Texas
again. I thought the National Guard was on the job? Didn’t they
warn this District?
Texas
School District Pays Ransom to Regain Access to Files
Port
Neches-Groves ISD in the Beaumont, Texas, area paid an undisclosed
amount of money via Bitcoin to a suspected overseas cyberattacker who
encrypted millions of the district’s files and issued
a four-day deadline to respond to the criminal demands.
… As
the file access is returned, district officials are still
investigating how and where the attackers got into the system.
… Moving
forward, the district is looking to implement new preventative
measures to stop similar attacks in the future.
“We
have a few getting ready to install now. One of those is a program
to pretest email on the URL side, which would help prevent any of
those viruses from coming in,” Fontenot said.
There
is strategy and then there is politics. One makes sense, the other
make nonsense.
Here
are the problems offensive cyber poses for NATO
NATO
has declared cyberspace a domain of warfare it must operate in and
called on the integration of cyber alongside operations. However, as
a defensive alliance, it has declared it won’t seek offensive cyber
capabilities itself, instead relying on the capabilities of voluntary
member states.
“The
idea of sovereign cyber effects provided voluntarily by allies is
good. But … that will not fall under the command and control of
the actual NATO commander,” David Bailey, senior national security
law advisor for Army Cyber Command, said Nov. 19 at the 2019
International Conference on Cyber Conflict U.S. (CyCon U.S.) in
Arlington. “It will still fall under the command and control of
the country that contributes. In my mind, it’s going to be
difficult to achieve that level of coordination that we’re used to
in military operations, even in a NATO context.”
If
you waited this long, you’re cooked.
Preparing
for Compliance Under California’s Privacy Law
Organizations
around the globe are now thinking about the California legislature’s
passage of its sweeping data privacy law, which will become effective
January 1, and the impact it will have on their operations in the
Golden State.
(Related)
Service by the lip?
Microsoft
Throws Its Support Behind CCPA and Tougher Privacy Laws
With
the stringent new California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which goes
into effect on January 1, 2020, the top technology companies in the
United States are starting to position themselves for a completely
new operating environment in less than two months. Seattle-based
Microsoft is now the first major tech company that says it plans to
abide by the new CCPA not just in California, but also in every state
where it operates in the United States. In a strongly worded blog
post, Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer Julie Brill called privacy a
“fundamental human right,” and explained that Microsoft was ready
to honor California’s digital privacy law all through the U.S.
An
architecture for AI?
Accenture:
Only 16% of companies have figured out how to make AI work at scale
"AI:
Built to Scale”
shows how difficult this transformation is as well as what it takes
to do it successfully.
"In
a nutshell, what our report found is that the majority of companies
are really struggling to scale AI," said Bob Berkey, MD,
Accenture Applied Intelligence. "They're stuck in the Proof of
Concept Factory, conducting AI experiments and pilots but achieving a
low scaling success rate and a low return on their AI investments."
… The
Accenture analysts found a positive correlation between successfully
scaling AI and three key measures of financial valuation: Enterprise
value/revenue ratio, price/earnings ratio, and price/sales ratio.
Companies that got this right saw an average lift of 32% on each of
these metrics.
Honest.
How
To Deal With Machine Learning Papers
Here’s
a very
useful article in
JAMA on how to read an article that uses machine learning to propose
a diagnostic model. It’s especially good for that topic, but it’s
also worth going over for the rest of us who may not be diagnosing
patients but who would like to evaluate new papers that claim an
interesting machine-learning result. I would definitely recommend
reading it, and also this
one on
appropriate controls in the field. The latter is a bit more
technical, but it has some valuable suggestions to people running
such models, and you can check to see if those are implemented yet.
Edit:
I should definitely mention Pat
Walters’ perspective on
this, too!
The
new article has a pretty clear basic introduction to the ML field,
and frankly, if you take it on board you’ll already be able to at
least sound more knowledgeable than the majority of your colleagues.
That’s the not-so-hidden secret of the whole ML field as applied to
biomedical and chemical knowledge: there
are some people who understand it pretty well, a few people who
understand it a bit, and a great big massive crowd of people who
don’t understand it at all. So here’s your chance to
move into the “understand it a bit” classification, which for
now, and probably for some time to come, will still be a relatively
elite category (!)
… All
that work has also exposed some of the pitfalls of image recognition
– see this
recent article for
a quick overview.
For
my students.
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