If you lost drives containing evidence or other confidential data would you be able to have Western Digital “fix” your disks? (Paranoid me asks: Would this ‘hack’ be a model for a company that wanted to force customers to upgrade?)
https://www.databreaches.net/western-digital-to-provide-recovery-services-for-hacked-nas-drives/
Western Digital to provide recovery services for hacked NAS drives
Western Digital has announced a new trade-in programme to help customers mitigate the effects of a mass malware attack that saw terabytes of data wiped from users’ NAS drives overnight.
Those who lost data as a result of the hack will be able to benefit from Western Digital’s data recovery services, as well as a trade-in programme for My Book Live network-attached storage devices that were targeted in the attack. Customers partaking in the programme will be able to upgrade to a new supported My Cloud device.
Both programmes will become available starting July, the company stated.
Read more on TechCentral.ie
Exceptional?
https://www.pogowasright.org/u-s-supreme-court-turns-away-digital-device-border-search-cases/
U.S. Supreme Court turns away digital device border search cases
Sara Merken reports:
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up three cases that relate to constitutional requirements for U.S. border searches of electronic devices like laptops and cell phones.
The high court’s decision to steer clear of the cases comes as courts around the country have grappled in varying ways with how the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution applies in the digital age.
In one of the cases, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked the justices to review a 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in which a three-judge panel ruled in February that U.S. border agents don’t need warrants to search travelers’ smartphones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of entry.
Read more on Reuters.
(Related)
Wisconsin Supreme Court Refuses to Limit Warrantless Forensic Searches of Cell Phones
From EPIC.org:
The Wisconsin Supreme Court issued an opinion in Wisconsin v. Burch finding that cell phone data downloaded with a forensic device can be used in a subsequent, unrelated investigation and trial regardless of whether the data was initially obtained without a warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment. A police department used a forensic device to download the entire contents of the defendant’s phone while investigating a hit-and-run and retained a full copy indefinitely. The sheriff’s office later accessed and searched the copy during an unrelated homicide investigation and used the defendant’s cell phone data as evidence during his trial. The Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to decide the constitutional question. Instead, the Court found that the evidence should not be excluded because the police “acted by the book” and there was no conduct to deter with exclusion. The Court said that the sheriff’s office “ha[d] every reason to think [the downloaded data] was lawfully obtained” and found there was no police misconduct because it is “common police practice to share records with other agencies.” Dissenting from this holding, Judge Bradley, along with two other justices of the court, recognized that law enforcement “generally needs a warrant to search the data [cell phones] hold.” She added that the exclusionary rule should apply in this case because “excluding evidence obtained by following such an unlawful and widespread policy provides significant societal value by both specifically deterring continued adherence to an unconstitutional practice and more broadly incentivizing police agencies to adopt policies in line with the Fourth Amendment.” EPIC, along with the ACLU and EFF, filed an amicus brief in the case that argued that the unchecked use of forensic devices to download, store, and share cell data violated the Fourth Amendment by “enabl[ing] the State to rummage at will among a person’s most personal and private information whenever it wanted, for as long as it wanted” without a warrant. EPIC regularly files amicus briefs challenging unlawful access to cell phone data.
A teaching aide?
https://www.bespacific.com/the-overlapping-infrastructure-of-urban-surveillance-and-how-to-fix-it/
The Overlapping Infrastructure of Urban Surveillance and How to Fix It
EFF Free Visual – The Overlapping Infrastructure of Urban Surveillance, and How to Fix It – “Between the increasing capabilities of local and state police, the creep of federal law enforcement into domestic policing, the use of aerial surveillance such as spy planes and drones, and mounting cooperation between private technology companies and the government, it can be hard to understand and visualize what all this overlapping surveillance can mean for your daily life. We often think of these problems as siloed issues. Local police deploy automated license plate readers or acoustic gunshot detection. Federal authorities monitor you when you travel internationally. But if you could take a cross-section of the average city block, you would see the ways that the built environment of surveillance—its physical presence in, over, and under our cities—makes this an entwined problem that must be combatted through entwined solutions. Thus, we decided to create a graphic to show how—from overhead to underground—these technologies and legal authorities overlap, how they disproportionately impact the lives of marginalized communities, and the tools we have at our disposal to halt or mitigate their harms…”
(Related)
https://www.pogowasright.org/maine-law-restricts-facial-recognition-technology-statewide/
Maine law restricts facial recognition technology statewide
AP reports:
A bill touted as the country’s strictest statewide regulation on the use of facial recognition technology has become law in Maine.
While several states regulate facial recognition as a surveillance tool, the Maine law represents a broad prohibition of the technology at the state, county and municipal government levels, with limited exceptions for law enforcement purposes, officials said.
Read more on AP News.
Related: L.D. 1585
Looks to be a bit too expensive for the average guy. Perhaps there is a market for cheaper tools?
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-ways-prevent-drones-infringing-privacy/
How to Prevent Drones Infringing on Your Privacy: 7 Ways
For your viewing pleasure?
https://www.pogowasright.org/funniest-privacy-videos-privacy-at-law-schools/
Funniest Privacy Videos + Privacy at Law Schools
Law professor Daniel Solove writes:
At my event, the Privacy Law Salon, we have a wonderful tradition of showing some of the year’s funniest privacy videos after dinner. I thought I’d share some of the videos I have enjoyed the most, plus some new ones I recently found.
When you want to be amazed and depressed at the same time.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/download-entire-facebook-history-data-downloader/
How to Download Your Entire Facebook History
… a look at how to download your Facebook data, what's included, and, perhaps most importantly, what's not included.
Once again I am pleased to see none of my students on this list.
https://www.databreaches.net/us-secret-service-brings-back-its-cyber-most-wanted-list/
US Secret Service brings back its Cyber Most Wanted list
Catalin Cimpanu reports:
The US Secret Service has updated its official website this month to add a new page where the agency is now listing the most sought-after fugitives involved in financially related cybercrime investigations.
The new Most Wanted Fugitives page was re-added to the agency’s site after the page had been removed from the site for the past few years.
The agency’s most wanted fugitives page is very similar to the FBI’s Cyber Most Wanted, with some names found on both lists.
Read more on The Record.
This is what passes for ethics today?
Nice publishes ethical framework for applying AI to customer service
Nice, a provider of a robotic process automation (RPA) platform infused with machine learning algorithms employed in call centers, today published a Robo Ethical Framework for employing AI to better serve customers.
The goal is to provide some direction on how best to employ robots alongside humans in a call center, rather than focusing on how to replace humans, said Oded Karev, vice president of RPA for Nice.
The field is probably not fracturing, but new buzzwords appear whenever people think they are inventing a new specialization. Or perhaps it’s just marketing.
https://searchenterpriseai.techtarget.com/tip/9-top-AI-and-machine-learning-trends
9 top AI and machine learning trends for 2021
Tiny ML, multi-modal learning, responsible AI -- learn about the top trends in AI for 2021 and how they promise to transform how business gets done.
Redefining antitrust.
https://www.wired.com/story/ftc-antitrust-case-against-facebook-very-much-alive/
Actually, the Antitrust Case Against Facebook Is Very Much Alive
YOU MAY HAVE heard about how the government’s effort to break up Facebook was dealt a death blow by a federal judge on Monday. Per The New York Times, the case was “thrown out,” in a “stunning setback.” As The Washington Post put it, the ruling “handed Facebook a major victory.” One Wall Street Journal reporter summed up the mood by noting on Twitter, “Hard to overstate the blow Facebook landed here.”
But according to several antitrust experts I’ve spoken with, overstatement is precisely the way to describe these news reports. Yes, Monday was a good day for Facebook, whose market cap briefly cracked $1 trillion on the strength of the news. The company had been facing parallel cases filed in December: one by the Federal Trade Commission, the other by a coalition of 46 states, plus Guam and the District of Columbia. On Monday, Judge James E. Boasberg dismissed the states’ case in its entirety, primarily because he found they had waited too long to bring it. That’s a big deal. But, for weird legal reasons that we won’t get into, the timing problem doesn’t apply to the federal government. And so the heart of the FTC’s legal effort—which seeks to force Facebook to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp—is still very much alive. It wasn’t thrown out, it was just sent back to the kitchen. Boasberg has given the FTC, under newly appointed chair Lina Khan, 30 days to beef up the parts of its complaint that he found lacking in evidence. Assuming it chooses to refile the case, there’s good reason to think the agency will be able to meet the challenge.
(Related)
Amazon Wants FTC Chair Khan Recused Over Past Criticism
Amazon.com Inc. wants Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan recused from matters involving the company because of her history criticizing the online retailer as a threat to competition.
Amazon filed a request with the agency on Wednesday, arguing that Khan should be barred from handling antitrust enforcement decisions affecting the company, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg News.
(Related) I have to keep reminding myself that monopoly not only means controlling the majority of a market but without a majority having the ability to influence the market. Where I really get confused is how one fifth of 46% constitutes undue influence on the market.
https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/global-advertising-spend-2020-quintopoly/
Quintopoly? Five tech companies now earn 46% of global ad revenues as news media left behind
Google, Facebook, Alibaba, TikTok owner Bytedance and Amazon generated ad sales of $296bn last year – making up 46% of the market.
Apparently there is big money in the ‘replace lawyers with software” business.
LegalZoom shares jump 35% in market debut; CEO sees further opportunity in online legal services
… The online legal platform was valued at over $7.5 billion as shares soared as much as 38%.
Perspective. Is Jonathon overreacting? Is the loss of information on the Internet disproportionately greater than other systems?
https://www.bespacific.com/the-internet-is-rotting/
The Internet Is Rotting
The Atlantic – Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone. By Jonathan Zittrain – “This absence of central control, or even easy central monitoring, has long been celebrated as an instrument of grassroots democracy and freedom. It’s not trivial to censor a network as organic and decentralized as the internet. But more recently, these features have been understood to facilitate vectors for individual harassment and societal destabilization, with no easy gating points through which to remove or label malicious work not under the umbrellas of the major social-media platforms, or to quickly identify their sources. While both assessments have power to them, they each gloss over a key feature of the distributed web and internet: Their designs naturally create gaps of responsibility for maintaining valuable content that others rely on. Links work seamlessly until they don’t. And as tangible counterparts to online work fade, these gaps represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge…
It turns out that link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has “billions of books and no central filing system.” Imagine if libraries didn’t exist and there was only a “sharing economy” for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It’s no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be—especially if someone reported a book being in someone else’s home in 2015, and then an interested reader saw that 2015 report in 2021 and tried to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That’s what we have right now on the web….”
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