Who would you like to win and by how much?
Perhaps now some election districts will ask for independent
verification? (Probably not)
Top Voting
Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems
Sold to States
The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted
in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed
remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a
period of six years, raising questions about the security of those
systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them.
In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April
and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software
acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection
software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006,"
which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold
them.
The statement contradicts what the company told
me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the New York Times
in February. At that time, a spokesperson said ES&S had never
installed pcAnywhere on any election system it sold.
A parallel guide for Computer Security students.
(Only 232 pages, about 20% of your textbook)
Updating
Government Auditing Standards – The 2018 Yellow Book
GAO WatchBlog: “Today we issued a new revision
of the Generally
Accepted Government Auditing Standards, also known as the
“Yellow Book,” which supersedes the 2011 revision of the
standards. What kind of training and experience make a competent
auditor? How is audit quality control to be maintained? How can an
auditor tell if he or she has come across material waste and abuse?
The Yellow Book has answers to these questions. Government auditors
are required to objectively evaluate government operations, gather
sufficient, appropriate evidence, and report the result. To do this,
auditors rely on these standards to provide a framework for
conducting high-quality audits with competence, integrity,
objectivity, and independence…”
I wonder what insurance will cost now in the EU
GDPR, big fine era?
Google
fined a record $5B for breaking EU antitrust laws
It’s been confirmed: the EU has fined Google a
record €4.34 billion ($5 billion). This is in response to the
technology giant’s mobile operating software, Android,
breaking European antitrust laws.
Announced at 1pm in Brussels by the EU’s
Competition Commissioner Margrethe
Vestager, she declared that Google must “put an effective end
to this conduct in 90 days” or face penalties.
I would imaging some costs will go down as the
insurance companies see healthy lifestyles. More granular than
simple actuarial tables, but has to average out the same.
Health
Insurers Increasing Data Collection on Patients and Rates are Rising
Joint reporting – ProPublica
and NPR: “Without any public scrutiny, insurers and data
brokers are predicting your health costs based on data about things
like race, marital status, how much TV you watch, whether you pay
your bills on time or even buy plus-size clothing… With little
public scrutiny, the health insurance industry has joined forces with
data brokers to vacuum up personal details about hundreds of millions
of Americans, including, odds are, many readers of this story. The
companies are tracking your race, education level, TV habits, marital
status, net worth. They’re collecting what you post on social
media, whether you’re behind on your bills, what you order online.
Then they feed this information into complicated computer algorithms
that spit out predictions about how much your health care could cost
them…”
Perspective. I was taught to play to my
strengths. Just saying…
Walmart is
reportedly building a video streaming service to take on Netflix
The
Information reports that retail giant Walmart is thinking about
getting into the streaming video business with a new platform – and
edge out the likes of Netflix
and Amazon
Prime Video with cheaper subscriptions.
The company is said to be considering offering
plans at under $8 a month, along with an ad-supported free tier.
That’d come in at less than Netflix’s cheapest plan in the US ($8
a month) and Amazon Prime Video ($8.99 a month).
That’s all well and good, but it’s worth
noting that Walmart already has a video streaming service: Vudu.
It acquired the platform back in March 2010, but hasn’t really
been able to capitalize on its investment in the past eight years.
In March, Bloomberg
cited comScore research that saw Vudu users spending less than
two hours a month on the platform, while folks spent about 25 hours a
month on Netflix.
There’s also the question of catching up to the
heavy hitters. Both Netflix and Amazon are busy expanding worldwide
and spending billions of dollars producing original content (Netflix
intends to burn through $8 billion in 2018 alone). Meanwhile,
Facebook
and Apple
are dipping their toes into the water too – and both have
tremendous clout with their users.
(Related) You can see why everyone wants to get
into this market.
I’ve been following Netflix since 2005, when I
first visited its headquarters in Silicon Valley and interviewed Reed
Hastings, its founder and CEO. I don’t think I’ve learned more
about strategy, technology, and culture from any other company I’ve
studied. It’s a stretch to claim that everything I know about
business I learned from watching Netflix, but there’s no doubt that
many leaders can see glimpses of the future of competition and
innovation by looking at how the company does business.
Despite this week’s news that the company had
added fewer new subscribers than expected, if there were an Academy
Awards show for business performance, Netflix would still sweep this
year’s categories — the corporate equivalent of “Titanic” or
“Lord of the Rings.” Wealth creation? The company, which is
barely 20 years old, has a stock-market
value of nearly $165 billion, more than Disney. Cultural sway?
Netflix recently got 112
Emmy nominations, the most of any network or streaming service,
toppling HBO, which had received the most nominations for 17 years.
Management cred? Its reputation is so strong that a simple
PowerPoint slideshow about its culture and HR policies has been
viewed more than 18 million times.
Here are three lessons from the rise of Netflix
that apply to every company:
Big
data is powerful, but big data plus big ideas is transformational.
If
you aim to disrupt an industry, you must be willing to disrupt
yourself.
Strategy
is culture, culture is strategy.
We’re going to be hip deep in lawyer-robots!
‘AI To
Create More Legal Jobs Than Losses’ – Landmark PwC Report
Artificial Lawyer: “AI will create more jobs
than it displaces by boosting economic growth, and in particular more
legal jobs will be created than lost in the long run, says a major
report by Big Four firm, PwC.
The study was focused on the UK, which is a useful standard model to
compare to other large, highly developed economies. The key finding
was that over the next 20 years AI and automation will radically
impact the economy ‘displacing’ 7 million roles nationally, but
also creating 7.2 million new roles, i.e. a net boost to employment.
The main area of losses will be manufacturing, which will see a
quarter of jobs disappear in the next 20 years. But, for lawyers
it’s an interesting picture (see table below for full details of
different employment types). Artificial Lawyer spoke to PwC
about the results and they stated that lawyers would be classed in
the ‘Professional, scientific and technical’ segment of the
economy. Though an amalgamated group, PwC therefore suggests that
some legal roles will see a 33% increase, while other types of role
decline by 18%, giving a net increase of 16% (when figures are
rounded). The AI data, which is contained in the new edition of
PwC’s regular UK Economic Outlook, does not get into granular
reasons for why or how AI will change the legal jobs outlook. But
here are some thoughts from Artificial Lawyer…”
Things my students will need to study. (10 minute
Video)
Whiteboard
Session: Why Every Organization Needs an AR Strategy
Michael Porter and Jim
Heppelman explain how augmented reality will change how we work. For
more, read "A
Manager's Guide to Augmented Reality."
Perspective. Looks like it needs a bot of work…
Hearing –
Facebook, Google and Twitter: Examining the Content Filtering
Practice
“House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob
Goodlatte (R-Va.) today delivered the following statement during the
House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on “Facebook,
Google, and Twitter: Examining the Content Filtering Practices of
Social Media Giants.” …Today, we continue to examine how
social media companies filter content on their platforms. At our
last hearing, which we held April, this Committee heard from Members
of Congress, social media personalities, legal experts, and a
representative of the news media industry to better understand the
concerns surrounding content filtering. Despite our invitations,
Facebook, Google, and Twitter declined to send witnesses. Today, we
finally have them here. Since our last hearing, we’ve seen
numerous efforts by these companies to improve transparency.
Conversely, we’ve also seen numerous stories in the news of content
that’s still being unfairly restricted. Just before July Fourth,
for example, Facebook automatically blocked a post from a Texas
newspaper that it claimed contained hate speech. Facebook then asked
the paper to “review the contents of its page and remove anything
that does not comply with Facebook’s policies.” The text at
issue was the Declaration of Independence…”
Witness Statements:
(Related)
Twitter
says it doesn’t ‘have the bandwidth’ to fix verification right
now
Twitter doesn’t presently “have the bandwidth”
to overhaul its verification system, the company’s new head of
product announced today. This comes despite Twitter’s continued
acknowledgement that it must bring transparency and a clear process
to verification and the blue checkmark, which has been stamped on
accounts belonging to an erratic mix of world leaders, celebrities,
athletes, business executives, journalists, and also
alt-right nationalists. The company maintains that verification
is fundamentally intended to confirm an account’s authenticity —
not signal any sort of endorsement.
… But this afternoon,
product lead Kayvon Beykpour said that his team is pausing work on
retooling verification and the task “isn’t a top priority for us
right now.” Instead, Twitter’s “health” team is focused
on election integrity and combatting disinformation ahead
of the coming US midterm elections this November and political
contests elsewhere.
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