Face it, we don’t do voting well.
Voter registration websites are crashing, locking out would-be voters
… There aren’t national statistics on failures, but voters in states around the country have pointed to problems like inaccurately labeled online forms. burdensome sign-up requirements, or, in some states, no way to register online at all. Other states have dealt with crashes too: In early October, voters in Pennsylvania also faced issues with the state’s registration system.
Crashes often generate local headlines—Florida and Virginia have poor track records, but there have been similar incidents in Georgia and New York—and experts recognize the outages as part of a long-running pattern, with potentially serious consequences. Tens of thousands of voters may try and fail to sign up on the last day of registration, enough to potentially swing the results of a hotly contested race.
“Hey it’s simple, only guilty criminal commie spies come to the US.”
Senators Urge Investigation After CBP Admits to Warrantless Cell Phone Surveillance
Mila Jasper reports:
Customs and Border Protection is using commercially available location data from cell phones to conduct warrantless tracking of people inside the U.S. and refused to provide lawmakers with a legal justification for these activities, according to five senators.
In a letter sent Friday to Homeland Security Department Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, five Democratic senators questioned CBP’s use of subscriptions with data broker Venntel, a government contractor based in Virginia, which gives them access to commercial location data.
Read more on NextGov,
Something to think about…
https://fortune.com/2020/10/26/accept-cookies-data-privacy-gdpr/
Those ‘accept cookies’ banners on websites undermine your privacy—but they can be fixed
… At best, the banners are a nuisance, and at worst they undermine their original purpose: to protect user privacy. As the CEO of a company that deploys what I hope is the least intrusive form of these dreaded banners, I can say there has to be a better solution, and one that is more focused on the end user’s best interest.
This was not always the norm. Amid the flurry of new privacy laws over the past few years like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), companies resorted to accept cookies banners as a means of compliance. But are they actually working? A recent study shows they may actually undermine EU privacy laws. The EU even released new guidelines this spring saying that companies cannot require users to accept cookies to access their website—because consent is only valid if it’s freely given, not in the form of a cookie wall that demands it.
… Some initial ideas that would improve user experience without sacrificing privacy:
Streamline the cookie consent process by elevating it to the browser level. That would mean users could opt in to accept or reject all cookies, eliminating the need for individual websites to notify visitors.
Modify consent requirements based on the relationship between user and website. A new user registering for an account, for example, would require more data disclosure than one who visits a website once.
Let users track what they’ve consented to by making a record of it with consent receipts. These receipts would give each user and website a record of what the user has already agreed to, limiting the need for ongoing and ultimately meaningless accept cookies pop-ups.
Perhaps we should know as much about them?
How politicians target you: 3,000 data points on every voter, including your phone number
Washington Post – “Our quest to find what politicians know about voters uncovered data troves with intimate information about income, debt, family, religion, gun ownership and a whole lot more… I’ve been on a crusade to find out what politicians know about me. So over the past few months, I’ve used California’s new data privacy law to force companies that specialize in collecting my personal information for campaigns to show me the data. What I learned: Privacy may be a cornerstone of American liberty, but politicians on both sides of the aisle have zero problem invading it. In fiercely competitive races, campaigns see our data as their edge. The Republican National Committee proudly told me it now has more than 3,000 data points on every voter. The Democratic National Committee said it acquires enough to understand you as a person, including unique identifiers from your phone that can be used to target ads across different apps. Politicians have long had special access to voter registration and participation data, which they use to plot strategy, run polls and coordinate volunteers. But in recent years, they’ve also begun tapping into commercial data brokers and murkier social media and smartphone tracking techniques. The scandal that erupted around Cambridge Analytica, which scraped data from Facebook while working for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, was just the tip of the iceberg…”
(Related) They likely use the same vendors…
Threat Actors From Russia and Iran Obtained Voter Data To Conduct Election Interference; Some Americans Are Receiving Intimidating Spoofed Emails
… While much of the concern during that time was about Russia having a substantial impact on election results, cybersecurity professionals have warned that Iran and China are also attempting to meddle. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has issued a statement that threat actors working from these nations have likely obtained US voter data, and that Iran has used that data to attempt to undermine the election with a direct campaign of spoofed emails.
Both Ratcliffe and FBI director John Wray made statements indicating that Russia and Iran were in possession of some amount of US voter data, though there was no further information on exactly how much or how it was obtained.
(Related)
Why political campaigns are sending 3 billion texts in this election
Text messaging is being widely used in politics because it’s highly effective, hard to police, and great for spreading disinformation.
Would it be okay for the robot to ‘turn you off?’
If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off? The moral implications of building true AIs
… As real artificial intelligence technology advances toward Hollywood’s imagined versions, the question of moral standing grows more important. If AIs have moral standing, philosophers like me reason, it could follow that they have a right to life. That means you cannot simply dismantle them, and might also mean that people shouldn’t interfere with their pursuing their goals.
Worth considering. Think about the metadata…
https://www.ciodive.com/news/gartner-data-trends-2020-rita-sallam/587790/
Gartner: 10 changes coming to data analytics
The year began with an ambitious data mandate for organizations: leverage data analytics and AI techniques to keep up with the competition and increase efficiency.
Pressed by the challenges of a redrawn business landscape, leaders searched for guidance in their data and analytics toolkit. In the pivot to distributed work, AI helped field rising help desk requests from a mobile workforce. Data analytics informed leaders in near-real time how consumption patterns shifted, helping manage supply chain constraints.
Radical change and uncertainty now challenges organizations to forge new paths within their data and analytics strategies, said Rita Sallam, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner speaking at a Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Americas session last week.
"It's not just to make it to the other side, but to thrive when we get there," Sallam said.
200 years ago, Denver was grass?
This incredible Google experiment lets you time travel to your hometown 200 years ago
Fast Company – “In the 20 years he’d lived in New York, Raimondas Kiveris had seen the city change immensely. “It was a completely different place, a different town,” says Kiveris, a software engineer at Google Research. This got him wondering what his neighborhood looked like even before that—before he’d lived there, before he’d even been born. “There’s really no easy way to find that information in any organized way,” he says. “So I was starting to think, can we somehow enable this kind of virtual time travel?” Three years later, his attempt at virtual time travel is taking shape as an open-source map that can show, in both a bird’s-eye view and a pedestrian-level view, the changes that happen to city streetscapes over time. With a slider to control the year, the map displays a historically accurate representation of development in almost any U.S. city dating back to 1800. Automatically generated 3D models of buildings rise from the landscape as the slider moves forward through time. It can even show a rough estimation of what a city would have looked like from the pedestrian’s view, like a low-res Google Street View…”
A backgrounder for my students.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/ip-mac-address/
Understanding IP and MAC Addresses: What Are They Good For?
Freebie!
Amazon is turning Audible into a true podcast app, but it’s got a long way to go
Audible is turning into more of a podcast app. The company announced today that its catalog now contains 100,000 free podcasts that are already available on other streaming platforms, including Pod Save America, This American Life, and Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. The shows are now available through the app and will soon show up on Audible’s podcast landing page. Listeners won’t need a subscription to access these shows.
The ‘Heck’s Angels’ model?
Harley-Davidson officially spins off new electric bicycle company with stunning first model
… Serial 1 will officially debut its first electric bicycle models for consumers in March 2021. For now, the company is showing off its first prototype model, which the brand describes as “a styling exercise, not necessarily intended for mass production.”
This prototype has been styled after that original 1903 Serial Number One motorcycle from Harley-Davidson.
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