Dear Supreme Court,
The Privacy Foundation at DU’s Sturm College of
Law has operated for several years by careful use of a cy pres fund.
Judging by the number of students and lawyers who attend their
seminars, this was money wisely invested. So, if you are looking for
a way to benefit Google users and the public at large…
U.S.
Supreme Court divided over Google privacy settlement
U.S. Supreme Court justices, in an internet
privacy case involving Google, disagreed on Wednesday over whether to
rein in a form of settlement in class action lawsuits that awards
money to charities and other third parties instead of to people
affected by the alleged wrongdoing.
… Roberts also said it was “fishy” that
settlement money could be directed to institutions to which Google
already was a donor. Some beneficiary institutions also were the
alma mater of lawyers involved in the case, conservative Justice
Brett Kavanaugh noted.
… In endorsing the Google settlement last
year, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said
each of the 129 million U.S. Google users who theoretically could
have claimed part of it would have received “a paltry 4 cents in
recovery.”
Clearly I’m not the only one anticipating a
repeat of 2016, or worse.
This is not
surprising:
This year, I bought two more machines to see if security had improved. To my dismay, I discovered that the newer model machines -- those that were used in the 2016 election -- are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easier to exploit than the older ones. Our voting machines, billed as "next generation," and still in use today, are worse than they were before -- dispersed, disorganized, and susceptible to manipulation.
Cory Doctorow's comment
is correct:
Voting machines are terrible in every way: the companies that make them lie like crazy about their security, insist on insecure designs, and produce machines that are so insecure that it's easier to hack a voting machine than it is to use it to vote.
I blame both the secrecy of the industry and the
ignorance of most voting officials . And it's not getting
better.
Perhaps I should buy a smartphone, or I may cease
to exist!
Joe Cadillic writes:
Surveillance cameras will soon be able to identify everyone by talking to their cellphones.
“This system basically allows surveillance cameras to talk to the public through their individual phones,” Purdue Univeristy doctoral student Siyuan Cao said.
As the above video illustrates, soon no where will be safe from Big Brother’s prying eyes.
Purdue University’s SIMBA Labs has developed a camera-to-human surveillance program called PHADE otherwise known as Private Human Addressing. The name of this new program, seems appropriate as everyone’s privacy will soon phade fade away. (Pun intended.)
Read more on MassPrivateI.
Betrayal! My vacuum cleaner gave Google a
detailed plan of my house? Are they selling this to burglars?
(iRobbers?)
Google
wants to improve your smart home with iRobot’s room maps
Google and iRobot have
announced they’re working together to improve smart home technology
using mapping data collected by iRobot’s robot vacuums. The two
companies say the aim is to make smart homes “more
thoughtful” by leveraging the unique dataset collected
by iRobot: maps of customers’ homes.
I’m sure they’ll get it right, eventually.
UK
Regulator Issues Second GDPR Enforcement Notice on Canadian Firm
On
6 July 2018, the UK's data protection regulator (ICO) issued the
first
GDPR-related enforcement notice. It was delivered on Canadian
firm Aggregate IQ.
… That
enforcement notice requires that AIQ should within 30 days "Cease
processing any personal data of UK or EU citizens obtained from UK
political organisations or otherwise for the purposes of data
analytics, political campaigning or any other advertising purposes."
AIQ
appealed
the notice. In that appeal, AIQ states "the data continues
to be held by AggregateIQ for the simple reason that it remains
subject to a preservation order made by Canadian officials."
… The
ICO has now issued a new enforcement notice (PDF)
that "varies and replaces the Notice served on AIQ dated 6 July
2018. The Notice clarifies the steps to be taken by AIQ..."
… But,
comments Flint, "Given that the October Notice states in
paragraph 2 that it "clarifies the steps to be taken by AIQ",
some lack of clarity remains. What is to happen to the personal data
of non-UK data subjects mentioned in the July Notice? What about UK
data subjects who have e-mail addresses other than ".co.uk"
-- such as outlook.com? Does the "clarification" go beyond
the original Notice which had a purpose restriction on the use of the
data -- the October Notice seems to be all encompassing."
In
short, he adds, "the October Notice may provide some
"clarification" but really raises as many questions as it
answers."
The
consequences of a “false positive” are growing as tools like this
become more widespread.
A number of border control checkpoints in the
European Union are about to get increasingly—and
unsettlingly—futuristic.
In Hungary, Latvia, and Greece, travelers will be
given an automated lie-detection test—by an animated AI border
agent. The system, called iBorderCtrl, is part of a
six-month pilot led by the Hungarian National Police at four
different border crossing points.
“We’re employing existing and proven
technologies—as well as novel ones [i.e.
new and unproven Bob] —to empower border agents to
increase the accuracy and efficiency of border checks,” project
coordinator George Boultadakis of European Dynamics in Luxembourg
told
the European Commission. “iBorderCtrl’s system will collect
data that will move beyond biometrics and on to biomarkers of
deceit.”
The virtual border control agent will ask
travelers questions after they’ve passed through the checkpoint.
… For travelers who pass the test, they will
receive a QR code that lets them through the border. If they don’t,
the virtual agent will reportedly get more serious, and the traveler
will be handed off to a human agent who will asses their report.
But, according to the New Scientist, this pilot program won’t, in
its current state, prevent anyone’s ability to cross the
border.
… Keeley Crockett at Manchester Metropolitan
University, UK, and a member of the iBorderCtrl team, said that they
are “quite
confident” they can bring the accuracy rate up
to 85 percent. But more than 700 million people travel
through the EU every year, according to the European
Commission, so that percentage would still lead to a
troubling number of misidentified “liars” if the
system were rolled out EU-wide.
Continuing a discussion with my students. (Do we
get this instead of HQ 2.0?)
Amazon’s
second ever 4-star store opening at Park Meadows mall in Lone Tree
… the experience offered by the
4,000-square-foot Amazon store that opens Thursday inside the Park
Meadows mall is best described as the physical equivalent of walking
into the Amazon.com homepage.
The first display table inside the door features a
group of top-rated products that appear on many Amazon’s user’s
online wish lists.
… “It’s something we’re really excited
about because we think we’re bringing a new approach to building a
store,” Cameron Janes, vice president of physical stores for Amazon
4-star said Wednesday. “We’re trying to create a store that is a
direct reflection of our customers.”
There are even excerpts from online reviews posted
below products on the shelves. Digital sales tags update prices in
real time based on what an item is selling for online.
Should my students look at this?
Handshake,
a LinkedIn for university students and diversity, raises $40M
LinkedIn
has created and — with 562
million users — leads the market in social platforms for people
who want to network with others in their professions, as well as look
for jobs. Now a startup that hopes to take it on in a specific niche
— university students and recent grads, with a focus on diversity
and inclusion — has raised a substantial round to grow. Handshake,
a platform for both students looking to take their early career steps
and employers that want to reach them, has raised $40 million in a
Series C round of funding, after hitting 14
million users in the U.S. across 700 universities, and
300,000 employers
targeting them.
A data analysis tool.
Why Jupyter
is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice
… Jupyter is a free, open-source, interactive
web tool known as a computational notebook, which researchers can use
to combine software code, computational output, explanatory text and
multimedia resources in a single document. Computational notebooks
have been around for decades, but Jupyter in particular has exploded
in popularity over the past couple of years. This rapid uptake has
been aided by an enthusiastic community of user–developers and a
redesigned architecture that allows the notebook to speak dozens of
programming languages
… For data scientists, Jupyter has emerged as
a de facto standard, says Lorena Barba, a mechanical and aeronautical
engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Mario
Jurić, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle who
coordinates the LSST’s data-management team, says: “I’ve never
seen any migration this fast. It’s just amazing.”
I’m not a fan, either taking or teaching.
Assessing
Online Learning in Law Schools: Students Say Online Classes Deliver
Dutton, Yvonne and Ryznar, Margaret and Long,
Kayleigh, Assessing Online Learning in Law Schools: Students Say
Online Classes Deliver (October 2018). Denver
University Law Review, Forthcoming; Indiana University Robert
H. McKinney School of Law Research Paper Forthcoming. Available at
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3242824
“This is the first article to provide empirical
data on the effectiveness of distance education in law schools since
the ABA this summer approved increasing the total number of credits
that law students could earn through online classes from 15 to 30.
Our data, composed of law student surveys and focus groups, reveal
not only the success of distance education in their experience, but
also the methods that are most effective for them.”
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