Sunday, April 21, 2019


Contrast with the FBI’s push to eliminate encryption, or at least provide them with a backdoor. Perhaps this kind of tool should be used by US campaigns to communicate.
Security flaw in French government messaging app exposed confidential conversations
The French government just launched its own messaging app called Tchap in order to protect conversations from hackers, private companies and foreign entities. But Elliot Alderson, also known as Baptiste Robert, immediately found a security flaw. He was able to create an account even though the service is supposed to be restricted to government officials.
Tchap wasn’t built from scratch. The DINSIC, France’s government agency in charge of all things digital, forked an open-source project called Riot, which is based on an open-source protocol called  Matrix.
In a few words, Matrix is a messaging protocol that features end-to-end encryption.
Developing Tchap became essential as Emmanuel Macron’s campaign team relied heavily on Telegram — the French government still uses Telegram and WhatsApp for many sensitive conversations. By default, Telegram doesn’t use end-to-end encryption. In other words, people working for Telegram could easily read Macron’s conversations.




A most interesting topic. If you are going to die soon (according to the AI) will the AI Nurse just give you morphine? Lots and lots of morphine?
AI COULD PREDICT DEATH. BUT WHAT IF THE ALGORITHM IS BIASED?
EARLIER THIS MONTH the University of Nottingham published a study in PloSOne about a new artificial intelligence model that uses machine learning to predict the risk of premature death, using banked health data (on age and lifestyle factors) from Brits aged 40 to 69. This study comes months after a joint study between UC San Francisco, Stanford, and Google, which reported results of machine-learning-based data mining of electronic health records to assess the likelihood that a patient would die in hospital. One goal of both studies was to assess how this information might help clinicians decide which patients might most benefit from intervention.
The FDA is also looking at how AI will be used in health care and posted a call earlier this month for a regulatory framework for AI in medical care.




Clearly we will need some new names. “e-Antitrust” seems a bit unwieldy.
The Antitrust Case Against Facebook: a turning point in the debate over Big Tech and monopoly
In 2017, a 28-year-old law student named Lina Kahn turned the antitrust world on its ear with her Yale Law Review paper, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, which showed how Ronald Reagan's antitrust policies, inspired by ideological extremists at the University of Chicago's economics department, had created a space for abusive monopolists who could crush innovation, workers' rights, and competition without ever falling afoul of orthodox antitrust law.
Now, Dina Srinivasan, a self-described technology entrepreneur and advertising executive who trained Yale Law School has done it again, with a magesterial, deftly argued paper for the Berkeley Business Law Journal called The Antitrust Case Against Facebook. It's one of the most invigorating, significant contributions to a new theory of antitrust for the digital age that I've ever read, ranking with Kahn's 2017 paper.
Srinivasan shows how Facebook came to dominate our online discourse through activities that would have been prohibited under pre-Reagan theories of antitrust, and how, prior to these monopolistic tactics, Facebook was not able to conduct surveillance on its users, having to contend with multiple, bruising PR disasters and user revolts when it tried to do so.
[Interesting sub-title:
A MONOPOLIST’S JOURNEY TOWARDS PERVASIVE SURVEILLANCE IN SPITE OF CONSUMERS’ PREFERENCE FOR PRIVACY




Perspective. Perhaps this is why they are the next country to have a GDPR-like law…
Digital Life: Brazilians are Among the Most Avid Internet Users
This is the first series of infographics on Digital Life in Brazil.
  • More than two out of three Brazilians have access to smartphones and the internet
  • Brazilians spend more than 9 hours per day connected (among the highest rates in the world)
  • They rank very high in the world in social media use, including the use of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, WhatsApp, and Pinterest
  • Digital advertising continues to grow in double digits
  • E-Commerce, the sharing economy, and home delivery services are booming




Perspective. I would like to see cities owning the monopoly with anyone able to buy access.
Big Telecom Is Killing Your Rights To Municipal Internet Service In 26 States
High-speed internet and robust infrastructure is often the life blood of growing communities looking to attract high tech business and satisfy citizens. In most cases, however, residents and businesses only have access to one, or at the most two, broadband internet providers. You'll usually have access to broadband cable as one option and DSL as the other. So, municipal internet – where cities and towns build out and run their own broadband service – is an obvious solution.
BroadbandNow, which is a company that keeps tabs on broadband availability across the United States, has published a rather sobering study on the state of municipal broadband. Sadly, the company has discovered that over half of U.S. states (26 to be exact) have either outright banned the formation of municipal broadband networks or limit their expansion. While municipal internet seems like a win-win for Americans, big telecom is doing everything in its power to crush them at every turn.



No comments: