Friday, June 14, 2019


No consequences, no security? Now how about senior management?
This is the kind of insider breach that makes patients lose confidence in hospitals. I am not surprised that the jury came down hard on the hospital. Of the $300,000 award, $295,000 is punitive damages against the hospital for not doing anything against the doctor when they were made aware of the problem.
A Coffee County jury on Tuesday awarded $300,000, including punitive damages, to plaintiff Amy Pertuit against Medical Center Enterprise for illegal access and disclosure of protected health information.
In a unanimous verdict, the jury found that Medical Center Enterprise failed to take action against its then-employee, Dr. Lyn Diefenderfer, after it learned that Dr. Diefenderfer had illegally accessed and disclosed Pertuit’s medical records.
Read more about the case on Dothan Eagle.




Mr. Paranoia says: Probably an individual attack. Possibly a ‘proof of concept’ military exercise.
Aircraft Component Maker ASCO Hit by Ransomware, Shuts Down Global Production
Belgian company ASCO Industries, a key leader in manufacturing components for both civilian and military planes, fell victim to a ransomware attack on June 7 that shut down production around the world, writes ZDNet. With all IT systems incapacitated, some 1,000 of 1,400 employees were sent home.
The company has plants in Belgium, Germany, Canada and the US, as well as office representation in Brazil and France. A week later, the plants are still closed and an investigation by external experts seeks to determine the actual damage caused. The infection occurred at the production plant in Belgium, but the plants in the rest of the locations were shut down as a precaution to prevent the ransomware from spreading across the entire network.
ASCO Industries manufactures airplane parts for Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier Aerospace, Lockheed Martin and the new F-35 fighter plane.




Interesting question. Would the FBI then make it public or allow the recipient to make it public or require the recipient to ignore it unless they can confirm it independently?
To Congress: If Russians Seek to Provide Dirt, Make it a Requirement to Report!
Shockingly – if anything shocks anymore – President Donald Trump told ABC news Wednesday that he need not tell the FBI if the Russians once again reached out with an offer of “dirt” on his opponents in the race for president. When Trump was told that Christopher Wray, the FBI director the president himself appointed, said last month that this kind of attempted foreign election interference was something that should be reported to federal law enforcement, Trump’s response was: “The FBI Director is wrong.”
The good news is that Congress is already working on this issue. The Anti-Collusion Act, introduced Wednesday by Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), would require everyone running for federal, state, or local office to report offers of assistance from a foreign government or agent of a foreign government to the Department of Justice.




Why are political reactions so often over reactions? “We gotta do something” overrides “let’s think about this.”
Amelia Vance of the Future of Privacy Forum has an excellent commentary in the Orlando Sentinel that begins:
After the horrific school shooting in Parkland last year, state legislators passed a law that included a little-noticed provision creating a new government database. Education Week recently reported that the database will include a vast range of sensitive, personal information about Florida students. The state plans to merge information from social media with records of students who have been bullied or harassed based on their religion, race, disability, or gender, plus data about students in foster care. In deciding which data to include, Florida did not take an evidence-based approach; instead, the state merely asked agencies and a few districts if they had any data that might indicate that someone was a threat.
Read her whole commentary in the Orlando Sentinel.




Ignore this if you’re certain you are not impacted, but expect lawsuits when you find out you are.
Webinar Invitation — Operationalizing the California Consumer Privacy Act
Please join the Hogan Lovells Privacy and Cybersecurity team and LexisNexis on June 19 for the webinar, Operationalizing the California Consumer Privacy Act – Key Decisions and Compliance Strategies.
explore the impact of the CCPA including:
  • Key terms used by the law that are fundamental to planning compliance – including broad definitions of “personal information” and “sale”;
  • How the act will interact with existing regulations covering organizations in healthcare, financial services, and beyond;
  • The new private right of action established by the law;
  • A comparison of the CCPA to Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), including learnings from GDPR compliance that can be applied in the United States.
… To register for the webinar, click here.




Alabama is in the forefront?
State commission to study artificial intelligence technology
Alabama now has one of the first state commissions formed to study the policy implications of artificial intelligence technology.
The Alabama Commission on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Associated Technologies will make policy recommendations to advance AI’s growth in the state’s tech sector.




For our non-geeks?
NYT has a course to teach its reporters data skills and now they’ve open-sourced it
NiemanLab: “Should journalists learn to code?” is an old question that has always had only unsatisfying answers. (That was true even back before it became a useful heuristic for identifying Twitter jackasses.) Some should! Some shouldn’t! Helpful, right? One way the question gets derailed involves what, exactly, the question-asker means by “code.” It’s unlikely a city hall reporter will ever have occasion to build an iPhone app in Swift, or construct a machine learning model on deadline. But there is definitely a more basic and straightforward set of technical skills — around data analysis — that can be of use to nearly anyone in a newsroom. It ain’t coding, but it’s also not a skillset every reporter has. The New York Times wants more of its journalists to have those basic data skills, and now it’s releasing the curriculum they’ve built in-house out into the world, where it can be of use to reporters, newsrooms, and lots of other people too…”




and for our geeks.
Semantic Sanity, A Personalized Adaptive Feed
About Semantic Sanity Semantic Sanity provides an adaptive ArXiv feed tailored to your research interests. This feed uses an AI model that recommends the latest papers across all ArXiv categories in Computer Science to help you stay up to date. Our AI model learns from you – when you indicate whether or not a paper is relevant, your feed will improve. It only takes a few clicks to see the most relevant research.
More Features & Benefits
    • Open access preprints from all ArXiv categories in Computer Science.
    • Refine feeds using categories and keywords.
    • Save feeds and papers to read later.
    • Create multiple feeds to track diverse research interests…”




Perspective. This could be difficult for my smartphone using students. Maybe there’s an App for that?
Jobs of the future: teaching empathy to artificial intelligence
Now, thanks to advancements in technology, we’re at a stage where we can think about the importance of empathy in machines. Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an ever-increasing presence in our daily lives, whether it’s the voice assistant on your phone, or the complex algorithms used to fight diseases.
The way we design interactions with AI systems and the results they provide should be thoughtfully considered, and in the future, the responsibility for designing artificial empathy could fall under the remit of an empathologist – a job that has yet to exist.




It’s my understanding that they don’t teach this in high school.



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