Thursday, August 17, 2017

They purchased a company with less than perfect security and paid an additional price for that mistake. 
Shipping company Maersk says June cyberattack could cost it up to $300 million
Container shipping company A.P. Moller Maersk on Tuesday said it expects that computer issues triggered by the NotPetya cyberattack will cost the company as much as $300 million in lost revenue.
"In the last week of the [second] quarter we were hit by a cyber-attack, which mainly impacted Maersk Line, APM Terminals and Damco," Maersk CEO Soren Skou said in a statement.  "Business volumes were negatively affected for a couple of weeks in July and as a consequence, our Q3 results will be impacted.  We expect that the cyber-attack will impact results negatively by USD 200-300m."
Maersk Line was able to take bookings from existing customers two days after the attack, and things gradually got back to normal over the following week, the company said.  It said it did not lose third-party data as a result of the attack.


A change is coming.  Is that good or bad?
Privacy and Court Records: Online Access and the Loss of Practical Obscurity
by on
Ardia, David S., Privacy and Court Records: Online Access and the Loss of Practical Obscurity (August 4, 2017).  University of Illinois Law Review, Vol. 2017, No. 5, 2017.  Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3013704
“Court records present a conundrum for privacy advocates.  Public access to the courts has long been a fundamental tenant of American democracy, helping to ensure that our system of justice functions fairly and that citizens can observe the actions of their government.  Yet court records contain an astonishing amount of private and sensitive information, ranging from social security numbers to the names of sexual assault victims.  Until recently, the privacy harms that attended the public disclosure of court records were generally regarded as insignificant because court files were difficult to search and access.  But this “practical obscurity” is rapidly disappearing as the courts move from the paper-based world of the twentieth century to an interconnected, electronic world where physical and temporal barriers to information are eroding.  These changes are prompting courts — and increasingly, legislatures — to reconsider public access to court records.  Although this reexamination can be beneficial, a number of courts are abandoning the careful balancing of interests that has traditionally guided judges in access disputes and instead are excluding whole categories of information, documents, and cases from public access.  This approach, while superficially appealing, is contrary to established First Amendment principles that require case-specific analysis before access can be restricted and is putting at risk the public’s ability to observe the functioning of the courts and justice system.  This article pushes back against the categorical exclusion of information in court records.  In doing so, it makes three core claims.  First, the First Amendment provides a qualified right of public access to all court records that are material to a court’s exercise of its adjudicatory power.  Second, before a court can restrict public access, it must engage in a case-specific evaluation of the privacy and public access interests at stake.  Third, per se categorical restrictions on public access are not permissible.  These conclusions do not leave the courts powerless to protect privacy, as some scholars assert.  We must discard the notion that the protection of privacy is exclusively the job of judges and court staff.  Instead, we need to shift the responsibility for protecting privacy to lawyers and litigants, who should not be permitted to include highly sensitive information in court files if it is not relevant to the case.  Of course, we cannot eliminate all private and sensitive information from court records, but as long as courts continue to provide physical access to their records, the First Amendment does not preclude court administrators from managing electronic access in order to retain some of the beneficial aspects of practical obscurity.  By minimizing the inclusion of unnecessary personal information in court files and by limiting the extent of electronic access to certain types of highly sensitive information, we can protect privacy while at the same time ensuring transparency and public accountability.”


Do they blame the Russians?  Partly. 
Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
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“The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University today released a comprehensive analysis of online media and social media coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign.  The report, “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” documents how highly partisan right-wing sources helped shape mainstream press coverage and seize the public’s attention in the 18-month period leading up to the election.
“In this study, we document polarization in the media ecosystem that is distinctly asymmetric.  Whereas the left half of our spectrum is filled with many media sources from center to left, the right half of the spectrum has a substantial gap between center and right.  The core of attention from the center-right to the left is large mainstream media organizations of the center-left.  The right-wing media sphere skews to the far right and is dominated by highly partisan news organizations,” co-author and principal investigator Yochai Benkler stated.  In addition to Benkler, the report was authored by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, and Ethan Zuckerman.
The fact that media coverage has become more polarized in general is not new, but the extent to which right-wing sites have become partisan is striking, the report says.  The study found that on the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets.  On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations.  Robert Faris, the Berkman Klein Center’s research director, noted, “Consistent with concerns over echo chambers and filter bubbles, social media users on the left and the right rarely share material from outside their respective spheres, except where they find coverage that is favorable to their choice of candidate.  A key difference between the right and left is that Trump supporters found substantial coverage favorable to their side in left and center-left media, particularly coverage critical of Clinton.  In contrast, the messaging from right-wing media was consistently pro-Trump.”  Conservative opposition to Trump was strongest in the center-right, the portion of the political spectrum that wielded the least influence in media coverage of the election.  In this recently-emerged universe, Breitbart stands at the center of a right-wing media ecosystem and is surrounded by sites like Fox News, the Daily Caller, the Gateway Pundit, the Washington Examiner, Infowars, Conservative Treehouse, and Truthfeed, according to the report’s analysis.”


I’ve been trying to tell my International students about the rules of discovery.  They seem to find it a very difficult concept.
Waymo v. Uber: Judge says Uber lawyers ‘misled the court,’ wants to tell jurors so
Waymo may get an edge over rival Uber as the two head into an explosive trade secrets trial this fall after a federal judge on Wednesday said he’ll likely tell the jury how Uber’s lawyers “misled the court” and repeatedly failed to produce documents that could be important in the case. 
   Uber’s lawyers from Morrison & Foerster recently disclosed that their firm has some information taken from Levandowski’s electronic devices.  Waymo is convinced that information contains stolen documents, which it says Uber’s team spent months hiding from the court.
“Wrong,” Uber’s lawyer, Arturo Gonzalez, said Wednesday.  His firm has some information, he said, but not the allegedly stolen documents.
But U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who is presiding over the case, seemed to side with Waymo.
“I am concerned that Mr. Gonzalez failed to disclose that he had the documents and took a long time to come clean,” Alsup said.  “Maybe he can get on the stand and explain it away.  But I am inclined … to tell the jury exactly this scenario: that he was ordered to come clean, did not come clean, ordered to come clean again, and did not come clean — finally in June or July came clean.”


Might be amusing.
An Augmented Reality Hackathon for Teachers
Earlier this week I shared some ideas for creating and using your own augmented reality experiences in school.  Metaverse is the free platform that makes it possible for teachers and students to create their own augmented reality experiences.  If you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend taking a crack at making your own augmented reality experience.  As some participants in my workshops this summer demonstrated, you really can create your own augmented reality experiences in as little as ten minutes.  Of course, the more time you spend using Metaverse, the more complex and robust you can make your augmented reality applications.
This weekend Metaverse is kicking-off a hackathon for teachers.  The Metaverse Hackathon starts on Saturday, August 19th and runs through Saturday, August 26th.  The purpose of the hackathon is to showcase the creative augmented reality experiences that teachers make for educational uses.  The winner of the Metaverse Hackathon will receive $200 in classroom supplies.  You can get all of the details and register for the Metaverse Hackathon here.  I can't wait to see what everyone creates.


Perspective.  Is this the start of something?   
How artists can (finally) get paid in the digital age


For all my students.
   everyone should check out Wolfram Alpha’s Problem Generator.  But every dumbfounded student knows that you need more than one lasso to tame the perils of mathematics… so enter Symbolab Math Solver.
   Symbolab is meant to be a search engine for discovering the meaning of an equation, and it helps you do that not with search keywords but with mathematical symbols.
   The step-by-step solution helps you work through the explanation.  You have the option to hide the steps and work through it on your own.  Here are some key features:
  • The engine has more than 300 calculators. You can use the calculators (and graphing calculators) to solve a variety of equations and download the results in PDF.
  • Pick a topic and practice math equations. You can choose from pre-algebra, matrices, vectors, functions, exponents, trigonometry, calculus, and word problems.
  • Test yourself with quizzes. Check your progress with the quizzes on the site and also make your own.
  • Download PDF Cheatsheets. Print them and carry them around for handy reference (not to cheat during your exams).
  • Save your work in an online notebook. Register for an account and save your practice problems in a personal notebook.
  • Create groups. Make your own group and interact with other students.


I’m beginning to think this is for real!
   MoviePass has actually been around for several years, but high prices and countless restrictions have prevented it from really taking off.  But that may all be about to change…
MoviePass is now offering unlimited movies in theaters for $9.95-per-month.  The only restrictions are that you’re limited to one film every day, and 3D and IMAX movies are off the menu entirely.  But beyond that it’s anything goes.  Which sounds too good to be true, to be honest.
How it works is that you pay MoviePass $9.95 every month via a debit card.  You then visit your local movie theater as usual, but MoviePass will pay for your ticket.  If you go once a month you’ll just about break even, but if you go more often than that you’ll be saving some serious cash.
This could be a win-win for everyone involved.  However, according to Variety, AMC is already trying to prevent MoviePass subscriptions from being used at its theaters.  The chain claims the pricing makes this an unsustainable model which will harm the movie business in the long run.

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