Thursday, June 27, 2019


Have we got your attention now?
DC Court of Appeals rules OPM responsible for hacking of 22 million personnel records
Washington Post: “A federal appeals court has revived the chances of monetary awards being paid to federal employees and others whose personal information was exposed in hacks of two government databases that were revealed in 2015. The ruling criticized the Office of Personnel Management for failing to safeguard that information despite having been the target of prior hacking attempts and despite repeated warnings from its inspector general’s office that the databases were vulnerable. “OPM effectively left the door to its records unlocked by repeatedly failing to take basic, known, and available steps to secure the trove of sensitive information in its hands,” said the decision Friday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The OPM deferred a request for comment to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.
The appellate court ruled that a federal district judge erred in dismissing a combined suit brought by two federal employee unions, the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union…”




What is an adequate backup and recovery plan worth?
On June 11, DataBreaches.net noted a report that Lake City, Florida was struggling to recover from “triple threat ransomware.” The attack had occurred on May 10, and one month later, the city’s landline phones were still knocked out and other services were also affected, although emergency services were operating.
Now, one week after another Florida city, Riviera Beach, decided to pay the equivalent of almost $600,000 ransom after they were attacked, Lake City has agreed to pay almost $500,000 ransom to its attackers. When the costs of this breach are tabulated, including any replacement hardware and consulting fees, legal fees, etc., this will likely be a very costly breach for Lake City.
Whether the attackers are the same individual or group or not is unknown, but with two Florida cities paying high ransoms within a short period of time, I think we can reasonably predict many more attacks with ransom demands in the half-million to million-dollar range.
CBS News reports:
The mayor of Lake City told CBS 47 Action News Jax on Tuesday that the small city in northern Florida would give the hackers $460,000 to hand back control of email and other servers seized two weeks ago.
Read more on CBS.




The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Presidential Phone Alerts Can Be Spoofed, Researchers Say
Presidential Alerts that all modern cell phones in the United States are required to receive and display as part of the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) program can be spoofed, researchers have discovered.
Issued via the Integrated Public Alert and Warnings System (IPAWS) along with AMBER alerts and imminent threat alerts, the Presidential Alerts are intended to inform the public of imminent threats and cannot be blocked.
In a recently published whitepaper, a group of security researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder has demonstrated how Presidential Alerts could be targeted in spoofing attacks using commercially available hardware and modified open source software.




Fake browsing history is easy. I just logon to my favorite porn sites as a certain law professor I know.
Firefox Will Give You a Fake Browsing History to Fool Advertisers
Vice:Security through obscurity is out, security through tomfoolery is in. That’s the basic philosophy sold by Track THIS, “a new kind of incognito” browsing project, which opens up 100 tabs crafted to fit a specific character—a hypebeast, a filthy rich person, a doomsday prepper, or an influencer. The idea is that your browsing history will be depersonalized and poisoned, so advertisers won’t know how to target ads to you. It was developed as a collaboration between mschf (pronounced “mischief”) internet studios and Mozilla’s Firefox as a way of promoting Firefox Quantum, the newest Firefox browser…” “These trackers and these websites really commoditize you, and they don’t really make you feel like a person,” Daniel Greenberg, director of strategy and distribution for mschf, said in a phone call. “So we wanted to do something visceral that makes the user feel like they’re in control again.”


(Related) An anti-social media checker. Some interesting phrases in this video.
Companies Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Screen for Problematic Employees
Watch how a startup named Fama Technologies is using artificial intelligence to help weed out problem employees - before or after they join an organization.


(Related) ...but individual scoring is Okay?
EU should ban AI-powered citizen scoring and mass surveillance, say experts
New recommendations have also been criticized as lacking enforceability




All the guidance I can find…
UK Government’s Guide to Using AI in the Public Sector
On June 10, 2019, the UK Government’s Digital Service and the Office for Artificial Intelligence released guidance on using artificial intelligence in the public sector (the “Guidance”). The Guidance aims to provide practical guidance for public sector organizations when they implement artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.
The section of the Guidance on using AI ethically and safely is addressed to all parties involved in the design, production, and deployment of AI projects, including data scientists, data engineers, domain experts, delivery managers and departmental leads.




This is one of the worrying aspects of AI.
The first AI universe sim is fast and accurate—and its creators don't know how it works
For the first time, astrophysicists have used artificial intelligence techniques to generate complex 3-D simulations of the universe. The results are so fast, accurate and robust that even the creators aren't sure how it all works.
The real shock was that D3M could accurately simulate how the universe would look if certain parameters were tweaked—such as how much of the cosmos is dark matter—even though the model had never received any training data where those parameters varied.




Perspective. The Internet as a municipal utility.
Anacortes, Wash., Outlines City-Owned Internet Fees
The Anacortes City Council unanimously approved fees Monday for fiber-optic Internet service for residences and businesses.
It was the latest step toward building a citywide broadband network.
The City Council first passed a resolution Monday establishing the city’s right to charge for fiber Internet service just as it charges for water, sewer, other utilities, and impact and development fees.
Council members then approved fees of $39 a month for 100 megabit per second (Mbps) service, and $69 a month for 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) for residences. The prices for businesses are $89 a month for 100 Mbps and $149 for 1 Gbps.




For my geeks.
New AI programming language goes beyond deep learning
In a paper presented at the Programming Language Design and Implementation conference this week, the researchers describe a novel probabilistic-programming system named “Gen.” Users write models and algorithms from multiple fields where AI techniques are applied — such as computer vision, robotics, and statistics — without having to deal with equations or manually write high-performance code. Gen also lets expert researchers write sophisticated models and inference algorithms — used for prediction tasks — that were previously infeasible.
The researchers also demonstrated Gen’s ability to simplify data analytics by using another Gen program that automatically generates sophisticated statistical models typically used by experts to analyze, interpret, and predict underlying patterns in data.
Gen’s source code is publicly available and is being presented at upcoming open-source developer conferences, including Strange Loop and JuliaCon. The work is supported, in part, by DARPA.



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