So, why haven’t they done this years ago?
Twitter
fights spam by requiring new users to confirm their email or phone
number
Twitter has traditionally had more lax sign up
requirements then its oft-cited competitor Facebook. Users haven’t
had to give their full name on Twitter, for example, which has made
it easier for users to protect their identity but has also made it
easy for spam accounts to take over the platform.
… In a blog
post, Twitter’s Yoel Roth and Del Harvey said that new users
will now have to confirm either an email address or phone number when
they sign up for the platform. This change will be rolled out later
this year, and the company says that its two-year-old Trust and
Safety Council will also be working with NGOs to “ensure this
change does not hurt someone in a high-risk environment where
anonymity is important.” The company will also start “auditing
existing accounts for signs of automated sign up.”
Before you try to be cool, be careful!
Education
Scotland order hard reset on school social networking app following
major security breach
An email distributed to headteachers and seen by
The Courier has revealed how management called for all log-ins to be
scrapped after it emerged
children had been encouraged in schools to share credentials with
their parents.
It means unauthorised could have gained access to
applications such as Yammer, a social networking tool that allows
every school child in Scotland – and by extension anyone with
access to their log in details – to privately send messages to one
another.
The service, which is hosted on the Glow learning
platform, also allows users, regardless of whether they go to the
same school, to view each other’s full name, school, interests,
friends and email address.
Access to the app was locked
down temporarily after an
investigation by The Courier revealed how the Scottish
Government’s own impact report had concluded
it was vulnerable to individuals looking to find children and “do
them harm”.
Education Secretary John Swinney claimed last week
the service was “closed to the general public” and had only ever
been accessible to pupils and educators.
However, it has now emerged that was not the case.
In some instances, children as young as five years
old were sent home with strips of paper containing log-in details to
give to their parents.
… “As Education
Scotland does not hold the contact details of parents, [Really?
Bob] informing them of the decision to reset passwords
for students using Glow has to be an action for the relevant local
authority.”
Is there also a targeting bias? Is Facial
Recognition is used mostly on darker skinned peoples? Is anyone
keeping track?
Microsoft’s
facial recognition can better identify people with darker skin tones
Microsoft says its facial
recognition tools are getting better at identifying people with
darker skin tones than before, according
to a company blog post today. The error rates have been reduced
by as much as 20 times for men and women with darker skin and by nine
times for all women.
The company says it’s been
training its AI tools with larger and more diverse datasets, which
has led to the progress. “If we are training machine learning
systems to mimic decisions made in a biased society, using data
generated by that society, then those systems will necessarily
reproduce its biases,” said Hanna Wallach, a Microsoft senior
researcher, in the blog post.
Paul Ohm is always interesting.
The Broad
Reach of Carpenter v. United States
Carpenter v. United States is an
inflection point in the history of the Fourth Amendment. From now
on, we’ll be talking about what the Fourth Amendment means in
pre-Carpenter and post-Carpenter terms. It
will be seen as being as important as Olmstead
and Katz
in the
overall arc of technological privacy.
I hope to develop the argument that Carpenter
is as important as Katz across two or three articles, but
let me begin with my overall big picture: The holding and reasoning
of Carpenter is breathtakingly broad and will be applied far
beyond the facts of this case. (For a detailed overview of the facts
and five opinions of this case, see this blog
post written by my star student and recent Georgetown graduate,
Sabrina McCubbin.)
(Related) Revolt isn’t the right word.
Reaction to overreach?
Digital
Searches, the Fourth Amendment, and the Magistrates’ Revolt
Berman, Emily, Digital Searches, the Fourth
Amendment, and the Magistrates’ Revolt (May 30, 2018). Emory Law
Journal, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3187612
“Searches of electronically stored information
present a Fourth Amendment challenge. It is often impossible for
investigators to identify and collect, at the time a warrant is
executed, only the specific data whose seizure is authorized.
Instead, the government must seize the entire storage medium—e.g.,
a hard drive or a cell phone—and extract responsive information
later. But investigators conducting that subsequent search
inevitably will encounter vast amounts of non-responsive (and often
intensely personal) information contained on the device. The
challenge thus becomes how to balance the resulting privacy concerns
with law enforcement’s legitimate need to investigate crime. Some
magistrate judges have begun including in their warrants for digital
searches limits on how those searches may be carried out—a
development that some have referred to as a “magistrates’
revolt,” and which has both supporters and detractors. This
Article argues that the magistrates’ “revolt” was actually no
revolt at all. Instead, these judges simply adopted a time-honored
tool—minimization—that is used to address a conceptually
analogous privacy threat posed by foreign intelligence collection. I
further argue that embracing both the practice and the label of
“minimization” will yield at least two benefits: First, it will
recast magistrates’ actions as a new instantiation of a legitimate
judicial role, rather than a novel, potentially illegitimate
practice. Second, it will allow magistrates to draw on lessons
learned from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s creative
use of minimization to safeguard Fourth Amendment rights in the
intelligence-collection context.”
Is this a real thing?
You can say
no to Duke Energy's wireless meter. But you'll need a doctor's note.
North Carolina will start offering an unusual
escape clause for the thousands of North Carolina residents who
complain that Duke Energy's two-way communication utility
meters give them headaches, ear-ringing and a case of the "brain
fog."
Residents who say they suffer from acute
sensitivity to radio-frequency waves can say no to Duke's smart
meters — as long as they have a notarized doctor's note to attest
to their rare condition.
The N.C. Utilities Commission, which sets utility
rates and rules, created
the new standard on Friday, possibly making North Carolina the
first state to limit the smart meter technology revolution by means
of a medical opinion. It took the Utilities Commission two years to
resolve the dispute — longer than it takes to review a complicated
rate increase or to issue a permit to build a coal-burning power
plant — after considering the warnings and denials of conflicting
studies and feuding experts.
Charlotte-based Duke had proposed charging
customers extra if they refused a smart meter. Duke wanted to charge
an initial fee of $150 plus $11.75 a month to cover the expense of
sending someone out to that customer's house to take a monthly meter
reading. But the Utilities Commission opted to give the benefit of
the doubt to customers with smart meter health issues until the
Federal Communications Commission determines the health risks of the
devices.
… "More than a dozen individuals,
including a physician, stated that they have personally experienced
debilitating health impacts from the cumulative impact of RF
emissions," the Utilities Commission said in its ruling. "A
few went so far as to assert that RF emissions from smart meters
contribute to violence and homicides."
The commission received a statement from the
director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the
University of Albany in New York, co-signed by four other scientists
and doctors. The letter said the greatest risk of radio frequency
wave exposure is cancer, but symptoms include memory loss and
fatigue.
What part of this headline will get all the
attention? Here’s a hint.
Bill Gates
hails 'huge milestone' for AI as bots
work in a team to destroy humans at video game 'Dota 2'
Founder of Microsoft Bill Gates has hailed what he
sees as a turning point in the development of AI.
OpenAI, a company which was cofounded by Elon
Musk, has created five neural-networks called OpenAI Five which are
capable of playing the online multi-player game "Dota 2."
Not only can the bots play as a team, they
actually destroyed humans at the game during a number of battles.
(Related) And less inflammatory?
Artificial
Intelligence: Emerging Opportunities, Challenges, and Implications
for Policy and Research
Artificial
Intelligence: Emerging Opportunities, Challenges, and Implications
for Policy and Research; GAO-18-644T: Published: Jun 26, 2018.
Publicly Released: Jun 26, 2018. “Artificial intelligence (AI)
could improve human life
and economic competitiveness—but it also poses new risks.
The Comptroller General convened a Forum
on AI to consider the policy and research implications of AI’s
use in 4 areas with the potential to significantly affect daily life:
-
cybersecurity,
-
automated vehicles,
-
criminal justice, and
-
financial services.
“Based on our March 2018 technology assessment,
we testified that AI will have far-reaching effects on society—even
if AI capabilities stop advancing today. We also testified about
prospects for AI in the near future and areas where changes in policy
and research may be needed.”
Not intrusive enough?
Facebook
abandons its plans to build giant drones and lays off 16 employees
Facebook is scrapping its efforts to build its
passenger jet-sized drones that provide wireless internet to the
developing world, and laying off staff, it
announced on Tuesday— a major retreat from what had been an
ambitious and high-profile initiative at the company.
… "We've decided now is the right moment
to focus on the next set of engineering and regulatory challenges for
HAPS connectivity," Facebook's Yael Maguire wrote in a blog
post. "This means we will no longer design and build our own
aircraft, and, as a result, we've closed our facility in
Bridgewater."
Perspective.
How Social
Networks Set the Limits of What We Can Say On-line
Content material moderation is difficult. This
ought to be apparent, but it surely’s simply forgotten. It’s
useful resource intensive and relentless; it requires making tough
and sometimes untenable distinctions; it’s wholly unclear what the
requirements ought to be, particularly on a world scale; and one
failure can incur sufficient public outrage to overshadow one million
quiet successes. We as a society are partly accountable
for having put platforms on this state of affairs. We generally
decry the intrusions of moderators, and generally decry their
absence.
Even so, now we have handed to non-public firms
the facility to set and implement the boundaries of acceptable public
speech. That is a gigantic cultural energy to be held by so few, and
it’s largely wielded behind closed doorways, making it tough for
outsiders to examine or problem. Platforms regularly, and
conspicuously, fail to reside as much as our expectations. Actually,
given the enormity of the endeavor, most platforms’ personal
definition of success contains failing customers regularly.
Useful in several classes, I think.
Paper –
Text as Data
Text
as Data – Matthew Gentzkow, Stanford; Bryan T. Kelly, Yale and
AQR Capital Management; Matt Taddy, Chicago Booth: “An ever
increasing share of human interaction, communication, and culture is
recorded as digital text. We
provide an introduction to the use of text as an input to economic
research. We discuss the features that make text
different from other forms of data, offer a practical overview of
relevant statistical methods, and survey a variety of applications.”
For my geeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment