the US President can issue in the event of apocalyptic crises, such as a devastating nuclear attack, have been declassified and released for all to see.

These government files are part of a larger collection of records that discuss the nature, reach, and use of secret Presidential Emergency Action Documents: these are executive orders, announcements, and statements to Congress that are all ready to sign and send out as soon as a doomsday scenario occurs. PEADs are supposed to give America's commander-in-chief immediate extraordinary powers to overcome extraordinary events.

PEADs have never been declassified or revealed before. They remain hush-hush, and their exact details are not publicly known.

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