Observations on articles I read to keep current about technology. My interests are: Privacy, security, business, the computer industry, and geeky stuff that catches my eye.
I don't think I have an agenda beyond my own amusement.
Note that I lump all my comments into a single post. This is not a typical BLOG technique, It's just an indication that I'm lazy.
Medicare data breach: government response ‘contemptible’,
says former AFP officer
The federal government’s response to a Medicare data
breach that led to patient details being sold on the dark web was
“disappointing, confusing and often contemptible,” according to a former
detective who headed the Australian federal police’s investigations into high-tech
crime.
…A
Guardian Australia investigation revealed in July
that a darknet vendor on a popular auction site for illegal products was
selling access to anyone’s Medicare card details. The seller used an Australian Department of
Human Services logo to advertise what they called “the Medicare machine”.
…A few days after
Guardian Australia revealed the data breach, Tudge and Hunt announced a review into the the security of Medicare online.
The
government has still not announced how the breach occurred. The review’s final report is due by 30
September.The government
was warned in 2014 in a report from the auditor-general’s
department that Medicare data security procedures did not fully comply with
mandatory information security requirements.
Should be interesting to see who reacts (and how) when all
of this data is released.
Civil liberties advocates scored
a win at the California Supreme Court on Thursday with a unanimous ruling
that data gathered by police license plate readers are not generally exempt
from public disclosure under state law.
The American Civil Liberties
Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and various news organizations have
sought data collected by automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to raise
awareness about how much data is collected by police on innocent civilians.
After Harvey, Small Social Networks Prove Their Might
…In the aftermath
of Hurricane Harvey — which has left thousands seeking shelter — small, locally
oriented social networks like Zello are showing their strength as organizing
tools. Though social networks are an imperfect
substitute for rescue infrastructure, a listen into Zello, or a peek into
Nextdoor (where neighbors are working to inform and help each other), or even a
visit to Harvey-related Facebook groups shows why people are relying on these
networks. They are focused and intensely
local, and put critical information in front of the right audiences quickly
with little distraction or noise.
Isn’t this how deliveries were made before things like
postal services?Are there more start-up
potentials in Ye Olde Way of doing other things?
Same-day delivery startup Deliv expands to 1,400 cities,
rivalling Amazon’s Prime Now
As Amazon continues to expand its retail muscle beyond its
own e-commerce portal, there’s been some activity among startups and businesses
hoping to develop systems that can help others compete better with it. Deliv,
a “crowdsourced” same-day delivery startup that currently partners with some
4,000 retailers to help them offer same-day delivery services to rival those of
Amazon, today announced that it has expanded its service to 33 markets and
1,400 cities, up from 19 markets previously.
…Deliv squarely
addresses one aspect of the commerce retail chain: getting delivery of goods
purchase online, and getting them quickly — a service and expectation that has
become a norm for many in today’s on-demand world.
“Same day delivery is quickly becoming table stakes across
every retail segment. With Deliv,
retailers can offer their customers that same exceptional level customer experience
without the need to invest in their own asset-based delivery fleet,” said
Daphne Carmeli, CEO and founder of Deliv, in a statement.
Mark wishes to remind you that he is not running for
President in 2020.
Mark Zuckerberg calls on Trump to protect ‘dreamers’ from
immigration reforms
Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg and
other tech executives are calling on President Donald Trump to preserve the
rights of "dreamers" under any immigration reform plan.
…In an open letter published
Thursday, the executives urged the president to retain the policy, saying that
the U.S. economy would lose hundreds of billions of dollars if workers and
students currently protected by DACA were faced with deportation.
I’ll bet most of my students don’t know these tricks.(Or that they have a middle button on their two
button mouse.)
In addition to not noticing that their employees were
gaming the system to “earn” higher bonuses, they apparently couldn’t even count
how many times it had happened!
Wells Fargo: There were nearly 70 percent more potentially
fake accounts opened than originally thought
…On Thursday, the
bank said the review of 165 million retail accounts opened from January 2009 to
September 2016 identified 3.5 million as potentially unauthorized. That is up from the 2.1 million accounts
originally identified in a narrower review that only covered 93.5 million
accounts opened from May 2011 to mid-2015.
Dorchester School District 2
officials say no student or staff member’s identity information was stolen or
compromised in a ransomware attack on the district’s computer network servers
over the summer, but that some files were corrupted and lost, and the district
was forced to pay a ransom to regain access to other data.
In a letter sent to parents and
staff Wednesday, DD2 officials revealed its operating system and database were
left disabled on 25 of the 65 servers for the district’s computer network after
they were infected with a ransomware virus during the summer.
The push to connect vehicles to
one another and to the Internet has created a role for federal agencies to
clarify its privacy protection role, the Government Accountability Office (GAO)
concluded in a report released on Monday. The government watchdog agency is worried that vehicles will continue to collect more
and more data while federal standards continue to fall behind,failing
to keep up with the pace of change in the industry.
[…]
GAO researchers contacted the
sixteen automakers responsible for 90 percent of the cars and trucks sold in
the United States and found that thirteen of them offered automobiles that
connected to the Internet. In 2014, GAO
released a report focusing on the privacy of in-car navigation devices (view report), but this
report focused specifically on systems that use a SIM card to connect to
wireless data providers to provide services such as roadside assistance or
automatic crash notification.
From HHS, clarification during these difficult times:
In response to Hurricane Harvey, U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tom Price, M.D., declared a public health
emergency in Texas and Louisiana and has exercised the authority to waive
sanctions and penalties against a Texas or Louisiana covered hospital that does
not comply with the following provisions of the Health Insurance Portability
and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule:
The
requirements to obtain a patient’s agreement to speak with family members
or friends involved in the patient’s care
The
requirement to honor a request to opt out of the facility directory
The
requirement to distribute a notice of privacy practices
The
patient’s right to request privacy restrictions
The
patient’s right to request confidential communications
Other provisions of the Privacy Rule continue to apply,
even during the waiver period.
For more detailed information regarding HIPAA privacy and
disclosures in emergency situations, click
here.
For more detailed information regarding emergency
situation preparedness, planning, and response, click
here.
To utilize the Disclosures for Emergency Preparedness
Decision Tool, click
here.
Making Artificial Intelligence deliberately stupid?
The more that artificial intelligence is incorporated into our computer
systems, the more it will be explored by adversaries looking for weaknesses to
exploit. Researchers from New York
University (NYU) have now demonstrated (PDF)
that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be backdoored to produce false
but controlled outputs.
Poisoning the machine learning (ML) engines used to detect
malware is relatively simple in concept. ML learns from data. If the data pool is poisoned, then the ML
output is also poisoned -- and cyber criminals are already attempting
to do this.
…CNNs, however, are at a
different level of complexity -- and are used, for example, to recognize and
interpret street signs by autonomous
vehicles.
Rural America Is Building Its Own Internet Because No One
Else Will
…About 19 million Americans still don't have access to broadband
internet, which the Federal Communication Commission defines as offering a
minimum of 25 megabits per second download speeds and 3mbps upload speeds. Those who do have broadband access often find
it's too expensive, unreliable, or has prohibitive data caps that make it unusable for modern
needs.
In many cases, it's not financially viable for big
internet service providers like Comcast and CharterSpectrum to expand into
these communities
…Here, a look at
three rural counties, in three different states, demonstrates how country folk
are leading their communities into the digital age the best way they know how:
ingenuity, tenacity, and good old-fashioned hard work.
Amusement for my Ethical hacking students. Nice and secure, except for the override
tool.
…Onity didn’t
patch the security flaw in its millions of vulnerable locks. In fact, no software patch could fix
it. Like so many other hardware
companies that increasingly fill every corner of modern society with tiny
computers, Onity was selling a digital product
without much of a plan to secure its future from hackers. It had no update mechanism for its locks. Every one of the electronic boards inside of
them would need to be replaced. And long
after Brocious’ revelation, Onity announced that it wouldn’t pay for those
replacements, putting the onus on its hotel customers instead. Many of those customers refused to shell out
for the fix—$25 or more per lock depending on the cost of labor—or seemed to
remain blissfully unaware of the problem.
And so instead of Brocious’ research protecting millions
of hotel rooms from larceny-minded hackers, it served up a rare, wide-open
opportunity to criminals.
Something for our Criminal Justice students to dive into?
Bureau of Justice Statistics Arrest Data Analysis Tool:
“This dynamic data analysis tool allows you to generate tables and figures of
arrest data from 1980 onward. You can
view national arrest estimates, customized either by age and sex or by age
group and race, for many offenses. This
tool also enables you to view data on local arrests. Select National Estimates or Agency-Level
Counts from the menu above. Use
the Annual Tables to view tables of arrest data broken down by
sex, race, age, or juvenile and adult age groups. Select Trend Tables by Sex or
Trend Tables by Race to create customized tables of long-term
trends. In National Estimates, you can also view figures of
long-term trends by sex or by race and age-arrest curves for many offenses. The underlying data are from the FBI’s Uniform Crime
Reporting (UCR) Program. BJS has
expanded on the FBI’s estimates to provide national arrest estimates detailed
by offense, sex, age, and race. The Methodology
tab describes estimation procedures and the limitations of the arrest data. The Terms & Definitions tab
explains the meaning or use of terms, including the FBI’s offense definitions. You can download output to Excel format. This User’s Guide provides
everything you need to get started.”
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
"War is the continuation of politics by other means."Well, so is state sponsored hacking.
North Korea Accused of Stealing Bitcoin to Bolster Finances
…This basic premise that
North Korea is targeting bitcoins is reiterated in a report
from the United Press International news agency. It says, "The CWIC Cyber Warfare Research
Center in South Korea stated a domestic exchange for bitcoin, the worldwide
cryptocurrency and digital payment system, has been the target of an attempted
hacking... CWIC's Simon Choi said it is
'not only one or two exchanges where attack attempts have been made'."
Good news out of a court in San
Francisco: a judge just issued an early ruling against LinkedIn’s abuse of the
notorious Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to block a competing service from perfectly
legal uses of publicly available data on its website. LinkedIn’s behavior is just the sort of bad
development we expected after the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth
Circuit delivered two dangerously expansive interpretations of the CFAA last
year—despite our warnings
that the decisions would be easily misused.
Within weeks after the decisions came out, LinkedIn
started sending out cease and desist letters citing the bad case
law—specifically Power Ventures—to companies it said were violating its
prohibition on scraping. One company
LinkedIn targeted was hiQ Labs, which provides analysis of data on LinkedIn
user’s publicly available profiles. Linkedin had tolerated hiQ’s behavior for
years, but after the Power Ventures decision, it apparently saw an
opportunity to shut down a competing service. LinkedIn sent hiQ letters warning that any
future access of its website, even the public portions, were “without
permission and without authorization” and thus violations of the CFAA.
Interesting, but will customers be willing to walk to the
curb (in rain, snow, dark of night, or from their 12th floor
apartment) to retrieve their pizzas?
…Participants
will receive text messages as the self-driving vehicle approaches with
instructions on how to retrieve their pizza, which can be unlocked from a
“heatwave compartment” inside the vehicle using a unique code.
Perspective.Because one AI isn’t enough? Note
that they won’t share data.
Alexa meets Cortana: Amazon and Microsoft to integrate their
digital assistants
Amazon and Microsoft announced
something of a curveball this morning as they released plans to integrate Alexa
and Cortana, their respective voice-activated digital assistants.
Later this year, consumers will be able to request Cortana
support through Alexa-powered devices, such as Amazon’s range of Echo smart
speakers, while those using a Cortana-enabled device will be able to beckon
Alexa.
FBI shuts down request for files on Hillary Clinton by citing
lack of public interest
The FBI is declining to turn over files related to its
investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails by arguing
a lack of public interest in the matter.
…in a letter sent
this week and obtained by Fox News, the head of the FBI’s Records Management
Division told Clevenger that the bureau has “determined you have not
sufficiently demonstrated that the public’s interest in disclosure outweighs
personal privacy interests of the subject.”
How could I pass up an article with a title like this?
Pennycook, Gordon and Rand, David G., Who Falls for Fake
News? The Roles of Analytic Thinking,
Motivated Reasoning, Political Ideology, and Bullshit Receptivity (August 21,
2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3023545
“Inaccurate beliefs pose a threat to democracy and fake
news represents a particularly egregious and direct avenue by which inaccurate
beliefs have been propagated via social media. Here we investigate the cognitive
psychological profile of individuals who fall prey to fake news. We find a consistent positive correlation
between the propensity to think analytically – as measured by the Cognitive
Reflection Test (CRT) – and the ability to differentiate fake news from real
news (“media truth discernment”). This
was true regardless of whether the article’s source was indicated (which,
surprisingly, also had no main effect on accuracy judgments). Contrary to the motivated reasoning account,
CRT was just as positively correlated with media truth discernment, if not more
so, for headlines that aligned with individuals’ political ideology relative to
those that were politically discordant. The
link between analytic thinking and media truth discernment was driven both by a
negative correlation between CRT and perceptions of fake news accuracy
(particularly among Hillary Clinton
supporters), and a positive correlation between CRT and perceptions of real
news accuracy (particularly among Donald
Trump supporters). This suggests
that factors that undermine the legitimacy of traditional news media may
exacerbate the problem of inaccurate political beliefs among Trump supporters,
who engaged in less analytic thinking and were overall less able to discern
fake from real news (regardless of the news’ political valence). We also found consistent evidence that
pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity negatively correlates with perceptions of
fake news accuracy; a correlation that is mediated by analytic thinking. Finally, analytic thinking was associated with
an unwillingness to share both fake and real news on social media. Our results
indicate that the propensity to think analytically plays an important role in
the recognition of misinformation, regardless of political valence – a finding
that opens up potential avenues for fighting fake news.”
“MISSILEMAP is an interactive
web visualization meant to aid in the understanding of information about the
capabilities and consequences of missile launches, in particular nuclear-armed
ballistic missiles. It allows for the
graphical representation of ranges, great-circle paths, accuracy (Circular
Error Probable), blast damage, and probabilities of kill (the chance that a
given weapon will put a particular amount of blast damage on a target). It was made to aid in discussions about
missile development, since the technical nature of honest-to-god “rocket
science” can make it rather impenetrable from the perspective of laymen, yet
many of the fundamental questions are key to local understanding of
geopolitical questions (e.g., “could North Korea hit my city with their latest
missile?”). It was created by Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and
technology at the College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens
Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA. The site’s hosting is paid for by the College
of Arts and Letters. It is programmed in
Javascript, making extensive use of JQuery and the D3.js
libraries, as well as the Google Maps Web API. Professor Wellerstein is a historian of
nuclear weapons, the creator of the NUKEMAP, the author of the Restricted
Data Blog, and developed this application using Cold War-era algorithms
that have long since been declassified…”
Skype’s new ‘Interviews’ feature lets you test candidates
using a real-time code editor
Skype recently introduced a feature designed to cement its place among
business users who aren’t as interested in things like emoji reactionsor “Stories.”It now
supports conducting technical interviews via its service through a new Skype Interviews
feature. From a dedicated website, interviewers can test candidates in seven programing
languages over Skype using a real-time code editor.
The feature was introduced a few days ago as a technical
preview, and currently only works in the browser version of Skype, Microsoft
tells us.
But the benefit to using Skype is the platform’s ubiquity,
which makes it a regular tool for doing remote video calls of any kind. Bundling in an interview testing feature
within Skype could speed up the interview process, as subjects won’t have to
switch to a different tool to complete the technical screening.
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
You should probably keep your public facing website and
you back-office applications separate, as in “not linked.” Just saying…
Major League Lacrosse is investigating a
massive data leak that exposed every individual player’s personal information.
According to an email the league sent to all players
Monday evening — that was in turn sent to News10NBC by a player — a link on one of their website pages mistakenly
re-directed browsers to a spreadsheet.The spreadsheet contained every player in the
league’s names, phone numbers, email and mailing addresses, Social Security
numbers and more.
Read more on WHEC.
That “more” in the personal info
sentence was defined in the email sent to players as:
full name, address, telephone
number, email address, Social Security number, citizenship, date of birth,
height, weight, position, college, graduation year, team, and non-MLL
occupation.
“The growing market for smart home IoT devices promises
new conveniences for consumers while presenting
new challenges for preserving privacywithin the home. Many smart home devices have always-on sensors
that capture users’ offline activities in their living spaces and transmit
information about these activities on the Internet. In this paper, we demonstrate that an ISP or
other network observer can infer privacy sensitive in-home activities by
analyzing Internet traffic from smart homes containing commercially-available
IoT devices even when the devices use encryption. We evaluate several strategies for mitigating
the privacy risks associated with smart home device traffic, including
blocking, tunneling, and rate-shaping.Our
experiments show that traffic shaping can effectively and practically mitigate
many privacy risks associated with smart home IoT devices. We find that 40KB/s extra bandwidth usage is
enough to protect user activities from a passive network adversary. This bandwidth cost is well within the
Internet speed limits and data caps for many smart homes.”
Interesting.You
can keep on spreading Russian propaganda but we don’t want you to profit from
it?Was that ever their primary
objective? Would kicking them off
Facebook be a better solution?
Facebook says Pages that regularly share false news won’t be
able to buy ads
The company has already been working with outside fact-checkers like Snopes and the AP
to flag inaccurate news stories. (These
aren’t supposed to be stories that are disputed for reasons of opinion or
partisanship, but rather outright hoaxes and lies.) It also says that when a story is marked as
disputed, the link can no longer be promoted through Facebook ads.
The next step, which the company is announcing today,
involves stopping Pages that regularly share these stories from buying any
Facebook ads at all, regardless of whether or not the ad includes a disputed
link.
Because we are more intellectual or because we are more
technical?
Menell, Peter S. and Lemley, Mark A. and Merges, Robert
P., Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age: 2017 – Chapters 1 and 2
(July 18, 2017). Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age 2017: Vol.
II Copyrights, Trademarks and State IP Protections; ISBN-13: 978-1945555077; UC
Berkeley Public Law Research Paper; Stanford Public Law Working Paper.
Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2999038
“Rapid advances in digital and life sciences technology
continue to spur the evolution of intellectual property law. As professors and practitioners in this field
know all too well, Congress and the courts continue to develop intellectual
property law and jurisprudence at a rapid pace. For that reason, we have significantly
augmented and revised Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age…”
Cheaper access to research means better student papers?
Phys.org – “Two independent studies looking at two aspects of
paywalls versus free access to research papers suggest that trouble may lie
ahead for traditional journals that continue to expect payment for access to
peer-reviewed research papers. In the
first study, a small team of researchers from the U.S. and Germany looked at
the number of freely available papers on the internet using a web extension
called Unpaywall—users enter information and the extension lists sources online
for free. In the second study, a team
with members from Canada, the U.S. and Germany looked at the popularity of a
website known as Sci-Hub that collects and freely distributes
research papers. Both groups have
written papers describing their studies and results and have uploaded them to
the PeerJ Preprints server. Free
access to research papers is a hot topic in the research
community, perhaps indicating coming changes to the status quo…”
Piwowar H, Priem J, Larivière V, Alperin JP, Matthias
L, Norlander B, Farley A, West J, Haustein S. (2017) The State of OA: A
large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles.
PeerJ Preprints 5:e3119v1 doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3119v1, peerj.com/preprints/3119/
Uber's New
CEO May Get at Least $200 Million to Exit Expedia
…Dara
Khosrowshahi, who spent 12 years at the helm of Expedia Inc., held unvested stock
options in that company worth $184.4 million as of Friday’s close in New York,
according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Companies typically grant replacement awards
to executives who must forfeit unvested equity when they leave before their
employment terms have expired.
The ride-hailing company will likely also grant
Khosrowshahi additional compensation, such as an annual salary and stock awards
that vest over several years to ensure he remains on the job for the forseeable
future. That could push his total price
tag north of $200 million.
Glitch
is a playground for coders of all kinds.Through it, you can make your own app or remix any of the
existing projects on the site.You can
be creative without the fear of breaking anything — and there are veteran
coders who are standing by to help you do it.
It’s an open and free collaborative coding site that’s
basically a miniature programming school.
Glitch gives you all the tools to instantly create, remix,
edit, and host an app, bot, or site. You
can invite collaborators who can simultaneously edit the code with you. Right now, the programming sandbox only
supports Node.js.
I have to admit, none of these seem appealing, but maybe
someone will like them.
Amazon Offers Students Music Unlimited for $4.99/Month
To coincide with everyone going back to school, Amazon is
offering students a Music Unlimited subscription for just $4.99/month. That's a saving of $60 per year for non-Prime
members. But it gets even better if you
are a Prime Student member. Amazon is
offering you six months access for just $6. After that, it reverts to the $4.99/month
price as long as you remain a student.
In order to take advantage of this student offer, Amazon
requires customers first validate their status as a student. For that, Amazon uses third-party service SheerID, which apparently
happens without interruption to the customer.
(Related).Take a
look at what SheerID claims to be able to verify.
…Our most popular
products are military verification, college student verification, and teacher
verification.
Monday, August 28, 2017
Interesting to me when mainstream magazines start
reporting on Apps invading Privacy.Maybe
they are finally recognizing that, “We were planning to add a feature for
you, but we changed our mind” isn’t really an excuse. Especially when that feature would have
announced to everyone on your Contacts list that you were using the “Anonymous”
messaging App.
Sarahah Has Been Downloading All the Data In Your Address
Book
The anonymous messaging app, biled as a platform for
honest feedback, has reportedly also been saving all the contacts in your
phone. According to The Intercept, when users download the app for the first time, “it
immediately harvests and uploads all phone numbers and email addresses in your
address book.” In some cases, Sarahah
does ask for permission to access your contacts, but it does not disclose that
it will be saving the data to its own servers.
Sarahah’s founder, Zain al-Abidin Tawfiq, tweeted in response to The Intercept's article , saying that the contacts were
being uploaded for a planned “find your friends” feature. The feature was then delayed due to “technical
issues” and was accidentally not removed from the current version of the app. He added that “the data request will be
removed on next update.”
With weather on everyone’s mind this week, this might be a
good time to point out that AccuWeather was caught sending user location data –
even when location sharing is off.
Last week, Zack Whittaker reported:
Popular weather app AccuWeather
has been caught sending geolocation data to a third-party data monetization
firm, even when the user has switched off
location sharing.
AccuWeather is one of the most
popular weather apps in Apple’s app store, with a
near perfect four-star rating and millions of downloads to its name. But what the app doesn’t say is that it sends
sensitive data to a firm designed to monetize user locations without users’
explicit permission.
Read more on ZDNet
and do read their
follow-up how the problem
persisted even after it was allegedly fixed.
China Tightens the Noose on Free Online Speech, Again
Chinese authorities have stepped up their war against free
online speech by banning web platforms from accepting comments from anonymous
users.
China's "cyberspace
administration" said in rules published Friday that internet forum providers had
to force their users to register using their real names, which they must verify, reports The
Diplomat. The web companies must also
immediately report illegal comments to the authorities, and pre-screen comments
on current affairs.
Illegal comments include those that
spread rumors, potentially disrupt social order, leak secrets, damage China's
national honor, incite hatred, undermine the state's policies about religion,
and insult people.
Hundreds of Russians Protest Tighter Internet Controls
About 1,000 Russians braved pouring rain in Moscow on
Saturday to demonstrate against the government's moves to tighten controls on
internet use, with police arresting about a dozen protesters.
,,,In July,
Russia's parliament voted to outlaw web tools
that let internet users sidestep official bans of certain websites.
It allows telecommunications watchdog Roskomnadzor to
compile a list of so-called anonymiser services and prohibit any that fail to
respect the bans, while also requiring users of online messaging services to
identify themselves with a telephone number.
"Innovation and technology will win! We will defend our freedoms!" one
protester said, according to a broadcast of the march on YouTube.
Russia's opposition groups rely heavily on the internet to
make up for their lack of access to the mainstream media.
But the Russian authorities have been clamping down on
such online services, citing security concerns.
Kill animals and destroy property before hurting humans,
Germany tells future self-driving cars
Germany’s government has answered the car ethics question
once and for all: driverless cars should prioritize the protection of human
life over the destruction of animals or property.
On Wednesday, the nation's Federal Ministry of Transport
and Digital Infrastructure – a curious combination that suggests they took
"information superhighway" too literally – announced it will "implement" guidelines devised
by a panel of experts scrutinizing self-driving technology.
Back in June, the ministry's ethics commission produced a report on how computer-controlled vehicles should be
programmed and designed in future. The
panel of 14 scientists and legal eggheads suggested some 20 rules autonomous
rides should follow. Now, Germany's
transport regulator has pledged to enforce them in one way or another.
Among the proposed rules are:
The
protection of human life always has top priority. If a situation on the
road goes south, and it looks as though an accident is going to happen,
the vehicle must save humans from death or injury even if it means
wrecking property or mowing down other creatures.
If
an accident is unavoidable, the self-driving ride must not make any
choices over who to save – it can't wipe out an elderly person to save a
kid, for instance. No decisions should be made on age, sex, race,
disabilities, and so on; all human lives matter.
Ultimately, drivers will still bear responsibility if
their autonomous charabanc crashes, unless it was caused by a system failure,
in which case the manufacturer is on the hook.
I always thought of fingerprints as solid science.Perhaps the procedure needs review?
Notable developments in courtrooms, academia and
government institutions, both state and federal, are laying the groundwork for
challenges to fingerprint matching. This
extensively researched, comprehensive annotated bibliography by Ken Strutin includes new and noteworthy materials
such as key opinions, significant articles and online resources concerning
accuracy, reliability, validity as well as authenticity of fingerprint
evidence. It also includes information
on scientific and technological developments that are pushing the frontiers of
biometric analysis.
Tossing the baby out with the bathwater? Are we missing an opportunity to point out the
errors in their logic and more importantly, the opportunity to laugh at them? Worth reading.
Nazis, The Internet, Policing Content And Free Speech
…I want to discuss an issue that's already
received plenty of attention: how various platforms -- starting with GoDaddy
and Google, but with much of the attention placed on Cloudflare -- decided to
stop serving the neo-Nazi forum site the Daily Stormer.
…Let's start with
the basics: Nazis -- both the old kind and the new kind -- are bad. My grandfather fought Nazis in Europe and
Northern Africa during WWII, and I have no interest in seeing Nazis in America
of all places. But even if you believe
that Nazis and whoever else uses the Daily Stormer are the worst of the absolute
worst, there are many other issues at play here beyond just "don't provide
them service." Of course, lots of
services are choosing not to. Indeed,
both the Washington Post and Quartz are keeping running tallies of all the services that
have been booting Nazis and other racist groups. And, I think it's fairly important to state
that these platforms have their own First Amendment rights, which allow them to
deny service to anyone. There's
certainly no fundamental First Amendment right for people to use any service
they want. That's not how free speech works.
…As many experts
in the field have noted, these things are complicated. And while I know many people have been cheering
on each and every service kicking off these users, we should be careful about
what that could lead to. Asking
platforms to be the arbiters of what speech is good and what speech is bad is
frought with serious problems.
If nothing else, you must admit he can catch the spotlight
whenever he wants to. (Which seems to
be, every time he thinks people are beginning to forget him.)
Kim Dotcom Wants YouTube Stars to Test His Bitcoin Payment
System
Kim Dotcom, the file-sharing entrepreneur who is currently
fighting extradition from New Zealand to the U.S. on copyright violation
charges, has provided a glimpse of the new payments platform he says will make
it easier to reward creators for their work.
Dotcom first talked about his Bitcache micropayments platform
a year ago, when he said the bitcoin-connected system could provide a new
business model for file-sharing—this would involve those who upload copyrighted
media being able to charge downloaders small amounts. However, on the weekend
he showed off how the platform could be used.
In a YouTube
video, Dotcom showed how YouTube creators could embed a bar at the bottom
of their videos, encouraging their viewers to give them very small amounts of
money through their Bitcache accounts.
Kim Dotcom to shift to Queenstown after assets and money
released
…Dotcom, who is
fighting extradition to the US, tweeted a Hong Kong judge had released some of
his fortune and four container loads of property.
…The entrepreneur
has fought for the past five years to have assets worth US$42.57m ($57.4m)
released after they were seized under the instruction of the US government.
…Dotcom is
flagging new court action against the New Zealand Government after a High Court
judgment revealed he was under GSCB surveillance far longer than
spies had previously admitted.
Allstate Insurance Co. is suing Ameriprise
Financial in a spat alleging Ameriprise is stealing Allstate’s confidential
information by recruiting the giant insurance company’s salespeople, known as
“exclusive financial specialists.”
Ameriprise is allegedly encouraging the Allstate sales agents to create
contact lists from customer information, use flash drives and
portable electronic devices to download client data, and then solicit Allstate
clients once they quit and move to Ameriprise, according to the complaint.
Read more on Investment
News. Ameriprise issued a statement
to the publication indicating it believed the complaint to be without merit.
[From the
article:
The complaint alleges violation of the Defend Trade Secrets Act,
tortious interference with business relationships and unfair competition.
In theory then, anything Utah requires a report on would
be part of the public record?
Urgent public health crises
generate pressures for access to information to protect the public’s health. Identifying patients with contagious
conditions and tracing their contacts may seem imperative for serious diseases
such as Ebola or SARS. But pressures for
information reach far more broadly than the threat of deadly contagion. Such is the situation with the opioid
epidemic, at least in Utah, where a federal district court recently determined
that patients have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their
prescription records, which can be transferred to state agencies under
state public health laws.
Patients should know that their physicians are required by law
to make reports of these prescriptions to state health departments, the court
said. These reports to state agencies
can include abuse, various infectious diseases, possible instances of
bioterrorism, tumors, abortions, birth defects—and, in most states, controlled
substance prescriptions. Because patients should know about these reports, they
have no Fourth Amendment expectation of privacy in them. And, so, warrantless searches by the Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) are constitutionally permissible. The Utah court’s reasoning potentially throws
into question the extent to which these reports may receive Fourth Amendment
protection.
A bill that will allow homes to
be searched without a warrant was passed with overwhelming support by the
United States Congress, and signed into law by President Trump—and it happened
with no media coverage and very little fanfare.
On the surface, House Joint Resolution 76 looks harmless. The title of the bill claims that its purpose
is “Granting the consent and approval of Congress for the Commonwealth of
Virginia, the State of Maryland, and the District of Columbia to enter into a
compact relating to the establishment of the Washington Metrorail Safety
Commission.”
[…]
However, there is one major red
flag buried within the text of the bill that stems from the list of “powers”
given to the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission, and it violates one of the
basic tenets of the U.S. Constitution.
“In performing its duties,
the Commission, through its Board or designated employees or agents, may: Enter
upon the WMATA Rail System and, upon reasonable notice and a finding by the
chief executive officer that a need exists, upon any lands, waters, and
premises adjacent to the WMATA Rail System, including, without limitation,
property owned or occupied by the federal government, for the purpose of making
inspections, investigations, examinations, and testing as the Commission may
deem necessary to carry out the purposes of this MSC Compact, and such entry
shall not be deemed a trespass.”
The text gives the Commission the
authority to enter property near the Metro Rail System “without
limitation” and without a warrant, for the purpose of “making
inspections, investigations, examinations, and testing.”
The roll
call shows that 5 legislators voted against the bill (all Republicans),
while 29 legislators did not vote on the bill at all. The bill had bipartisan support, passing
399-5.
Perspective.I
thought all those Smartphone users downloaded everything they could get their
hands on…
Majority of U.S. consumers still download zero apps per
month, says comScore
Apps are dominating consumers’ digital media habits, but
getting people to try new ones is still a tough sell. That’s the latest from comScore’s newly
released 2017 U.S. Mobile Apps Report, which finds that 57 percent
of consumers’ time spent using digital media is now taking place in mobile
apps. Of that, 50 percent is occurring
in smartphone apps versus only 7 percent for apps on tablets.
…A majority of
users (51%) still don’t download any apps in a month, says comScore.
Of those who download one or more apps on average in a
month (49%), 13 percent download just one app, 11 percent download 2 apps, 8
percent download 3 apps, 5 percent download 4 apps, 7 percent download 5 to 7
apps, and 5 percent download 8 or more.
Again, it’s millennials (18-34) who are driving much of
the interest in new app downloads, the report also finds. 70 percent say they’re always looking for new
apps to try, and they’re willing to pay.
I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.
