The Rundown for May 23, 2022

• Marginalia: “This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.”

• The tombstone of Evelyn Davis (Twitter post): “Power is greater than love, and I did not get where I am today by standing in line, nor by being shy.”

• Really deep dive into the internal workings of a mechanical watch

• Planting Undetectable Backdoors in Machine Learning Models :

Given the computational cost and technical expertise required to train machine learning models, users may delegate the task of learning to a service provider. We show how a malicious learner can plant an undetectable backdoor into a classifier. On the surface, such a backdoored classifier behaves normally, but in reality, the learner maintains a mechanism for changing the classification of any input, with only a slight perturbation. Importantly, without the appropriate "backdoor key", the mechanism is hidden and cannot be detected by any computationally-bounded observer. We demonstrate two frameworks for planting undetectable backdoors, with incomparable guarantees.

• Contra Chrome - “With her meticulous rearrangement of Scott McCloud's Google-commissioned Chrome comic from 2008, she delivers what she calls "a much-needed update". Laying bare the inner workings of the controversial browser, she creates the ultimate guide to one of the world's most widely used surveillance tools.”