Sunday, November 03, 2019


No doubt every law enforcement agency will buy this tool.
Hackers Claim ‘Any’ Smartphone Fingerprint Lock Can Be Broken In 20 Minutes
… Unless you have invested in a smartphone such as the iPhone 11 that has done away with fingerprints as a biometric security measure, the chances are you rely upon that finger image to unlock your device and many of the apps within. Which could be bad news as Chinese hackers have demonstrated how, they say, any fingerprint scanner can be beaten using equipment costing $140 (£108) and an app that analyzes a photograph of your print.




Perspective.
One year after mandatory breach reporting was enacted in Canada, there are 6 times as many breach reports
One year ago, Canadian businesses became subject to increased data breach notification requirements under PIPEDA (the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act). Rather than deciding whether to voluntarily disclose or report breaches, they were now required to report all breaches that pose a significant risk of harm to individuals to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. They are also required to notify the affected individuals.
So what have the breach report numbers looked like over the past 12 months? Here are some key statistics from a recent report by OPC, who received 680 reports — six times the volume submitted in the 12 months prior to the new requirement going into effect.
  • The number of Canadians affected by a data breach is well over 28 million.
  • The majority of reported breaches – 58% – involved unauthorized access. Employee snooping and social engineering hacks were key factors in these types of breaches.
  • One in four incidents involved social engineering attacks such as phishing and impersonation.
  • More than one in five incidents involved accidental disclosure.
  • Loss of hardware or paper records accounted for 12% of the breach reports.
  • Theft of documents, computers or computer components accounted for 8% of the breach reports.
You can read the full blog post here.




Big Brother in you Apps. Surveillance by design!
Why Adding Client-Side Scanning Breaks End-To-End Encryption
Sometimes called “endpoint filtering” or “local processing,” this privacy-invasive proposal works like this: every time you send a message, software that comes with your messaging app first checks it against a database of “hashes,” or unique digital fingerprints, usually of images or videos. If it finds a match, it may refuse to send your message, notify the recipient, or even forward it to a third party, possibly without your knowledge.
On their face, proposals to do client-side scanning seem to give us the best of all worlds: they preserve encryption, while also combating the spread of illegal and morally objectionable content.
But unfortunately it’s not that simple. While it may technically maintain some properties of end-to-end encryption, client-side scanning would render the user privacy and security guarantees of encryption hollow. Most important, it’s impossible to build a client-side scanning system that can only be used for child exploitation imagery (CEI).


(Related) Someone else in Apps.
Alexa, Who Am I Speaking To? Understanding Users' Ability to Identify Third-Party Apps on Amazon Alexa
Many Internet of Things (IoT) devices have voice user interfaces (VUIs). One of the most popular VUIs is Amazon's Alexa, which supports more than 47,000 third-party applications ("skills"). We study how Alexa's integration of these skills may confuse users. Our survey of 237 participants found that users do not understand that skills are often operated by third parties, that they often confuse third-party skills with native Alexa functions, and that they are unaware of the functions that the native Alexa system supports. Surprisingly, users who interact with Alexa more frequently are more likely to conclude that a third-party skill is native Alexa functionality. The potential for misunderstanding creates new security and privacy risks: attackers can develop third-party skills that operate without users' knowledge or masquerade as native Alexa functions. To mitigate this threat, we make design recommendations to help users distinguish native and third-party skills.




Architecture. Doubly important for AI.
Developers: Understand the business logic of your next project before you start coding
Anybody can learn how to code and get really good at it nowadays. Implementing code isn’t the hardest part anymore. Trying to figure out how an application should flow for a user has crept up that list of priorities. Getting that information out of a product manager or project managers can be tricky since you’re all speaking different jargon. That means someone has to be able to translate business logic into code — and that someone is you.




Simple.
Alexa, Are You With Me Or Against Me?
Fancy it or fear it, artificial intelligence is a juggernaut that will not pause long enough for anyone to take a breath. Unless you are prepared to swear off your smartphone and go live off-the-grid, you can take it for granted that AI will continue worming its way into your life. Especially if you’re in marketing.
AI will give marketers increasingly powerful tools with which to do our work more effectively. Already, we’re using it to streamline data collation and improve the targeting of brand campaigns. Before we get in any deeper, there’s a question I think we need to consider: How can we be sure we’re using AI for good and not for ill? This question needs more than just good intentions. It needs strong ethical guidelines.


(Related) More complex. AI as metaphysics.
Jay Richards at COSM Talks Ray Kurzweil and Strong AI
On a new episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid catches up with philosopher Jay Richards at the recent COSM conference in greater Seattle. The two discuss the history of George Gilder’s Telecosm conferences and how the first one gave birth to a book Richards edited and contributed to 18 years ago, Are We Spiritual Machines? Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I.
Is the “singularity” coming, as Kurzweil argues there and elsewhere, when machines equal and then quickly surpass human intelligence? Does “machine learning” really mean learning? Will “Skynet” wake up? Jay describes Kurzweil’s sunny version of strong AI and the dystopian version. Then he argues the other side, namely that human beings possess something beyond the purely material, something even the most powerful computers will never possess. Download the podcast or listen to it here.




Summary
Artificial Intelligence's Societal Impacts, Governance, and Ethics
AI’s societal impacts and governance challenges carry high stakes but are deeply uncertain, due to uncertainties in both the characteristics and capabilities of the technologies and in how they will be developed, deployed, and used in social and political context. We provide an introduction and synthesis of discussions at the 2019 Summer Institute on AI and Society, an intense interdisciplinary exploration of these issues.




We all have students like this.



No comments: