Wednesday, February 19, 2020


Perspective.
16 DDoS attacks take place every 60 seconds, rates reach 622 Gbps
DDoS attacks are aimed at disrupting online services. A flood of illegitimate traffic is generated by PCs, Internet of Things (IoT), and other devices which send request after request, and these queries eventually overwhelm a service. users are then unable to get through. There are different forms of DDoS that target particular aspects of a service, but resource exhaustion and HTTP floods tend to be common.




Black boxes? Are the algorithms subject to FOIA?
Report on Artificial Intelligence in Federal Agencies
Washington, D.C., Stanford, Calif., and New York, February 18, 2020 — The Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), Stanford Law School, and New York University School of Law are pleased to announce the release of a major report exploring federal agencies’ use of artificial intelligence (AI) to carry out administrative law functions. This is the most comprehensive study of the subject ever conducted in the United States. The report, entitled Government by Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence in Federal Administrative Agencies, examines the growing role that machine learning and other AI technologies are playing in federal agency adjudication, enforcement, and other regulatory activities. Based on a wide-ranging survey of federal agency activities and interviews with federal officials, the report maps current uses of AI technologies in federal agencies, highlights promising uses, and addresses challenges in assuring accountability, transparency, and non-discrimination. Stanford Law School Professors David Freeman Engstrom and Daniel Ho, NYU Law Professor Catherine Sharkey, and California Supreme Court Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar served as principal advisors on the report. They received research assistance from 30 Stanford law, computer science, and engineering students, and five NYU Law students, who participated in the Spring 2019 Stanford policy lab, Administering by Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence in the Regulatory State. Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, with which Engstrom, Ho, and Cuéllar are affiliated, also provided seed funding for the report…”




A flipped classroom tool? Would videos be more interesting to my students than articles like this one?
Quickly Turn Articles Into Videos With InVideo
This morning I was browsing Product Hunt when I saw a new product that was promoting itself as a way to create "insanely good social videos." The service is called InVideo. While it is fairly easy to use to make audio slideshow-style videos, that's not why I'm mentioning it today. The reason I'm mentioning it is that contains a feature to convert written articles into videos.
InVideo offers lots of tools and templates for making audio slideshow videos to share on social media and elsewhere. One of those tools lets you copy the text of an article into a template then have InVideo automatically select images to match the text of the article. A similar InVideo template lets you enter the URL of an article and have a video made with images that are automatically selected to make the text of the article. In both cases parts of the text appear on the slides with the images. And in both cases you can manually override the automatic image selections.
When your InVideo video is complete you can download it for free with a watermark applied to it. Alternatively, you can invite other people to join InVideo and the watermark is removed. Or you can purchase an InVideo subscription to have all watermarks removed.
InVideo probably isn't a tool that students can use because it does require a phone number in order to sign up. That said, it could be useful for teachers who want to provide their students with a visual summary of the key points of a long passage of text.



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