Another case of ignoring basic security procedures.
Zack Whittaker reports:
Navionics, an electronic navigational chart maker owned by tech giant Garmin, has secured an exposed database that contained hundreds of thousands of customer records.
The MongoDB database wasn’t secured with a password, allowing anyone who knew where to look to access and download the data.
The company’s main products give boat, yacht and ship owners better access to real-time navigation charts, and boasts the “world’s largest cartography database.”
Bob Diachenko, Hacken.io’s newly appointed director of cyber risk research, said in a blog post that the 19 gigabyte database contained 261,259 unique records, including customer names and email addresses.
Read more on TechCrunch.
Automating the legal process.
DoNotPay
launches tools to lock security down, sue after hacks
First Joshua Browder went after parking tickets,
building a bot that helped hundreds of thousands of users challenge
their fines.
Then, the 21-year-old student broadened his focus,
expanding into everything from landlord disputes to chasing
compensation for lost luggage on flights.
In 2018, Browder took aim at Equifax after a data
breach exposed the personal data the firm held on tens of millions of
Americans, and his app DoNotPay was used
to help file 25,000 lawsuits against the company.
The British entrepreneur is now expanding into
privacy and data security. On Wednesday, he announced that DoNotPay
will now help users easily
lock the privacy settings on their social media accounts —
and help sue those companies that expose users' data through hacks
and breaches.
… DoNotPay is a tool that provides automated,
free legal assistance. The user writes in what they need help with,
and they're then asked relevant questions before being given
appropriate documentation or guidance on how to tackle their problem
— from flight refunds to maternity leave requests — sidestepping
the need for traditional (and costly) legal guidance.
There's two strands to Wednesday's update. The
first is focused on privacy, and helps users lock down their accounts
from prying eyes. It automatically makes a series of what Browder
calls "no brainer" changes to users' settings on Facebook,
Instagram, and Twitter — like disabling personalized Twitter ads,
deleting your call and text history from Facebook, and stopping other
accounts seeing when you're online on Instagram.
No good deed goes unpunished?
uja Amin of Womble Bond Dickinson writes about a
complaint that may be of interest to some readers:
…Just before the alert was sent out, Judge
Katherine Polk Failla, rejected three self-represented New Yorkers’
request for a preliminary injunction to halt the test of the
Presidential Alert system, apparently finding Plaintiffs’ claims
“too speculative.” The New York Plaintiffs had filed its
lawsuit, Nicholas v. Trump, case number 1:18-cv-08828, on
September 26, 2018 in the Southern District Court of New York against
Donald Trump and the head of FEMA, arguing that the new system
violates First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
In
their complaint, the Plaintiffs proclaim that they are “American
citizens who do not wish to receive text messages, or messages of any
kind, on any topic or subject, from Defendant Trump.” Citing the
Carpenter
v. United States decision we discussed here on TCPALand a
few months back, Plaintiffs allege that these messages allow the
government “to trespass into and hijack” cellular devices without
explicit consent, which violates the “Fourth Amendment right to
privacy in their cellular devices.”
Read more on National
Law Review. And thanks to Joe Cadillic for sending along this
one!
Exactly what I tell my students. Almost.
Technology,
Evidence, and Its Procedural Rules
Chasse, Ken, Technology, Evidence, and Its
Procedural Rules (September 15, 2018). Available at SSRN:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3249947
or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3249947
“The rules of procedure that govern proceedings
concerning discovery, disclosure, and admissibility have to be
flexibly applied to fit each technology that produces the evidence
being dealt with because
technology cannot be made to change its nature to suit rules of
procedure. That is particularly important for those
sources of very frequently used kinds of evidence such as, electronic
records management systems (records now being the most frequently
used kind of evidence), mobile phone tracking evidence,
breathalyzer/intoxilyzer devices, and, TAR (technology assisted
review) software programs that are used to conduct the “records
review stage” of electronic discovery proceedings. Motivations to
limit the time and cost of legal proceedings by limiting the issues
to be decided are now outmoded because the more complex the sources
of evidence become, the greater are the number and complexity of
issues of law and fact that must be decided to determine the
reliability of such evidence and adequacy of its production. And,
the more complex a
technology, the more ways it has to break down. And so, a
motor vehicle has more ways, and therefore a greater probability to
perform inadequately than does a bicycle. As a result, when society
becomes dependent upon a more complex technology, legal proceedings
must be expected to take longer and cost more. And so, mass
transportation based upon motor vehicles, has imposed a vastly
greater burden upon the justice system than did mass transportation
based upon horses. But technology is constantly changing and so
lawyers’ education has to change accordingly so that they can
challenge the reliability of complex technology’s sources of
evidence. Specialist legal research lawyers, able to advise all
lawyers as to the nature and vulnerabilities of such technology will
have to be formally recognized by law societies, and made available
in law society-sponsored centralized legal research support services,
operated at cost, per case so serviced. How else to provide the
legal profession at large with such complex and ever-changing
information with which to compose its cross-examinations and
arguments adequately? That includes arguments as to why and how the
rules of procedure must be flexibly applied so as to know, for
example, the exact point at which the onus of proof can in fairness
be transferred to the opposing party to provide “evidence to the
contrary.” Given that technology is a constantly evolving, moving
target, how to teach lawyers and law students about such factors as,
software errors rates and architecture, the strengths and
vulnerabilities of particular technologies, its national and
international standards, and the requirements for its adequate
manufacture, usage, and maintenance? Very little of that has an
adequate legal infrastructure. Manufacturing motor vehicles
allegedly does. Nevertheless, every year its manufacturers must
recall millions of automobiles that they have inadequately made.
Technology that produces such evidence raises issues as to the reliability of software. The technical literature warns repeatedly, we trust software far too much. And so knowledge of technology is essential to “doing justice.” Otherwise, by default lawyers treat its sources of evidence as being infallible. It is far from that. And therefore, so are the rules of procedure that govern the use of such evidence. Blame lawyers; not judges. Judges must decide cases using only the evidence and argument provided by lawyers. Their purpose is to decide disputes; not to educate lawyers. The legal profession is just another industry that must keep up with technology in law and practice, or be bypassed by technology…”
Can Senators identify fake news?
Pentagon
says memo asking for Broadcom-CA deal review is likely fake
The U.S. Department of Defense said on Wednesday
that a memo purporting to show the Pentagon asking for a national
security review of chipmaker Broadcom Inc’s $19 billion deal to buy
software company CA Technologies was likely fake.
… The Pentagon is looking into who wrote the
fake memo, according to a spokeswoman. She said they considered it
likely to be fake based on an initial assessment.
… Senator Rand Paul’s office, however,
reiterated his call for a national security review of the deal,
denying that a memo was behind the lawmaker’s request for a review.
Perspective.
IFPI Report
Finds Streaming Continues to Rise, YouTube Dominates Online Listening
… streaming
continues to dominate music listening, with 86% of respondents
engaging in music that way, with 57% in the 16- to 24-year-old demo
using a paid audio service. Another finding shows nearly half of the
time spent listening to on-demand music is through YouTube,
with 52% of that total on video streaming, 28% on paid audio
streaming and 20% on free audio streaming.
… Still copyright infringement remains an
issue, with 38% of consumers obtaining music through infringing
methods, stream ripping dominating with 32% of the audience.
Perspective.
EU
hijacking: self-driving car data will be copyrighted...by the
manufacturer
Today, the EU held a routine vote on regulations
for self-driving cars, when something decidedly out of the ordinary
happened...
The autonomous vehicle
rules contained a clause that affirmed that "data generated by
autonomous transport are automatically generated and are by nature
not creative, thus making copyright protection or the right on
databases inapplicable."
This is pretty inoffensive stuff. Copyright
protects creative work, not factual data, and the telemetry generated
by your car – self-driving or not – is not copyrighted.
But just before the vote, members of the European
Peoples' Party (the same bloc that pushed through the catastrophic
new Copyright
Directive) stopped the proceedings with a rare "roll call"
and voted down the clause.
In other words, they've snuck in a space for the
telemetry generated by autonomous vehicles to become someone's
property.
Perspective.
Amazon recently made headlines by announcing that
it would voluntarily increase its minimum hourly wage to $15. With a
federal minimum wage of only $7.25, this pledge might seem like a
curious decision — especially for a company as laser-focused on
cost containment as Amazon. But thinking only about the costs
involved in raising wages misses a key issue: pay hikes can also
boost workplace productivity.
Given Amazon’s well-deserved reputation as a
data-driven (and long-term oriented) company, you can bet that
Amazon’s management team has done the analysis and figured out that
paying employees more is, from a business perspective, more benefit
than cost. They’re not the first company to make a decision like
this — most notably, Walmart set a minimum wage of $11
earlier in 2018 — and we hope others come to realize that paying
workers more can be a matter of enlightened self-interest.
… First, higher wages allow firms to attract
and retain better employees (assuming competitors don’t follow suit
and raise their wages as well). But there is an important — and
often overlooked — second effect. Paying wages that are above the
market rate (known within economics as “efficiency wages”) can
also be an important motivating force for your existing employee
base. The intuition is straightforward: higher wages makes
a job more desirable. This leads to a larger applicant
pool waiting to take over when openings occur, and makes
it easier to replace a slacker employee. It also means
that workers have more to lose by slacking off — who cares if
you’re fired from a $7.25 an hour job, but where else will you find
somewhere that pays $15 per hour?
The concept of efficiency wages is an old idea,
dating back at least to Henry Ford’s introduction of the “five
dollar day” in 1914, at a time when the daily wage at manufacturing
plants near his Highland Park factory was $2.30. Ford
himself called it his finest cost-cutting move, because of
the boost to productivity that came as a result.
For my Android users.
Wow! I just said the same thing to my boss.
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