Monday, January 06, 2020


It’s not just local, it’s everywhere! Following a simple procedure would have prevented this.
Colorado Town Wires Over $1 Million to BEC Scammers
Colorado Town of Erie lost more than $1 million to a business email compromise scam (BEC) that ended with the town's employees sending the funds to a bank account controlled by scammers.
… The fraudsters used an electronic form on the town's website to request a change to the payment information on the building contract for Erie Parkway Bridge awarded to SEMA Construction in October 2018.
"Specifically, the change was to receive payments via electronic funds transfer rather than by check," Erie Town Administrator Malcolm Fleming said in an email memo according to The Denver Post.
"Although town staff checked some of the information on the form for accuracy, they did not verify the authenticity of the submission with SEMA Construction; they accepted the form and updated the payment method."




Useful!
justdelete.me




Facebook seems to feel that way about a lot of laws.
Facebook Refuses to Change Web Tracking Practices, Believes That CCPA Does Not Apply to Them
… The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook has told advertisers that it is exempt from the terms of the CCPA as the social media company does not directly sell the data it collects about users.
… The catch that Facebook thinks will get them out of CCPA is that businesses are able to install Pixel free of charge, and pay only for Facebook to deliver targeted ads based on the information they harvest. Facebook believes that they are excepted from the CCPA terms given that they are not directly selling the personal data they collect to these businesses, and given that it is never made visible to them. The business simply provides Facebook with the general demographics to target ads to, things like location and age range, and Facebook targets their ads to users it believes fit the requested profile.




Similar to the encryption ban that targeted PGP? How does one identify “essential?”
US announces AI software export restrictions
The US will impose new restrictions on the export of certain AI programs overseas, including to rival China.
The ban, which comes into force on Monday, is the first to be applied under a 2018 law known as the Export Control Reform Act or ECRA. This requires the government to examine how it can restrict the export of “emerging” technologies “essential to the national security of the United States” — including AI. News of the ban was first reported by Reuters.




Sure to impact architecture.
Top 10 predictions for AI in IT operations
AIOps tools are commonplace, but many IT leaders remain cautious about using these relatively new capabilities. That's likely to change next year, however, as AIOps adoption goes mainstream; use cases will crystallize for improving IT efficiencies and supporting faster decision-making.
AI-enhanced automation will become smarter and more contextual, acquisition activity will explode, and you'll see more movement of AIOps toward the edge. Here are the top 10 predictions to track.




Perhaps we can do without lawyers?
Legal Tech's Predictions for Artificial Intelligence in 2020
So we’re at a new decade. Are the robot lawyers here yet? When are they coming? My mental picture of C3PO projecting a hologram of a case file has not yet come true, and I must confess that I’m a bit disappointed.
… Even if there aren’t robot lawyers, AI has begun to fundamentally change how lawyers across the country practice. And from the predictions below, it’s clear that both attorneys and technologists alike expect more growth from here.




We could do this in other fields…
Free Textbooks for Law Students
Inside Higher Ed – “Legal scholars are increasingly adopting and creating free textbooks in an attempt to increase affordability for students. But are these textbooks considered open educational resources? Law school is notoriously expensive, but a growing number of professors are pushing back on the idea that law textbooks must be expensive, too. Faculty members at the New York University School of Law have taken matters into their own hands by publishing their own textbooks at no cost to students. Barton Beebe, a law professor at NYU, published the sixth edition of his trademark-law textbook last year. Fellow NYU professors Jeanne Fromer and Christopher Jon Sprigman also published the first edition of their copyright-law textbook in 2019. Both titles are available to download electronically at no charge and are already in use at dozens of universities. Print copies of the textbooks can be ordered on demand through Amazon for the bargain-basement price of $20.26 and $15.40, respectively. The authors make no profit from these sales…”




Always a fun topic to get my students arguing. Can we eliminate all (any) middlemen? (Remember when disintermediation was a hot topic?
An elegy for cash: the technology we might never replace
MIT Technology Review – Cash is gradually dying out. Will we ever have a digital alternative that offers the same mix of convenience and freedom? – “This is a feature of physical cash that payment cards and apps do not have: freedom. Called “bearer instruments,” banknotes and coins are presumed to be owned by whoever holds them. We can use them to transact with another person without a third party getting in the way. Companies cannot build advertising profiles or credit ratings out of our data, and governments cannot track our spending or our movements. And while a credit card can be declined and a check mislaid, handing over money works every time, instantly. We shouldn’t take this freedom for granted. Much of our commerce now happens online. It relies on banks and financial technology companies to serve as middlemen. Transactions are going digital in the physical world, too: electronic payment tools, from debit cards to Apple Pay to Alipay, are increasingly replacing cash. While notes and coins remain popular in many countries, including the US, Japan, and Germany, in others they are nearing obsolescence. This trend has civil liberties groups worried. Without cash, there is “no chance for the kind of dignity-preserving privacy that undergirds an open society,” writes Jerry Brito, executive director of Coin Center, a policy advocacy group based in Washington, DC. In a recent report, Brito contends that we must “develop and foster electronic cash” that is as private as physical cash and doesn’t require permission to use…”




My students could use this. (Hint, hint!)
Open database of 25,099,646 free scholarly articles
  • How do you find all these fulltext articles? We harvest content directly from over 50,000 journals and open-access repositories from all over the world. We also use great open data from PubMed Central, the DOAJ, Crossref (particulary their license info), and DataCite.
  • Is Unpaywall legal? Yes! We harvest content from legal sources including repositories run by universities, governments, and scholarly societies, as well as open content hosted by publishers themselves. We do not harvest from sources of dubious legality like ResearchGate or Sci-Hub. If you ever encounter content indexed by Unpaywall that is posted in violation of copyright, let us know and we’ll remove it immediately.
  • How can I make sure content from my open repository appears in Unpaywall? Good question! We made a page about that here.
  • How is this related to the oaDOI service? We used to call the browser extension “Unpaywall,” and the data source behind it “oaDOI.” That got confusing, so now the whole project is just called Unpaywall, including the database, the API, the extension, and everything else…”



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