I have many questions...
20 of the
best social media monitoring tools
Social
Media Explorer: “There’s enough social media monitoring tools
on the market to get you absolutely confused. This list is here to
help. Every tool on the list does what it claims to do (which is not
universal among software and products in general) – it either
focuses on social media monitoring exclusively or does social media
monitoring as a part of a broader toolkit. When in the right hands,
it will definitely help improve customer service, raise brand
awareness, and prevent a social media crisis. And some of the tools
do even more than that…”
For all my students.
The wait for the victims of GandCrab is over: a new decryption tool has been released today for free on the No More Ransom depository for the latest strand of GandCrab, one of the world’s most prolific ransomware to date.
This tool was developed by the Romanian Police in close collaboration with the internet security company Bitdefender and Europol, together with the support of law enforcement authorities from Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, UK, Canada and US FBI.
In addition to versions 1, 4 and early versions of 5, the new tool resolves infections with version 5.0.4 through 5.1 – the latest version developed by the cybercriminals.
WHY THE FUSS?
GandCrab has surpassed all other strains of ransomware in 2018, having infected over half a million victims since it was first detected in January last year.
Back in October, a decryption tool was made available covering all but two versions of the then existing versions of the malware. This tool followed an earlier release back in February. Downloaded more than 400 000 times so far, these two tools have helped close to 10 000 victims retrieve their encrypted files, saving them some USD 5 million in ransomware payment.
The GandCrab criminals have since released new versions of the file-encrypting malware, all of which are covered by the tool released today.
The best cure against ransomware remains diligent prevention. Users are strongly advised to use a security solution with layered anti-ransomware defences, regularly back up their data and avoid opening attachments delivered with unsolicited messages.
Find more information and prevention tips on www.nomoreransom.org
While we’ve been concentrating on self-driving
cars…
The Navy
just bought a fleet of robot submarines to prowl the oceans and mess
with adversaries
The Navy is bulking up its fleet of autonomous
robot vessels with the purchase of a cadre of four of Boeing's
extremely
large and incredibly grandiose unmanned Orca submarines.
On Feb. 13, the Navy awarded Boeing a $43 million
contract
to produce four of the 51-foot Orca Extra Large Unmanned Undersea
Vehicles (XLUUVs) that are capable of traveling some 6,500 nautical
miles unaided, the U.S. Naval Institute reported.
According to USNI, the Navy could potentially
deploy the Orcas from existing vessels to conduct "mine
countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare,
electronic warfare and strike missions."
We need to know how this works.
Expanding
transparency around political ads on Twitter
… Last May, we launched our Political
Campaigning Policy in the United States to provide clear insight
into how we define political content and who is advertising political
content on Twitter. In conjunction, we launched the Ads
Transparency Center (ATC). The ATC allows anyone across the
globe to view ads that have been served on Twitter, with even more
details on political campaigning ads, including ad spend and
targeting demographics.
Today, we’re expanding our political ads policy
and transparency approach to include all European Union member
states, India, and Australia.
(Related)
Over the weekend, Google presented
a white paper at the Munich
Security Conference detailing how it fights disinformation across
its largest services. This includes efforts covering Google Search,
News, and YouTube, as well as advertising platforms.
… The full
white paper is worth a read and covers what steps Google is
taking in its four key products.
GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out. An old sin with
new sinners? Has anyone (BJS?) done a comparative study?
Dirty Data,
Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data,
Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice
Richardson, Rashida and Schultz, Jason and
Crawford, Kate, Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights
Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and
Justice (February 13, 2019). New York University Law Review Online,
Forthcoming. Available at SSRN
in PDF:
“Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using
algorithmic predictive policing systems to forecast criminal activity
and allocate police resources. Yet in numerous jurisdictions, these
systems are built on data produced within the context of flawed,
racially fraught and sometimes unlawful practices (‘dirty
policing’). This can include systemic data manipulation,
falsifying police reports, unlawful use of force, planted evidence,
and unconstitutional searches. These policing practices shape the
environment and the methodology by which data is created, which leads
to inaccuracies, skews, and forms of systemic bias embedded in the
data (‘dirty data’). Predictive
policing systems informed by such data cannot escape the legacy of
unlawful or biased policing practices that they are built on.
Nor do claims by predictive policing vendors that these systems
provide greater objectivity, transparency, or accountability hold up.
While some systems offer the ability to see the algorithms used and
even occasionally access to the data itself, there is no evidence to
suggest that vendors independently or adequately assess the impact
that unlawful and bias policing practices have on their systems, or
otherwise assess how broader societal biases may affect their
systems.
In our research, we examine the implications of
using dirty data with predictive policing, and look at jurisdictions
that (1) have utilized predictive policing systems and (2) have done
so while under government commission investigations or federal court
monitored settlements, consent decrees, or memoranda of agreement
stemming from corrupt, racially biased, or otherwise illegal policing
practices. In particular, we examine the link between unlawful and
biased police practices and the data used to train or implement these
systems across thirteen case studies. We highlight three of these:
(1) Chicago, an example of where dirty data was ingested directly
into the city’s predictive system; (2) New Orleans, an example
where the extensive evidence of dirty policing practices suggests an
extremely high risk that dirty data was or will be used in any
predictive policing application, and (3) Maricopa County where
despite extensive evidence of dirty policing practices, lack of
transparency and public accountability surrounding predictive
policing inhibits the public from assessing the risks of dirty data
within such systems. The implications of these findings have
widespread ramifications for predictive policing writ large.
Deploying predictive policing systems in jurisdictions with extensive
histories of unlawful police practices presents elevated risks that
dirty data will lead to flawed, biased, and unlawful predictions
which in turn risk perpetuating additional harm via feedback loops
throughout the criminal justice system. Thus, for any jurisdiction
where police have been found to engage in such practices, the use of
predictive policing in any context must be treated with skepticism
and mechanisms for the public to examine and reject such systems are
imperative.”
(Related) Does anyone teach the proper use of
emojis in high school English classes?
Emoji are
showing up in court cases exponentially, and courts aren’t prepared
Bay Area prosecutors were
trying to prove that a man arrested during a prostitution sting was
guilty of pimping charges, and among the evidence was a series of
Instagram DMs he’d allegedly sent to a woman. One read: “Teamwork
make the dream work” with high heels and money bag emoji placed at
the end. Prosecutors said the message implied a working relationship
between the two of them. The defendant said it could mean he was
trying to strike up a romantic relationship. Who was right?
Emoji are showing up as
evidence in court more frequently with each passing year. Between
2004
and 2019, there was an exponential rise in emoji and emoticon
references in US court opinions, with over 30 percent of all cases
appearing in 2018, according to Santa Clara University law professor
Eric Goldman, who has
been tracking all of the references to “emoji” and “emoticon”
that show up in US court opinions. So far, the emoji and emoticons
have rarely been important enough to sway the direction of a case,
but as they become more common, the ambiguity in how emoji are
displayed and what we interpret emoji to mean could become a larger
issue for courts to contend with.
Sure.
Can Science
Fiction Predict the Future of Technology?
… The article “Science
Fiction and the Future” quotes Arthur C. Clarke: “A critical
. . . reading of science fiction is essential training for anyone
wishing to look more than ten years ahead.” And in “Does
science fiction — yes, science fiction — suggest futures for
news?”, Loren Ghiglione quotes author Orson Scott Card on the
necessity of science fiction’s “thought experiments”: “We
have to think of them so that if the worst does come, we’ll already
know how to live in that universe.”
Both the idea of looking to the future, and the
possibility of using fiction to do that, are relatively new. In “Has
Futurism Failed?“, David Rejeski and Robert L. Olson write
that:
A fundamental change in human thinking about the future began in the 18th century, as technological change accelerated to a point where its effects were easily visible in the course of a single lifetime, and terms such as progress and development entered human discourse… Speculation about the future became more common as human beings increasingly reshaped the world during the 19th and early 20th centuries, though it was seen largely as entertainment, a diversion from the often stark realities of everyday life. Yet some of that speculation proved surprisingly close to the mark.
For my geeks.
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