Tuesday, May 12, 2020


Someday we will take the time and spend the money to secure our elections. Someday…
DHS memo: 'Significant' security risks presented by online voting
The Department of Homeland Security has told election officials and voting vendors that internet-connected voting is risky to the point that ballots returned online “could be manipulated at scale” by a malicious attacker.
The advisory that DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sent states on Friday is perhaps the federal government’s sternest warning yet against online voting. It comes as officials weigh their options for conducting elections during a pandemic and as digital voting vendors see an opportunity to hawk their products.


(Related)
Putin Is Well on His Way to Stealing the Next Election




SO, if the dog finds drugs they can’t say, “good dog?”
Tim Cushing writes:
This case, via FourthAmendment.com, is an amazing anomaly. Not only did the court choose to hear from experts on drug dog training and handling, it actually went so far as to call into question the reliability of every drug dog in the state.
The suppression order [PDF] contains a subheading rarely seen in federal court decisions:
A. The court has serious concerns about Tank’s training and reliability.
Tank is Officer Moore’s drug dog. Officer Moore handled the training in accordance with Utah’s Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) guidelines. Unfortunately, those guidelines do nothing to prevent officers from turning drug dogs into subservient partners with a desire to please and a willingness to respond to handler cues.
Read more on TechDirt.




Does this lower the threshold of acts of war?
The Importance of New Statements on Sovereignty in Cyberspace by Austria, the Czech Republic and United States
A recent United Nations event gave States a new opportunity to announce their positions on how international law applies to cyberspace, and those of Austria and the Czech Republic stood out. The United Nations Open-ended Working Group on developments in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security (OEWG ) held its second substantive session February 10-14. In their statements, both States took firm positions in the ongoing debate concerning whether sovereignty is merely a principle, or also a rule of international law, with both supporting the latter view by recognizing the existence of an independent obligation to respect sovereignty in cyberspace.
The Austrian representative stated (from 2:40:10 in this webcast, reaffirmed here, p. 3):
Austria has recently been the target of a severe cyber operation. In that context, we would like to refer to the principle of state sovereignty. A violation of this rule constitutes an internationally wrongful act – if attributable to a state – for which a target state may seek reparation under the law of state responsibility. A target state may also react through proportionate countermeasures.




Covid-19 has changed everything. Can we un-change things?
AI, Robots, and Ethics in the Age of COVID-19
Before COVID-19, most people had some degree of apprehension about robots and artificial intelligence. Though their beliefs may have been initially shaped by dystopian depictions of the technology in science fiction, their discomfort was reinforced by legitimate concerns. Some of AI’s business applications were indeed leading to the loss of jobs, the reinforcement of biases, and infringements on data privacy.
Those worries appear to have been set aside since the onset of the pandemic as AI-infused technologies have been employed to mitigate the spread of the virus. We’ve seen an acceleration of the use of robotics to do the jobs of humans who have been ordered to stay at home or who have been redeployed within the workplace.
After a vaccine for COVID-19 is developed (we hope) and the pandemic retreats, it’s hard to imagine life returning to how it was at the start of 2020. Our experiences in the coming months will make it quite easy to normalize automation as a part of our daily lives. Companies that have adopted robots during the crisis might think that a significant percentage of their human employees are not needed anymore. Consumers who will have spent more time than ever interacting with robots might become accustomed to that type of interaction. When you get used to having food delivered by a robot, you eventually might not even notice the disappearance of a job that was once held by a human. In fact, some people might want to maintain social distancing even when it is not strictly needed anymore.




No worries! By the time we’ve experienced a couple of dozen pandemics, AI will catch up.
Our weird behavior during the pandemic is screwing with AI models
In the week of 12 to 18 April, the top ten search terms on Amazon.com were: toilet paper, face mask, hand sanitizer, paper towels, lysol spray, clorox wipes, mask, lysol, masks for germ protection, and n95 mask. People weren’t just searching, they were buying too—and in bulk. The majority of people looking for masks ended up buying the new Amazon #1 Best Seller, “Face Mask, Pack of 50”.
When covid-19 hit, we started buying things we’d never bought before. The shift was sudden: the mainstays of Amazon’s top ten—phone cases, phone chargers, Lego—were knocked off the charts in just a few days.
But they have also affected artificial intelligence, causing hiccups for the algorithms that run behind the scenes in inventory management, fraud detection, marketing, and more. Machine-learning models trained on normal human behavior are now finding that normal has changed, and some are breaking as a result.




W hat have I ever done to amuse or anger the Turkmen?






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