This concerns me and should concern those government agencies reaching into my computers. What if the bad guys left a tripwire that recognized an “unauthorized” command and set off some nasty responses?
Emotet malware forcibly removed today by German police update
Emotet, one of the most dangerous email spam botnets in recent history, is being uninstalled today from all infected devices with the help of a malware module delivered in January by law enforcement.
The botnet's takedown is the result of an international law enforcement action that allowed investigators to take control of the Emotet's servers and disrupt the malware's operation.
… After the takedown operation, law enforcement pushed a new configuration to active Emotet infections so that the malware would begin to use command and control servers controlled by the Bundeskriminalamt, Germany's federal police agency.
Law enforcement then distributed a new Emotet module in the form of a 32-bit EmotetLoader.dll to all infected systems that will automatically uninstall the malware on April 25th, 2021.
I thought that might be the case. Move “sensitive” processes outside your agency so you can say, “We don’t do that” with a straight face.
The Postal Service’s Social Media Surveillance Program Sends 100’s of Reports To Fusion Centers
Earlier this week, this site linked to a report by The Guardian about the U.S. Postal Service monitoring social media posts. Over on MassPrivateI, Joe Cadillic also had something to say about the revelations.
“DHS has succeeded in turning the Postal Service into a clandestine government agency,” Joe writes. And he says we shouldn’t be surprised.
All of this really shouldn’t come as a surprise; a 2019 USPIS annual report revealed the existence of iCOP, albeit in less ominous terms.
Page 36 of the report says iCOP is one of seven functional groups that send hundreds of intelligence reports to fusion centers.
Joe also notes that
A 2019 Federal News Network article revealed how iCOP postal inspectors have been going ‘undercover’ on the dark web since at least 2014.
Anyone who was surprised simply hasn’t been paying enough attention. And that’s probably what the government hopes for.
Perhaps we will need to wait for AI systems that will “know it when they see it.”
Canada’s Attempt to Regulate Sexual Content Online Ignores Technical and Historical Realities
Daly Barnett writes:
Canadian Senate Bill S-203, AKA the “Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act,” is another woefully misguided proposal aimed at regulating sexual content online. To say the least, this bill fails to understand how the internet functions and would be seriously damaging to online expression and privacy. It’s bad in a variety of ways, but there are three specific problems that need to be laid out: 1) technical impracticality, 2) competition harms, and 3) privacy and security.
[…]
Then there’s the privacy angle. It’s ludicrous to expect all adult users to provide private personal information every time they log onto an app that might contain sexual content. The implementation of verification schemes in contexts like this may vary on how far privacy intrusions go, but it generally plays out as a cat and mouse game that brings surveillance and security threats instead of responding to initial concerns. The more that a verification system fails, the more privacy-invasive measures are taken to avoid criminal liability.
Read more on EFF.
Oh, the horror!
https://commons.ln.edu.hk/pg-conf-2021/day2-3/panel2/4/
Comical computers and dull PCs: The ethics of giving artificial intelligence a sense of humour
There seems an increasing and equal measure of excitement and anxiety about the growth in sophistication technology has demonstrated over the past 100 years. One particular anxiety that has been the subject of academic research and science fiction alike is artificial intelligence (AI) and the threat or hope it poses. But a major research gap in contemplating the ethics and future of AI is humour. While science fiction often portrays AI as humourless, researchers of computational humour are working to engineer into AI an understanding of humour. Research projects like JAPE, HAHAacronym and STANDUP have attempted to implement humour to varying degrees of success. But humour can be greatly contentious, inflicting offence and even breaking certain speech laws. If we are to programme a sense of humour into AI, whose sense of humour ought to be? Equally, if we exclude this form of intelligence from AI, then will we be able to safely engage in human-agent interaction without AI being able to discern between bona-fide and non bona-fide communication? This paper offers an introduction to the ethical problems in computational humour.
A potential for privacy.
https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/aii_fac_pub/508/
Machine Learning Meets Internet of Things: From Theory to Practice
Standalone execution of problem-solving Artificial Intelligence (AI) on IoT devices produces a higher level of autonomy and privacy. This is because the sensitive user data collected by the devices need not be transmitted to the cloud for inference. The chipsets used to design IoT devices are resource-constrained due to their limited memory footprint, fewer computation cores, and low clock speeds. These limitations constrain one from deploying and executing complex problem-solving AI (usually an ML model) on IoT devices. Since there is a high potential for building intelligent IoT devices, in this tutorial, we teach researchers and developers; (i) How to deep compress CNNs and efficiently deploy on resource-constrained devices; (ii) How to efficiently port and execute ranking, regression, and classification problems solving ML classifiers on IoT devices; (iii) How to create ML-based self-learning devices that can locally re-train themselves on-the-fly using the unseen real-world data.
For lawyers who expect to have AI clients… Lots of reference articles.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-021-00306-9
Rights for Robots: Artificial Intelligence, Animal and Environmental Law (2020) by Joshua Gellers
AI and the law?
Technology and International Relations: The New Frontier in Global Power
5 Artificial Intelligence: a paradigm shift in international law and politics? Autonomous weapons systems as a case study.
(Related) How to write AI law?
A Pragmatic Approach to Regulating Artificial Intelligence: A Technology Regulator’s Perspective
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the regulation thereof is a topic that is increasingly being discussed within various fora. Various proposals have been made in literature for defining regulatory bodies and/or related regulation. In this paper, we present a pragmatic approach for providing a technology assurance regulatory framework. To the best knowledge of the authors this work presents the first national AI technology assurance legal and regulatory framework that has been implemented by a national authority empowered through law to do so. In aim of both providing assurances where required and not stifling innovation yet supporting it, herein it is proposed that such regulation should not be mandated for all AI-based systems and that rather it should primarily provide a voluntary framework and only be mandated in sectors and activities where required and as deemed necessary by other authorities for regulated and critical areas.
Perspective.
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S2705078521300012
The AI Wars, 1950–2000, and Their Consequences
Philosophy and AI have had a difficult relationship from the beginning. The “classic” period from 1950 to 2000 saw four major conflicts, first about the logical coherence of AI as an endeavor, and then about architecture, semantics, and the Frame Problem. Since 2000, these early debates have been largely replaced by arguments about consciousness and ethics, arguments that now involve neuroscientists, lawyers, and economists as well as AI scientists and philosophers. We trace these developments, and speculate about the future.
The future of the law firm?
https://fortune.com/2021/04/21/legal-tech-rocket-lawyer-raises-223-million-expansion/
Exclusive: Legal tech startup Rocket Lawyer raises $223 million for expansion
… The company, which has 25 million registered users, already offers online legal documents and virtual attorney meetings to businesses and individuals in the U.S., U.K. and parts of Europe. Customers pay $40 monthly for a subscription or for individual documents, from $40 for a simple living will to $100 for an incorporation filing.
… Rocket Lawyer is among a host of legal startups attracting money from venture capitalists looking to disrupt the staid legal profession. Last year, Everlaw, which helps lawyers sort and search vast amounts of digital documentary evidence, raised $62 million from investors including Google parent Alphabet. Verbit, an A.I.-powered courtroom transcription service, raised $91 million in two rounds of fundraising. And Notarize, which offers online notary services, raised $35 million.
Perspective. The Streisand Effect won’t work if people in India can’t see news about the suppression and India probably doesn’t care what outsiders think since they don’t vote.
https://www.makeuseof.com/india-removes-tweets-criticizing-government/
India Orders Twitter to Remove Tweets Criticizing the Government's Handling of the Pandemic
Tools?
https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-use-linkedin-as-a-research-tool/
How to Use LinkedIn as a Research Tool
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