“We don’t hack and we pledge to not hack any more.”
US Indicts
Chinese Govt Hackers Over Attacks in 12 Countries
The
Justice Department said the hackers had targeted numerous managed
service providers (MSPs), specialist firms which help other companies
manage their information technology systems -- potentially giving
hackers an entry into the computer networks of dozens of companies.
Companies
who were hacked were not named, but 45 victims in the United States
included key government agencies -- the NASA Goddard Space Center and
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Department of Energy's Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, and the US Navy, where the personal
information of more than 100,000 personnel was stolen.
Internationally,
the hackers accessed the computers of a major bank, three
telecommunications or consumer electronics companies, mining and
health care companies, and business consultancies.
Rosenstein
slammed Beijing for repeatedly violating a pledge made by Xi to
then-president Barack Obama in 2015 to halt cyber-attacks on US
companies and commercial infrastructure.
… In
London, the Foreign Office likewise accused China of not living up to
their bilateral agreement against hacking driven by commercial and
economic motives.
For
my lecture on encryption.
India's
Government Denies Telling Federal Agencies They Can Snoop On Every
Computer, Despite An Order That Seems To Say They Can
A row broke out in India's parliament on Friday
after the country's Ministry of Home Affairs, a federal government
authority that controls the country’s internal security, seemingly
authorized ten government agencies – including federal intelligence
and law enforcement agencies – to
monitor, intercept, and decrypt all data on all computers in the
country.
The governmental order detailing the powers
immediately drew strong criticism from both India’s privacy
activists and its opposition parties, who said it enabled blanket
state surveillance, and violated the fundamental right to privacy
that India’s 1.3 billion citizens are
constitutionally
guaranteed.
… India's Information Security Act allows
agencies to invoke surveillance measures in the interest of national
security since 2008, but the Act demands that the government provide
written reasons that clearly explain why such measures are necessary.
“This latest order completely bypasses that,”
said Sinha.
Milestones in technology: Facial recognition and
slurpees.
Pay with
your ‘face’ as AI system starts at Seven-Eleven
… Users are required to have a photo taken of
their faces by a camera tied into the cash register in advance to
utilize the system.
Once users are registered in the system, all they
need to do is to show their faces to make purchases, which will be
deducted from their salaries.
Should we be concerned that the FCC does not
control the entire world?
As it turns out, if the U.S. Federal
Communications Commission asks you not to do something, you should
probably not do that thing—particularly when it comes to launching
to
unapproved
satellites into orbit.
This is the lesson currently faced by Swarm
Technologies, a startup being fined $900,000 by the FCC for launching
four unauthorized satellites into orbit in January.
… The satellites launched in January with the
Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on its Polar Satellite
Launch Vehicle (PSLV).
Quartz
reported in March that the FCC raised concerns about the size of the
satellites, which the agency said were “below the size threshold at
which detection by the Space Surveillance Network (SSN) can be
considered routine.”
For the continuing debate in my classes.
7 Arguments
Against the Autonomous-Vehicle Utopia
Thank god someone is asking the big questions.
How are
algorithms distributing power between people?
I work in algorithmic fairness; in
particular, I’m interested in thinking about algorithmic systems as
explicitly resource distribution mechanisms. I’m not interested in
necessarily how the particulars of the sorting happens; I’m
interested in the final outcomes that are issued, and I am interested
in the distributional outcomes that are deemed to be appropriate or
inappropriate under our various fairness notions. How are algorithms
distributing power between people? What
kind of questions are they enabling us to ask, what kind of questions
are they enabling us to solve, and not only that, but what kind of
questions are they preventing us from answering? That’s
kind of my big research agenda…”
Wolfram Alpha is an extremely useful math tool.
This could be interesting. (The examples in the article are trivial
compared to what Wolfram Alpha can do.)
Alexa now
taps Wolfram Alpha to answer science and math questions
… “We rolled out an Alexa Q&A
integration with Wolfram Alpha to U.S. customers, which expands
Alexa’s capabilities to answer more questions related to
mathematics, science, astronomy, engineering, geography, history, and
more,” an Amazon spokesperson told VentureBeat. “Information
curated by Wolfram Alpha has rolled out to select customers and will
continue to roll out over the coming weeks and months.”
… When it arrives on Alexa-enabled smart
speakers and displays, you’ll be able to ask questions like “Alexa,
what is the billionth prime number?” and “Alexa, how high do
swans fly?”
Here are a few additional queries Wolfram Alpha
will step in to handle:
Alexa, what is x
to the power of three plus x plus five where x is equal to seven?
Alexa, how fast is
the wind blowing right now?
Alexa, how many
sheets of paper will fit in a binder?
Alexa, how long until the moon rises?
This suggests that Congress is either much dumber
(high probability) or much smarter (low probability) than they have
ever shown themselves to be. Politicians may speak in vague, even
misleading words (Okay, they lie) but lawmakers must not.
Can a
Statute Have More Than One Meaning?
Doerfler, Ryan, Can a Statute Have More Than One
Meaning? (December 12, 2018). New York University Law Review, Vol.
94, 2019. Available at SSRN:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3300262
“What statutory language means can vary from
statute to statute, or even provision to provision. But what about
from case to case? The conventional wisdom is that the same language
can mean different things as used in different places within the
United States Code. As used in some specific place, however, that
language means what it means. Put differently, the same statutory
provision must mean the same thing in all cases. To hold otherwise,
courts and scholars suggest, would be contrary both to the rules of
grammar and to the rule of law. This Article challenges that
conventional wisdom. Building on the observation that speakers can
and often do transparently communicate different things to different
audiences with the same verbalization or written text, it argues
that, as a purely linguistic matter, there is nothing to prevent
Congress from doing the same with statutes. More still, because the
practical advantages of using multiple meanings — in particular,
linguistic economy — are at least as important to Congress as to
ordinary speakers, this Article argues further that it would be just
plain odd if Congress never chose to communicate multiple messages
with the same statutory text. As this Article goes on to show,
recognizing the possibility of multiple statutory meanings would let
courts reach sensible answers to important doctrinal questions they
currently do their best to avoid. Most notably, thinking about
multiple meanings in an informed way would help courts explain under
what conditions more than one agency should receive deference when
interpreting a multi-agency statute. Relatedly, it would let courts
reject as false the choice between Chevron deference and the rule of
lenity for statutes with both civil and criminal applications.”
As a demonstration of military/terrorist
capability, this seems to be a success. As to policy, once they
determine they can do nothing they resume flights? Has the risk
suddenly become acceptable? More likely the negative political
repercussions of a continued halt are more important.
Flights have resumed at London’s Gatwick Airport
after a full day of cancellations yesterday due to a mysterious drone
that was spotted repeatedly in the area
… Other airports around the world are on high
alert because if this is a coordinated disruption it obviously
doesn’t take much to put an entire airport out of commission. It
appears that all you need is a drone with a sufficiently long range
to not get caught.
… police are reportedly trying to use radio
signal jammers, just the same, in an effort to stop the drones. The
airport is crawling with more police and military than usual, as
would be expected. And there have been calls to just “
shoot
down” the drone, though that’s much more involved than it
seems. First you have to catch it.
… Who’s behind the disruption? Your guess
is as good as anyone’s, it would seem. Some believe that it’s
domestic actors like British environmentalists. Others speculate
that it could be a state actor like China or Russia testing out what
it would take to shut down an airport. If it’s the latter we now
know that the answer is “it doesn’t take much.”
(Related)
There’s
No Real System to Counter Rogue Drones
