Wednesday, April 29, 2020


Forrest Gump was right, “Stupid is as stupid does.”
Nine million logs of Brits' road journeys spill onto the internet from password-less number-plate camera dashboard
In a blunder described as "astonishing and worrying," Sheffield City Council's automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) system exposed to the internet 8.6 million records of road journeys made by thousands of people, The Register can reveal.
The ANPR camera system's internal management dashboard could be accessed by simply entering its IP address into a web browser. No login details or authentication of any sort was needed to view and search the live system – which logs where and when vehicles, identified by their number plates, travel through Sheffield's road network.
The unsecured management dashboard could have been used by anyone who found it to reconstruct a particular vehicle's journey, or series of journeys, from its number plate, right down to the minute with ease. A malicious person could have renamed the cameras or altered key metadata shown to operators, such as a camera's location, direction, and unique identifying number.




Our legislature is too smart to pass this bill, that’s why we came to you.
Microsoft can’t get its privacy bill passed in its home state. It’s trying its luck elsewhere.
Microsoft's multiyear effort to get privacy legislation passed in its home state of Washington came up short for a second time last month when state legislators couldn't agree on a compromise version of what would have become the Washington Privacy Act.
But the losses at home haven't stopped Microsoft from trying elsewhere. Protocol has identified four other states — Arizona, Hawaii, Illinois and Minnesota — where the company is trying to get versions of the Washington legislation passed.




How common will this become? Will I have drones in my back yard?
Sara Merken report:
A federal judge in Maryland has cleared the way for the Baltimore police department to go ahead with an aerial surveillance pilot program.
U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett in Baltimore on Friday denied a bid by local activists backed by the American Civil Liberties Union for a preliminary injunction that sought to prevent the Baltimore Police Department from operating the six-month pilot program aimed at combating crime.
Read more on Reuters.




Worth reading!
The Case for AI Insurance
Most major companies, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber, and Tesla, have had their artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems tricked, evaded, or unintentially misled. Yet despite these high profile failures, most organizations’ leaders are largely unaware of their own risk when creating and using AI and ML technologies. This is not entirely the fault of the businesses. Technical tools to limit and remediate damage have not been built as quickly as ML technology itself, existing cyber insurance generally doesn’t fully cover ML systems, and legal remedies (e.g., copyright, liability, and anti-hacking laws) may not cover such situations. An emerging solution is AI/ML-specific insurance. But who will need it and exactly what it will cover are still open questions.




Boy, is my AI ticked… It’s looking for a good AI lawyer to appeal.
Artificial Intelligence Cannot Be Inventors, US Patent Office Rules
On Monday, the United States Patent and Trademark Office published a decision that claims artificial intelligences cannot be inventors. Only “natural persons” currently have the right to get a patent.




Finding needles in haystacks is easy.
How to make sense of 50,000 coronavirus research papers
As of last week, the CORD-19 dataset had ballooned to over 50,000 medical papers and has been downloaded over 75,000 times, the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) said in an updated paper. That A.I. research group, founded by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is among the firms working on the project.
Kyle Lo, an AI2 applied research scientist, told Fortune that one of the challenges was to consolidate tens of thousands of academic papers into something readable that neural networks—software used for deep learning—can understand. Each part of the document, from the chart captions to the annotations, must be preserved for the A.I. technologies reviewing them to work well. While this may seem trivial, anyone who has ever tried copy-and-pasting text from a PDF file into another document can likely tell you how that process introduces errors.
Although it’s unclear whether the CORD-19 A.I. project will result in any immediate coronavirus breakthroughs, Lo said he hopes that at minimum, the project will lead to more A.I. researchers developing machine-learning tools for rapidly scanning medical literature. He’s also wishing that the CORD-19 project leads to more medical papers being released for free, an idea referred to as “open science.”




Perspective.
How AI is changing the customer experience
AI is rapidly transforming the way that companies interact with their customers. MIT Technology Review Insights’ survey of 1,004 business leaders, “The global AI agenda,” found that customer service is the most active department for AI deployment today. By 2022, it will remain the leading area of AI use in companies (say 73% of respondents), followed by sales and marketing (59%), a part of the business that just a third of surveyed executives had tapped into as of 2019.




Tools you can use in isolation.
Google Meet video conferencing is now free for anybody
Google is opening up its Google Meet videoconferencing service to anybody who wants to use it, instead of just offering it to enterprise and education customers via G Suite. The company says anybody with a Google account will now be able to create free meetings of up to 100 people that can last any amount of time — though after September 30th it may restrict meeting length to 60 minutes.


(Related)
Google’s Meet teleconferencing service now adding about 3 million users per day




Virtual tours.
The Coolest Ways to Experience Boston Museums Virtually Right Now
Boston City Life – Simple slideshows? No way. Check out these interactive, multi-sensory, and downright fun online resources. “Even as art galleries sit empty and museum doors stay shut, cultural institutions everywhere are still coming up with creative ways to connect with the public during the pandemic. Beyond virtual museum tours available for free via Google Arts & Culture, Boston’s best museums are rolling out plenty of innovative new ideas and activities this spring. From a digital music playlist that animates an urban art exhibit, to an interactive game that lets history buffs play sailor, check out these exciting ways to engage online with Boston’s museums right now…”



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