No matter who is behind this attack, or what their purpose may be, you have to consider this a cyber war proof of concept.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47624207

Huge aluminium plants hit by cyber-attack

One of the world's biggest aluminium producers has switched to manual operations at its smelting facilities following a cyber-attack.

Hydro, which employs more than 35,000 people in 40 countries, says the attack began on Monday night and is ongoing.

A spokesman told the BBC that he could not yet confirm what type of cyber-attack the Norwegian firm was facing, or who was behind it.

The company's website is currently down and it is posting updates to Facebook.

"IT systems in most business areas are impacted," the firm said.

Hydro told the BBC that digital systems at its smelting plants were programmed to ensure machinery worked efficiently.

However, these systems had had to be turned off.

… Smelting operations in Norway, Qatar and Brazil had been affected, according to the Reuters news agency. Additionally, Hydro had shut down some of its smaller metal extrusion plants.

Will the police track down those who watched this live? Did they have knowledge that it was coming?

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/03/update-on-new-zealand/

Update on New Zealand

• The video was viewed fewer than 200 times during the live broadcast. No users reported the video during the live broadcast. Including the views during the live broadcast, the video was viewed about 4000 times in total before being removed from Facebook.

• The first user report on the original video came in 29 minutes after the video started, and 12 minutes after the live broadcast ended.

• Before we were alerted to the video, a user on 8chan posted a link to a copy of the video on a file-sharing site.

Because they work!

https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/phishing-attacks-now-more-common-than-malware/

Phishing Attacks: Now More Common Than Malware

As custodians of the world’s most commonly used computer operating systems and cloud-based office tools, Microsoft’s security team is uniquely positioned to analyze trends in cyber security threats. The company’s regular Security Intelligence Reports, published at least annually since 2006, serve as an excellent indicator of these trends. The most recent report indicates that phishing attacks are now by far the most frequent threat to the cyber landscape, increasing a massive 250% since the publication of the previous report.

Microsoft’s numbers are based on an internal scan of Office 365 email addresses, with over 470 billion messages analyzed. The company reports that not only are phishing attacks much more frequent, but they have also significantly increased in sophistication in a short amount of time.

What happens when the system tries to kill you?

https://khn.org/news/death-by-a-thousand-clicks/

Death By 1,000 Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong

The U.S. government claimed that turning American medical charts into electronic records would make health care better, safer, and cheaper. Ten years and $36 billion later, the system is an unholy mess. Inside a digital revolution that took a bad turn.

… Her doctor had considered the possibility of an aneurysm and, to rule it out, had ordered a head scan through the clinic’s software system, the government alleged in court filings. The test, in theory, would have caught the bleeding in Monachelli’s brain. But the order never made it to the lab; it had never been transmitted.

… It didn’t take long for Foster to assemble a dossier of troubling reports — Better Business Bureau complaints, issues flagged on an eCW user board, and legal cases filed around the country — suggesting the company’s technology didn’t work quite the way it said it did.

We’ll have it all worked out in 20 or thirty years.

https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2019/03/18/products-liability-and-the-evolving-internet-of-things/

Products Liability and the Evolving Internet of Things

… Traditional products liability principles apply reasonably well to IoT devices when the device itself malfunctions.

… Liability is more difficult to judge in the IoT realm, where devices are increasingly integrated into networks. In the past, manufacturers have been held liable where defects in their products caused a series of failures in other, integrated products only when the manufacturer “substantially participated” in the integration of its products into the overall design of the network.

… Privacy threats and liability for security breaches fit less neatly in the traditional products liability framework, which may require an evolution of products liability law. The lack of clear, universal industry standards for IoT security makes proof of the existence of a design defect difficult.

Who knew that New York Law Schools had a class in Chutzpah. Not silly, non-lawyer me.

NYC's New Tourist Trap Claims the Rights to Every Photo You Take Inside of It

New York City’s newest luxury neighborhood, Hudson Yards, officially opened on Friday and visitors are already scrambling to photograph or mock its gilded pinecone landmark structure dubbed the Vessel.

But, as Gothamist points out, Hudson Yards seemingly claims rights to all such photos of the $200-million giant honeycomb floating above an active train yard, so long as they’re taken in and around the Vessel.

… Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association told Gothamist that these terms and conditions don’t mean that Hudson Yards owns visitors’ content, but the organization is allowed “broad license” to use the content how it would like without visitors’ consent. And it means visitors can’t use their Vessel content commercially, according to Osterreicher’s reading.

James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell Law School and Cornel Tech, blasted the “content” clause on Twitter.

James Grimmelmann @grimmelm

It's even broader than phototographs taken inside the Vessel. It also covers photographs "depicting or relating to the Vessel" even if not taken from inside. So if you "agree" to the license, it even applies to your later photographs of the Vessel taken from across the river.

James Grimmelmann @grimmelm

So: Go to the Vessel. Take a photo or a video. Put it online with a Creative Commons Attribution license. You're not making a commercial use, and anyone else who does never agreed to the Vessel's terms.

No doubt President Trump would love to copy this law.

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-putin-signs-fake-news-legislation/29828242.html

Russia's Putin Signs Into Law Bills Banning 'Fake News,' Insults

President Vladimir Putin has signed legislation enabling Russian authorities to block websites and hand out punishment for "fake news" and material deemed insulting to the state or the public.

For the toolkit.

https://www.bespacific.com/ft-com-free-data-visualization-tool/

FT.com free data visualization tool

Center for Data Innovation: “The Financial Times has released a free data visualization tool called FastCharts to help people make professional charts with their data in less than a minute. Users can paste in their data in CSV or TSV format and the tool will automatically create an area, bar, column, or line chart with labels and a title. Once the tool creates a chart, users can customize their chart through actions such as highlighting specific data on the chart or changing the scale.”

• Take a look.

A tool for checking student papers?

https://www.bespacific.com/this-site-detects-whether-text-was-written-by-a-bot/

This Site Detects Whether Text Was Written by a Bot

Futurism – Reassuringly, Futurism articles registered as being written by humans. “Last month, developers from OpenAI announced that they had built a text generating algorithm called GPT-2 that they said was too dangerous to release into the world, since it could be used to pollute the web with endless bot-written material. But now, a team of scientists from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and Harvard University built an algorithm called GLTR that determines how likely it is that any particular passage of text was written by a tool like GPT-2 — an intriguing escalation in the battle against spam.

When OpenAI unveiled GPT-2, they showed how it could be used to write fictitious-yet-convincing news articles by sharing one that the algorithm had written about scientists who discovered unicorns. GLTR uses the exact same models to read the final output and predict whether it was written by a human or GPT-2. Just like GPT-2 writes sentences by predicting which words ought to follow each other, GLTR determines whether a sentence uses the word that the fake news-writing bot would have selected… The IBM, MIT, and Harvard scientists behind the project built a website that lets people test GLTR for themselves. The tool highlights words in different colors based on how likely they are to have been written by an algorithm like GPT-2 — green means the sentence matches GPT-2, and shades of yellow, red, and especially purple indicate that a human probably wrote them…”