High value targets.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/hacking-weapons-systems.html
Hacking Weapons Systems
Lukasz Olejnik has a good essay on hacking weapons systems.
Basically, there is no reason to believe that software in weapons systems is any more vulnerability free than any other software. So now the question is whether the software can be accessed over the Internet. Increasingly, it is. This is likely to become a bigger problem in the near future. We need to think about future wars where the tech simply doesn’t work.
This was inevitable. The CIA does not inform Google when it starts a hack.
Google’s top security teams unilaterally shut down a counterterrorism operation
The decision to block an “expert” level cyberattack has caused controversy inside Google after it emerged that the hackers in question were working for a US ally.
Security by crippling the car?
https://thenextweb.com/shift/2021/03/26/dodges-anti-theft-feature-no-sense-experts/
Dodge’s new anti-theft feature made NO sense… until I spoke with experts
… Dodge’s new security feature is a type of two-factor authentication. Before starting the car, the driver has to input a four-digit code into the infotainment screen to unlock its full potential.
If the driver doesn’t punch in the code, the car will enter a low-power mode where its engine won’t rev beyond idle.
This kind of tech is nothing new. It can be enabled as an option on Tesla vehicles, and it has also been used on Peugeot and Citroën cars — in fact my dad had it on one of his old cars, he tells me it was nothing but a faff, anyway…
Dodge says their cars will be limited to 675 rpm, and produce less than 3 horsepower. In other words, it will roll away at walking pace.
Is it possible to claim “equal time” on social media? Should it be?
https://www.makeuseof.com/study-facebook-election-misinformation/
Study Suggests Facebook Handled Election Misinformation Poorly
… Avaaz’ latest online campaign, entitled "Facebook: From Election to Insurrection," claims that Facebook could have prevented 10.1 billion estimated views of post flagged for election misinformation (from its "top-performing pages") if it had acted sooner.
Failure to downgrade the reach of these pages and to limit their ability to advertise in the year before the election meant Facebook allowed them to almost triple their monthly interactions, from 97 million interactions in October 2019 to 277.9 million interactions in October 2020. [This number is] catching up with the top 100 US media pages (ex. CNN, MSNBC, Fox News) on Facebook.
Probably still a long way to go, but I keep looking for ideas.
New Federal Privacy Law Proposal Designed to Reach Across Political Aisle
After an extended pause due to the coronavirus and the 2020 election, the prospect of a federal privacy law is once again being raised by Congress. Discussions of the several existing bills that were effectively tabled for over a year are resuming, and one that seems to be gaining early traction is the Information Transparency and Personal Data Control Act. First introduced by Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA) in April of 2019, the bill covers personal data protection issues championed by Democrats while also attempting to appeal to the business issues raised by Republican legislators who have shown an interest in increased regulation of tech companies.
Forces of change?
https://www.politico.eu/article/gdpr-reform-digital-innovation/
How to bring GDPR into the digital age
… most importantly, the GDPR is seriously hampering the EU’s capacity to develop new technology and desperately needed digital solutions, for instance in the realm of e-governance and health.
While the creation of our golden standard of data protection is a great achievement, it has come to be seen as something untouchable that ranks above all other legal interests and fundamental rights, with no exception.
Many of the important technologies of the future — such as artificial intelligence, blockchain or single sign-on solutions — were already widely known in 2016, when the GDPR was finalized. And yet, provisions in the legislation — which many argue was supposed to be “technology neutral” — make it impossible to properly use or even develop them.
Would they ever recommend increased use of AI? What simple implementations are we missing?
ACLU to FOIA information about national security uses of AI
The ACLU will be seeking information about how the government is using artificial intelligence in national security, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: The development of AI has major implications for security, surveillance, and justice. The ACLU's request may help shed some light on the government's often opaque applications of AI.
I find this a simple(?) yet elegant idea.
This Electronic Notary Startup Just Raised $130 Million After A Year Of 600% Growth
… When Covid-19 hit and the world went on lockdown, industries that operated exclusively on paper were left behind, scrambling to navigate the regulatory intricacies between the physical world and the Internet. Boston-based Notarize had the process down cold. “The reason we were doing well prior to Covid is because we had really created legal clarity in the market. Online is infinitely more convenient, but if it doesn’t have legal standing, it’s pointless.”
Kinsel knows all about a lack of legal standing, as well as the inconveniences of the notary process, which he encountered after selling Spindle, his mobile data collection startup, to Twitter in 2013. The transaction resulted in a ton of documents that needed to be notarized, and when the notary stamped, but forgot to sign them, the documents became invalid. This began a weeks-long process to ratify the situation, which Kinsel vowed to never do again. In an effort to eliminate this pain point by bringing the process online, Kinsel spent the last few years, and tens of millions of dollars, navigating the thorny notarization regulatory system, which intersects different requirements at the federal and state levels, and in some instances, county. Kinsel himself has traveled to 40 states and helped pass 31 pieces of state legislation to help pave the way for Notarize, which proved critical when the demand poured in last March.
Got an idea for a children’s book?
https://www.bespacific.com/childrens-books-get-the-algorithm-treatment/
Children’s Books Get the Algorithm Treatment
WSJ (paywall): “Goodnight Ninja? Knuffle Blobfish? Epic, a digital reading platform, tracks what kids are searching for on its site and uses that data to create new books; ‘Bug is higher on the list than crocodile’… The digital comic book passed one million reads in its first five days last week. Epic predicted as much. It engineered the book to become a hit with kids ages 6 to 10 by basing its new owl heroine partly on children’s preferences and reading habits on the site. When a kid’s sticky fingers search for something to read, Epic captures that activity and feeds the information into its book recommendation engine—a tool that also informs the creation of new titles in-house. Epic’s team knows that children prefer owls to chickens and chickens to hedgehogs. Kids hunt for unicorns almost twice as often as they look for mermaids. Volcanoes are more popular than tsunamis, which are more popular than earthquakes. The Titanic is bigger than cowboys, pizza is bigger than cake, science is bigger than art and “poop” is bigger than all of them. During the pandemic, Epic has more than doubled its reach to 50 million children globally, most of them in the U.S. The online subscription children’s book service, founded in 2013 and based in Redwood City, Calif., is free to schools and has become a fixture of remote classrooms across the country by offering an easily accessible library of books and educational videos. Epic now possesses a trove of data on children, a group famously difficult to track…”
A bit of legal prognostication.
Digital Justice in 2058: Trusting Our Survival to AI, Quantum and the Rule of Law
Ritter, Jeffrey, Digital Justice in 2058: Trusting Our Survival to AI, Quantum and the Rule of Law (December 22, 2020). 8 J. INT’L & COMPARATIVE LAW __ (2021), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3778678 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3778678
“As legal scholarship on the interactions among artificial intelligence (AI) and the rule of law advances, quantum computing is rapidly moving from scientific theory into reality, offering unprecedented potential for what AI will accomplish. To anticipate what the rule of law will offer when quantum becomes real, Part I introduces a future reality in which a new machine-based legal system, quantum law, governs humankind. Time travelling forward to 2058, the centennial birthday of the Internet, Part II surveys the condition of the world, in which the rule of law serves an essential purpose—to extend the survival of humankind. Part III offers the text of an imagined keynote address in that year, describing the foundations on which justice has evolved and quantum law is administered. Part IV concludes by challenging custodians of the law to think differently about how to fit law and technology together, while still preserving and advancing the humane values cherished as principles of the rule of law today—compassion, forgiveness, redemption, equality and fairness.”
(Related) A short SciFi story dealing with the future of law.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/51420/51420-h/51420-h.htm
LICENSE TO STEAL
By LOUIS NEWMAN
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