Friday, December 21, 2018

“We don’t hack and we pledge to not hack any more.”
US Indicts Chinese Govt Hackers Over Attacks in 12 Countries
The Justice Department said the hackers had targeted numerous managed service providers (MSPs), specialist firms which help other companies manage their information technology systems -- potentially giving hackers an entry into the computer networks of dozens of companies.
Companies who were hacked were not named, but 45 victims in the United States included key government agencies -- the NASA Goddard Space Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the US Navy, where the personal information of more than 100,000 personnel was stolen.
Internationally, the hackers accessed the computers of a major bank, three telecommunications or consumer electronics companies, mining and health care companies, and business consultancies.
Rosenstein slammed Beijing for repeatedly violating a pledge made by Xi to then-president Barack Obama in 2015 to halt cyber-attacks on US companies and commercial infrastructure.
In London, the Foreign Office likewise accused China of not living up to their bilateral agreement against hacking driven by commercial and economic motives.




For my lecture on encryption.
India's Government Denies Telling Federal Agencies They Can Snoop On Every Computer, Despite An Order That Seems To Say They Can
A row broke out in India's parliament on Friday after the country's Ministry of Home Affairs, a federal government authority that controls the country’s internal security, seemingly authorized ten government agencies – including federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies – to monitor, intercept, and decrypt all data on all computers in the country.
The governmental order detailing the powers immediately drew strong criticism from both India’s privacy activists and its opposition parties, who said it enabled blanket state surveillance, and violated the fundamental right to privacy that India’s 1.3 billion citizens are constitutionally guaranteed.
… India's Information Security Act allows agencies to invoke surveillance measures in the interest of national security since 2008, but the Act demands that the government provide written reasons that clearly explain why such measures are necessary.
“This latest order completely bypasses that,” said Sinha.




Milestones in technology: Facial recognition and slurpees.
Pay with your ‘face’ as AI system starts at Seven-Eleven
… Users are required to have a photo taken of their faces by a camera tied into the cash register in advance to utilize the system.
Once users are registered in the system, all they need to do is to show their faces to make purchases, which will be deducted from their salaries.




Should we be concerned that the FCC does not control the entire world?
As it turns out, if the U.S. Federal Communications Commission asks you not to do something, you should probably not do that thing—particularly when it comes to launching to unapproved satellites into orbit.
This is the lesson currently faced by Swarm Technologies, a startup being fined $900,000 by the FCC for launching four unauthorized satellites into orbit in January.
… The satellites launched in January with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). Quartz reported in March that the FCC raised concerns about the size of the satellites, which the agency said were “below the size threshold at which detection by the Space Surveillance Network (SSN) can be considered routine.”




For the continuing debate in my classes.
7 Arguments Against the Autonomous-Vehicle Utopia




Thank god someone is asking the big questions.
How are algorithms distributing power between people?
Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University: “Why Computer Scientists Need Philosophers, According to a Mathematician – “Lily Hu is a 3rd year PhD candidate in Applied Mathematics at Harvard University, where she studies algorithmic fairness with special interest in its interaction with various philosophical notions of justice. Currently, she is an intern at Microsoft Research New York City and a member of the Mechanism Design for Social Good research group (co-founded by Berkman affiliate Rediet Abebe). She is also passionate about education equity; she has taught subjects such as physics, biology, chemistry, English, and Spanish History/Geography in San Francisco, Cambridge, and Madrid.
I work in algorithmic fairness; in particular, I’m interested in thinking about algorithmic systems as explicitly resource distribution mechanisms. I’m not interested in necessarily how the particulars of the sorting happens; I’m interested in the final outcomes that are issued, and I am interested in the distributional outcomes that are deemed to be appropriate or inappropriate under our various fairness notions. How are algorithms distributing power between people? What kind of questions are they enabling us to ask, what kind of questions are they enabling us to solve, and not only that, but what kind of questions are they preventing us from answering? That’s kind of my big research agenda…”




Wolfram Alpha is an extremely useful math tool. This could be interesting. (The examples in the article are trivial compared to what Wolfram Alpha can do.)
Alexa now taps Wolfram Alpha to answer science and math questions
… “We rolled out an Alexa Q&A integration with Wolfram Alpha to U.S. customers, which expands Alexa’s capabilities to answer more questions related to mathematics, science, astronomy, engineering, geography, history, and more,” an Amazon spokesperson told VentureBeat. “Information curated by Wolfram Alpha has rolled out to select customers and will continue to roll out over the coming weeks and months.”
… When it arrives on Alexa-enabled smart speakers and displays, you’ll be able to ask questions like “Alexa, what is the billionth prime number?” and “Alexa, how high do swans fly?”
Here are a few additional queries Wolfram Alpha will step in to handle:
  • Alexa, what is x to the power of three plus x plus five where x is equal to seven?
  • Alexa, how fast is the wind blowing right now?
  • Alexa, how many sheets of paper will fit in a binder?
  • Alexa, how long until the moon rises?




This suggests that Congress is either much dumber (high probability) or much smarter (low probability) than they have ever shown themselves to be. Politicians may speak in vague, even misleading words (Okay, they lie) but lawmakers must not.
Can a Statute Have More Than One Meaning?
Doerfler, Ryan, Can a Statute Have More Than One Meaning? (December 12, 2018). New York University Law Review, Vol. 94, 2019. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3300262
“What statutory language means can vary from statute to statute, or even provision to provision. But what about from case to case? The conventional wisdom is that the same language can mean different things as used in different places within the United States Code. As used in some specific place, however, that language means what it means. Put differently, the same statutory provision must mean the same thing in all cases. To hold otherwise, courts and scholars suggest, would be contrary both to the rules of grammar and to the rule of law. This Article challenges that conventional wisdom. Building on the observation that speakers can and often do transparently communicate different things to different audiences with the same verbalization or written text, it argues that, as a purely linguistic matter, there is nothing to prevent Congress from doing the same with statutes. More still, because the practical advantages of using multiple meanings — in particular, linguistic economy — are at least as important to Congress as to ordinary speakers, this Article argues further that it would be just plain odd if Congress never chose to communicate multiple messages with the same statutory text. As this Article goes on to show, recognizing the possibility of multiple statutory meanings would let courts reach sensible answers to important doctrinal questions they currently do their best to avoid. Most notably, thinking about multiple meanings in an informed way would help courts explain under what conditions more than one agency should receive deference when interpreting a multi-agency statute. Relatedly, it would let courts reject as false the choice between Chevron deference and the rule of lenity for statutes with both civil and criminal applications.”




As a demonstration of military/terrorist capability, this seems to be a success. As to policy, once they determine they can do nothing they resume flights? Has the risk suddenly become acceptable? More likely the negative political repercussions of a continued halt are more important.
Flights have resumed at London’s Gatwick Airport after a full day of cancellations yesterday due to a mysterious drone that was spotted repeatedly in the area
… Other airports around the world are on high alert because if this is a coordinated disruption it obviously doesn’t take much to put an entire airport out of commission. It appears that all you need is a drone with a sufficiently long range to not get caught.
… police are reportedly trying to use radio signal jammers, just the same, in an effort to stop the drones. The airport is crawling with more police and military than usual, as would be expected. And there have been calls to just “shoot down” the drone, though that’s much more involved than it seems. First you have to catch it.
… Who’s behind the disruption? Your guess is as good as anyone’s, it would seem. Some believe that it’s domestic actors like British environmentalists. Others speculate that it could be a state actor like China or Russia testing out what it would take to shut down an airport. If it’s the latter we now know that the answer is “it doesn’t take much.”


(Related)
There’s No Real System to Counter Rogue Drones


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