Disaster
Recovery. Whatever the cause and whoever is responsible, is there a
repair team ready to respond?
’It’s a
matter of life or death’: Cell, internet outages prevent town from
calling 911
When someone is in an emergency, the response time
from emergency crews can be the difference between life or death.
However, neighbors in Fair Bluff can’t even reach those emergency
crews because of recent cell and Internet outages.
People in the town said the outages have happened
several times for several
hours over the past month.
… WECT called the town’s cell and Internet
provider, RiverStreet Networks, about the issue.
A spokesperson said the outages are due to
companies working in the Raleigh area accidentally cutting a fiber
line. The spokesperson said those fiber lines connect to Fair Bluff.
She said the company that
does the damage has to fix it, so doesn’t know how long repairs
will take.
… The outages are also affecting businesses.
When the Internet is down, most places can only take cash, no cards.
Worth reading for the cyber threats and artificial
intelligence issues.
2019
National Intelligence Strategy of the United States
“This National
Intelligence Strategy (NIS) provides the Intelligence Community
(IC) with strategic direction from the Director of National
Intelligence (DNI) for the next four years. It supports the national
security priorities outlined in the National Security Strategy as
well as other national strategies. In executing the NIS, all IC
activities must be responsive to national security priorities and
must comply with the Constitution, applicable laws and statutes, and
Congressional oversight requirements.”
“…The strategic environment is changing rapidly, and the United States faces an increasingly complex and uncertain world in which threats are becoming ever more diverse and interconnected. While the IC remains focused on confronting a number of conventional challenges to U.S. national security posed by our adversaries, advances in technology are driving evolutionary and revolutionary change across multiple fronts. The IC will have to become more agile, innovative, and resilient to deal effectively with these threats and the ever more volatile world that shapes them. The increasingly complex, interconnected, and transnational nature of these threats also underscores the importance of continuing and advancing IC outreach and cooperation with international partners and allies..”
This should be interesting…
Victory:
Federal Court in Seattle Will Begin Disclosing Surveillance Records
The public will learn how often federal
investigators in Seattle obtain
private details about your communications, such as who you called
and when, as a result of a petition to unseal those records brought
by EFF client The
Stranger.
Federal prosecutors and the U.S. District Court
for the Western District of Washington clerk’s office have
agreed to begin tracking and docketing various forms of
warrantless surveillance requests and next year will issue reports
every six months detailing the cases.
Timely indeed.
Blockchain
and the Law: A Critical Evaluation
Quintais, João and Bodó, Balázs and
Giannopoulou, Alexandra and Ferrari, Valeria, Blockchain and the Law:
A Critical Evaluation (January 17, 2019). Pedro Quintais, B. Bodó,
A. Giannopoulou, & A. Ferrari (2019). Blockchain and the Law: A
Critical Evaluation. Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law & Policy
(2)1; Amsterdam Law School Research Paper No. 2019-03; Institute for
Information Law Research Paper No. 2019-01. Available at SSRN:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3317404
“It is a high-risk, high-reward enterprise to
write a scholarly monograph on an emerging technology when its
societal use, economic worth, and even its technical design are still
in flux. With little empirical material with which to work, one
often has to resort to extrapolating the future developments from the
myriad seed of possibilities of the present. Yet, there are moments
in time when undertaking such an enterprise seems inevitable, because
there is a rough consensus that the emerging technology represents
more than just an incremental improvement of already existing
routines, and promises—or threatens—a disruption of the status
quo. Such is the case of blockchain or distributed ledger
technologies. In that light, Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright’s
Blockchain and the Law is a timely and valuable contribution.”
Perspective. Note this is not being reported much
in US newspapers.
In Davos,
US executives warn that China is winning the AI race
… The Chinese government has made tech
dominance a priority in its "Made in China 2025" plan.
Chinese leaders are pouring government money into
AI research and development in a scientific push that has been
compared to the space race or the Manhattan Project that the United
States government funded during World War II to develop a nuclear
weapon.
… For the first time this year, consulting
firm PwC used its annual CEO survey to ask global business leaders
whether they thought AI would have a larger impact that the Internet.
Eighty-four per cent of Chinese executives said AI
would be bigger than the Internet, while only 38 per cent of American
executives said the same.
… The survey asked executives how widely they
had deployed AI initiatives in their company.
China was by far the leader, with a quarter of
Chinese business leaders saying AI was utilised in a wide scale at
their firm. Only 5 per cent of US executives said the same.
Perspective.
How Digital
Ushers in a New Entertainment Golden Age
Listen to the podcast:
Digital
technology makes piracy easier and thus has long threatened the
dominance of Hollywood studios, the music industry and publishers in
the creation and distribution of content. But this technology also
lets anyone develop and disseminate content: Authors self-publish,
musicians bypass record labels to release songs directly to the
public, and filmmakers do the same without a major studio.
This
democratization has led to a tsunami of content and ushered in a new
Golden Age of entertainment, said Joel Waldfogel, associate dean of
MBA programs at the University of Minnesota and a former Wharton
professor of business economics and public policy.
… An
edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Anything that get children to read is a good idea.
Prisma’s
style transfer tech creeps into kids’ books
… we find ourselves confronted with neural
nets being used to serve up contextual illustrations of children so
parents can gift personalized books that seamlessly insert a child’s
likeness into the story, thereby casting them as a character in the
tale.
… And while they note there are other
publishing services that offer the chance to insert a bit of custom
text and photography into a book they claim their collaboration is
the only publishing technology that does this “seamlessly”, i.e.
thanks to the AI’s style blending fingers.
… Kabook,
which was set up last year — describing itself as “a
technology-based” children’s book publisher, with a focus on kids
aged 0-7 years — is currently offering four stories that can be
personalized with a kid’s AI-generated likeness.
Three of the books incorporate just one custom
image into the story. While a fourth, called Hornswoggled!,
makes uses of seven photos in a pirate-themed buried treasure
adventure.
The personalized stories start at $24.99 per book,
with hard and soft cover versions available.
Furthering our discussion of AI in self-driving
cars.
No comments:
Post a Comment