Is
there real concern that DHS would cover up Russian hacking?
Bipartisan
Legislation to Require DHS Alerts on Election Hacking
Bipartisan
legislation formally unveiled this week would require the Department
of Homeland Security to send notifications on breaches affecting the
election systems.
… “It
has now been nearly two months since Florida delegation members were
briefed by the FBI on the two hacked counties in Florida – and the
voters in these counties still don’t know if Russians have accessed
their personal data,” Waltz said.
The
bill would require federal officials to promptly alert appropriate
state and local officials and Members of Congress when there is
credible evidence that an election system has been breached and voter
information believed to have been altered or otherwise affected.
State
and local officials would then be required to alert potentially
affected voters of the incident.
Just
saying…
Microsoft
Office 365: Banned in German schools over privacy fears
State
of Hesse says student and teacher information could be "exposed"
to US spy agencies.
… The
state's
data-protection commissioner has ruled that
using the popular cloud platform's standard configuration exposes
personal information about students and teachers "to possible
access by US officials".
… Besides
the details that German users provide when they're working with the
platform, Microsoft Office 365 also transmits telemetry data back to
the US.
Last
year, investigators
in the Netherlands discovered that
that data could include anything from standard software diagnostics
to user content from inside applications, such as sentences from
documents and email subject lines. All of which contravenes the EU's
General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, the Dutch said.
How
the police state works?
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kx4z8/revealed-this-is-palantirs-top-secret-user-manual-for-cops
Revealed:
This Is Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops
Palantir
is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data
analysis. The company acts as an information management service for
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporations like JP
Morgan and
Airbus,
and dozens of other local, state, and federal agencies. It’s been
described by scholars as a “secondary
surveillance network,” since
it extensively catalogs and maps interpersonal relationships between
individuals, even those who aren't suspected of a crime.
Palantir
software is instrumental to the operations of ICE, which is planning
one of the largest-ever targeted immigration enforcement raids this
weekend on thousands of undocumented families. Activists argue raids
of this scale would
be impossible without software like Palantir.
For
a minute there I was excited. Then I realized they meant a human to
‘direct’ AI, not the other way around.
VA
Appoints First-Ever Artificial Intelligence Director
The
agency tapped Dr. Gil Alterovitz, a Harvard Medical School professor
and member of the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston
Children’s Hospital, to spearhead its efforts to improve veteran
care through AI-enabled solutions.
Making
AI ubiquitous.
AI
at the Very, Very Edge
TinyML
is a community of engineers focused on how best to implement machine
learning (ML) in ultra-low power systems.
… “TensorFlow
Lite has been targeting mobile phones but we are excited about
running it on ever smaller devices,” he said.
After
building a model in TensorFlow, engineers can run it through the
Tensor Flow Lite converter, which “makes it smaller and does things
like quantisation, which allow you to reduce the size and precision
of the model down to a scale where it will fit comfortably on the
device you are targeting,” he said.
Situnayake
described one technique that could be used to increase power
efficiency, which involves chaining models together.
“Imagine
a cascading model of classifiers where you have a really low power
model using barely any power to detect if there is a sound going on,
then another model that takes more energy to run, which figures out
if it’s human speech or not,” he explained. “Then a deeper
network that only wakes up when these conditions are met, that uses
more power and resources. By chaining these together, you only wake
up the [energy intensive] one when you need to, so you can make big
savings on energy efficiency.”
Baby
them!
The
AI technique that could imbue machines with the ability to reason
… “Obviously
we’re missing something,” he said. A baby can develop an
understanding of an elephant after seeing two photos, while
deep-learning algorithms need to see thousands, if not millions. A
teen can learn to drive safely by practicing for 20 hours and manage
to avoid crashes without first experiencing one, while
reinforcement-learning algorithms (a subcategory of deep learning)
must go through tens of millions of trials, including many egregious
failures.
The
answer, he thinks, is in the underrated deep-learning subcategory
known as unsupervised learning. While algorithms based on supervised
and reinforcement learning are taught to achieve an objective through
human input, unsupervised ones extract patterns in data entirely on
their own. (LeCun prefers the term “self-supervised learning”
because it essentially uses part of the training data to predict the
rest of the training data.)
What
must we do to gain their attention?
Facebook’s
$5 billion FTC fine is an embarrassing joke
Facebook
gets away with it again
Facebook’s
stock went up
after
news of a
record-breaking $5 billion FTC fine for
various privacy violations broke today.
… From
some other perspectives, that $5 billion fine is a big deal, of
course: it’s the biggest fine in FTC history, far bigger than the
$22 million fine levied against Google in 2012. And $5 billion is a
lot of money, to be sure. It’s just that like everything else that
comes into contact with Facebook’s scale, it’s still entirely too
small: Facebook had $15 billion in revenue last quarter alone, and
$22 billion in profit
last
year.
The
largest FTC fine in the history of the country represents basically a
month of Facebook’s revenue,
and the company did such
a good job of telegraphing it to investors that
the stock price went up.
Here’s
another way to say it: the
biggest FTC fine in United States history increased Mark Zuckerberg’s
net worth.
Perspective.
(Podcast) “I am shocked. Shocked I tell you!”
Dysfunctional
Justice: What’s Wrong with the U.S. Legal System
Bruce
Cannon Gibney discusses his new book about how our legal system has
deteriorated since the 1950s as laws
have become needlessly complex, clouded by politics and influenced by
money.
