Thursday, December 20, 2018

Amazon’s “human error” suggests there is a hack waiting to happen.
Reuters reports:
A user of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant in Germany got access to more than a thousand recordings from another user because of “a human error” by the company.
The customer had asked to listen back to recordings of his own activities made by Alexa but he was also able to access 1,700 audio files from a stranger when Amazon sent him a link, German trade publication c’t reported.
Read more on Reuters.




The cost of failure? A suit for the Cambridge Analytica nonsense finally arrives.
Facebook Has Biggest Plunge Since July as ‘Another Shoe’ Drops
Facebook Inc. tumbled on Wednesday, with shares extending their decline throughout the session after the social-media company was sued by the District of Columbia over a privacy breach.
The news followed a report from the New York Times that Facebook had allowed more than 150 companies to access more personal data from users than it had disclosed, the latest in a series of controversies that have weighed on shares in 2018.
The stock fell as much as 7.3 percent, putting it on track for its biggest one-day percentage drop since its historic collapse in late July. Wednesday’s decline extends a sell-off that has erased nearly 40 percent in value. [GDPR only wants 4%. It’s these self-inflicted wounds that truly hurt. Bob]




Would CBO believe that I do not own a cell phone? I’m guessing we won’t get any useful answers from this.
American Sues US Government For Allegedly Pressuring Him To Unlock His Phone at Airport
Haisam Elsharkawi, a 35-year-old US citizen of Egyptian descent, said he was stopped at the gate at the Los Angeles International Airport on February 9, 2017, after passing through TSA and security checks with no issues. As he was boarding his flight, according to a lawsuit filed by Elsharkawi in a California court in late October, CBP agents allegedly pulled him aside and repeatedly asked him questions, searched his belongings, and asked him to unlock his cell phones.
When he refused and asked for an attorney, CBP officers allegedly handcuffed him and took him to a room for more questioning, where a DHS officer eventually convinced him to unlock the phone and then looked through it for 15 minutes. At no point did the agents tell him why they were searching and questioning him, the lawsuit alleges, nor did they they have a warrant. According to the lawsuit, the “interrogation” lasted four hours, and Elsharkawi missed his flight.




For my Computer Architecture students.
AI makers get political
Earlier this month, Ed Felten — a Princeton professor and former adviser to President Obama — chided an international audience of artificial intelligence experts packing a cavernous Montreal convention center.
What he's saying: For too long, AI hands have been hiding in their basements, in effect playing God by deciding which technology is ultimately released to the masses, Felten said. Stop assuming that you know what's best for people, he admonished his listeners, and instead dive into the already-raging public debate of what happens next with AI.
"The group of us deeply concerned about the societal impacts of AI has grown extensively," said Brent Hecht, chair of the ACM Future of Computing Academy, an association of young computing professionals.
This movement is being pushed along by nonprofits, including the Partnership on AI and OpenAI. The Center for a New American Security, a think tank, has convened back-room conversations between policymakers and researchers.




Perspective. A mere 95 years.
All Copyrighted Works First Published In the US In 1923 Will Enter Public Domain On January 1st
… At midnight on New Year’s Eve, all works first published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public domain. It has been 21 years since the last mass expiration of copyright in the U.S. That deluge of works includes not just “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which appeared first in the New Republic in 1923, but hundreds of thousands of books, musical compositions, paintings, poems, photographs and films. After January 1, any record label can issue a dubstep version of the 1923 hit “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” any middle school can produce Theodore Pratt’s stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and any historian can publish Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis with her own extensive annotations. Any artist can create and sell a feminist response to Marcel Duchamp’s seminal Dadaist piece, The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) and any filmmaker can remake Cecil B. DeMille’s original The Ten Commandments and post it on YouTube.
“The public domain has been frozen in time for 20 years, and we’re reaching the 20-year thaw,” says Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The release is unprecedented, and its impact on culture and creativity could be huge. We have never seen such a mass entry into the public domain in the digital age. The last one—in 1998, when 1922 slipped its copyright bond—predated Google. “We have shortchanged a generation,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. “The 20th century is largely missing from the internet.” For academics fearful of quoting from copyrighted texts, teachers who may be violating the law with every photocopy, and modern-day artists in search of inspiration, the event is a cause for celebration. For those who dread seeing Frost’s immortal ode to winter used in an ad for snow tires, “Public Domain Day,” as it is sometimes known, will be less joyful. Despite that, even fierce advocates for copyright agree that, after 95 years, it is time to release these works. “There comes a point when a creative work belongs to history as much as to its author and her heirs,” said Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild….”




Something to slip into ye olde tool chest.
This free online tool uses AI to quickly remove the background from images
If you’ve ever needed to quickly remove the background of an image you know it can be tedious, even with access to software like Photoshop. Well, Remove.bg is a single-purpose website that uses AI to do the hard work for you. Just upload any image and the site will automatically identify any people in it, cut around the foreground, and let you download a PNG of your subject with a transparent background. Easy.




Sometimes the best tool for the job is not the right tool for the job.


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