Tuesday, February 19, 2019

I have many questions...
20 of the best social media monitoring tools
Social Media Explorer: “There’s enough social media monitoring tools on the market to get you absolutely confused. This list is here to help. Every tool on the list does what it claims to do (which is not universal among software and products in general) – it either focuses on social media monitoring exclusively or does social media monitoring as a part of a broader toolkit. When in the right hands, it will definitely help improve customer service, raise brand awareness, and prevent a social media crisis. And some of the tools do even more than that…”




For all my students.
The wait for the victims of GandCrab is over: a new decryption tool has been released today for free on the No More Ransom depository for the latest strand of GandCrab, one of the world’s most prolific ransomware to date.
This tool was developed by the Romanian Police in close collaboration with the internet security company Bitdefender and Europol, together with the support of law enforcement authorities from Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, UK, Canada and US FBI.
In addition to versions 1, 4 and early versions of 5, the new tool resolves infections with version 5.0.4 through 5.1 – the latest version developed by the cybercriminals.

WHY THE FUSS?

GandCrab has surpassed all other strains of ransomware in 2018, having infected over half a million victims since it was first detected in January last year.
Back in October, a decryption tool was made available covering all but two versions of the then existing versions of the malware. This tool followed an earlier release back in February. Downloaded more than 400 000 times so far, these two tools have helped close to 10 000 victims retrieve their encrypted files, saving them some USD 5 million in ransomware payment.
The GandCrab criminals have since released new versions of the file-encrypting malware, all of which are covered by the tool released today.
The best cure against ransomware remains diligent prevention. Users are strongly advised to use a security solution with layered anti-ransomware defences, regularly back up their data and avoid opening attachments delivered with unsolicited messages.
Find more information and prevention tips on www.nomoreransom.org




While we’ve been concentrating on self-driving cars…
The Navy just bought a fleet of robot submarines to prowl the oceans and mess with adversaries
The Navy is bulking up its fleet of autonomous robot vessels with the purchase of a cadre of four of Boeing's extremely large and incredibly grandiose unmanned Orca submarines.
On Feb. 13, the Navy awarded Boeing a $43 million contract to produce four of the 51-foot Orca Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (XLUUVs) that are capable of traveling some 6,500 nautical miles unaided, the U.S. Naval Institute reported.
According to USNI, the Navy could potentially deploy the Orcas from existing vessels to conduct "mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, electronic warfare and strike missions."




We need to know how this works.
Expanding transparency around political ads on Twitter
… Last May, we launched our Political Campaigning Policy in the United States to provide clear insight into how we define political content and who is advertising political content on Twitter. In conjunction, we launched the Ads Transparency Center (ATC). The ATC allows anyone across the globe to view ads that have been served on Twitter, with even more details on political campaigning ads, including ad spend and targeting demographics.
Today, we’re expanding our political ads policy and transparency approach to include all European Union member states, India, and Australia.


(Related)
Over the weekend, Google presented a white paper at the Munich Security Conference detailing how it fights disinformation across its largest services. This includes efforts covering Google Search, News, and YouTube, as well as advertising platforms.
… The full white paper is worth a read and covers what steps Google is taking in its four key products.




GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out. An old sin with new sinners? Has anyone (BJS?) done a comparative study?
Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice
Richardson, Rashida and Schultz, Jason and Crawford, Kate, Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice (February 13, 2019). New York University Law Review Online, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN in PDF:
“Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using algorithmic predictive policing systems to forecast criminal activity and allocate police resources. Yet in numerous jurisdictions, these systems are built on data produced within the context of flawed, racially fraught and sometimes unlawful practices (‘dirty policing’). This can include systemic data manipulation, falsifying police reports, unlawful use of force, planted evidence, and unconstitutional searches. These policing practices shape the environment and the methodology by which data is created, which leads to inaccuracies, skews, and forms of systemic bias embedded in the data (‘dirty data’). Predictive policing systems informed by such data cannot escape the legacy of unlawful or biased policing practices that they are built on. Nor do claims by predictive policing vendors that these systems provide greater objectivity, transparency, or accountability hold up. While some systems offer the ability to see the algorithms used and even occasionally access to the data itself, there is no evidence to suggest that vendors independently or adequately assess the impact that unlawful and bias policing practices have on their systems, or otherwise assess how broader societal biases may affect their systems.
In our research, we examine the implications of using dirty data with predictive policing, and look at jurisdictions that (1) have utilized predictive policing systems and (2) have done so while under government commission investigations or federal court monitored settlements, consent decrees, or memoranda of agreement stemming from corrupt, racially biased, or otherwise illegal policing practices. In particular, we examine the link between unlawful and biased police practices and the data used to train or implement these systems across thirteen case studies. We highlight three of these: (1) Chicago, an example of where dirty data was ingested directly into the city’s predictive system; (2) New Orleans, an example where the extensive evidence of dirty policing practices suggests an extremely high risk that dirty data was or will be used in any predictive policing application, and (3) Maricopa County where despite extensive evidence of dirty policing practices, lack of transparency and public accountability surrounding predictive policing inhibits the public from assessing the risks of dirty data within such systems. The implications of these findings have widespread ramifications for predictive policing writ large. Deploying predictive policing systems in jurisdictions with extensive histories of unlawful police practices presents elevated risks that dirty data will lead to flawed, biased, and unlawful predictions which in turn risk perpetuating additional harm via feedback loops throughout the criminal justice system. Thus, for any jurisdiction where police have been found to engage in such practices, the use of predictive policing in any context must be treated with skepticism and mechanisms for the public to examine and reject such systems are imperative.”


(Related) Does anyone teach the proper use of emojis in high school English classes?
Emoji are showing up in court cases exponentially, and courts aren’t prepared
Bay Area prosecutors were trying to prove that a man arrested during a prostitution sting was guilty of pimping charges, and among the evidence was a series of Instagram DMs he’d allegedly sent to a woman. One read: “Teamwork make the dream work” with high heels and money bag emoji placed at the end. Prosecutors said the message implied a working relationship between the two of them. The defendant said it could mean he was trying to strike up a romantic relationship. Who was right?
Emoji are showing up as evidence in court more frequently with each passing year. Between 2004 and 2019, there was an exponential rise in emoji and emoticon references in US court opinions, with over 30 percent of all cases appearing in 2018, according to Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, who has been tracking all of the references to “emoji” and “emoticon” that show up in US court opinions. So far, the emoji and emoticons have rarely been important enough to sway the direction of a case, but as they become more common, the ambiguity in how emoji are displayed and what we interpret emoji to mean could become a larger issue for courts to contend with.




Sure.
Can Science Fiction Predict the Future of Technology?
… The article “Science Fiction and the Future” quotes Arthur C. Clarke: “A critical . . . reading of science fiction is essential training for anyone wishing to look more than ten years ahead.” And in “Does science fiction — yes, science fiction — suggest futures for news?”, Loren Ghiglione quotes author Orson Scott Card on the necessity of science fiction’s “thought experiments”: “We have to think of them so that if the worst does come, we’ll already know how to live in that universe.”
Both the idea of looking to the future, and the possibility of using fiction to do that, are relatively new. In “Has Futurism Failed?“, David Rejeski and Robert L. Olson write that:
A fundamental change in human thinking about the future began in the 18th century, as technological change accelerated to a point where its effects were easily visible in the course of a single lifetime, and terms such as progress and development entered human discourse… Speculation about the future became more common as human beings increasingly reshaped the world during the 19th and early 20th centuries, though it was seen largely as entertainment, a diversion from the often stark realities of everyday life. Yet some of that speculation proved surprisingly close to the mark.




For my geeks.


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