Depressing. I had hoped for better.

https://www.databreaches.net/more-than-half-of-canadian-ransomware-victims-paid-the-ransom-demands-in-2021/

More than half of Canadian ransomware victims paid the ransom demands in 2021 – study

TORONTO, Febr. 7, 2022 /CNW/ – Canadian IT company, NOVIPRO, today unveiled its sixth annual IT Portrait of Canadian Businesses in collaboration with Leger, which revealed the deep vulnerability of Canadian companies to computer attacks. The study reveals that more than half (56%) of organizations targeted by malware have paid the amounts requested by cybercriminals. Of these, one of three companies (33%) retained the services of a negotiator, while 23% proceeded without the help of an intermediary.

Read the full press release at Yahoo! Finance.

Not easy to teach in my security classes.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3648654/social-engineering-definition-examples-and-techniques.html#tk.rss_all

Social engineering: Definition, examples, and techniques

Social engineering is the art of exploiting human psychology, rather than technical hacking techniques, to gain access to buildings, systems, or data.

For example, instead of trying to find a software vulnerability, a social engineer might call an employee and pose as an IT support person, trying to trick the employee into divulging his password.

A topic I’ve been tracking for years. This book is available in my local library.

https://www.bespacific.com/how-technology-is-changing-intelligence/

How Technology Is Changing Intelligence

Webinar now available: “The Hoover Institution hosted How Technology Is Changing Intelligence on Friday, February 4, 2022 at 1:00 p.m. PST. Emerging technologies are changing who can collect, analyze, and act on information on a global scale. Commercial satellite imagery enabled private citizens to observe the buildup of Russian troops near the Ukraine border and social media platforms provide nefarious actors with a vast battleground to conduct information warfare. Amy Zegart joins us virtually to discuss what she learned about how technology is changing intelligence while researching her latest book, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence.”

More scary than the Terminator?

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/what-humans-lose-when-we-let-ai-decide/

What Humans Lose When We Let AI Decide

It’s been more than 50 years since HAL, the malevolent computer in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, first terrified audiences by turning against the astronauts he was supposed to protect. That cinematic moment captures what many of us still fear in AI: that it may gain superhuman powers and subjugate us. But instead of worrying about futuristic sci-fi nightmares, we should instead wake up to an equally alarming scenario that is unfolding before our eyes: We are increasingly, unsuspectingly yet willingly, abdicating our power to make decisions based on our own judgment, including our moral convictions. What we believe is “right” risks becoming no longer a question of ethics but simply what the “correct” result of a mathematical calculation is.

Rely on AI to justify your screwup?

https://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/research/people-analytics-equitable-workplace

People Analytics for an Equitable Workplace

“People analytics” – traceable to 1911’s The Principles of Scientific Management, which sought to apply engineering methods to managing people – has exploded with advances in computer power, statistical methods and artificial intelligence (AI).

As managers use algorithms to measure productivity and make decisions in hiring, compensation, promotion and training opportunities, firms are using this technology to identify and close pay gaps across gender, race, or other demographic categories. This signals improvement for every phase of the “HR pipeline,” from recruitment and compensation to promotion, training and evaluation.

“And yet, for all the promise of people analytics tools, they may also lead managers seriously astray,” says Maryland Smith’s Margrét Bjarnadóttir, with co-authors – Smith PhD David Anderson ’13 (Villanova) and David Gaddis Ross (University of Florida). “People analytics, especially based on AI, is an incredibly powerful tool that has become indispensable in modern HR. But quantitative models are intended to assist, not replace, human judgment.”

Writing in Harvard Business Review, they describe three keys to be aware of when applying AI and other analytics tools to the HR pipeline:

Making all other claims suspect?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/07/facebook-appeal-over-cambridge-analytica-data-rejected-by-australian-court-as-divorced-from-reality

Facebook appeal over Cambridge Analytica data rejected by Australian court as ‘divorced from reality’

Facebook has lost a major battle with the Australian regulator over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, after a court dismissed the social media giant’s claim that it neither conducts business nor collects personal information in the country.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) is suing Facebook, now Meta, for breaching the privacy of more than 300,000 Australian Facebook users in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, exposed more than four years ago by the Guardian.

Perspective. (I learn all kinds of things on the Internet.)

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/05/bitcoin-a-lifeline-for-sex-workers-like-ex-nurse-making-1point3-million.html

Bitcoin has become a lifeline for sex workers, like this former nurse who made $1.3 million last year

Another list, but with interesting analysis behind each item.

https://www.bespacific.com/top-10-global-consumer-trends-2022/

Top 10 Global Consumer Trends 2022

“Every year, Euromonitor International identifies emerging and fast-moving trends that are expected to gain traction in the year ahead. These trends provide insight into changing consumer values, exploring how consumer behaviour is shifting and causing disruption for businesses globally. Each of the 10 trends in this report follows the same format: Overview and defining characteristics; Consumer behaviour and motivation; Business environment and impact; Outlook and strategic recommendations. Change was the only constant over the past two years. Radical lifestyle shifts motivated consumers to make intentional, mindful and ambitious decisions. Now, the world is on the road to recovery. Consumers are putting their plans into motion, taking chances and seizing the moment. Access and action are the driving forces behind the top 10 global consumer trends in 2022. Resilience and adaptability were tested in 2021, forcing consumers to relinquish control and embrace ambiguity. This year, consumers are taking back the reins and paving a path forward based on their passions and values… The global population aged 60+ will grow 65% from 2021 to 2040, reaching over two billion people. This relatively wealthy cohort is gaining more experience and confidence using online services and choosing to adopt more tech solutions that assist with their daily lives. Alongside browsing and shopping online, Digital Seniors embrace virtual solutions for socialising, health screenings, finances and learning. TikTok is one platform these consumers use, as a result of their digitally native grandchildren influencing and empowering them to be on social media. In fact, over 60% of consumers aged 60+ visited a social networking website at least once a week, whilst 21% took part in video gaming weekly…”

A consequence of digital citizenship. My AI says, “I am not a crook!”

https://www.lawaudience.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Can-Artificial-Intelligence-Be-Punished-for-Committing-Offences-A-Critical-Analysis-of-The-Applicability-of-Criminal-Law-Principles-on-Artificial-Intelligence.pdf

Can Artificial Intelligence Be Punished for Committing Offences? A Critical Analysis of The Applicability of Criminal Law Principles on Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is rapidly occupying every sphere of our life. From the mobiles to airplanes, AI is being employed everywhere. However, what if AI commits crime while carrying out its duties? Can AI be punished? This article presents possible answers to the question.

Section I define AI along with present day examples of the same and delineate the grounds for subjecting AI to the rigors of law whereas Section II lists out the reasons justifying the imposition of punishment on AI. Section III deals with the analysis of the scope of punishment for AI followed by conclusion that AI punishment is plausible but there are limitations which needs to be addressed for the same.

Everyone seems sure that AI will go to war.

https://www.proquest.com/openview/12ebf5557ede4be4658af4d49c6d2080/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y

International Humanitarian Law and Artificial Intelligence: A Canadian Perspective

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most remarkable achievements in the technology world. AI can be used dually by both civilians and combatants, serving with both beneficial and harmful aims. In the military realm, by empowering military systems to perform most warfare tasks without human involvement, AI developments have changed the capacity of militaries to conduct complex operations with heightened legal implications. Accordingly, it is vital to consider the consequences emanating from its use in military operations. International Humanitarian Law (IHL), also known as the laws of war, or the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), is a set of rules which regulates armed conflict between States, as well as civil wars. IHL protects people who are not involved or have ceased participating in hostilities and restricts the means and methods of war. While capabilities of new means of military AI continue to advance at incredible rates, on an international level, IHL principles should be revisited to account for the new reality in military operations. Additionally, on a national level, the impacts of military AI developments on military power for international competition have attracted the attention of national authorities. Therefore, studying both international and national pathways will be necessary as the first step toward promoting transparency in legal rules. Ultimately, central to my research is analyzing the Canadian perspective on IHL and the military use of AI at both national and international levels. Using a comparative approach with the American perspective, I conclude that if Canada develops more cohesive policies on the new military use of AI, it could become a legal leader in this realm.

Just because…

https://www.degruyter.com/document/isbn/9781474483599/html?lang=en

Ethics of Drone Strikes

The violent use of armed, unmanned aircraft (‘drones’) is increasing worldwide, but uncertainty persists about the moral status of remote-control killing and why it should be restrained. Practitioners, observers and potential victims of such violence often struggle to reconcile it with traditional expectations about the nature of war and the risk to combatants. Addressing the ongoing policy concern that state use of drone violence is sometimes poorly understood and inadequately governed, the book’s ethical assessments are not restricted to the application of traditional Just War principles, but also consider the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), virtue ethics, and guiding principles for forceful law-enforcement.

This edited collection brings together nine original contributions by established and emerging scholars, incorporating expertise in military ethics, critical military studies, gender, history, international law and international relations, in order to better assess the multi-faceted relationship between drone violence and justice.

Is super-AI ethical?

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Slobodan-Adzic/publication/358285082_The_Impact_of_Covid-19_on_Companies_Insights_from_Serbia_and_Kuwait/links/61fb9b50007fb504473110e2/The-Impact-of-Covid-19-on-Companies-Insights-from-Serbia-and-Kuwait.pdf#page=198

Artificial Intelligence: Human Ethics in Non-Human Entities

Artificial intelligence is one of the basic foundations of the Industrial Revolution 4.0. We find its application every day in various devices, and modern life is inconceivable without artificial intelligence of a certain level. In everyday life, we encounter smart algorithms that have the ability to learn and automate certain processes or manage certain hardware. Such artificial intelligence is not an ethical challenge. However, as technological development is very fast, and the creation of artificial superintelligence is one of the proclaimed goals of further development, it is necessary to analyze various aspects that the transformation of AI into ASI would have, especially with cognitive abilities, as well as ethical challenges that the existence and application of artificial superintelligence, and whose consequences can be far-reaching. This paper aims to investigate and present the ethical problems that humanity would face in creating and delegating responsibility for certain work and life processes to artificial intelligence, especially to its most complex iteration, which we call cognitive artificial superintelligence.

Bias by design.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-022-00136-w

Algorithms are not neutral

When Artificial Intelligence (AI) is applied in decision-making that affects people’s lives, it is now well established that the outcomes can be biased or discriminatory. The question of whether algorithms themselves can be among the sources of bias has been the subject of recent debate among Artificial Intelligence researchers, and scholars who study the social impact of technology. There has been a tendency to focus on examples, where the data set used to train the AI is biased, and denial on the part of some researchers that algorithms can also be biased. Here we illustrate the point that algorithms themselves can be the source of bias with the example of collaborative filtering algorithms for recommendation and search. These algorithms are known to suffer from cold-start, popularity, and homogenizing biases, among others. While these are typically described as statistical biases rather than biases of moral import; in this paper we show that these statistical biases can lead directly to discriminatory outcomes. The intuitive idea is that data points on the margins of distributions of human data tend to correspond to marginalized people. The statistical biases described here have the effect of further marginalizing the already marginal. Biased algorithms for applications such as media recommendations can have significant impact on individuals’ and communities’ access to information and culturally-relevant resources. This source of bias warrants serious attention given the ubiquity of algorithmic decision-making.

Creating Robolawyers is easy, Robojudges not so much.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4021610

Of Robolawyers and Robojudges

Artificial intelligence (AI) may someday play various roles in litigation, particularly complex litigation. It may be able to provide strategic advice, advocate through legal briefs and in court, help judges assess class action settlements, and propose or impose compromises. It may even write judicial opinions and decide cases. For it to perform those litigation tasks, however, would require two breakthroughs: one involving a form of instrumental reasoning that we might loosely call common sense or more precisely call abduction and the other involving a form of reasoning that we will label purposive, that is, the formation of ends or objectives. This Article predicts that AI will likely make strides at abductive reasoning but not at purposive reasoning. If those predictions prove accurate, it contends, AI will be able to perform sophisticated tasks usually reserved for lawyers, but it should not be trusted to perform similar tasks reserved for judges. In short, we might welcome a role for robolawyers but resist the rise of robojudges.

(Related) What will work here and what won’t…

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-88615-8_10

‘Intelligent Justice’: AI Implementations in China’s Legal Systems

How are Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems transforming China’s public security and judicial systems? As part of China’s AI national strategy, AI technologies are leveraged for judicial reform and modernization. Big data, cloud computing, natural language processing, and video recognition support ‘internet courts’ such as the ‘Court2Judge’ platform (Chen 2015). Machine learning and cognitive computing used by the ‘206 System’ assist public security and court personnel with evidence verification and trial argumentation (Cui 2020). Advanced AI robotics power ‘smart courts’ that employ the nation’s first robot judges such as ‘Xiaozhi’ that can efficiently adjudicate some civil cases (Gao, Xia, and Luo 2019). AI is also used by public security agencies for locating lawbreakers and interrogating suspects to ensure the integrity and expediency of the processes from arrest to trial. However, not everyone is optimistic about this ‘new age’ law enforcement. Concerns about data privacy and skepticism around the credibility of the so-called black box of AI algorithms call into question the benefits of AI-assisted justice. This paper historicizes AI-powered systems by discussing their implementation in China’s courts and public security bodies through three stages of AI development: ‘intelligent perception,’ ‘intelligent cognition,’ and ‘intelligent decision making.’ This paper also aims to demonstrate why China’s effort to pursue AI as an innovative technical practice for realizing judicial fairness and justice must recognize the legitimate roles played by social and ethical considerations; progress is predicated on public participation, respect for human values, and clear-eyed understanding of AI’s current challenges.

The “how”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214785322003315

Analysis of facial recognition techniques

Facial recognition has become a hot spot for researchers this past few decades due to its relevance in privacy and security application. The various facial recognition techniques can be catalogued into Database Matching, Statistical Approach, Contour Mapping, Fiducial Mapping, and Feature Mapping. This paper aims to compile the various techniques proposed into the five subcategories mentioned above for facile discrimination. Each technique involves training a classifier with a large number of facial images, applying statistical algorithms to the pixel matrix of the facial images, capturing the distinct variations in the contour of the facial image, tracing distance between points that stand out and differentiate the person and the use of a neural network to extract feature that best represents a particular face. The final object of the paper is to compile features and the drawback of each of the five categories of facial recognition, as there is does not exists a singular facial recognition technology that can perform facial recognition under various external factors such as poor lighting, different facial condition, and distortion in facial images. The compiled set of features for each technique will help the reader decide the best techniques for a given condition in which facial recognition has to be performed.

Perspective. May explain why I’m uncomfortable reading about it.

https://thenextweb.com/news/is-bitcoin-technically-a-religion-a-scholar-investigates

Is Bitcoin technically a religion? A scholar investigates

Read enough about Bitcoin, and you’ll inevitably come across people who refer to the cryptocurrency as a religion.

Bloomberg’s Lorcan Roche Kelly called Bitcoin “the first true religion of the 21st century.” Bitcoin promoter Hass McCook has taken to calling himself “The Friar” and wrote a series of Medium pieces comparing Bitcoin to a religion. There is a Church of Bitcoin, founded in 2017, that explicitly calls legendary Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto its “prophet.”

Hacking for insider information?

https://www.databreaches.net/news-corp-says-it-was-hacked-believed-to-be-linked-to-china/

News Corp says it was hacked; believed to be linked to China

Eric Tucker and Frank Bajak report:

News Corp, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, said Friday that it had been hacked and had data stolen from journalists and other employees, and a cybersecurity firm investigating the intrusion said Chinese intelligence-gathering was believed behind the operation.

The news company, whose publications and businesses include the New York Post and WSJ parent Dow Jones, said it discovered the breach on Jan. 20

Read more at TechXPlore

Because individual computers are easier?

https://www.databreaches.net/a-look-at-the-new-sugar-ransomware-demanding-low-ransoms/

A look at the new Sugar ransomware demanding low ransoms

Lawrence Abrams reports:

A new Sugar Ransomware operation actively targets individual computers, rather than corporate networks, with low ransom demands.

First discovered by the Walmart Security Team, ‘Sugar’ is a new Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operation that launched in November 2021 but has slowly been picking up speed.

The name of the ransomware is based on the operation’s affiliate site discovered by Walmart at ‘sugarpanel[.]space’.

Read more at BleepingComputer.

Another voice?

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2923986/new-dod-chief-digital-artificial-intelligence-office-launches/

New DOD Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office Launches 

The Defense Department must become a digital and artificial intelligence-enabled enterprise capable of operating at the speed and scale necessary to preserve its military advantage, according to a memorandum issued by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen H. Hicks.  

The memorandum, published on defense.gov, outlines how the chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, or CDAO, is charged with making sure DOD supports such an enterprise. John Sherman, DOD chief information officer, will serve as the acting chief digital and artificial intelligence officer until the position is filled permanently.

Summary.

https://www.pogowasright.org/jump-in-facial-and-voice-recognition-raises-privacy-cybersecurity-civil-liberty-concerns/

Jump in Facial and Voice Recognition Raises Privacy, Cybersecurity, Civil Liberty Concerns

Joseph J. Lazzarotti, Jason C. Gavejian, and Jody Kahn Mason of JacksonLewis write:

Facial recognition, voiceprint, and other biometric-related technology are booming, and they continue to infiltrate different facets of everyday life. The technology brings countless potential benefits, as well as significant data privacy and cybersecurity risks.

Whether it is facial recognition technology being used with COVID-19 screening tools and in law enforcement, continued use of fingerprint-based time management systems, or the use of various biometric identifiers such as voiceprint for physical security and access management, applications in the public and private sectors involving biometric identifiers and information continue to grow … so do concerns about the privacy and security of that information and civil liberties. Over the past few years, significant compliance and litigation risks have emerged that factor heavily into the deployment of biometric technologies, particularly facial recognition. This is particularly the case in Illinois under the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).

Read our Special Report which discusses these concerns and the growing legislating activity. You can also access our Biometric Law Map.

Coming soon to the US?

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/04/britain-beefs-up-online-safety-bill-with-new-criminal-offences.html

Britain takes aim at online fraud, revenge porn with beefed-up rules for Big Tech

The U.K. government has updated proposals to regulate online platforms with new criminal offences to tackle fraud and revenge porn.

Britain’s landmark Online Safety Bill seeks to combat the spread of harmful and illegal content on social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok.

Late last year, lawmakers wrapped up an inquiry into how online platforms deal with such material, concluding the government should add more offences to the scope of the law, such as self harm, racial abuse and scam advertising.

The government said Friday that the bill will now include extra-priority provisions outlawing content that features revenge porn, drug and weapons dealing, suicide promotion and people smuggling, among other offences.

It will also target individuals who send online abuse and threats, with criminal sentences ranging up to five years.

(Related) They keep trying.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/02/the-earn-it-act-is-back.html

The EARN IT Act Is Back

Senators have reintroduced the EARN IT Act, requiring social media companies (among others) to administer a massive surveillance operation on their users:

A group of lawmakers led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have re-introduced the EARN IT Act, an incredibly unpopular bill from 2020 that was dropped in the face of overwhelming opposition. Let’s be clear: the new EARN IT Act would pave the way for a massive new surveillance system, run by private companies, that would roll back some of the most important privacy and security features in technology used by people around the globe. It’s a framework for private actors to scan every message sent online and report violations to law enforcement. And it might not stop there. The EARN IT Act could ensure that anything hosted online — backups, websites, cloud photos, and more — is scanned.

Slashdot thread.

Perspective. Am I missing out? Just because I own it, doesn’t make it valuable.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/future-internet-blockchain-investment-banking/621480/?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4

The Internet Is Just Investment Banking Now

The internet has always financialized our lives. Web3 just makes that explicit.

Twitter has begun allowing its users to showcase NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, as profile pictures on their accounts. It’s the latest public victory for this form of … and, you know, there’s the problem. What the hell is an NFT anyway?

There are answers. Twitter calls NFTs “unique digital items, such as artwork, with proof of ownership that’s stored on a blockchain.” In marketing for the new feature, the company offered an even briefer take: “digital items that you own.” That promise, mated to a flood of interest and wealth in the cryptocurrency markets used to exchange them, has created an NFT gold rush over the past year. Last March, the artist known as Beeple sold an NFT at auction for $69.5 million. The digital sculptor Refik Anadol, one of the artists The Alantic commissioned to imagine a COVID-19 memorial in 2020, has brought in millions selling editions of his studio’s work in NFT form. Jonathan Mann, who started writing a song every day when he couldn’t find a job after the 2008 financial collapse, began selling those songs as NFTs, converting a fun internet hobby into a viable living.

For the faculty.

https://www.makeuseof.com/best-platforms-to-start-online-tutoring-career/

The 8 Best Platforms to Start a Successful Online Tutoring Career

Are you looking to start your own online tutoring career? Here are some of the best platforms that'll help you to get started.

Thinking about computers…

https://spectrum.ieee.org/on-beyond-moores-law-4-new-laws-of-computing

Moore’s Not Enough: 4 New Laws of Computing

Moore’s and Metcalfe’s conjectures are taught in classrooms every day—these four deserve consideration, too

I teach technology and information-systems courses at Northeastern University, in Boston. The two most popular laws that we teach there—and, one presumes, in most other academic departments that offer these subjects—are Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law. Moore’s Law, as everyone by now knows, predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years. One of the practical values of Intel cofounder Gordon Moore’s legendary law is that it enables managers and professionals to determine how long they should keep their computers. It also helps software developers to anticipate, broadly speaking, how much bigger their software releases should be.

Metcalfe’s Law is similar to Moore’s Law in that it also enables one to predict the direction of growth for a phenomenon. Based on the observations and analysis of Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of the Ethernet and pioneering innovator in the early days of the Internet, he postulated that the value of a network would grow proportionately to the number of its users squared.

Law 1. Yule’s Law of Complementarity

If two attributes or products are complements, the value/demand of one of the complements will be inversely related to the price of the other complement.

Law 2. Hoff’s Law of Scalability

The potential for scalability of a technology product is inversely proportional to its degree of customization and directly proportional to its degree of standardization.

Law 3. Evans’s Law of Modularity

The inflexibilities, incompatibilities, and rigidities of complex and/or monolithically structured technologies could be simplified by the modularization of the technology structures (and processes).

Law 4. The Law of Digitiplication

The law of digitiplication stipulates that whenever a resource or process is digitalized, its potential value grows in a multiplicative manner.

For my hackers.

https://www.darkreading.com/careers-and-people/want-to-be-an-ethical-hacker-here-s-where-to-begin

Want to Be an Ethical Hacker? Here's Where to Begin

By utilizing these resources, beginner hackers can find their specific passions within the cybersecurity space and eventually make their own mark in the ethical hacking profession.

(Related) Just like real hacking!

https://www.makeuseof.com/ethical-hacking-steps/

What Are the 5 Steps of Ethical Hacking?

Ethical hacking is not a contradiction; some people use their evil-genius skills to help improve security, and here’s how they do it.

The next frontier that we need to tame.

https://thenextweb.com/news/metaverse-needs-laws-protect-users-data

The metaverse needs laws to protect users and data

The “metaverse” seems to be the latest buzzword in tech. In general terms, the metaverse can be viewed as a form of cyberspace. Like the internet, it’s a world – or reality, even – beyond our physical world on Earth.

The difference is that the metaverse allows us to immerse a version of ourselves as avatars in its environment, usually through augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR), which people are and will increasingly be able to access using tools like VR goggles.

While it all seems very exciting, a curious lawyer like me is inclined to ask: who or what governs the metaverse? The way I see it, there are three key areas that, at this stage, are legally murky.

1. A boundless marketplace

2. Data

3. User interactions

This could be useful if the results are timely and can lead to Best Practices.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-administration-forms-cybersecurity-review-board-to-probe-failures-11643898601?mod=djemalertNEWS

Biden Administration Forms Cybersecurity Review Board to Probe Failures

The Biden administration has formed a panel of senior administration officials and private-sector experts to investigate major national cybersecurity failures, and it will probe as its first case the recently discovered Log4j internet bug, officials said.

The new Cyber Safety Review Board is tasked with examining significant cybersecurity events that affect government, business and critical infrastructure. It will publish reports on security findings and recommendations, officials said. Details of the board will be announced Thursday.

The board, officials have said, is modeled loosely on the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates and issues public reports on airplane crashes, train derailments and other transportation accidents.

(Related)

https://thehackernews.com/2022/02/cynet-log4shell-webinar-thorough-and.html

Cynet Log4Shell Webinar: A Thorough - And Clear - Explanation

Most security practitioners are now aware of the Log4Shell vulnerability discovered toward the end of 2021. No one knows how long the vulnerability existed before it was discovered. The past couple of months have had security teams scrambling to patch the Log4Shell vulnerability found in Apache Log4j, a Java library widely used to log error messages in applications. Beyond patching, it's helpful and instructive for security practitioners to have a deeper understanding of this most recent critical vulnerability.

Fortunately, Cynet Senior Security Researcher Igor Lahav is hosting a webinar [Register here ] to provide "buzzword free" insights into Log4Shell. Based on a webinar preview provided by Cynet, the discussion will cover the software bugs in Apache Log4j that permitted the critical vulnerability, the exploits used to take advantage of the vulnerabilities and the remediation options available to protect your organization.

Do you identify people authorized to access the base, or ‘everyone else.’ (Clearly Clearview is still has an irresistible sales pitch.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/technology/air-force-clearview-ai-glasses.html

Air Force taps Clearview AI to research face-identifying augmented reality glasses.

In a flyer, Clearview said the product “saves lives,” “saves time” and “improves health” by increasing social distancing and keeping officers’ hands free to grab their weapons.

The U.S. Air Force is looking into keeping its airfields safer with help from the facial recognition start-up Clearview AI.

The Air Force Research Laboratory awarded Clearview $49,847 to research augmented reality glasses that could scan people’s faces to help with security on bases.

… Last month, Mr. Ton-That said in a public letter that his company would not use its technology “in a real-time way,” but outfitting glasses with the technology to recognize faces seems to fit that bill.

Something to think about?

https://venturebeat.com/2022/02/03/the-state-of-ai-ethics-the-principles-the-tools-the-regulations/

The state of AI ethics: The principles, the tools, the regulations

… The Montreal AI Ethics Institute (MAIEI) is an international nonprofit organization democratizing AI ethics literacy. It aims to equip citizens concerned about artificial intelligence to take action, as its founders believe that civic competence is the foundation of change.

The institute’s State of AI Ethics Reports, published semi-annually, condense the top research & reporting around a set of ethical AI subtopics into one document. As the first of those reports for 2022 has just been released, VentureBeat picked some highlights from the almost 300 page document to discuss with Gupta.

Tools & Techniques.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/singapore-releases-software-toolkit-to-guide-financial-sector-on-ai-ethics/

Singapore releases software toolkit to guide financial sector on AI ethics

Singapore has released a software toolkit aimed at helping financial institutions ensure they are using artificial intelligence (AI) responsibly. Five whitepapers also have been issued to guide them on assessing their deployment based on predefined principles.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said the documents detailed methodologies for incorporating the FEAT principles – of Fairness, Ethics, Accountability, and Transparency – into the use of AI within the financial services sector.

The whitepapers were developed by the Veritas consortium, which is part of Singapore's national AI strategy and comprises 27 industry players that include Amazon Web Services, Bank of China, Bank of Singapore, Google Cloud, Goldman Sachs, OCBC Bank, and Unionbank of the Philippines.

… The Veritas consortium also developed the software toolkit to automate the fairness metrics assessment and facilitate visualisation of the assessment interface. Available on GitHub, the open source toolkit allows for plugins to enable integration with the financial institution's IT systems.