Have
we got your attention now?
DC
Court of Appeals rules OPM responsible for hacking of 22 million
personnel records
Washington
Post:
“A federal appeals court has revived the chances of monetary awards
being paid to federal employees and others whose personal information
was exposed in hacks of two government databases that were revealed
in 2015. The ruling criticized the Office of Personnel Management
for failing to safeguard that information despite having been the
target of prior hacking attempts and despite repeated
warnings from its inspector general’s office that
the databases were vulnerable. “OPM effectively left the door to
its records unlocked by repeatedly failing to take basic, known, and
available steps to secure the trove of sensitive information in its
hands,” said the decision Friday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the District of Columbia Circuit. The OPM deferred a request for
comment to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.
The appellate court ruled that a federal district judge erred in dismissing a combined suit brought by two federal employee unions, the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union…”
What
is an adequate backup and recovery plan worth?
On
June 11, DataBreaches.net noted a report that Lake City, Florida was
struggling
to recover from
“triple threat ransomware.” The attack had occurred on May 10,
and one month later, the city’s landline phones were still knocked
out and other services were also affected, although emergency
services were operating.
Now,
one week after another Florida city, Riviera Beach, decided
to pay the equivalent of almost $600,000 ransom after
they were attacked, Lake City has agreed to pay almost $500,000
ransom to its attackers. When the costs of this breach are
tabulated, including any replacement hardware and consulting fees,
legal fees, etc., this will likely be a very costly breach for Lake
City.
Whether
the attackers are the same individual or group or not is unknown, but
with two Florida cities paying high ransoms within a short period of
time, I think we can
reasonably predict many more attacks with ransom demands in the
half-million to million-dollar range.
CBS
News reports:
The mayor of Lake City told CBS 47 Action News Jax on Tuesday that the small city in northern Florida would give the hackers $460,000 to hand back control of email and other servers seized two weeks ago.
Read
more on CBS.
The
sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Presidential
Phone Alerts Can Be Spoofed, Researchers Say
Presidential
Alerts that all modern cell phones in the United States are required
to receive and display as part of the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA)
program can be spoofed, researchers have discovered.
Issued
via the Integrated Public Alert and Warnings System (IPAWS) along
with AMBER alerts and imminent threat alerts, the Presidential Alerts
are intended to inform the public of imminent threats and cannot be
blocked.
In
a recently published whitepaper, a group of security researchers from
the University of Colorado Boulder
has demonstrated how Presidential Alerts could be targeted in
spoofing attacks using commercially available hardware and modified
open source software.
Fake
browsing history is easy. I just logon to my favorite porn sites as
a certain law professor I know.
Firefox
Will Give You a Fake Browsing History to Fool Advertisers
Vice:
“Security
through obscurity is
out, security through tomfoolery is in. That’s the basic
philosophy sold by Track
THIS,
“a new kind of incognito” browsing project, which opens up 100
tabs crafted to fit a specific character—a hypebeast, a filthy rich
person, a doomsday prepper, or an influencer. The idea is that your
browsing history will be depersonalized and poisoned, so advertisers
won’t know how to target ads to you. It was developed as a
collaboration between mschf (pronounced “mischief”) internet
studios and Mozilla’s Firefox as a way of promoting Firefox
Quantum, the newest Firefox browser…” “These trackers and
these websites really commoditize you, and they don’t really make
you feel like a person,” Daniel Greenberg, director of strategy and
distribution for mschf, said in a phone call. “So we wanted to do
something visceral that makes the user feel like they’re in control
again.”
(Related)
An anti-social media checker. Some interesting phrases in this
video.
Companies
Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Screen for Problematic Employees
Watch
how a startup named Fama Technologies is using artificial
intelligence to help weed out problem employees - before or after
they join an organization.
(Related)
...but individual scoring is Okay?
EU
should ban AI-powered citizen scoring and mass surveillance, say
experts
New
recommendations have also been criticized as lacking enforceability
All
the guidance I can find…
UK
Government’s Guide to Using AI in the Public Sector
On
June 10, 2019, the UK Government’s Digital Service and the Office
for Artificial Intelligence released guidance
on using artificial intelligence in the public sector (the
“Guidance”). The Guidance aims to provide practical guidance for
public sector organizations when they implement artificial
intelligence (AI) solutions.
… The
section of the Guidance on using
AI ethically and safely is
addressed to all parties involved in the design, production, and
deployment of AI projects, including data scientists, data engineers,
domain experts, delivery managers and departmental leads.
This
is one of the worrying aspects of AI.
The
first AI universe sim is fast and accurate—and its creators don't
know how it works
For
the first time, astrophysicists have used artificial intelligence
techniques to generate complex 3-D simulations of the universe. The
results are so fast, accurate and robust that even the creators
aren't sure how it all works.
… The
real shock was that D3M could accurately simulate how the universe
would look if certain parameters were tweaked—such as how much of
the cosmos is dark matter—even
though the model had never received any training data where those
parameters varied.
Perspective.
The Internet as a municipal utility.
Anacortes,
Wash., Outlines City-Owned Internet Fees
The
Anacortes City Council unanimously approved fees Monday for
fiber-optic Internet
service for residences and businesses.
It
was the latest step toward building a citywide broadband
network.
The
City Council first passed a resolution Monday establishing the city’s
right to charge for fiber Internet service just as it charges for
water, sewer, other utilities, and impact and development fees.
Council
members then approved fees of $39 a month for 100 megabit per second
(Mbps) service, and $69 a month for 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) for
residences. The prices for businesses are $89 a month for 100 Mbps
and $149 for 1 Gbps.
For
my geeks.
New
AI programming language goes beyond deep learning
In
a paper presented at the Programming Language Design and
Implementation conference this week, the researchers describe a novel
probabilistic-programming system named “Gen.” Users write models
and algorithms from multiple fields where AI techniques are applied —
such as computer vision, robotics, and statistics — without having
to deal with equations or manually write high-performance code. Gen
also lets expert researchers write sophisticated models and inference
algorithms — used for prediction tasks — that were previously
infeasible.
… The
researchers also demonstrated Gen’s ability to simplify data
analytics by using another Gen program that automatically generates
sophisticated statistical models typically used by experts to
analyze, interpret, and predict underlying patterns in data.
… Gen’s
source code is publicly
available and
is being presented at upcoming open-source developer conferences,
including Strange Loop and JuliaCon. The work is supported, in part,
by DARPA.
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