Wednesday, July 18, 2018

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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