There
are a number of questions I’d like answered.
Congress
Wants Capital One, Amazon to Explain Data Breach
Leaders
of House and Senate committees want Capital One and Amazon to explain
to Congress how a hacker
accessed personal information from
more than 100 million Capital One credit card customers and
applicants.
… "As
this is not the first incident in which Capital One's customer data
was exposed, we need to understand what bank regulators have been
doing to ensure that this bank and other banks have strong
cybersecurity policies and practices," Waters said. She plans
legislation to improve oversight of the cybersecurity of financial
institutions.
In
a letter Thursday to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Jordan and other
Republicans on the House Oversight panel note that Capital One data
was stored on a cloud service provided by Amazon Web Services. The
suspected hacker , Paige Thompson, is a former Amazon software
engineer. [Connection or
coincidence? Bob]
My
class will be in favor.
Apple
suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns
In
response to concerns raised by a Guardian story
last week over
how recordings of Siri queries are used for quality control, Apple is
suspending the program world wide. Apple says it will review the
process that it uses, called grading, to determine whether Siri is
hearing queries correctly, or being invoked by mistake.
In
addition, it will be issuing a software update in the future that
will let Siri users choose whether they participate in the grading
process or not.
(Related)
Google
will pause listening to EU voice recordings while regulators
investigate
Google
has agreed to stop listening in and transcribing Google Assistant
recordings for three months in Europe, according to German
regulators.
In
a
statement released today, Germany’s
data protection commissioner said the country was investigating after
reports that
contractors listen to audio captured by Google’s AI-powered
Assistant to improve speech recognition. In the process, according
to the reports, contractors found themselves listening to
conversations accidentally recorded by products like the Google Home.
… A
Google spokesperson said it had itself moved to pause “language
reviews” while it investigated
recent media leaks. [“We
will find out who ratted us out!” Bob]
Extrapolation?
California
privacy act interpretation could make common newsgathering practice
unlawful
Reporters
Committee for Freedom of Information –
” The California court of appeal is considering an expansive
interpretation of state privacy law — in a pending lawsuit pending
involving Yelp — that would
make it unlawful to take notes during telephone conversations.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and a coalition of
17 media organizations are urging the court to reject the argument
that the California
Invasion of Privacy Act prevents
note taking. In the case, plaintiff Eric Gruber alleges that Yelp
violated the CIPA by recording conversations between him and Yelp
employees. Yelp argues that it only made “one-way” recordings in
which only the Yelp employee’s voice was recorded.
The district court found that Yelp did not violate CIPA, but Gruber appealed, calling for a more “expansive” reading of what qualifies as a recording under the law that would include “all simultaneously-created records” as long as they are “registered in reproducible form,” whether that be audio, written, photographic or another form of recording. In a friend-of-the-court brief filed July 10, Reporters Committee attorneys argue, along with 17 media organizations, that this expansive interpretation of CIPA could potentially make journalists responsible for damages or criminalize those who take notes — either by hand or by computer — during conversations and consequently, criminalize the common journalistic practice of notetaking. Note taking should not be considered recording, “even if done without the consent of all parties to the communication.”…
Another
minor problem?
Evidence
in the Age of Privacy: Access to Data in the Criminal Justice System
The
California Consumer Privacy Act, scheduled to go into effect on
January 1, 2020, will make it harder for people accused of crimes to
defend themselves. So would the New York Privacy Act, introduced on
May 9, 2019. And so would eight of eleven proposed federal privacy
bills currently under consideration in the United States Congress.
Most likely, lawmakers aren’t even aware of the problem.
… The
vast majority of proposed laws share a common feature — they grant
law enforcement more or better access to useful data than they afford
to defense counsel and the investigators who work with them.
In
exchange for Amazon giving the cops video from the door cameras?
Amazon-owned home security company Ring is
pursuing contracts with police departments that would grant it direct
access to real-time emergency dispatch data, Gizmodo has learned.
The California-based company is seeking police
departments’ permission to tap into the computer-aided dispatch
(CAD) feeds used to automate and improve decisions made by emergency
dispatch personnel and cut down on police response times. Ring has
requested access to the data streams so it can curate “crime news”
posts for its “neighborhood watch” app, Neighbors.
Is
there much left to reveal?
Edward
Snowden memoir to reveal whistleblower’s secrets
The
Guardian – In
Permanent Record, the former spy will recount how his mass
surveillance work eventually led him to make the biggest leak in
history –
“After
multiple books and films about his decision to leak the biggest cache
of top-secret documents in history, whistleblower Edward
Snowden is
set to tell his side of the story in a memoir, Permanent Record. Out
on 17 September, the book will be published in more than 20 countries
and will detail how and why the former CIA agent and NSA
contractor
decided to reveal the US government’s plans for mass surveillance
around the world and in the US – which included monitoring phone
calls, text messages and emails. UK publisher Macmillan said the
book would see him “bringing the reader along as he helps to create
this system of mass surveillance, and then experiences the crisis of
conscience that led him to try to bring it down”…”
Interesting
but complicated. Will they flag Russian ads?
This
Tool Lets You See Facebook’s Targeted Political Ads All Over the
World
Vice
– Facebook
has failed to be fully transparent with data concerning political
advertising, so two researchers collected the data themselves.
”A
team of two researchers has created the most comprehensive
visualization
of Facebook’s political advertisements.
Detailing hundreds of thousands of ads across 34 countries by more
than 150 political actors, ad.watch
is
a new tool aimed at providing transparency to political
advertisements on the platform. Three years after the Cambridge
Analytica scandal,
in which user data was used to target political ads, someone has
finally made a way for ordinary people to learn which political
campaign ads are being posted on Facebook all around the world.
“With ad.watch, you can explore both country-specific contextual
issues and political strategies, as well as broader questions about
the power of persuasion that the use of personal data facilitates,”
the website notes. “Through our interfaces, you can understand
targeting and optimization, compare monetary investment, and trace
the timelines of ads.”…”
Is
the Visicalc of AI on the way?
Bringing
machine learning to the masses
Artificial
intelligence (AI) used to be the specialized domain of data
scientists and computer programmers. But companies such as Wolfram
Research, which makes Mathematica, are trying to democratize the
field, so scientists without AI skills can harness the technology for
recognizing patterns in big data. In some cases, they don't need to
code at all. Insights are just a drag-and-drop away. One of the
latest systems is software called Ludwig, first made open-source by
Uber in February and updated last week. Uber used Ludwig for
projects such as predicting food delivery times before releasing it
publicly. At least a dozen startups are using it, plus big companies
such as Apple, IBM, and Nvidia. And scientists: Tobias Boothe, a
biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and
Genetics in Dresden, Germany, uses it to visually distinguish
thousands of species of flatworms, a difficult task even for experts.
What
are you looking for?
Facebook
open-sources algorithms for detecting child exploitation and
terrorism imagery
Facebook
will open-source two algorithms it uses to identify child sexual
exploitation, terrorist propaganda, and graphic violence, the company
said today. PDQ and TMK+PDQF, a pair of technologies that store
files as digital hashes and compare them with known examples of
harmful content, have been released
on Github,
Facebook said in a blog post.
Capitalizing
on ignorance. What has politics become?
Biden’s
flubbed text message appeal launches at least five internet domains
Bay
Area-native Keoua Medeiros saw an immediate opportunity when Joe
Biden flubbed a campaign promo during his closing statement at the
Democratic
debate Wednesday night.
“If
you agree with me, go to Joe 30330 and help me in this fight,” the
former vice president said, pausing as he said the numbers and
seemingly directing viewers
of the CNN-hosted debate to
a website. But the Democratic front-runner meant to say “Text Joe
to 30330,” his campaign said in a statement the next day, adding,
“oops.”
… “It
seemed like he didn’t know what he was saying,” Medeiros said of
Biden.
Medeiros
said he snapped up the domain joe3033.com for about $15. The
registrant name for the URL is private, but the purchase was made via
the domain hosting company GoDaddy at about 7:50 p.m. Pacific —
four minutes after Biden’s
slip — according to registration data from Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The domain was one of at
least five variants of Joe followed by threes and zeros that were
registered in the minutes after Biden’s remark.
“By
the time I went to buy joe30330, that was taken already by
the Josh for America guy,” Medeiros said.
I
would threaten my students with this, but they’d probably enjoy it.
Science
Goes Too Far, Creates AI That Turns You Into an Anime Character
… The
AI-anime-convertor is the brainchild of Junho Kim, Minjae Kim,
Hyeonwoo Kang, and Kwanghee Lee, researchers working for the video
game company NCSoft, the publishers of Guild
Wars 2.
The NCSoft team released
the code on github and
published
its research online.
No comments:
Post a Comment