Year archives: 2023

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 15, 2023

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: The potential healthcare privacy risks of ChatGPT; “Shadow libraries” at heart of mounting copyright lawsuits against OpenAI; Congressional Report Finds Meta and Tax Prep Companies “Recklessly” Shared Taxpayers’ Data; and Cooper Davis Act Would Force Tech Companies to Flag Users for Drugs.

Subjects: AI, Big Data, Copyright, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Commerce, Legal Research, Privacy, Social Media, United States Law

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 8, 2023

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Google Says It’ll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI; How secure are voice authentication systems really?; Scammers using AI voice technology to commit crimes; and privacy alert – disable third party cookies in Chrome as companies continue to track you online.

Subjects: Big Data, Computer Security, Cybersecurity, Email Security, Government Resources, KM, Privacy, Social Media

LegalTech’s AI Race: A Sign of What’s to Come

Nicole L. Black notes the milestone of Thomson Reuters announcement that it had entered into an agreement to acquire Casetext, a legal research software company, for $650 million. For the past decade, Casetext has provided a legal research platform grounded in AI technology. The company consistently developed innovative features that utilized AI technology to streamline legal research and brief creation, most recently releasing CoCounsel, a generative AI legal assistant tool powered by GPT-4, which is the same technology that powers ChatGPT Plus.

Subjects: AI, KM, Legal Research, Legal Technology, Online Legal Research Services

LLRX June 2023 Issue

Articles and Columns for June 2023 Brevity is the Soul of Profit: What Lawyers Need to Know About Executive Summaries – Elizabeth Southerland writes that Jerry Lawson’s essay Plain English for Lawyers: The Way to a C-Level Executive’s Heart has some good ideas about the best ways to communicate with senior executives. However, there is …

Subjects: KM

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, June 30, 2023

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Amazon delays virtual care service’s unveiling after senators raised privacy concern; FBI launches national ‘swatting’ database amid rising incidents; How Do Some Companies Get Compromised Again and Again?; and Does ChatGPT Save My Data? OpenAI’s Privacy Policy Explained.

Subjects: AI, Big Data, Congress, Criminal Law, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Economy, Education, Email Security, Financial System, Health, Healthcare, Legal Research, Privacy

Brevity is the Soul of Profit: What Lawyers Need to Know About Executive Summaries

Elizabeth Southerland writes that Jerry Lawson’s essay Plain English for Lawyers: The Way to a C-Level Executive’s Heart has some good ideas about the best ways to communicate with senior executives. However, there is a key imperative that is not addressed: The purpose of an executive summary is to boil this down to a few sentences that tell the leader what they want to know.

Subjects: Communication Skills, Communications, KM, Leadership, Legal Profession, Management

AI and the Financial System – June 28, 2023

This new bi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, reports, government and industry documents, and academic papers on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on many facets of the global financial system. The chronological links provided are to the primary sources, and as available, indicate links to alternate free versions. Each entry includes the publication name, date published, article title, abstract and tags. Pacifici is also compiling a list of actionable subject matter resources at the end of each column that will be updated regularly.

Subjects: AI, AI in Banking and Finance, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Economy, Ethics, Financial System, Legal Research, Technology Trends

Is A Crypto Collapse Inevitable?

Jerry Lawson and Elizabeth Southerland identify technical reasons why the crypto bubble is bursting, including the fact that theoretically unbreakable encryption schemes like those underpinning blockchain have proven to be less than impermeable in practice, as users of Coinbase discovered upon losing fortunes. Attackers go after the weakest link in the chain, usually the way in which the algorithm is implemented. Perhaps more ominous, the emergence of a new class of devices called quantum computers threatens to eat the algorithms that underlie crypto for lunch.

Subjects: Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Cryptocurrency, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Economy, Financial System, Legal Research

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, June 24, 2023

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: How Your New Car Tracks You; Democratic senators concerned Amazon health platform ‘harvesting consumer health data from patients’; How generative AI is creating new classes of security threats; and US cyber ambassador says China can win on AI, cloud.

Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Data Mining, Healthcare, Intellectual Property, KM, Legal Research, Privacy, RSS Newsfeeds

The Digital Psychology of Persuasion

Kevin Novack, digital strategist and CEO with extensive experience digitizing disparate collections at the Library of Congress, discusses the increasing importance of acknowledging and incorporating social proof into your marketing strategies to showcase the power of your brands and services. The recent wave of digital tools that are built to influence decisions have come under increasing scrutiny as we have learned, they may not be all that trustworthy. Examples include TikTok and its power to influence and even change the behaviors of impressionable next gens. Or Instagram’s role in enabling body shaming and mocking others. And more recently the overwhelming impact of ChatGPT, and the fascination with and growing use of thousands of apps and services built on OpenAI. Novack asks – but can you trust it? And responds – probably about as much as you can trust all online listings and crowdsourced input, which are the sources of GPT’s recommendations. From the user perspective, discerning fact from fiction, when interacting with your organization, is only becoming more critical.

Subjects: Communication Skills, Ethics, Internet Trends, KM, Social Media