Definitely worth discussing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/us/florida-ransomware-hacking-it.html

When Ransomware Cripples a City, Who’s to Blame? This I.T. Chief Is Fighting Back

… The former information technology director of Lake City, the northern Florida city that was forced to pay out nearly half a million dollars after a ransomware attack this summer, was blamed for the breach, and for the long time it took to recover. But in a new lawsuit, Mr. Hawkins said he had warned the city about its vulnerability long ago — urging the purchase of an expensive, cloud-based backup system that might have averted the need to pay a ransom.

The error was in police software. Does US police software process the raw data before investigators/prosecutors see it?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/world/europe/denmark-cellphone-data-courts.html

Flaws in Cellphone Evidence Prompt Review of 10,000 Verdicts in Denmark

The authorities in Denmark say they plan to review over 10,000 court verdicts because of errors in cellphone tracking data offered as evidence.

The country’s director of public prosecutions on Monday also ordered a two-month halt in prosecutors’ use of cellphone data in criminal cases while the flaws and their potential consequences are investigated.

“It’s shaking our trust in the legal system,” Justice Minister Nick Haekkerup said in a statement.

The first error was found in an I.T. system that converts phone companies’ raw data into evidence that the police and prosecutors can use to place a person at the scene of a crime. During the conversions, the system omitted some data, creating a less-detailed image of a cellphone’s whereabouts. The error was fixed in March after the national police discovered it.

In a second problem, some cellphone tracking data linked phones to the wrong cellphone towers, potentially connecting innocent people to crime scenes, said Jan Reckendorff, the director of public prosecutions.

We can do this to Kazakhstan but would any first world government tolerate it?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/browsers-take-stand-against-kazakhstans-invasive-internet-surveillance

Browsers Take a Stand Against Kazakhstan’s Invasive Internet Surveillance

Yesterday, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple’s Safari browsers started blocking a security certificate previously used by Kazakh ISPs to compromise their users’ security and perform dragnet surveillance.

… The two-step of Kazakh ISPs deploying an untrusted certificate, and users manually trusting that certificate allows the ISPs to read and even alter the online communication of any of their users, including sensitive user data, messages, emails, and passwords sent over the web.

This assumes the hospital’s controls were adequate.

https://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20151110/NEWS/311109995/hospital-found-not-liable-for-facebook-post-about-patient-s-std

Hospital found not liable for Facebook post about patient's STD

An Ohio hospital is not liable for a worker's Facebook post that included a screenshot of a patient's medical records showing she had a sexually transmitted disease, a judge ruled.

The University of Cincinnati Medical Center employee posted records in 2013 on a Facebook group with a name that includes a derogatory term for women considered promiscuous.

… Last year, the patient sued the hospital, her former boyfriend and the employee, who was fired a week after the post.

After looking into what transpired, the hospital found that the financial services employee had accessed the information, court documents show.

A Hamilton County Common Pleas Court judge on Monday found that the worker did not act within the scope of her employment and that the hospital needs to be dropped from the lawsuit, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.

"(The hospital) had a policy. It was violated," Judge Jody Luebbers said. "It's tragic, but that's just how I see it."

It seems we need better solutions than this article suggests.

https://theconversation.com/singularity-how-governments-can-halt-the-rise-of-unfriendly-unstoppable-super-ai-121999

Singularity: how governments can halt the rise of unfriendly, unstoppable super-AI

… A super-AI raises two fundamental challenges for its inventors, as philosopher Nick Bostrom and others have pointed out. One is a control problem, which is how to make sure the super-AI has the same objectives as humanity. Without this, the intelligence could deliberately, accidently or by neglect destroy humanity – an “AI disaster”.

The second is a political problem, which is how to ensure that the benefits of a super-intelligence do not go only to a small elite, causing massive social and wealth inequalities. If a super-AI arms race occurs, it could lead competing groups to ignore these problems in order to develop their technology more quickly. This could lead to a poor-quality or unfriendly super-AI.