What is the right thing to do?
Influencers:
FBI should disclose San Bernardino iPhone security hole to Apple
Now that American law enforcement may have a way
into the iPhone used by the San Bernardino, Calif., shooter, it
should also disclose details about the security hole to Apple, said
81 percent of Passcode’s Influencers.
… “The security of a product used by so many
people – including and especially Americans – is part of national
security,” said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and computer
science at Harvard Law School. “While it is appropriate for law
enforcement, with a warrant, to use a security flaw to gain access to
which it is legally entitled, the flaw should be patched as soon as
possible for everyone else’s sake.”...
… For its part, Apple says
it would prefer the government share the details of its iPhone
hack tactics if the case continues. But on Thursday, FBI Director
James Comey declined
to comment about whether he would tell Apple the details – and
officials have so far said nothing about whether it would be subject
to what’s known as the Vulnerability Equities Process.
The equities review, chaired by White House
cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel, is a relatively secretive
process in which multiple agencies help determine whether security
flaws in government hands must be disclosed to companies for fixing –
or kept secret for national security reasons. As part of the
decision making process, officials consider whether keeping the
vulnerabilities secret would result in significant risks to
consumers, Mr. Daniel has previously explained in a 2014 blog
post about how the US decides about when to disclose
vulnerabilities. (Editor’s note: Daniel is also an Influencer.)
Another way to define
the “right thing?” The alternative would be to retaliate, hack
for hack.
In an indictment
released this morning, the Justice Department charged seven Iranians
with carrying out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on US
financial institutions and also charged one of the seven with hacking
a dam in New York. The indictment is the latest instance of a ramped
up effort by the US government to publicly attribute cyber intrusions
to foreign governments and foreign government-linked hackers.
… Both indictments draw a line under behavior
that the United States has pushed at the international level to have
deemed off limits.
… The United States and China agreed
in September 2015 that “neither country’s government will conduct
or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property,
including trade secrets or other confidential business information,
with the intent of providing competitive advantages to companies or
commercial sectors.” In a report
last summer, the UN Group of Governmental Experts, which includes the
United States, China, and Russia, among others, agreed that states
“should not conduct or knowingly support [information and
communications technology] activity contrary to its obligations under
international law that intentionally damages critical infrastructure
or otherwise impairs the use and operation of critical infrastructure
to provide services to the public” (para. 13(f)).
Perhaps the Terminator
was intended to be helpful?
Microsoft
silences its new A.I. bot Tay, after Twitter users teach it racism
Microsoft’s newly
launched A.I.-powered bot called Tay, which was responding to
tweets and chats on GroupMe and Kik, has already been shut down due
to concerns with its inability to recognize when it was making
offensive or racist statements. Of course, the bot wasn’t coded
to be racist, but it “learns” from those it interacts with. And
naturally, given that this is the Internet, one of the first things
online users taught Tay was how to be racist, and how to spout back
ill-informed or inflammatory political opinions. [Update:
Microsoft now says it’s “making adjustments” to Tay in light of
this problem.]
The French believe they
are right and the rest of the world is wrong. There is no arguing
with that.
PTI reports
that France’s National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL)
has gone and done it – they’ve fined Google $112,000 for failure
to fully comply with requests to remove search results from people
who have made requests under “right to be forgotten.”
The dispute between France’s data protection
agency (CNIL) and Google has been going on since last June, when the
CNIL demanded that Google
delist
results across all domains and countries – and not just
county-specific results. Google appealed (of course!) but
France denied
the appeal in September, 2015.
That France believes it can impose its laws across
all countries is …. cute? hubris? irrational? You can fill in the
blank for yourself, but I do understand why Google has not complied.
Google had attempted to assuage the French
regulators by basing search results for delisted urls on the IP
addressses, so that someone in France searching for a delisted url
would not find it even if they searched google.com instead of
google.fr.
France was having none of that, however:
“Contrary to what Google says, delisting on all extensions does not impinge on freedom of expression in that it does not involve any removal of Internet content,” the CNIL said.
PTI reports:
Google says it has received 86,600 requests in France involving more than a quarter million Web pages, and has honoured just over half of them. Those turned away can appeal to a judge or, more often, to CNIL, which has received 700 complaints of which 45 per cent were deemed legitimate and forwarded to Google.
“As a matter of principle, we respectfully disagree with the idea that a national data protection authority can assert global authority to control the content that people can access around the world,” Google’s privacy chief Peter Fleischer said in July.
The fine is a drop in the bucket for Google, of
course, but it’s clear that this battle is far from over.
An interesting research
tool.
Podcat Is
Pretty Much Like IMDb for Podcast Hosts
Podcasts
are great. In fact, some podcasts are so popular, that their hosts
are actually quite famous. Some listeners care more about who hosts
the show than the show itself. So why don’t podcast hosts have a
site like IMDb
where listeners (and the hosts themselves) can find out on what shows
anyone has appeared?
As it
turns out, there’s a site called Podcat
that does just that!
So I don't have to tutor students…
For those who are studying undergraduate calculus,
Prof
Leonard is another addition to the video tutorials I
have already shared in Math and Multimedia. The Prof Leonard channel
contains 76 Calculus I, II, and III videos ranging from 15 minutes up
to more than 3 hours. Most of the videos are about 1 hour in length.
The channel also contains videos on Intermediate Algebra and
Statistics.
I have shared several Youtube
channels in this blog about calculus particularly that of Khan
Academy, MIT
Open Courseware, and Patrick
JMT tutorials. You can also visit more video tutorials
here.
I'm teaching Spreadsheets in the Spring, this
Infographic will make me seem smart.
These Excel
Shortcuts Will Save You Time and Effort
Is nothing
sacred?
Playboy for
sale, reports say
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