I thought we had eliminated such stupidity…
GE puts default password in radiology devices, leaving healthcare networks exposed
Dan Goodin reports:
Dozens of radiology products from GE Healthcare contain a critical vulnerability that threatens the networks of hospitals and other health providers that use the devices, officials from the US government and a private security firm said on Tuesday.
The devices—used for CT scans, MRIs, X-Rays, mammograms, ultrasounds, and positron emission tomography—use a default password to receive regular maintenance. The passwords are available to anyone who knows where on the Internet to look.
Read more on Ars Technica.
(Ditto) Court orders the impossible.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/08/tutanota_backdoor_court_order/
Court orders encrypted email biz Tutanota to build a backdoor in user's mailbox, founder says 'this is absurd'
Tutanota has been served with a court order to backdoor its encrypted email service – a situation founder Matthias Pfau described to The Register as "absurd."
Our friends at Heise reported auf Deutsch that a court in Germany last month ordered Tutanota to help investigators monitor the contents of a user's encrypted mailbox. The site has until the end of the year to add functionality to perform this surveillance.
Such a peephole would destroy the unique selling point of Tutanota: it encrypts all data stored in people's mailboxes in such a way that it can't retrieve the contents beyond some metadata. It also allows people to wrap their outgoing and incoming messages in end-to-end encryption that, again, Tutanota can't break.
The site can, say, provide the cops access to new incoming non-encrypted emails for a particular inbox, though it can't hand over its encrypted contents. We imagine Tutanota could alter its code to capture a copy of the user's password during login so that someone else can unlock it later, though it's not clear if the court order goes this far. In any case, if the user never logs in again, the mailbox contents will remain enciphered, and the court order can't be fulfilled.
I agree!
Web scraping is a tool, not a crime
As a reporter who can code, I can easily collect information from websites and social media accounts to find stories. All I need to do is write a few lines of code that go into the ether, open up websites, and download the data that is already publicly available on them. This process is called scraping.
But there’s a calculus I make in my head whenever I begin pursuing a story that requires scraping: “Is this story worth going to prison for?”
The devil is in the details.
The untold story of how the Golden State Killer was found: A covert operation and private DNA
Paige St. John reports:
The dramatic arrest in 2018 of Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. was all the more astounding because of how detectives said they caught the elusive Golden State Killer— by harnessing genetic technology already in use by millions of consumers to trace their family trees.
But the DNA-matching effort that caught one of America’s most notorious serial killers was more extensive than previously disclosed and involved covert searches of private DNA housed by two for-profit companies despite privacy policies, according to interviews and court discovery records accessed by The Times.
Read more on the Los Angeles Times.
A tool that might help.
https://fpf.org/2020/12/08/legislative-findings-brookings-builds-on-u-s-privacy-legislation-report/
Legislative Findings: Brookings Builds on U.S. Privacy Legislation Report
Today, the Brookings Institution released model legislative findings for federal privacy legislation, intended to accompany the model privacy legislation they published in June, 2020. The findings are designed to motivate discussion and to reconcile differences between two of the leading proposals: Sen. Maria Cantwell’s (D-WA) Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act and Sen. Roger Wicker’s (R-MS) SAFE DATA Act. The legislative findings also provide useful framing for the recommendations and options outlined in Brookings’ Report, “Bridging the gaps: A path forward to federal privacy legislation.”
Tighten your grip on customers?
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/pwc-5-tactics-that-increase-your-chance-of-winning-with-ai/
PwC: 5 tactics that increase your chance of winning with AI
A new report finds that the uncertainty of the pandemic forced executives to rely on artificial intelligence to map out multiple scenarios to find a way forward.
Artificial intelligence is now mainstream and the companies making it work are building a competitive edge that may be insurmountable, according to a new report from PwC. Successful early adopters are building a virtuous cycle [??? Bob] that starts with better customer experiences, which encourages customers to share more data, which in turn powers smarter AI algorithms.
Anand Rao, global artificial intelligence lead at PwC, said the new report explains how companies are using AI successfully and what changes they are making to support that success. The new report, "How to navigate the top 5 AI trends facing your business," includes data from 1,032 executives at US companies, including more than 200 CEOs.
Eliminating lawyers?
Analyse this: AI faster at evaluating contracts than human lawyers in Alibaba contest
… In the first competition of its kind in China, humans were pitted against AI on Friday in reviewing contracts, one of the most common tasks conducted at law firms. The AI program passed with flying colours, sending its results within a minute after the competition started, state-owned newspaper China Daily reported. The program recorded an accuracy rate of 96 per cent, beating the lawyers.
Still, the best results came from a team consisting of both lawyers and AI, which found the highest number of risks. The contestants, who were divided into groups either working with the program or working independently, went through five contracts totaling nearly 20,000 lines of text in 30 minutes.
Want to scare the kids?
iHuman review – doom-laden documentary about the future of AI
What will happen when robots become smarter than humans – will they want to kill us? No, according to the computer scientist in charge of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence research company OpenAI. His name is Ilya Sutskever and he believes that super intelligent machines won’t hate us, but they will prioritise their own survival. Think about the way we treat animals. We’re fond of them but we don’t ask their permission to build a road; it’ll be like that. His analogy is an extraordinary moment in this doom-laden documentary about the future of AI from Norwegian film-maker Tonje Hessen Schei – an eye-opening film if your anxiety levels are up to it.
Another interviewee jokes that AI is being developed by a few companies and a handful of governments for three purposes – “killing, spying and brainwashing” and the film then briskly rattles through the worst-case scenarios facing human civilisation.
[Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeSTYN75aic
Released on 10 December in cinemas and in virtual cinemas online.
Hacking Youtube to make it a teaching tool.
https://www.bespacific.com/7-youtube-secrets-how-to-make-a-gif-get-a-transcript-and-more/
7 YouTube secrets: How to make a GIF, get a transcript, and more
Fast Company: “…while many people never do more than open up a video, watch it, and then move on, YouTube has a surprisingly rich set of features. Here are some cool tricks you can use to make your viewing experience more engaging, efficient, and fun… If you’re looking to achieve true YouTube-watching mastery, then keyboard shortcuts are a must. Google keeps a full list here, but some of the more notable ones include using the J, K, and L keys to go back 10 seconds, pause, and go forward 10 seconds, respectively [Google owns YouTube]… There are roughly a bajillion ways to turn YouTube videos into animated GIFs, but adding “gif” to the front of a video’s URL is probably the easiest to remember…”
You know that book you’ve been meaning to write…
https://www.makeuseof.com/reedsy-book-editor-write-publish-book/
How to Use the Reedsy Book Editor to Write and Publish Your Book
It’s one thing to write a story and another to prepare a manuscript for publication. This is something professional writing software like Reedsy's Book Editor can help with.
Apart from a space to type out your narrative, you get tools that transform it according to publishing industry standards. If you’d like to get to know this handy writing app, here are some key steps to follow.
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