Been
there, ate that, paid cash.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/10/breach-at-dickeys-bbq-smokes-3m-cards/
Breach
at Dickey’s BBQ Smokes 3M Cards
One
of the digital underground’s most popular stores for peddling
stolen credit card information began selling a batch of more than
three million new card records this week. KrebsOnSecurity has
learned the data was stolen in a lengthy data breach at more than 100
Dickey’s Barbeque Restaurant locations around the country.
On
Monday, the carding bazaar Joker’s Stash debuted “BlazingSun,”
a new batch of more than three million stolen card records,
advertising “valid rates”
of between 90-100 percent. This is typically an indicator that the
breached merchant is either unaware of the compromise or has only
just begun responding to it.
Worth
reading, but clearly not a quick fix.
https://hbr.org/2020/10/a-practical-guide-to-building-ethical-ai
A Practical Guide to
Building Ethical AI
Companies
are leveraging data and artificial intelligence to create scalable
solutions — but they’re also scaling their reputational,
regulatory, and legal risks. For instance, Los
Angeles is suing IBM
for
allegedly misappropriating data it collected with its ubiquitous
weather app. Optum
is being investigated
by
regulators for creating an algorithm that allegedly recommended that
doctors and nurses pay more attention to white patients than to
sicker black patients. Goldman
Sachs is being investigated
by
regulators for using an AI algorithm that allegedly discriminated
against women by granting larger credit limits to men than women on
their Apple cards. Facebook infamously granted Cambridge Analytica,
a political firm, access
to the personal data
of
more than 50 million users.
… Despite
the costs of getting it wrong, most companies grapple with data and
AI ethics through ad-hoc discussions on a per-product basis. With no
clear protocol in place on how to identify, evaluate, and mitigate
the risks, teams end up either overlooking risks, scrambling to solve
issues as they come up, or crossing their fingers in the hope that
the problem will resolve itself. When companies have attempted to
tackle the issue at scale, they’ve tended to implement strict,
imprecise, and overly broad policies that lead to false positives in
risk identification and stymied production. These problems grow by
orders of magnitude when you introduce third-party vendors, who may
or may not be thinking about these questions at all.
… AI
ethics does not come in a box. Given the varying values of companies
across dozens of industries, a data and AI ethics program must be
tailored to the specific business and regulatory needs that are
relevant to the company. However, here are seven steps towards
building a customized, operationalized, scalable, and sustainable
data and AI ethics program.
1.
Identify existing infrastructure that a data and AI ethics program
can leverage.
2.
Create a data and AI ethical risk framework that is tailored to your
industry.
3.
Change how you think about ethics by taking cues from the successes
in health care.
4.
Optimize guidance and tools for product managers.
5.
Build organizational awareness.
6.
Formally and informally incentivize employees to play a role in
identifying AI ethical risks.
7. Monitor impacts and engage
stakeholders.
(Related)
https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/machine-learning-ethics
Six ways machine learning
threatens social justice
When you harness the power and potential of machine learning,
there are also some drastic downsides that you've got to manage.
Deploying machine learning, you face the risk that it be
discriminatory, biased, inequitable, exploitative, or opaque. In
this article, I cover six ways that machine learning threatens social
justice and reach an incisive conclusion: The remedy is to take on
machine learning standardization as a form of social activism.
When you use machine learning, you aren't just optimizing models
and streamlining business. You're governing. In essence, the models
embody policies that control access to opportunities and resources
for many people. They drive consequential decisions as to whom to
investigate, incarcerate, set up on a date, or medicate – or to
whom to grant a loan, insurance coverage, housing, or a job.
An improvement upon: “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t open the pod
bay door.”
https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-virtual-agent-humans.html
Pilot: A virtual agent that
can negotiate with humans
… A
research team at the university of Southern California has been
exploring the possibility of building automated systems that can
negotiate with humans. In a paper pre-published on arXiv
and set to be presented at the IJCAI
conference, they presented a virtual agent based on a framework
called IAGO
(Interactive Arbitration Guide Online),
which can negotiate with humans in a three-round negotiation
task.
This virtual agent, called Pilot, is one of the finalists of the
IJCAI conference's global negotiation challenge (ANAC).
… During
the three-round ANAC task, Pilot typically tries to lead the
negotiation by continuously rolling out offers. Meanwhile, it also
guides human partners and offers its assistance, using simple
sentences such as “let me help you out.”"
"A
key characteristic of Pilot is the effective use of favor exchange,"
Chawla said. “repeated negotiations provide the opportunity to
indulge in favor exchange with the human, where a favor accepted in
the current negotiation can be paid back in the upcoming ones.
However, prior work shows that whether the favor request is fruitful
or not depends on the personality of the partner such as their social
value orientation, a feature that captures how cooperatively an
individual is expected to approach the negotiation."
Rules?
We don’t need no stinking rules!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-15/fcc-to-move-on-trump-plan-to-weaken-social-media-legal-shield
Trump
Foes Fume Over FCC’s Efforts to Rein In Twitter
Agency chief says it will conduct
rulemaking Trump sought
Like everyone else?
https://www.law.com/2020/10/15/the-pandemic-is-accelerating-the-expansion-of-the-gc-role/
Law.com Barometer: The
Pandemic is Accelerating the Expansion of the GC Role
… That
agility requirement has GCs leading many strategic conversations with
the executive team on how best to balance employee safety, company
reputation, legal and compliance risk and long-term company survival.
GCs are implementing innovative initiatives that require working
with teams across business units such as HR, real estate, operations,
IT, finance, and supply teams. The difficulty around these
decisions, however, is compounded for global operations, where the
guidance and regulations may require different standards or may even
conflict. As Judy Wong, Tricor’s Group Chief Legal Counsel and
Chief Compliance Officer shared with Corporate Counsel, “In today’s
changing regulatory and business environment, businesses always have
to think about risk in new innovative ways, but COVID-19
just fast-tracked everything.”
Perspective. (Podcast)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/15/1010365/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-has-begun-nows-the-time-to-join/
The Fourth Industrial
Revolution has begun: Now’s the time to join
To prepare for a data-dominated
future, says Lumen CTO Andrew Dugan, organizations need the right
tools to collect, analyze, and act on it.
… When it comes to next-generation apps and devices, edge
compute—the ability to process data in real time at the edge of a
network (think a handheld device) without sending it back to the
cloud to be processed—has to be the focus. Dugan explains: “When
a robot senses something and sends that sensor data back to the
application, which may be on-site, it may be in some edge compute
location, the speed at
which that data can be collected, transported to the application,
analyzed, and a response generated, directly affects the speed at
which that device can operate.” This data must be
analyzed and acted on in real time to be useful to the organization.
Makes me feel even older…
https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-cobol/
What
Is COBOL and Why Is It in Demand?
The 60-year-old programming COBOL is
experiencing a resurgence. Many government system mainframes run
COBOL and have been struggling to deal with a surge in demand. In
particular, the state of New Jersey’s unemployment systems is
administered by a 40-year-old COBOL mainframe.
With the surge in unemployment connected
to COVID-19, the system is struggling to keep up. Governor Murphy has
identified COBOL programmers as an under-appreciated necessity.
… To
help address the growing need for COBOL programmers, IBM has created
a free
COBOL course.
The course consists of a series of videos, quizzes, and lab
assignments, takes 16 hours to complete and you will receive a badge
at the end.
Tools.
https://www.makeuseof.com/lalal-separate-vocals-instruments/
LALAL.AI
Makes Separating Vocals and Instruments Easy
If you don't have the master track,
listening to just the vocals or instruments for a song requires
absurd amounts of audio editing hours to split the tracks into stems.
It's a painful process that may not even
end up perfect, no matter how much time you invest.
It
doesn't have to be this way, though, as LALAL.AI
actually
uses artificial intelligence to split the vocal and instrumental
tracks for you. Not only does it require next to no effort on your
part, but it only takes a few moments to create downloadable versions
of each track.
It
really doesn't get much easier than using LALAL.AI. You simply go to
the website,
upload the song you'd like to have split, and wait a minute or two
while the AI processes the file and outputs the split version.
Once
the files are split, you can listen to them directly in your browser
or download the MP3 the separated files to use in whatever way you
need them. It really is that simple.
