Category «Other»

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 12, 2024

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: Why Multi-factor authentication (MFA) alone won’t protect you in the age of adversarial AI; HHS to crack down on providers blocking access to electronic medical records; Justice Department, Microsoft disrupt Russian intelligence cyber scheme; and Reports: China hacked Verizon and AT&T, may have accessed US wiretap systems.

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Subjects: AI, Cybersecurity, Healthcare, Privacy, Technology Trends

The Heritage Foundation’s Reckless Misuse of FOIA to Target Individuals

In this Opinion, researched and authored by Michael Ravnitzky, he says that the Heritage Foundation’s current public records campaign is an abuse of the FOIA process. In recent years, the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and its publishing spinoff, The Daily Signal, have filed an unprecedented and overwhelming number of FOIA requests – 65,000 according to Reuters and more than 50,000 according to ProPublica. According to recent articles, the goal of the requests is to scrutinize government employees’ communications, to identify (for example, individuals using keywords or phrases such as “climate change”, “reduction in force” or DEI) and potentially remove civil servants perceived as obstructive to Trump’s agenda, in preparation for a potential Trump administration.

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Subjects: Digital Archives, E-Discovery, Freedom of Information, Government Resources, Legal Research, United States Law

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 5, 2024

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: Why Microsoft’s Security Initiative and Apple’s Cloud Privacy Matter; AI assistants are blabbing our embarrassing work secrets; PayPal’s data sharing controversy: New setting raises privacy concerns; and Are Lesser-Known Browsers More Secure?

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Subjects: AI, Cybersecurity, Economy, Privacy, Social Media

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 21, 2024

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. Five highlights from this week: FTC Says Social Media Platforms Engage in ‘Vast Surveillance’ of Users; AI voices are officially too realistic; Tor Network Denies Report That ‘Anonymity Is Completely Canceled’; ‘Terrorgram’ Charges Show US Has Had Tools to Crack Down on Far-Right Terrorism All Along; and DuckDuckGo Joins AI Chat, Promises Enhanced Anonymity.

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Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Internet Trends, Privacy, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Social Media, Spyware, Technology Trends

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 14, 2024

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. Five highlights from this week: Why digital identity should be a priority for the next president; Google, TSA Testing New “ID Pass” in Wallet, Created by Scanning Passport; Google sued over AI-driven tool for customer service call review; and Reolink’s battery-powered security camera can record for days without subscription fees; and This Tool Finds Matching Usernames Across 400 Social Media Networks.

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Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Financial System, Law Library Management, Privacy, Search Engines, Search Strategies

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, August 31, 2024

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. Six highlights from this week: Remote Work: A Ticking Time Bomb Waiting to be Exploited; Microsoft to overhaul Windows security after outage hits hospitals; How safe is Telegram?; Wyze’s new AI feature lets users search security cam footage; Safeguarding Subsea Cables Protecting Cyber Infrastructure amid Great Power Competition; and When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself.

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Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Government Resources, Healthcare, Privacy

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, August 24, 2024

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. Five highlights from this week: Meta’s new crawler could scrape your page, even when you don’t want it to; Don’t trust Google for customer service numbers. It might be a scam; Cox Communications Battles Copyright Case That Could Disrupt TV Streaming for Millions; U.S. government urging to update Galaxy phones due to vulnerability; and IRS still faces security challenges in aftermath of taxpayer data leak.

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Subjects: Congress, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Economy, Financial System, Privacy, Social Media

ChatGPT is bullshit

Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. Dr. Michael Townsen Hicks, Dr. James Humphries and Dr. Joe Slater argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. They distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. They further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems.

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Subjects: AI, Big Data, Information Management, Internet Resources, KM, Legal Research, Search Engines, Technology Trends

Rejecting Dogmas Around AI, User Privacy, and Tech Policy

The Markup’s Ross Teixeira had a virtual discussion with Jonathan Frankle, Chief Scientist at DataBricks, about the the ethics of companies using customer data to train models, the growing trend of integrating AI models into our personal devices and lives, and how people can get involved in policy conversations from national to local level.

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Subjects: AI, Big Data, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), Privacy
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