Anything you say could be a lie…
https://www.makeuseof.com/tiktok-stopping-new-video-uploads-russia/
Why TikTok Stopping New Video Uploads in Russia Is Significant
Many tech companies have left or reduced their footprint in Russia because of its ongoing conflict with Ukraine. Most of them were forced to do so after the respective governments of their corporate headquarters imposed sanctions.
However, TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, isn't greatly affected by these sanctions as China has so far remained neutral in the Russia-Ukraine crisis. Nevertheless, the insanely popular social media platform has suspended uploads and livestreaming in Russia.
So why did the company make the decision?
As with any war, both sides want to control information from the front lines. Because of this, the Russian parliament amended its criminal code last March 4, 2022, to include imprisonment for spreading "fake news".
As social media spaces are increasingly becoming an information battleground between opposing sides, Russian TikTok creators who oppose Putin's administration may soon become targets of the new law. For this reason, the company decided to suspend all livestreaming and uploading inside Russia.
Keeping up...
https://www.pogowasright.org/more-news-and-an-important-new-book-on-breaches/
More news and an important new book on breaches!!
It’s so hard to keep up with news these days, so in case you missed these developments:
Public Health Agency of Canada didn’t act transparently when it proposed to access, then eventually viewed, Canadians’ mobility data, the House of Commons’ Ethics committee heard in February. Read more at iPolitics.
Yahoo shutters email service in China. Read more at The Register.
You can find these and more on Joe Cadillic’s MassPrivateI post for March 7.
And…. NEW!!!!!!! (Yes, I’m Excited!)
Breached!: Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve it is available now. It’s by privacy law scholars Daniel Solove and Woodrow Hartzog. Solove and Hartzog have studied and written about privacy laws and breaches for years now, and their book provides a unique perspective on why our system is broken and how to fix it. From the Abstract of their book, as posted on SSRN:
Abstract
Digital connections permeate our lives—and so do data breaches. Given that we must be online for basic communication, finance, healthcare, and more, it is remarkable how difficult it is to secure our personal information. Despite the passage of many data security laws, data breaches are increasing at a record pace. In their book, BREACHED! WHY DATA SECURITY LAW FAILS AND HOW TO IMPROVE IT (Oxford University Press 2022), Professors Daniel Solove and Woodrow Hartzog argue that the law fails because, ironically, it focuses too much on the breach itself.
Drawing insights from many fascinating stories about data breaches, Solove and Hartzog show how major breaches could have been prevented or mitigated through better rules and often inexpensive, non-cumbersome means. They also reveal why the current law is counterproductive. It pummels organizations that have suffered a breach but doesn’t recognize how others contribute to the breach. These outside actors include software companies that create vulnerable software, device companies that make insecure devices, government policymakers who write regulations that increase security risks, organizations that train people to engage in risky behaviors, and more.
Although humans are the weakest link for data security, the law remains oblivious to the fact that policies and technologies are often designed with a poor understanding of human behavior. BREACHED! sets forth a holistic vision for data security law—one that holds all actors accountable, understands security broadly and in relationship to privacy, looks to prevention and mitigation rather than reaction, and is designed with people in mind. The book closes with a roadmap for how we can reboot law and policy surrounding data security.
Want to test-drive the book? The authors have made the first chapter freely available via SSRN. Download it here.
Want to order the book? It’s published by Oxford University Press. It is also available on Amazon.com.
Banning Clearview, one country at a time?
Facial recognition: Italian SA fines Clearview AI €20 million; Bans use of biometric data and monitoring of Italian data subjects
From Italy’s data protection agency, this press release today:
The Italian SA (Garante per la protezione dei dati personali) fined the US-based company Clearview AI EUR 20 million after finding it applied what amounted to biometric monitoring techniques also to individuals in the Italian territory.
The company reportedly owns a database including over 10 billion facial images from all over the world, which are extracted from public web sources (media outlets, social media, online videos) via web scraping. It offers a sophisticated search service which allows, through AI systems, creating profiles on the basis of the biometric data extracted from the images. The profiles can be enriched by information linked to those images such as image tags and geolocation or the source web pages.
The Italian SA’s inquiries were started also following complaints and alerts and found that Clearview AI – contrary to what was alleged – allows tracking Italian nationals and persons located in Italy. The findings showed that the personal data held by the company, including biometric and geolocation information, were processed unlawfully without an appropriate legal basis – since the legitimate interest of the US-based company does not qualify as such. Additionally, the company infringed several fundamental principles of the GDPR including transparency – as it failed to adequately inform users -, purpose limitation – as it processed users’ data for purposes other than those for which they had been made available online -, and storage limitation – as it did not set out any data storage period. Thus, Clearview AI is violating data subjects’ freedoms including the protection of privacy and non-discrimination.
Based on the infringements found, the Italian SA fined Clearview AI EUR 20 million and ordered the company to erase the data relating to individuals in Italy; it banned any further collection and processing of the data through the company’s facial recognition system.
Clearview AI was finally ordered by the Italian SA to designate a representative in the EU to be addressed in addition to or instead of the US-based controller in order to facilitate exercise of data subject rights.
Rome, 9 March 2022
Got power? Expect a visit from a “faceless company.”
This Texas Town Was Deep In Debt From A Devastating Winter Storm. Then A Crypto Miner Came Knocking.
Last February, a disastrous winter storm pummeled Texas with ice and snow, threatening to topple the Texan energy grid. In the city of Denton, neighborhoods blinked off and on as the local power provider tried to conserve electricity. Places like assisted living facilities were momentarily excluded from the blackouts, but those eventually went dark too. Then the gas pipelines froze, and the power plant stopped working. Over the next four days, the city bled more than $200 million purchasing energy on the open market. It would later sue the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator also known as ERCOT, for saddling Denton with inflated energy prices that caused it to accrue $140 million in debt.
“While we were in an emergency, ERCOT allowed prices to go off the scale,” Denton City Council Member Paul Meltzer told BuzzFeed News. “We were forced to pay. We were approached Tony Soprano–like to empty our reserves.”
So when a faceless company appeared three months later, auspiciously proposing to solve Denton’s money problems, the city listened. A deal was offered. In exchange for millions of dollars in annual city revenue, enough to balance its ledgers and then some, Denton would host a cryptocurrency mine at its natural gas power plant. And not just any mine — a massive data center that would double Denton’s energy footprint so that rows upon rows of sophisticated computers could mint stockpiles of bitcoin, ether, and other virtual currencies. To officials who had simply tried to keep the lights on when conditions became deadly, the unexpected infusion seemed a relief.
But the thought of becoming a crypto town was a bitter pill for some to swallow.
“It was super shady just the way it all came about because none of the elected officials around here have ever talked about crypto, and suddenly we’re renting out space near the power plant that’s gonna use as much energy as the whole city consumes,” said Denton resident Kendall Tschacher, who told BuzzFeed News that by the time he learned about the crypto project, it was all but a done deal.
Something we’ve done many times and never earned ‘extra’ income from… Might be fun to have students create courses.
https://www.freetech4teachers.com/2022/03/creating-and-marketing-online-courses.html
Creating and Marketing Online Courses With TinyTap
In last week’s post about using TinyTap to create your own online courses I mentioned that there is an option to sell your courses for use beyond your classroom. That’s what today’s post is all about. In this post I’ll outline why you would want to create courses for sale, how to do it, and the differences between the TinyTap app and the Tiny Courses app.
How to Create TinyTap Courses for Sale
The basics of creating a TinyTap course to sell are largely the same as they are for creating a free course. Those basics are covered in last week’s blog post and in this video that shows you how to create an online course in five minutes or less.
Can you improve on “To be or not to be”
https://www.freetech4teachers.com/2022/03/wordtune-helps-you-quickly-revise-your.html
WordTune Helps You Quickly Revise Your Writing
WordTune is a tool that I wrote about last year when it launched as a Chrome extension. It is still available as a Chrome extension and is now also available as a Microsoft Word add-in.
Both the Chrome extension and the Microsoft Word add-in version of WordTune do the same thing. That is they both allow you to highlight sentences in your document and instantly get suggestions for alternative ways to write the same sentence. In this video I demonstrate how the Word version of WordTune works and in this video I demonstrate how the Chrome version works.
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