Cyber war: Disrupting the logistics that enable warfighting is a legitimate strategic goal.
Fuel Troubles Continue in Europe as Oil Terminals in Netherlands and Belgium Suffer Cyber Attacks; Unclear if Breaches Are Coordinated
Following closely on the heels of incidents with two oil suppliers in Germany, oil terminals in two other European countries have been hit with cyber attacks.
Belgium’s SEA-Invest and the Netherlands’ Evos are both reporting recent cyber attacks that have disrupted operations, collectively impacting port operations throughout Europe and Africa.
Biometric ID for all!
https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/09/sri_lanka_to_adopt_indias/
Sri Lanka to adopt India’s Aadhaar digital identity scheme
Sri Lanka has decided to adopt a national digital identity framework based on biometric data and will ask India if it can implement that nation’s Aadhaar scheme.
The island nation had previous indicated it would work with the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP), an organisation based in India that offers tools governments can use to create and manage digital identities.
But a list of Cabinet decisions published on Tuesday, Sri Lanka’s government announced its intention to ask India for a grant of its scheme, which has been widely interpreted as meaning India share Aadhaar technology.
Aadhaar sees Indian citizens and residents issued a twelve-digit identity number, linked to either a fingerprint or iris scan, and is used to authenticate users of government services.
If I can use Google’s image search to find your face on social media, can you ban a company for doing it more efficiently?
Lawmakers call on feds to drop Clearview AI facial recognition contracts
A group of four progressive lawmakers — Sens. Markey (D-MA) and Merkley (D-OR) and Reps. Jayapal (D-WA) and Pressley (D-OH) — sent letters to several federal agencies on Wednesday calling for an end to their use of Clearview AI’s controversial facial recognition system.
The letter was sent to the Departments of Justice, Defense, Homeland Security, and the Interior. All four agencies were identified in an August 2021 report from the General Accounting Office as using Clearview for “domestic law enforcement” purposes.
“Clearview AI’s technology could eliminate public anonymity in the United States,” the letter reads, describing the system as “capable of fundamentally dismantling Americans’ expectation that they can move, assemble, or simply appear in public without being identified.”
… The letter adds to ongoing pressure on federal agencies to drop facial recognition systems entirely. On Monday, the director of the General Services Agency (GSA) told The Washington Post the agency is “committed to not deploying facial recognition… until rigorous review has given us confidence that we can do so equitably.” Still other agencies are planning to expand their use of the technology once it is more adequately tested.
(Related) While I never want that much familiarity with the IRS, I do enjoy walking into my bank and being greeted by name. (They do it the old fashioned way.)
https://gizmodo.com/id-me-facial-recognition-optional-government-1848503651
ID.me Says It Will Make Facial Recognition Optional for Government Agencies
The major reversal comes one day after the IRS ended its use of ID.me's facial recognition service and amidst an outpouring of public pushback.
In a major turn of events, embattled identity verification company ID.me says it will make facial recognition verification optional for all of its public sector government partners. Additionally, starting March 1, the company says all ID.me users will be able to delete their face scans.
That reversal comes just one day after the Internal Revenue Service said it would scrap ID.me’s facial recognition service for users trying to access online IRS services amid an outpouring of criticism from civil liberty groups and a bipartisan collection of lawmakers.
Well golly gosh and gee whiz, we might could maybe need this capability at some point.
https://theintercept.com/2022/02/08/cellebrite-phone-hacking-government-agencies/
WHY HAVE 14 OF 15 U.S. CABINET DEPARTMENTS BOUGHT PHONE UNLOCKING TECHNOLOGY? FEW WILL SAY.
INVESTIGATORS WITH THE U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service frequently work to thwart a variety of environmental offenses, from illegal deforestation to hunting without a license. While these are real crimes, they’re not typically associated with invasive phone hacking tools. But Fish and Wildlife agents are among the increasingly broad set of government employees who can now break into encrypted phones and siphon off mounds of data with technology purchased from the surveillance company Cellebrite.
Perspective. $600 Billion is too small to be a monopoly?
Facebook market cap falls below $600 billion — which could actually help it dodge new antitrust scrutiny
Facebook’s shrinking market cap could hold one upside for the tech giant: the possibility of skirting new antitrust liability.
The company, recently renamed Meta, closed with a market cap below $600 billion on Tuesday for the first time since May 2020. The stock fell 2.1%, bringing it to a market cap of $599.32 billion.
The $600 billion market cap figure also happens to be the number House legislators picked as the threshold for a “covered platform” under a package of competition bills designed specifically to target Big Tech. If Meta were to remain below that threshold, it could avoid the additional hurdles the bills would install for how it can conduct its business and make deals, while its larger peers like Amazon, Alphabet, Apple and even Microsoft become subject to the rules.
Perspective. I’ll need someone with a background in both Law and Economics to explain this to me.
https://www.bespacific.com/public-blockchains-are-the-new-national-economies-of-the-metaverse/
Public Blockchains Are the New National Economies of the Metaverse
Wired: “When we speak of an economy, we usually refer to a country or a region where interrelated activities of production, consumption, and trade happen. When we speak of blockchains, we speak of decentralized computer networks. On the surface, these two seem unrelated. But with on-chain activities growing at warp speed, the ecosystems of layer 1 public blockchains (the foundational blockchain protocols where decentralized databases and computer programs are run) are starting to look more and more similar to national economies—except the nation in this case is not a physical territory but a decentralized digital network. The trustless and programmable nature of public blockchains have made it possible to implement new “fiscal” and “monetary” policy tools in the blockchain economies, which in many cases have advantages over the traditional economic policy tools of national governments. In addition, the proof-of-stake mechanism adopted by second-generation public blockchains introduces a de facto “universal basic capital income” for their network “citizens.” This could be a major innovation in how economic systems distribute values among participants, with broader income-distribution implications for years to come as blockchain economies grow. (Disclosure: I hold cryptocurrency and have previously advised crypto funds.) Public blockchains allow anyone to deploy decentralized applications (DApps) on top, which users can interact with. Currently, decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and non-fungible token assets (NFTs) are the two main economic activities on layer 1 blockchains and associated layer 2 chains. (Layer 2 chains are secondary blockchain networks that rely on the underlying layer 1 for security, but typically offer faster and cheaper transactions.) Both activities have grown tremendously in the past couple of years. At the end of November 2021, gross total value locked from DeFi in the top 10 layer 1 blockchain platforms exceeded $250 billion, a year-over-year growth of 1,400 percent. And according to NFTGo.io, the market cap of NFT projects on Ethereum alone reached over $7 billion in November, increasing over 14,500 percent from a year before…”
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