Saturday, January 25, 2020


The Phishing is good!
Hackers Stole $10.5 Million From Richardson Company: Feds
Hackers stole $10.5 million from a Richardson real estate software company with the help of “money mules” – dozens of Americans who unwittingly accepted fraudulent money into their accounts, transferred it to those behind the scheme, and kept a cut for themselves, according to court documents.
The company, RealPage, contacted the Dallas office of the U.S. Secret Service about a computer intrusion in May 2018 after hackers, possibly from Nigeria, obtained the login credentials of an employee and accessed the company’s online financial accounts, according to a summary of the investigation included in a federal seizure document.
… It took RealPage 20 days to realize that hackers had gained access to its computer network through a phishing attack after an employee clicked on an email that appeared to be legitimate, the agent said.




Clearview is “over promoting” itself, is New Jersey over reacting?
New Jersey Bars Police From Using Clearview Facial Recognition App
New Jersey police officers are now barred from using a facial recognition app made by a start-up that has licensed its groundbreaking technology to hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the country.
Gurbir S. Grewal, New Jersey’s attorney general, told state prosecutors in all 21 counties on Friday that police officers should stop using the Clearview AI app.
… “Until this week, I had not heard of Clearview AI,” Mr. Grewal said in an interview. “I was troubled. The reporting raised questions about data privacy, about cybersecurity, about law enforcement security, about the integrity of our investigations.”
In a promotional video posted to its website this week, Clearview included images of Mr. Grewal because the company said its app had played a role last year in Operation Open Door, a New Jersey police sting that led to the arrest of 19 people accused of being child predators.
I was surprised they used my image and the office to promote the product online,” said Mr. Grewal, who confirmed that Clearview’s app had been used to identify one of the people in the sting. “I was troubled they were sharing information about ongoing criminal prosecutions.”
Mr. Grewal’s office sent Clearview a cease-and-desist letter that asked the company to stop using the office and its investigations to promote its products.


(Related) Several backgrounder articles…
Facial Recognition
The controversial and nearly ever-present technology that could replace the fingerprint


(Related)
Opinion | We’re Banning Facial Recognition. We’re Missing the Point.
Communities across the United States are starting to ban facial recognition technologies. In May of last year, San Francisco banned facial recognition; the neighboring city of Oakland soon followed, as did Somerville and Brookline in Massachusetts (a statewide ban may follow). In December, San Diego suspended a facial recognition program in advance of a new statewide law, which declared it illegal, coming into effect. Forty major music festivals pledged not to use the technology, and activists are calling for a nationwide ban. Many Democratic presidential candidates support at least a partial ban on the technology.
These efforts are well intentioned, but facial recognition bans are the wrong way to fight against modern surveillance. Focusing on one particular identification method misconstrues the nature of the surveillance society we’re in the process of building. Ubiquitous mass surveillance is increasingly the norm. In countries like China, a surveillance infrastructure is being built by the government for social control. In countries like the United States, it’s being built by corporations in order to influence our buying behavior, and is incidentally used by the government.
In all cases, modern mass surveillance has three broad components: identification, correlation and discrimination. Let’s take them in turn.




A debate my student’s grandchildren will continue?
The battle for ethical AI at the world’s biggest machine-learning conference
Diversity and inclusion took centre stage at one of the world’s major artificial-intelligence (AI) conferences in 2018. But once a meeting with a controversial reputation, last month’s Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference in Vancouver, Canada, saw attention shift to another big issue in the field: ethics.
The focus comes as AI research increasingly deals with ethical controversies surrounding the application of its technologies — such as in predictive policing or facial recognition. Issues include tackling biases in algorithms that reflect existing patterns of discrimination in data, and avoiding affecting already vulnerable populations.
AI Now goes a step further: in a report published last month, it called for all machine-learning research papers to include a section on societal harms, as well as the provenance of their data sets.




For my students.
Takeaways from the Understanding Machine Learning Masterclass
The slides are available for download here. Attendees also received a copy of FPF’s Privacy Expert’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, a guide that explains the technological basics of AI and ML systems at a level of understanding useful for non-programmers, and addresses certain privacy challenges associated with the implementation of new and existing ML-based products and services.




AI in the world.
An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus
On January 9, the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China: a cluster of pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, possibly from vendors’ exposure to live animals at the Huanan Seafood Market. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gotten the word out a few days earlier, on January 6. But a Canadian health monitoring platform had beaten them both to the punch, sending word of the outbreak to its customers on December 31.
BlueDot uses an AI-driven algorithm that scours foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and official proclamations to give its clients advance warning to avoid danger zones like Wuhan.
Khan says the algorithm doesn’t use social media postings because that data is too messy.




Is it too early or too late?
Investing in AI: A Beginner's Guide
Artificial intelligence is on track to be a truly revolutionary technology. Here's what investors need to know.



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