Tuesday, April 09, 2019


The question should be: Is this something new or are they just playing catch-up?
China’s Next Naval Target Is the Internet’s Underwater Cables
As the West considers the threat posed by China’s naval ambitions, there is a natural tendency to place overarching attention on the South China Sea. This is understandable: Consolidating it would provide Beijing with a huge windfall of oil and natural gas, and a potential chokehold over up to 40 percent of the world’s shipping.
But this is only the most obvious manifestation of Chinese maritime strategy. Another key element, one that’s far harder to discern, is Beijing’s increasing influence in constructing and repairing the undersea cables that move virtually all the information on the internet. To understand the totality of China’s “Great Game” at sea, you have to look down to ocean floor.
While people tend think of satellites and cell towers as the heart of the internet, the most vital component is the 380 submerged cables that carry more than 95 percent of all data and voice traffic between the continents.
But now the Chinese conglomerate Huawei Technologies, the leading firm working to deliver 5G telephony networks globally, has gone to sea. Under its Huawei Marine Networks component, it is constructing or improving nearly 100 submarine cables around the world.




I can’t help asking what China may have learned from this incident. What happened while the Secret Service was concentrating on her?
Attorney: Mar-a-Lago Infiltrator Had Hidden-Camera Detector
Assistant U.S. Attorney Rolando Garcia told Magistrate Judge William Matthewman during a bond hearing that “there are a lot of questions that remain” about 32-year-old Yujing Zhang
He said the FBI is still investigating whether Zhang is a spy. [Consider her a distraction. Bob]


(Related)
Hey Secret Service: Don't Plug Suspect USB Sticks into Random Computers
I just noticed this bit from the incredibly weird story of the Chinese woman arrested at Mar-a-Lago:
Secret Service agent Samuel Ivanovich, who interviewed Zhang on the day of her arrest, testified at the hearing. He stated that when another agent put Zhang's thumb drive into his computer, it immediately began to install files, a "very out-of-the-ordinary" event that he had never seen happen before during this kind of analysis. The agent had to immediately stop the analysis to halt any further corruption of his computer, Ivanovich testified. The analysis is ongoing but still inconclusive, he said.
This is what passes for forensics at the Secret Service? I expect better.
EDITED TO ADD (4/9): ArsTechnica has more detail.




The can of worms has been opened.
Leap in Cyber Attacks Against Elections in OECD Countries: Canada
Cyber attackers targeted half the member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that held national elections in 2018, the agency that monitors Canada's telecoms networks said Monday.
"The proportion of elections targeted by cyber threat activity has more than tripled" since 2015, said the Canadian Security Establishment (CSE), which warned of a further spike this year.
"A small number of nation-states have undertaken most cyber threat activity against democratic processes worldwide," the center said, mostly pointing the finger at Russia.
"This shift seems to have started in 2016, which is likely due in part to the perceived success among cyber threat actors of Russia's cyber interference activity against the 2016 United States presidential election," the report said.


(Related)
Preparing for Upcoming Indian Elections
As Indians prepare to vote in the General Election for the 17th Lok Sabha, Facebook and our family of apps continue our efforts to help make sure the elections are fair and free from interference, both foreign and domestic.
We’ve also gotten better at using artificial intelligence and machine learning to fight interference. For example, these tools help us block or remove approximately one million accounts a day. They also help us, at a large scale, identify abusive or violating content, quickly locate it across the platform and remove it in bulk. This dramatically reduces its ability to spread. We continue to expand on this initiative, adding 24 new languages — including 16 for India — to our automatic translation system.
And last week we removed nearly 700 Pages, Groups and accounts in India for violating Facebook’s policies on coordinated inauthentic behavior and spam.




Maury Nichols adds to yesterday’s post about ‘alternative data’ collected by credit bureaus.
In regards to data related to one’s voice, cellular, cable TV, etc. there actually is a credit reporting agency named National Consumer Telecommunications & Utilities Exchange  (“NCTUE”). They share data amongst their telecommunication peers so if one was to move from Denver to San Diego and both cities were member of this organization the telecommunication provider in San Diego could get a fairly comprehensive view on how the person in Denver treated Comcast, CenturyLink, Dish, etc. Or if a person in Denver wishes to change carriers it is quite likely that the carrier will check the NCTUE database. So, if one did not pay their early termination fee it may or it may not appear on one’s credit report from the big three agencies (today); but that data would certainly be available to those telecommunication firms that are members of this rather niche credit bureau.
While NCTUE is “managed” by Equifax, at this point-in-time the data collected by NCTUE does not appear to be utilized by Equifax in calculating one’s credit score.




Still looks like a GDPR for an “ex” EU member.
The UK’s online laws could be the future of the internet—and that’s got people worried
Technology giants will be forced to have a “duty of care” for their users, if a proposal announced by the government on Monday becomes law.
The proposal—a “white paper,” in UK legal parlance, which is one of the first stages of a formal government policy—is, on the surface at least, sweeping in scope and is a serious shot across the bows for big tech companies. But it has also raised some serious concerns about how it will be implemented and the possible consequences it might have on citizens' free speech.
Aiming to tackle well-defined harms such as hate crime, stalking, and terrorist activity alongside issues such as trolling and disinformation, the UK government proposes combining work done across eight or more separate regulators into one.
This new "super-regulator" could have powers to fine technology companies according to their revenue, or even to block them. It could also be able to prosecute individual executives.
The plans also shift the government view away from any idea that the technology industry is somehow stateless or ungovernable—judging instead, likely rightly, that the UK market is large and wealthy enough to give the industry a powerful interest in complying even with legislation they loathed.




Delete my data, but provide a transcript?”
Beyond FERPA: The California Consumer Privacy Act’s New Rules for Privacy in the Education Sector
While the CCPA does not apply to nonprofit educational institutions, it may apply to certain for-profit educational institutions, third-party service providers, and others in the education space. If an educational entity meets the threshold requirements below or it processes information on behalf of such an entity, it should prepare for CCPA implementation by January 2020.
Business entities are not allowed to discriminate against consumers who exercise their rights under the CCPA. However, businesses are permitted to offer financial incentives for consumers to provide consent for the collection, sale, or deletion of their personal information.




Nothing written by lawyers will be obfuscation free. Can we find a use for this?
The Market for Data Privacy
Ramadorai, Tarun and Uettwiller, Antoine and Walther, Ansgar, The Market for Data Privacy (March 13, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3352175 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3352175
We scrape a comprehensive set of US firms’ privacy policies to facilitate research on the supply of data privacy. We analyze these data with the help of expert legal evaluations, and also acquire data on firms’ web tracking activities. We find considerable and systematic variation in privacy policies along multiple dimensions including ease of access, length, readability, and quality, both within and between industries. Motivated by a simple theory of big data acquisition and usage, we analyze the relationship between firm size, knowledge capital intensity, and privacy supply. We find that large firms with intermediate data intensity have longer, legally watertight policies, but are more likely to share user data with third parties.”




Take that, young whippersnappers! Actually, I read this as fake news. I might have another opinion if the headline was “The Favorite Target of Internet Scammers is Old People.”
The Future Of The Internet Is Old People
BuzzFeedNews – “There will soon be more people aged 65+ in the US than in any other demographic, and it will stay that way for decades. I’ve spent months collecting data on the online habits of older people, with a particular focus on how they interact with false content. I just published a new story that dives deep into this — here are some of the most compelling points:
  • Four recent studies found that those over 65 are more likely to consume and share fake news on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and the web.
  • They don’t have a good understanding of the role algorithms play in determining what content we see online.
  • They have a harder time differentiating between news and opinion.
  • They are often targeted with ads from hyperpartisan and fake news sites.
  • They’re also targeted by online scams, malware, and other internet ills. Just last month, the Department of Justice announced “the largest coordinated sweep of elder fraud cases in history.”




My students expect tedious. Could this be the future of textbooks?
Want to learn about lithium-ion batteries? An AI has written a tedious book on the subject
On Monday, Springer Nature published what it claims is the first machine-generated book from an academic publisher, titled "Lithium-Ion Batteries A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research."
The book for battery boffins, available as a free download, provides an overview of lithium-ion battery research, summarizing more than 150 research papers published between 2016 and 2018.
As a one-stop shop for lithium-ion battery research, "Lithium-ion batteries" is possibly functional, not so much for reading as for finding reference links to academic papers. But even for that, Bigham suggests concentrating a list of Google Scholar search results might work just as well.



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