It is becoming easier to surveil yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYiYhLNfc0I

Amazon’s flying indoor security camera (first look)

We got the first public demo of Amazon’s flying indoor security camera, the Always Home Cam, at CES 2023, plus some hands-on time with the autonomous drone designed for inside your home. The company says the $250 camera might ship in 2024

(Related)

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/amazons-new-car-cam-takes-personal-surveillance-on-the-road.html

Amazon’s New Car Cam Takes Personal Surveillance on the Road

Amazon on Thursday opened preorders for a long-awaited addition to its vast catalogue of Ring personal surveillance devices: the Car Cam. Starting at $200, the car cam includes front- and rear-facing cameras, motion alerts, GPS tracking, and voice communications. It is, as its name suggests, a Ring for cars — a comprehensive monitoring system for your vehicle and whoever might find themselves in or even near it.

The bad guys are clearly early adopters. Perhaps they will also use Chatgpt to ask for reduced sentences or early parole?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2023/01/06/chatgpt-cybercriminal-malware-female-chatbots/?sh=4060b4005534

Armed With ChatGPT, Cybercriminals Build Malware And Plot Fake Girl Bots

Cybercriminals have started using OpenAI’s artificially intelligent chatbot ChatGPT to quickly build hacking tools, cybersecurity researchers warned on Friday. Scammers are also testing ChatGPT’s ability to build other chatbots designed to impersonate young females to ensnare targets, one expert monitoring criminal forums told Forbes.

Many early ChatGPT users had raised the alarm that the app, which went viral in the days after its launch in December, could code malicious software capable of spying on users’ keyboard strokes or create ransomware.

Privacy in the new year.

https://www.pogowasright.org/privacy-in-the-city-that-never-sleeps-the-new-york-privacy-bill/

Privacy in the City That Never Sleeps: The New York Privacy Bill

Odia Kagan of Fox Rothschild writes:

It’s six days into the new year and we already have four new comprehensive privacy bills from: New York, Kentucky, Tennessee and Oklahoma.

There are a lot of moving pieces here and you can go cross-eyed trying to comply with all the proposed rules. Still, here are some of the highlights from the New York bill.

• The preamble to the New York bill reads: “Privacy is a fundamental right and an essential element of freedom; we need to do something about non transparency privacy notices and give NY consumers more control over their data and digital privacy.”

• On the heels of the Data Protection Commission Ireland’s 390 million Euro Meta decision on the scope of contractual necessary, the New York bill says, “Targeted advertising and sale of personal data shall not be considered processing purposes that are necessary to provide services or goods requested by a consumer.”

Read more of the highlights at Privacy Compliance & Data Security

A very slow death…

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-surveillance-capitalism/

The Slow Death of Surveillance Capitalism Has Begun

SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM JUST got a kicking. In an ultimatum, the European Union has demanded that Meta reform its approach to personalized advertising—a seemingly unremarkable regulatory ruling that could have profound consequences for a company that has grown impressively rich by, as Mark Zuckerberg once put it, running ads.

The ruling, which comes with a €390 million ($414 million) fine attached, is targeted specifically at Facebook and Instagram, but it’s a huge blow to Big Tech as a whole. It’s also a sign that GDPR, Europe’s landmark privacy law that was introduced in 2018, actually has teeth. More than 1,400 fines have been introduced since it took effect, but this time the bloc’s regulators have shown they are willing to take on the very business model that makes surveillance capitalism, a term coined by American scholar Shoshana Zuboff, tick. “It is the beginning of the end of the data free-for-all,” says Johnny Ryan, a privacy activist and senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

The current generation is unable to write (or read?) cursive. Is the next generation doomed to be unable to read? Why bother learning to read if Apple will read it for you?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/apple-rolls-out-ai-narrated-audiobooks-and-its-probably-the-start-of-trend/

Apple rolls out AI-narrated audiobooks, and it’s probably the start of a trend

Apple's digital storefronts now offer audiobooks recorded by artificial narrators instead of humans in a sound booth. The audiobooks are listed in the Books app as "Narrated by Apple Books."

Clicking on the information icon next to that line brings up a text box that clarifies the book is narrated by "a digital voice based on a human narrator." There are multiple digital voices across the Apple Books library, with names like "Madison" or "Jackson"—but each book is offered with just one of them.

Tools & Techniques.

https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-transfer-books-from-libby-to-ereader/

How to Transfer Books From Libby to Your eReader

Imagine an assignment to create disinformation that the disinformation detectors can’t detect.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/05/new-jersey-is-the-first-state-to-mandate-k-12-students-learn-information-literacy-00076352

New Jersey becomes first state to mandate K-12 students learn information literacy

… Gov. Phil Murphy on Wednesday signed legislation, NJ S.B. 588 (22R)/NJ A.B. 4169 (22R), that will make New Jersey the first state to require that K-12 students learn about how information is produced and spread on the internet, critical thinking skills, the difference between facts and opinions and the ethics of creating and sharing information both online and in print.

How red must the flag be?

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/06/jp_morgan_lawsuit_essilor/

JP Morgan must face suit from Ray-Ban maker after crooks drained $272m from accounts

A New York federal judge told JP Morgan Chase Bank this week that he would not toss a lawsuit accusing the bank of ignoring red flags when cybercrooks stole $272 million from the New York account of the company that makes Ray-Bans in 2019.

… In the original complaint [PDF], the sunglasses maker said crooks made a total of 243 fraudulent payments, altogether pulling out a cool $272.151 million from EMTC's New York account with JP Morgan. The money was deposited into various straw man accounts and shell entities throughout the world, the complaint added.

The filing also outlined a situation that most non-JP-Morgan-account-having readers will be unfamiliar with: Essilor claimed that "from mid-September 2019 until mid-December 2019, EMTC repeatedly exceeded its daily overdraft limit, but Chase didn't contact EMTC or Essilor." Daily transfers from the NY account were supposed to be capped at $10 million, but sometimes exceeded this "by more than $20 million," the complaint added.

A question to be debated?

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/5/23540291/chatgpt-ai-writing-tool-banned-writing-academic-icml-paper

Top AI conference bans use of ChatGPT and AI language tools to write academic papers

AI tools can be used to ‘edit’ and ‘polish’ authors’ work, say the conference organizers, but text ‘produced entirely’ by AI is not allowed. This raises the question: where do you draw the line between editing and writing?

Another step along AI’s master plan to eliminate lawyers?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2351893-ai-legal-assistant-will-help-defendant-fight-a-speeding-case-in-court/

AI legal assistant will help defendant fight a speeding case in court

In February, an AI from DoNotPay is set to tell a defendant exactly what to say and when during an entire court case. It is likely to be the first ever case defended by an artificial intelligence

For my Computer Forensics students.

https://www.makeuseof.com/delete-incognito-history/

How to Delete Your Incognito Mode History and Protect Your Privacy

No, simply using Incognito or Private Mode isn't enough: records of your online activities are still kept. Here's what you need to do.

… When you browse the internet in incognito mode, the browser doesn't save your web queries and the websites you visit. Your browsing history, cookies, or other site data are not saved in incognito mode. However, just using the incognito mode doesn't guarantee private browsing. Your browser is not the only place where your data is stored.

Your ISP collects and stores data about your online activities, including which websites you visit—yes, when you're using incognito mode too.

Would it be better to teach students how to detect errors the Chatgpt makes and correct them? No doubt they will encounter this technology outside of school.

https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2023/1/3/23537987/nyc-schools-ban-chatgpt-writing-artificial-intelligence

NYC education department blocks ChatGPT on school devices, networks

New York City students and teachers can no longer access ChatGPT — the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that generates stunningly cogent and lifelike writing — on education department devices or internet networks, agency officials confirmed Tuesday.

The education department blocked access to the program, citing “negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content,” a spokesperson said. The move from the nation’s largest school system could have ripple effects as districts and schools across the country grapple with how to respond to the arrival of the dynamic new technology.

Interesting?

https://www.bespacific.com/the-way-forward-for-legal-education/

The Way Forward for Legal Education

Thomson, David I. C., The Way Forward for Legal Education (January 3, 2023). Carolina Academic Press (2023), U Denver Legal Studies Research Paper Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4300580 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4300580

“This book (of which this paper is an excerpt) offers a post-pandemic vision for the future of legal education and charts a path to get there. Among the book’s recommendations are that schools must dispense with the LSAT and develop an alternative non-discriminatory admissions process. Further, that law schools should admit a much larger cohort to the 1L year, at much reduced cost, and put most of 1L content online in a hybrid format. It suggests that a “baby bar” be administered at the end of the first year, with only roughly half passing into second year and the rest awarded a master’s degree in American Law, which will become a credential to become a Limited License Legal Technician (LLLT), the expansion of which will help address the critical justice gap that we currently have in the legal system. It argues for the expansion of experiential learning and the intentional formation of professional identity in the 2L and 3L years. While these proposals may seem radical at first, many of them are already happening in various natural experiments around legal education, and the ABA is already moving in this direction. This book provides comprehensive guidance on how these proposals can be gradually adopted, with the goal that they spread throughout legal education over the next decade. More information about this book can be found here: https://cap-press.com/books/isbn/9781531023966/The-Way-Forward-for-Legal-Education

It seems it is better to buy forgiveness than to ask permission.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/03/google_tracking_settlements/

Google gets off easy in location tracking lawsuits

Google has settled two more of the many location tracking lawsuits it had been facing over the past year, and this time the search giant is getting an even better deal: just $29.5 million to resolve complaints filed in Indiana and Washington DC with no admission of wrongdoing.

The cases filed in the Midwestern state and the capital are similar to those settled elsewhere in the US in the last 12 months and center on allegations that Google deceived users into handing over location data, which it then turned into billions in advertising dollars.

Karl Racine, attorney general of Washington DC until his term ended yesterday, called the settlement [PDF] a win because "Google must also make clear to consumers how their location data is collected, stored, and used."

Racine said his office filed its suit because Google's behavior "made it nearly impossible for users to stop their location from being tracked." Washington DC's portion of the two settlements totals $9.5 million.

Indiana settled [PDF] for $20 million, which Attorney General Todd Rokita described as "another manifestation of our steadfast commitment to protect Hoosiers from Big Tech's intrusive schemes."

To TSA, it’s a game.

https://www.pogowasright.org/tsa-argues-for-impunity-for-checkpoint-staff-who-rape-travelers/

TSA argues for impunity for checkpoint staff who rape travelers

Ed Hasbrouck wrote:

Two years ago, at least a dozen women on a Qatar Airways flight to Sydney were ordered off the plane at Doha Airport in Qatar and subjected to forced vaginal examinations.

Australia made diplomatic protests, as both the airline and the airport are controlled by the government of Qatar. The Qatari government issued a public apology and said that, “Those responsible for these violations and illegal actions have been referred to the Public Prosecution Office.” Last month, just before the start of the World Cup soccer tournament in Qatar, some of the women filed a lawsuit in an Australian court against the airport operator and the airline.

If you think that this couldn’t happen in the USA, or that the victims would fare better with government authorities and in the courts in the USA than in Qatar, think again.

Today a panel of judges of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument in San Francisco in a lawsuit (Michele Leuthauser v. USA) brought by a woman who complained that she was digitally penetrated — a finger pushed into her vagina, i.e., raped — in 2019 by Transportation Security Administration staff after they ordered her into a back room at the airport in Las Vegas for a “pat-down” after she went through a whole-body imaging machine.

Read more at Papers, Please!

Maury Nichols pointed me to this article, which I missed back in October.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6f2a3205-8937-4c1c-a20e-9ed4e7f58524&l=9XC25FU

In a nutshell: data protection, privacy and cybersecurity in USA

A law that is expected to fail?

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-01-01/californians-will-soon-have-their-chance-to-sue-the-gun-industry

Californians have a green light to sue the gun industry. How will that work?

One of the strangest pieces of legislation ever enacted in California took effect Jan. 1, giving state residents and visitors the same power to threaten the gun industry that Texans now wield over abortion providers.

Even backers of the law say this isn’t an entirely good thing.

SB 1327 authorizes anyone other than state or local government officials to sue people who violate the state’s laws against the manufacture, distribution or sale of assault weapons, ghost guns and other banned firearms. Lawsuits could also be brought against gun dealers who violate the state’s law against selling or transferring weapons (besides hunting rifles) to anyone under 21 years old.

… Gov. Gavin Newsom sought the measure as a response to Texas’ SB 8, which empowers “any person” to sue those who perform or knowingly aid an abortion in that state after the fetus shows signs of cardiac activity. When the Supreme Court refused to throw out SB 8, Newsom (who sharply criticized it) called for California to use it as a model for a novel approach to gun control.

Building an AI replacement for lawyers…

https://www.bespacific.com/gpt-takes-the-bar-exam/

GPT Takes the Bar Exam

Bommarito, Michael James and Katz, Daniel Martin, GPT Takes the Bar Exam (December 29, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4314839

“Nearly all jurisdictions in the United States require a professional license exam, commonly referred to as “the Bar Exam,” as a precondition for law practice. To even sit for the exam, most jurisdictions require that an applicant completes at least seven years of post-secondary education, including three years at an accredited law school. In addition, most test-takers also undergo weeks to months of further, exam-specific preparation. Despite this significant investment of time and capital, approximately one in five test-takers still score under the rate required to pass the exam on their first try. In the face of a complex task that requires such depth of knowledge, what, then, should we expect of the state of the art in “AI?” In this research, we document our experimental evaluation of the performance of OpenAI’s text-davinci-003 model, often-referred to as GPT-3.5, on the multistate multiple choice (MBE) section of the exam. While we find no benefit in fine-tuning over GPT-3.5’s zero-shot performance at the scale of our training data, we do find that hyperparameter optimization and prompt engineering positively impacted GPT-3.5’s zero-shot performance. For best prompt and parameters, GPT-3.5 achieves a headline correct rate of 50.3% on a complete NCBE MBE practice exam, significantly in excess of the 25% baseline guessing rate, and performs at a passing rate for both Evidence and Torts. GPT-3.5’s ranking of responses is also highly correlated with correctness; its top two and top three choices are correct 71% and 88% of the time, respectively, indicating very strong non-entailment performance. While our ability to interpret these results is limited by nascent scientific understanding of LLMs and the proprietary nature of GPT, we believe that these results strongly suggest that an LLM will pass the MBE component of the Bar Exam in the near future.”

Backgrounder.

https://www.bespacific.com/annotated-history-of-modern-ai-and-deep-learning/

Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning

Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning – Juergen Schmidhube. [v2] Thu, 29 Dec 2022 11:38:07 UTC. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.11279

“Machine learning is the science of credit assignment: finding patterns in observations that predict the consequences of actions and help to improve future performance. Credit assignment is also required for human understanding of how the world works, not only for individuals navigating daily life, but also for academic professionals like historians who interpret the present in light of past events. Here I focus on the history of modern artificial intelligence (AI) which is dominated by artificial neural networks (NNs) and deep learning, both conceptually closer to the old field of cybernetics than to what’s been called AI since 1956 (e.g., expert systems and logic programming). A modern history of AI will emphasize breakthroughs outside of the focus of traditional AI text books, in particular, mathematical foundations of today’s NNs such as the chain rule (1676), the first NNs (linear regression, circa 1800), and the first working deep learners (1965-). From the perspective of 2022, I provide a timeline of the — in hindsight — most important relevant events in the history of NNs, deep learning, AI, computer science, and mathematics in general, crediting those who laid foundations of the field. The text contains numerous hyperlinks to relevant overview sites from my AI Blog. It supplements my previous deep learning survey (2015) which provides hundreds of additional references. Finally, to round it off, I’ll put things in a broader historic context spanning the time since the Big Bang until when the universe will be many times older than it is now.”

Tools & Techniques. This could be useful.

https://www.makeuseof.com/hoaxy-track-twitter-information-spread/

How to Track the Spread of Twitter Information With Hoaxy

With information spreading on Twitter more easily than ever, it's a good idea to check where it comes from. Hoaxy can help to visualize its spread.

… Hoaxy is a joint project between the Indiana University Network Science Institute (IUNI) and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS), and uses the Twitter search API to visualize the spread of information.

As its name suggests, Hoaxy was designed with misinformation in mind. In addition to showing the origin of particular tweets, the tool can indicate whether retweets are (most likely) made by accounts operated by real people, or are automated (bot) accounts.

and probably sooner rather than later. What does that do to your Security budget?

https://www.techspot.com/news/97118-cyberattacks-could-soon-become-impossible-insure.html

Cyberattacks could soon become impossible to insure

Attacks against critical technologies and cyber-infrastructures are increasingly becoming the most dangerous threat against civilization. That, at least, is the opinion of some insurance figureheads, which seemingly don't want to pay victims the enormous amounts of money needed to cover the costs of attacks.

The costs of cyberattacks will soon become so high that insurance companies will not be able to do business with the affected parties anymore. According to Mario Greco, chief executive of Zurich Insurance Group, cyber-risks will soon take the place of pandemics, climate change and other natural disasters as systemic risks which are essentially "uninsurable."

For the second year in a row, 2022 is ending with more than $100 billion-worth of claims for natural catastrophes, but according to Greco, cyber is the true risk to watch. "What if someone takes control of vital parts of our infrastructure, the consequences of that?" Greco stated in an interview with the Financial Times.

(Related) Another budget consideration…

https://www.databreaches.net/2023-new-years-resolution-dont-get-whacked-by-a-state-ag-for-cybersecurity-compliance/

2023 New Year’s Resolution: Don’t Get “Whacked” By A State AG for Cybersecurity Compliance

Joe Lazzarotti of Jackson Lewis writes:

It usually happens after a reported data breach. The organization experiencing the breach sends notifications to affected individuals, as well as federal and or state agencies where appropriate and perhaps other parties. Not long thereafter, the organization receives an inquiry from one or more government agencies. These inquiries typically seek more information about the breach and its incident response process, but also the nature and extent of the organization’s data security policies and procedures in place prior to the breach. Deficiencies in any of these areas could support getting “whacked”!

On December 16, Pennsylvania’s Attorney General and soon to be Governor, Josh Shapiro, announced a settlement with a company that experienced a data incident in April 2021 that exposed 30,295 Pennsylvania consumers’ payment card information. Following an investigation jointly conducted by Mr. Shapiro’s office and its counterpart in New York, it was determined that the company “failed to properly employ reasonable data security measures in protecting consumers’ payment card information.”

Read more at Workplace Privacy, Data Management & Security Report.

Elvis, the Beatles, Frank Sinatra – who would you like to see next? Perhaps even performing in your living room...

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/29/abba-voyage-avatar-show-in-london-offers-glimpse-of-future-for-live-music.html

ABBA’s successful avatar show in London offers a glimpse at a daring new direction for live music

Before the launch of “ABBA Voyage,” the London concert performed by 3D digital avatars of the iconic Swedish band, member Björn Ulvaeus said they hoped audiences would “feel that they’ve gone through something that they’ve never seen before.”

Following its May 27 debut, much of the reaction from domestic and international critics, fans and industry professionals has been rapturous.

Nothing unexpected, but worth repeating.

https://www.makeuseof.com/skills-to-become-business-intelligence-analyst/

10 Skills to Learn to Become a Business Intelligence Analyst

Aspiring to become a business intelligence analyst and make a name for yourself? Check out these skills you'll need to learn.