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.
