Looks like the 2020 Election meddling has begun. These folks have
had a couple of years to get their act together. Were the hackers
that good? (ie State Sponsored)
Alex Isenstadt and John Bresnahan report:
The House GOP campaign arm suffered a major hack during the 2018 election, exposing thousands of sensitive emails to an outside intruder, according to three senior party officials.
The email accounts of four senior aides at the National Republican Congressional Committee were surveilled for several months, the party officials said. The intrusion was detected in April by an NRCC vendor, who alerted the committee and its cybersecurity contractor. [Not good for their reputation. Bob]
Read more on Politico.
[From
the article:
However, senior House Republicans — including
Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of
California and Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana — were
not informed of
the hack until Politico contacted the NRCC on Monday with
questions about the episode. Rank-and-file House Republicans were
not told, either.
(Related) Another tool for spreading
disinformation.
We need to
identify, disqualify and regulate chatbots before they destroy
political speech.
Be
careful how you hack. Valuing your house at $5 million might seem a
bit suspicious in a neighborhood of $250,000 identical homes.
Letting
Algorithms Replace Human Appraisers
- Home appraisals could be done electronically without the need for a licensed human regulator, according to new proposals
- Regulators say the vast majority of homes could be appraised using electronic algorithms which could make house buying faster and cheaper
- About 214,000 home sales could have been made last year with the change
- House appraisers were largely blamed for inflating prices during the crash…”
“We know everything about you and we can’t
stop knowing.”
Google
personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study
claims
The amount of personalization inherent in any one
of Google’s many massive software products runs deep, based on
everything from your search history to your location to every single
search link you might have clicked. And avoiding that
personalization seems to have become more difficult over the years.
According
to a new study conducted by Google competitor DuckDuckGo, it does
not seem possible to avoid personalization when using Google search,
even by logging out of your Google account and using the private
browsing “incognito” mode.
Probably seemed like a good idea at the time. If
compliance is difficult, find an easier way!
Could GDPR
Consent String Fraud Bring Down the Whole Ad Tech Ecosystem?
In an effort to get
around some of the more onerous provisions of the European
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect in
May 2018, some ad tech vendors appear to be engaging in a form of
data privacy fraud known as “consent string fraud.” If this type
of data privacy fraud becomes rampant and European regulators begin
to assess fines against ad tech companies knowingly circumventing the
GDPR, it could bring down the whole ad tech ecosystem. At the very
least, it could have a chilling effect on the entire digital
advertising industry as publishers and advertisers decide to scale
back their activity.
How easily could you organize a “fake protest”
using “fake news?”
How
Facebook Groups sparked a crisis in France
… What
commentators are saying, both inside France and out, is that the
movement has been organized primarily on Facebook. The writer
Frederic
Filloux described some of the group’s methods:
Two weeks ago, more than 1,500 Yellow Vests-related Facebook events were organized locally, sometimes garnering a quarter of a city’s population. Self-appointed thinkers became national figures, thanks to popular pages and a flurry of Facebook Live. One of them, Maxime Nicolle (107,000 followers), organizes frequent impromptu “lives”, immediately followed by thousands of people. His gospel is a hodgepodge of incoherent demands but he’s now a national voice.
… Writing
for Bloomberg (and quoting a French-language column I couldn’t read
myself), Leonid Bershidsky argues that Facebook’s decision to
promote posts from groups in the News Feed may
have exacerbated the protests.
Perspective. The world is about to change
(again). Not everywhere and not for everyone.
Riding in
Waymo One, the Google spinoff’s first self-driving taxi service
… Waymo, the self-driving
subsidiary of Alphabet, launched its first commercial autonomous
ride-hailing service here in the Phoenix suburbs on Wednesday — a
momentous moment for the former Google self-driving project that has
been working
on the technology for almost a decade. I was one of the lucky
few to test out the company’s robot taxi experience a week before
the launch. And I say “lucky” because to ride in one of Waymo’s
autonomous minivans, not only do you
have to live in one of four suburbs around Phoenix, but you also have
to be in a very exclusive, 400-person club called the Early Riders.
… The cars aren’t fully
driverless yet: they will include “trained drivers” behind the
steering wheel until Waymo decides to pull them out. Chu says it
will test a variety of “configurations;” the company says it will
eventually offer driverless rides, but it declined to give an exact
date.
Perspective. This is largely about self-driving
cars and the switch to electric cars.
Keeping up with my students. (More likely, their
children)
Something for my students to consider.
Kik is an instant messenger service that’s
increasingly popular with teens and young adults, but it doesn’t
have the best reputation
… You sign up using an email address and
password, negating the need for a phone number. If you want hands-on
experience yourself, it’s free for iPhone and Android.
I gotta get me one of these!
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