Saturday, June 27, 2020


Poor precedent. Perhaps it will lead to better backups going forward?
California University Paid $1.14 Million After Ransomware Attack
The University of California, San Francisco paid criminal hackers $1.14 million this month to resolve a ransomware attack.
The hackers encrypted data on servers inside the school of medicine, the university said Friday. While researchers at UCSF are among those leading coronavirus-related antibody testing, the attack didn’t impede its Covid-19 work, it said. The university is working with a team of cybersecurity contractors to restore the hampered servers “soon.”
The data that was encrypted is important to some of the academic work we pursue as a university serving the public good,” it said in the statement. “We therefore made the difficult decision to pay some portion of the ransom.”




Are all predictions evil? There must be some value to knowing where police will be needed. Have we tossed the baby out with the bath water?
California city bans predictive policing in U.S. first
As officials mull steps to tackle police brutality and racism, California’s Santa Cruz has become the first U.S. city to ban predictive policing, which digital rights experts said could spark similar moves across the country.
Understanding how predictive policing and facial recognition can be disportionately biased against people of color, we officially banned the use of these technologies in the city of Santa Cruz,” Mayor Justin Cummings said on Wednesday.




Can’t hurt?
AI gatekeepers are taking baby steps toward raising ethical standards
The Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems will require a “broader impact statement” addressing the effect a piece of research might have on society. The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing will begin rejecting papers on ethical grounds. Others have emphasized their voluntary guidelines.
The new standards follow the publication of several ethically dubious papers. Microsoft collaborated with researchers at Beihang University to algorithmically generate fake comments on news stories. Harrisburg University researchers developed a tool to predict the likelihood someone will commit a crime based on their face. Researchers clashed on Twitter over the wisdom of publishing these and other papers.




Podcast.
Global competition for AI talent grows each day
You may have heard the United States is in a worldwide competition for talent in artificial intelligence. So it makes sense to understand the career motivations of these people. That’s what Remco Zwetsloot, a research fellow, and Catherine Aiken, a research survey specialist, have done. They are both from Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, and joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin to talk more.
We have about 58% of them who are actually US citizens who studied here for their Ph.D. and 43% who are not US natives who came here to study and complete their Ph.D. here.




Tools for teachers and others I suppose.
How to Make a Free Temporary Website Within Seconds
Create a Temporary Web Page Using Just Email




Field trips for shut-ins.
50 National Geographic 360 Videos
Watching 360 degree videos is probably my favorite thing to do with my Google Cardboard viewer. A lot of people don't realize that a Cardboard viewer can be used for more than just Google Expeditions. For example, National Geographic's YouTube channel contains fifty 360 videos featuring things like Mount Everest, glaciers in Iceland, elephants, sea turtles, lions, sharks, and polar expeditions.
You don't need to have a Google Cardboard viewer or any virtual reality headset. You can can just view them in your web browser then click and drag to experience the full 360 degree imagery. Of course, it's more fun to do it in a VR viewer.
YouTube's search tools include a filter to help you identify 360 degree videos.



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