Saturday, July 13, 2019


Is there real concern that DHS would cover up Russian hacking?
Bipartisan Legislation to Require DHS Alerts on Election Hacking
Bipartisan legislation formally unveiled this week would require the Department of Homeland Security to send notifications on breaches affecting the election systems.
… “It has now been nearly two months since Florida delegation members were briefed by the FBI on the two hacked counties in Florida – and the voters in these counties still don’t know if Russians have accessed their personal data,” Waltz said.
The bill would require federal officials to promptly alert appropriate state and local officials and Members of Congress when there is credible evidence that an election system has been breached and voter information believed to have been altered or otherwise affected.
State and local officials would then be required to alert potentially affected voters of the incident.




Just saying…
Microsoft Office 365: Banned in German schools over privacy fears
State of Hesse says student and teacher information could be "exposed" to US spy agencies.
The state's data-protection commissioner has ruled that using the popular cloud platform's standard configuration exposes personal information about students and teachers "to possible access by US officials".
Besides the details that German users provide when they're working with the platform, Microsoft Office 365 also transmits telemetry data back to the US.
Last year, investigators in the Netherlands discovered that that data could include anything from standard software diagnostics to user content from inside applications, such as sentences from documents and email subject lines. All of which contravenes the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, the Dutch said.




How the police state works?
Revealed: This Is Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops
Palantir is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data analysis. The company acts as an information management service for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporations like JP Morgan and Airbus, and dozens of other local, state, and federal agencies. It’s been described by scholars as a “secondary surveillance network,” since it extensively catalogs and maps interpersonal relationships between individuals, even those who aren't suspected of a crime.
Palantir software is instrumental to the operations of ICE, which is planning one of the largest-ever targeted immigration enforcement raids this weekend on thousands of undocumented families. Activists argue raids of this scale would be impossible without software like Palantir.
The document obtained by Motherboard for this story is public and viewable on DocumentCloud.




For a minute there I was excited. Then I realized they meant a human to ‘direct’ AI, not the other way around.
VA Appoints First-Ever Artificial Intelligence Director
The agency tapped Dr. Gil Alterovitz, a Harvard Medical School professor and member of the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, to spearhead its efforts to improve veteran care through AI-enabled solutions.




Making AI ubiquitous.
AI at the Very, Very Edge
TinyML is a community of engineers focused on how best to implement machine learning (ML) in ultra-low power systems.
… “TensorFlow Lite has been targeting mobile phones but we are excited about running it on ever smaller devices,” he said.
After building a model in TensorFlow, engineers can run it through the Tensor Flow Lite converter, which “makes it smaller and does things like quantisation, which allow you to reduce the size and precision of the model down to a scale where it will fit comfortably on the device you are targeting,” he said.
Situnayake described one technique that could be used to increase power efficiency, which involves chaining models together.
Imagine a cascading model of classifiers where you have a really low power model using barely any power to detect if there is a sound going on, then another model that takes more energy to run, which figures out if it’s human speech or not,” he explained. “Then a deeper network that only wakes up when these conditions are met, that uses more power and resources. By chaining these together, you only wake up the [energy intensive] one when you need to, so you can make big savings on energy efficiency.”




Baby them!
The AI technique that could imbue machines with the ability to reason
… “Obviously we’re missing something,” he said. A baby can develop an understanding of an elephant after seeing two photos, while deep-learning algorithms need to see thousands, if not millions. A teen can learn to drive safely by practicing for 20 hours and manage to avoid crashes without first experiencing one, while reinforcement-learning algorithms (a subcategory of deep learning) must go through tens of millions of trials, including many egregious failures.
The answer, he thinks, is in the underrated deep-learning subcategory known as unsupervised learning. While algorithms based on supervised and reinforcement learning are taught to achieve an objective through human input, unsupervised ones extract patterns in data entirely on their own. (LeCun prefers the term “self-supervised learning” because it essentially uses part of the training data to predict the rest of the training data.)




What must we do to gain their attention?
Facebook’s $5 billion FTC fine is an embarrassing joke
Facebook gets away with it again
Facebook’s stock went up after news of a record-breaking $5 billion FTC fine for various privacy violations broke today.
From some other perspectives, that $5 billion fine is a big deal, of course: it’s the biggest fine in FTC history, far bigger than the $22 million fine levied against Google in 2012. And $5 billion is a lot of money, to be sure. It’s just that like everything else that comes into contact with Facebook’s scale, it’s still entirely too small: Facebook had $15 billion in revenue last quarter alone, and $22 billion in profit last year.
The largest FTC fine in the history of the country represents basically a month of Facebook’s revenue, and the company did such a good job of telegraphing it to investors that the stock price went up.
Here’s another way to say it: the biggest FTC fine in United States history increased Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth.




Perspective. (Podcast) “I am shocked. Shocked I tell you!”
Dysfunctional Justice: What’s Wrong with the U.S. Legal System
Bruce Cannon Gibney discusses his new book about how our legal system has deteriorated since the 1950s as laws have become needlessly complex, clouded by politics and influenced by money.



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