Failure to plan is planning to fail.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/york-university-cyber-attack-1.5555106

Students, experts call for explanation after York University suffers 'extremely serious' cyber attack

Students and digital security experts say York University must release more information about what the school calls an "extremely serious" cyber attack last week.

York says the Friday evening attack corrupted a number of its servers and workstations, though it has not yet said if any sensitive information was stolen.

… York has advised that everyone at the university will need to reset their passwords as a result of the attack.

But the York Federation of Students (YFS) has voiced concerns over what it says is a lack of communication following the hack. The student union says the university did not directly inform students about the situation, relying instead on statements posted to its website and social media.

Are they worried about something?

Funding off limits for school facial recognition projects

Connor Hoffman reports:

In a surprise unannounced change, the New York State Education Department amended its website to explain the department is not currently approving Smart Schools Bond Act project applications that utilize facial recognition technology.

The Union-Sun & Journal noticed the change last week.

“The Review Board is not currently approving plans that include facial recognition technology or other similar self-learning analytic software,” the website says.

It is unclear when exactly the change was made or whether it’s permanent.

Read more on Lockport Journal.

While this is good news, it’s also a bit confusing news until we find out more about why the decision was made. It would be nice if the state had suddenly gained insight into how dystopian some of these technologies are, but I’m a bit skeptical that that’s the explanation.

Because CCPA isn’t enough?

Californians for Consumer Privacy Introduces California Privacy Rights Act for November 2020 Ballot

Hunton Andrews Kurth writes:

On May 4, 2020, Californians for Consumer Privacy (the group behind the ballot initiative that inspired the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“CCPA”)) announced that it had collected over 900,000 signatures to qualify the California Privacy Rights Act (“CPRA”) for the November 2020 ballot. The group announced that it was taking steps to submit the CPRA for inclusion on the November ballot in counties across California. The CPRA would amend the CCPA to create new and additional privacy rights and obligations in California, including the following:

Read more on Privacy & Information Security Law Blog.

Of course they’re going to keep the data. What government wouldn’t?

UK COVID-19 contact-tracing app data may be kept for ‘research’ after crisis ends, MPs told

Gareth Corfield reports:

Britons will not be able to ask NHS admins to delete their COVID-19 contact-tracking data from government servers, digital arm NHSX’s chief exec Matthew Gould admitted to MPs this afternoon.

Gould also told Parliament’s Human Rights Committee that data harvested from Britons through NHSX’s COVID-19 contact tracing app would be “pseudonymised” – and appeared to leave the door open for that data to be sold on for “research”.

Read more on The Register.

Pay for articles in search results?

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/may/04/google-poster-newsagents-window-publishers-tech-giant-says

Google is like a poster in the newsagent's window for publishers, tech giant says

Google Australia responds to government’s move to force it to pay for content by arguing it provides publishers with free advertising

… The local arm of Google was responding to the government’s assertion that Australian news content is “lucrative for the tech titans”, and Google and Facebook should be paying publishers millions of dollars annually for using it.

“In the offline print world, publishers have long paid retailers, newsstands and kiosks to distribute their newspapers and magazines – acknowledging the value of acquiring audiences to a publishers’ content and the advertising publishers sell alongside it,” Google Australia’s managing director, Mel Silva, said in a lengthy riposte to the government’s instruction to the competition watchdog to develop a mandatory code to force the digital platforms to pay for using news content.

Keep learning.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-our-new-free-python-programming-language-courses-are-for-novice-ai-developers/

Microsoft: Our new free Python programming language courses are for novice AI developers

Microsoft has released two more Python series for beginners in the form of two three-hour courses on YouTube, which add to the 44-part Python for Beginners series it released last fall.

… The new More Python for Beginners series consists of 20 videos that run between two minutes and 15 minutes each. It covers working with files, lambdas or 'anonymous functions', and object-oriented programming, and each tutorial is followed by a short demo video.

… The second of the two new series, called Even More Python for Beginners: Data Tools, follows the same format and consists of 31 videos.