Thursday, January 02, 2020


Special Operations is shifting to Techie Operations. My library reading list.
Hackers will be the weapon of choice for governments in 2020
Indeed, as a new crop of books expertly explain, cyber capabilities are expanding and transforming the old game of statecraft. The Russians are playing right alongside the Americans, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans, and others in using hackers to shape history and try to bend geopolitics to their will.
Over two decades, the international arena of digital competition has become ever more aggressive,” writes Ben Buchanan, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, in his upcoming The Hacker and the State. “The United States and its allies can no longer dominate the field the way they once did. Devastating cyber attacks and data breaches animate the fierce struggle among states.”
Meanwhile, Sandworm, a new book by journalist Andy Greenberg, zeroes in on multiple interrelated Russian hacking groups responsible not only for the sprawling campaign against the Olympics but for an impossibly long list of headline-making hacks.
Hacker States, an upcoming book by the British academics Luca Follis and Adam Fish, distinguishes between the different dimensions of destruction. Whether or not a hack achieves a specific technical goal—malware installed, account taken over, data breached—it can undermine public confidence and democracy.




A first. Should employers be required to tell applicants about the law?
Illinois says you should know if AI is grading your online job interviews
Artificial intelligence is increasingly playing a role in companies’ hiring decisions. Algorithms help target ads about new positions, sort through resumes, and even analyze applicants’ facial expressions during video job interviews. But these systems are opaque, and we often have no idea how artificial intelligence-based systems are sorting, scoring, and ranking our applications.
A new Illinois law — one of the first of its kind in the US — is supposed to provide job candidates a bit more insight into how these unregulated tools actually operate. But it’s unlikely the legislation will change much for applicants. That’s because it only applies to a limited type of AI, and it doesn’t ask much of the companies deploying it.
Set to take effect January 1, 2020, the state’s Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act has three primary requirements. First, companies must notify applicants that artificial intelligence will be used to consider applicants’ “fitness” for a position. Those companies must also explain how their AI works and what “general types of characteristics” it considers when evaluating candidates. In addition to requiring applicants’ consent to use AI, the law also includes two provisions meant to protect their privacy: It limits who can view an applicant’s recorded video interview to those “whose expertise or technology is necessary” and requires that companies delete any video that an applicant submits within a month of their request.




Interesting reading.
The Decade in Legal Tech: The 10 Most Significant Developments
LawSites – Robert Ambrogi – “In legal technology, it was a decade of tumult and upheaval, bringing changes that will forever transform the practice of law and the delivery of legal services. Feisty startups took on established behemoths. The cloud dropped rain on legacy products. Mobile tech untethered lawyers. Clients demanded efficiency and transparency. Robots arrived to take over our jobs. “Alternative” became a label for new kinds of legal services providers. An expanding justice gap fueled efforts at ethics reform. Investment dollars began to pour in. Data got big.
Every year, I write a year-end wrap-up of the most significant developments in legal technology. But as we reach the end of a decade, I decided to look back on the most significant developments of the past 10 years. Looking back, it may well have been the most tumultuous decade ever in changing how legal services are delivered. (Here are my prior years’ lists of the most important developments: For several years now, I’ve closed out the year with a round-up of the 10 most important legal developments 2018, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013. In 2017, I bypassed the list to focus on a single overarching development, The Year of Women in Legal Tech.)…”




The pursuit of freebies!
Movies, Music, and Books That Enter the Public Domain in 2020
Gizmodo: “[January 1, 2020] isn’t just a day to nurse your hangover from New Year’s Eve—it’s also a day to celebrate the public domain. Movies, books, music, and more from 1924 are all entering the public domain today, meaning that you’re free to download, upload, and share these titles however you see fit. And it’s completely legal. Some titles from 1924, like the movie The Thief of Baghdad, already entered the public domain because there were stricter rules about registering copyright before the 1970s. If a copyright holder forgot to renew a copyright or put a mandatory copyright notice on their work, it could slip into the public domain accidentally. But there are plenty of other works that finally lose their copyright-protected status on January 1, 2020, like classic movies from silent-era comedians Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. There are also books from Thomas Mann and E. M. Forster, and an English translation of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, a pioneering dystopian science fiction novel from the Soviet Union. Even George Gershwin’s song “Rhapsody in Blue,” one of the most famous songs of the 20th century, finally becomes public domain today. While the list below, inspired by the work of Duke Law’s Center For the Study of the Public Domain and the Public Domain Review, may not be comprehensive, it’s a good place to start.



No comments: