Centennial Man: 2021-02-14

Saturday, February 20, 2021

Another worthwhile summary.

https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-ransomware/

What Is Ransomware and How Can You Remove It?

It’s always wise to agree with Sir Tim.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/australia-internet-law-tim-berners-lee-b1803988.html

Australian law could make internet ‘unworkable’, says World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee

Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee has said Australia’s plan to make tech giants pay for journalism could render the internet as we know it “unworkable”.

The inventor of the World Wide Web claimed that proposed laws could disrupt the established order of the internet.

“Specifically, I am concerned that that code risks breaching a fundamental principle of the web by requiring payment for linking between certain content online,” Berners-Lee told a Senate committee scrutinizing a bill that would create the New Media Bargaining Code.

If the code is deployed globally, it could “make the web unworkable around the world”, he said.

It’s a question dividing proponents and critics of the proposed Australian law: does it effectively make Google and Facebook “pay for clicks” and might it be the beginning of the end of free access?

The battle is being watched closely in the European Union, where officials and lawmakers are drafting sweeping new digital regulations.

Google contends the law does require it to pay for clicks.

(Related) Or is everyone wrong?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/20/1019365/what-we-can-learn-from-facebook-australia-news-debacle/

What we can learn from the Facebook-Australia news debacle

Democracies are right to look for creative ways to direct money from big tech to the news industry.

(Related) Can’t get news from thousands of sources? Grab Apps to get it from one source at a time.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/19/22291406/abc-news-app-top-charts-facebook-ban-australia?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4

Australia’s ABC News shot to the top of the App Store charts following Facebook’s news ban

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ABC News app shot to the top of Apple’s App Store charts in Australia over the course of the last few days, not long after Facebook banned Australian news sources on its platform. As Financial Times’ Uma Patel suggests in a tweet thread, that’s possibly because ABC capitalized on Facebook’s news ban with an ad sending users to its app.

ABC News currently sits at No. 2 in the App Store’s overall app rankings in Australia, according to the analytics firm App Annie, and No. 1 in the news app charts. When Patel noticed the change, the app was also briefly No. 1 overall, ahead of Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and the Facebook app itself.

What’s worse than unethical AI? An AI cook!

https://thenextweb.com/neural/2021/02/19/ai-farm-crickets-sustainable-protein-solve-hunger/

AI can now farm crickets (and hopefully solve world hunger in the process)

Earth’s expanding population and unequal distribution of natural resources are pushing the planet towards a food insecurity crisis.

One solution to the problem is adding an unusual ingredient to our diets: crickets.

The insects have a high protein content and low environmental footprint that could provide a sustainable alternative to meat and fish.

They might not have the most appetizing appearance, but looks can be deceiving: crickets are renowned for their subtle nutty flavor, crunchy texture, and exquisite astringency.

Hide behind your monitor…

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/free-internet-tv-channels-watch-online/

15 Free Internet TV Channels You Can Watch Online

Friday, February 19, 2021

A case of “We can, therefore we must?”

https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-privacy/singapore-government-plan-to-install-monitoring-app-on-student-computers-meets-with-resistance-from-privacy-groups-ngos/

Singapore Government Plan To Install Monitoring App on Student Computers Meets With Resistance From Privacy Groups, NGOs

In response to the school closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic last year, the government of Singapore is rolling out an initiative that aims to ensure all secondary school students in the country have a computer for home learning. However, these student computers will come packed with a potentially unwelcome addition: a monitoring app that allows teachers to view and control the screens remotely. And once the computers are distributed, students using their own devices will be required to install the monitoring app on them as well.

The plan has sparked backlash from various privacy groups and NGOs, Human Rights Watch among them. The monitoring app appears to extend beyond individual class sessions to allow instructors to look in on other aspects of what should be private devices, including search history. The proposed plan would monitor student computers for the viewing of “objectionable material” and it appears this would be done even outside of the context of the classroom.

Is anyone surprised?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/18/amazon-facebook-google-maryland-lawsuit-tax/

Silicon Valley-backed groups sue Maryland to kill country’s first-ever online advertising tax

The lawsuit from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and groups such as the Internet Association, whose members include Amazon, Facebook and Google, comes just a week after the state imposed the tax to help fund education

Following Facebook’s impact on Australia,

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/business/media/facebook-australia-news.html

Facebook’s New Look in Australia: News and Hospitals Out, Aliens Still In

The social network’s decision to block journalism rather than pay for it erased more than expected, leaving many outraged and debating what should happen next.

(Related) A little background.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/2/17/paying-for-news

Paying for news

Newspaper revenue really started to collapse well over a decade ago, and we've been discussing what to do about it for almost as long.

None of the issues have changed much: newspapers had an oligopoly of attention and an oligopoly of a certain kind of advertising reach, and the internet removed both of these. People read many more things in many more places and advertisers have many more and better options, and so newspaper ad revenue is down by three quarters or more. Meanwhile, Google and Facebook created huge new ad businesses on the internet, that advertisers prefer, and some newspaper companies think that somehow or other they should get some of that money. That was the case in 2010 or even 2000, and it's the case now, except that the numbers got worse.

If one cares about these things, it's worth noting that a lot of Google and FB ad revenue doesn't actually come from things that used to be in newspapers: many of their advertisers are SMEs that rarely advertised before, while many actual newspaper advertisers moved to things that don't look like ads at all. The real estate agent that bought inserts now pays Zillow or Zoopla, and the soap company is paying Amazon for search placement (Amazon had close to $20bn in revenue from this in 2020, and perhaps more profit than AWS). Meanwhile, very little of the traffic on Google or Facebook comes from news, and very little advertising (and less with much value) appears next to news search results. Google didn't take their money, any more than Boeing took money from the ocean liners. The internet destroyed the model.

Have all Republicans gone crazy? Granting monopolies encourages competition?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/gop-plan-for-broadband-competition-would-ban-city-run-networks-across-us/

House Republicans propose nationwide ban on municipal broadband networks

GOP claims ban would "promote competition by limiting government-run networks."

A handy way to compare the field.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/as-power-bi-aces-gartners-new-magic-quadrant-whats-the-story-behind-microsofts-success/

As Power BI aces Gartner's new Magic Quadrant, what's the story behind Microsoft's success?

A new Gartner Magic Quadrant on analytics and business intelligence (BI) is out, and Microsoft is once again in the "Leaders" quadrant. In fact, according to Microsoft, this is its 14th year in a row as a leader in BI. While Microsoft is in virtually the identical spot as it was last year, its closest competitors have actually lost ground. Thoughtspot has fallen into the Visionaries quadrant. Qlik, while it has increased along the "completeness of vision" axis, it has slipped in "ability to execute." Tableau, meanwhile, regressed in both of those dimensions.

Tools. My students seem to do this automatically.

https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-scan-on-iphone/

How to Scan Documents on Your iPhone

You don't need a special scanner app to scan documents with your iPhone anymore. Let's learn how to use the Camera app and scan anything with a click.

Thursday, February 18, 2021

Closer.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/virginia-is-about-to-get-a-major-california-style-data-privacy-law/

Virginia is about to get a major California-style data privacy law

… If adopted, the Consumer Data Protection Act would apply to entities of a certain size that do business in Virginia or have users based in Virginia

… Legislatures in several other states—including Minnesota, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Washington —have some kind of data privacy bills currently under consideration.

Broad New Data Privacy Legislation Supported by Florida Governor and House Speaker

Hayden R. Dempsey and Kate Black of Greenberg Traurig, LLP write:

On Feb. 15, Gov. Ron DeSantis and House Speaker Chris Sprowls held a press conference to announce their support for legislation that would significantly increase data privacy and security regulation and create new rights for Florida consumers with respect to their personal information (PI).

House Bill 969 by Rep. Fiona McFarland (R-Sarasota) would apply to any for-profit business that collects PI about Florida residents and satisfies one or more of the following thresholds: (a) has annual revenue over $25 million, (b) collects 50% or more of its revenue from selling or sharing PI, or (c) sells or shares the PI of 50,000 or more consumers or devices. If passed, the law will take effect Jan. 1, 2022.

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Securing privacy.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/spy-pixels-in-emails-to-track-recipient-activity-are-now-an-endemic-privacy-concern/#ftag=RSSbaffb68

Tracker pixels in emails are now an ‘endemic’ privacy concern

This week, the Hey messaging service analyzed its traffic following a request from the BBC and discovered that roughly two-thirds of emails sent to its users' private email accounts contained what is known as a "spy pixel."

Spy pixels, also known as tracking pixels or web beacons, are invisible, tiny image files – including .PNGs and .GIFs – that are inserted in the content body of an email.

They may appear as clear, white, or another color to merge with the content and remain unseen by a recipient and are often as small as 1x1 pixels.

The recipient of an email does not need to directly engage with the pixel in any way for it to track certain activities. Instead, when an email is opened, the tracking pixel is automatically downloaded – and this lets a server, owned by a marketer, know that the email has been read. Servers may also record the number of times an email is opened, the IP address linked to a user's location, and device usage.

… In Europe, GDPR demands that organizations tell recipients of the use of such pixels. However, the water has been muddied surrounding the transparency necessary to implement pixel tracking, as consent is not always required – and when it is, this could be 'obtained' automatically when a user signs up to an email service and is asked to read a privacy notice published on a website.

… It is possible to prevent tracking pixels from triggering by disallowing automatic image uploads in your web browser, or by downloading email and browser add-ons to block trackers.

Was this really a bad idea?

https://www.bespacific.com/the-troubling-new-practice-of-police-livestreaming-protests/

The Troubling New Practice of Police Livestreaming Protests

Slate – “This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech. Last summer’s anti–police brutality protests represented the largest mass demonstration effort in American history. Since then, law enforcement departments nationwide have faced intense scrutiny for how they policed these historic protests. The repeated, egregious instances of violence against journalists and protesters are well documented and have driven widespread calls for systematic reform. These calls have focused in part on surveillance, after the police used sophisticated social media data monitoring, commandeered non-city camera networks, and tried other intrusive methods to identify suspects. [Does participation make you a ‘suspect?’ Bob] But in Oregon, the Portland Police Bureau went a step further in its innovation: It broadcast its surveillance publicly, in real time, by livestreaming protests on social media. According to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, PPB hosted a video on YouTube and on its official Twitter feed—which has more than 230,000 followers—on at least three occasions. PPB allegedly zoomed in to focus on individual protesters’ faces, making them easily identifiable and vulnerable to surveillance technologies such as facial recognition software, which law enforcement used to identify a protester in D.C.’s Lafayette Square and, reportedly, many of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. PPB first justified its public livestreaming on the grounds that it was necessary to provide “situational awareness” and to record possible criminal activity, and later “so the community could understand what was occurring at the protest.” But an Oregon court quickly forbade the livestreams, based on Oregon law and a local consent decree…”

If a home owner refused, were there consequences? How could they know in advance?

https://gizmodo.com/the-lapd-asked-ring-owners-to-hand-over-footage-of-blm-1846283117

The LAPD Asked Ring Owners to Hand Over Footage of BLM Protesters

… On Tuesday, digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation released the results of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request which it had sent to the LAPD. The EFF obtained emails showing that a detective with the LAPD—which has a partnership with Ring’s Neighbors community app— asked for owners of the doorbell cams to submit footage to the “Safe L.A. Task Force” picturing “recent protests.” The timeline of the requests match up with nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, which drew countless thousands over the course of weeks in Los Angeles.

The implications are at least confusing. Watch the short video...

https://petapixel.com/2021/02/16/ai-can-now-turn-you-into-a-fully-digital-realistic-talking-clone/

AI Can Now Turn You Into a Fully Digital, Realistic Talking Clone

Hour One describes itself as a “video transformation company” that wants to replace cameras with code, and its latest creation is the ability for anyone to create a fully digital clone of themselves that can appear to speak “on camera” without a camera or audio inputs at all.

The company has debuted its digital clone technology in partnership with YouTuber Taryn Southern. In the video above, Southern is a fully digital creation that was created as a collaborative experiment between Southern and Hour One. The company uses a proprietary AI-driven process to provide automation to video creation, which enables presenter-led videos at scale without needing to put a person in front of a camera.

I’m betting that this won’t work either.

https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2021/02/how-prevent-ai-taking-over-world

How to prevent AI from taking over the world

… The best and most direct way to control AI is to ensure that its values are our values. By building human values into AI, we ensure that everything an AI does meets with our approval. But this is not simple. The so-called “Value Alignment Problem” – how to get AI to respect and conform to human values – is arguably the most important, if vexing, problem faced by AI developers today.

So far, this problem has been seen as one of uncertainty: if only we understood our values better, we could program AI to promote these values. Stuart Russell, a leading AI scientist at Berkeley, offers an intriguing solution. Let’s design AI so that its goals are unclear. We then allow it to fill in the gaps by observing human behaviour. By learning its values from humans, the AI’s goals will be our goals.

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

A tool for my Computer Security (and Ethical Hacking) students.

https://www.muo.com/network-secure-analyse-network-traffic-wireshark/

Is Your Network Secure? How to Analyse Network Traffic With Wireshark

Want to learn how to use Wireshark? This guide introduces the core features of Wireshark with real-world examples.

Wireshark is available to download on devices running Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Podcast and transcript.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/podcast/7-layers/7-layers-artificial-intelligence-friend-or-foe/2021/02/

7 Layers: Artificial Intelligence, Friend or Foe?

… In this episode we will cover:

What AI is
The elements and types of AI
AI implementation, supporting technologies, and use cases
AI origins
The current market landscape
And the future of AI

The non-lawyer asks: Could individuals have sued Standard Oil? If the government has opted not to sue is that evidence of Googles innocence?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/technology/google-facebook-private-antitrust.html

Big Tech’s Next Big Problem Could Come From People Like ‘Mr. Sweepy’

Google is facing antitrust cases from Europe’s top competition enforcer, the Justice Department and attorneys general from more than 30 states and territories.

Then there are the lawsuits from people like Mr. Sweepy.

The operator of a website called Sweepstakes Today, Mr. Sweepy — a nickname used by Craig McDaniel — says Google used its power over online advertising to bleed his website dry. In December, he filed a lawsuit against Google, saying he was entitled to “substantial” damages.

His case is one of what is expected to be a host of private antitrust lawsuits stemming from the government cases against Google and Facebook.

Already, more than 10 suits echoing the federal and state cases have been filed against one or both of the Silicon Valley giants in recent months. Many of them lean on evidence unearthed by the government investigations. Last month, for example, a media company in West Virginia sued Google and Facebook, arguing that the tech companies had worked together to monopolize the digital ad market. Its lawyers extensively cited evidence from the government cases.

Just because I like lists of sites/services/tools I might use.

https://www.muo.com/tag/9-cleanest-safest-websites-download-free-software-windows/

The 10 Safest Free Software Download Sites for Windows

(Ditto)

https://www.muo.com/tag/programmer-browser-ides/

The 13 Best Browser IDEs Every Programmer Should Know About

In my local library and already on hold. (I like that ‘Library Extension’ in Chrome.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/ai-fyi/

AI, FYI

Editor’s Note: The below is an expanded version of a review that appears in the current issue of National Review. The book is A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: What It Is, Where We Are, and Where We Are Going, by Michael Wooldridge.

Monday, February 15, 2021

Utah is on a roll?

https://www.pogowasright.org/utah-house-passes-bill-to-further-limit-warrantless-collection-of-electronic-data/

Utah House Passes Bill to Further Limit Warrantless Collection of Electronic Data

More positive news out of Utah this week. Mike Maharrey explains:

… the Utah House unanimously passed a bill that would require police to get a warrant before accessing data transmitted through an electronic communication service. The proposed law would not only increase privacy protections in Utah; it will also hinder the expansion of the federal surveillance state.

Rep. Craig Hall (R-West Valley City) introduced House Bill 87 (HB87 ) on Jan 19. The proposed law would prohibit law enforcement agencies from accessing electronic information or data transmitted through a provider of an electronic communication service. In practice, this tightens up the existing law to ensure police must get a warrant before accessing communication service provider networks in order to intercept data.

The proposed law also makes some technical changes to warrant reporting procedures.

On March 5, the House Judiciary Committee approved HB87 by a 7-0 vote. Yesterday, the full House passed the bill with a vote of 72-0.

Centennial Man

Saturday, February 20, 2021

Friday, February 19, 2021

Thursday, February 18, 2021

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

Monday, February 15, 2021

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