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Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa
by Giacomo Tesio April 11, 2019

April 11, 2019

A global team reviews audio clips in an effort to help the voice-activated assistant respond to commands. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone-listening-to-y… The team comprises a mix of contractors and full-time Amazon employees who work in outposts from Boston to Costa Rica, India and Romania, according to the people, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program. They work nine hours a day, with each reviewer parsing as many as 1,000 audio clips per shift, according to two workers [...] Occasionally the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, say, or a child screaming for help. The teams use internal chat rooms to share files when they need help parsing a muddled word—or come across an amusing recording. [...] Sometimes they hear recordings they find upsetting, or possibly criminal. Two of the workers said they picked up what they believe was a sexual assault. When something like that happens, they may share the experience in the internal chat room as a way of relieving stress. Amazon says it has procedures in place for workers to follow when they hear something distressing, but two Romania-based employees said that, after requesting guidance for such cases, they were told it wasn’t Amazon’s job to interfere. [...] ...the recordings sent to the Alexa auditors don’t provide a user’s full name and address but are associated with an account number, as well as the user’s first name and the device’s serial number. [...] “You don’t necessarily think of another human listening to what you’re telling your smart speaker in the intimacy of your home,” said Florian Schaub, a professor at the University of Michigan who has researched privacy issues related to smart speakers. “I think we’ve been conditioned to the [assumption] that these machines are just doing magic machine learning. But the fact is there is still manual processing involved.”

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Official EU Agencies Falsely Report More Than 550 Archive.org URLs as Terrorist Content
by Giacomo April 11, 2019

April 11, 2019

http://blog.archive.org/2019/04/10/official-eu-agencies-falsely-report-more… The European Parliament is set to vote on legislation that would require websites that host user-generated content to take down material reported as terrorist content within one hour. We have some examples of current notices sent to the Internet Archive that we think illustrate very well why this requirement would be harmful to the free sharing of information and freedom of speech that the European Union pledges to safeguard. In the past week, the Internet Archive has received a series of email notices from Europol’s European Union Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU) falsely identifying hundreds of URLs on archive.org as “terrorist propaganda”. At least one of these mistaken URLs was also identified as terrorist content in a separate take down notice from the French government’s L’Office Central de Lutte contre la Criminalité liée aux Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication

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Security Flaws in WPA3 Protocol Let Attackers Hack WiFi Password
by Giacomo April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/wpa3-hack-wifi-password.html The Wi-Fi Protected Access III (WPA3) protocol was launched in an attempt to address technical shortcomings of the WPA2 protocol from the ground, which has long been considered to be insecure and found vulnerable to KRACK (Key Reinstallation Attack). Though WPA3 relies on a more secure handshake, known as Dragonfly, that aims to protect Wi-Fi networks against offline dictionary attacks, security researchers Mathy Vanhoef and Eyal Ronen found weaknesses in the early implementation of WPA3-Personal, allowing an attacker to recover WiFi passwords by abusing timing or cache-based side-channel leaks. "Concretely, attackers can then read information that WPA3 was assumed to safely encrypt. This can be abused to steal sensitive transmitted information such as credit card numbers, passwords, chat messages, emails, and so on," the researchers say.

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"Ethics washing made in Europe"
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

Ethics washing made in Europe On Tuesday, the EU has published ethics guidelines for artificial intelligence. A member of the expert group that drew up the paper says: This is a case of ethical white-washing. Thomas Metzinger /Thomas Metzinger is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Mainz and was a member of the commission's expert group that has worked on the guidelines published on Tuesday./ /Read his op-ed in German here <https://background.tagesspiegel.de/ethik-waschmaschinen-made-in-europe>./ It's really good news: Europe has just taken the lead in the hotly contested global debate on the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). On Monday in Brussels, the EU Commission presented its Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. The 52-member High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (HLEG AI), of which I am a member, worked on the text for nine months. The result is a compromise of which I am not proud, but which is nevertheless the best in the world on the subject. The United States and China have nothing comparable. How does it fit together? [...] continua qui: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/eu-guidelines-ethics-washing-made-in-eu…

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the-coming-ai-autumn
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

http://jeffreybigham.com/blog/2019/the-coming-ai-autumnn.html (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Landlord 2.0: Tech’s New Rentier Capitalism – OneZero
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

https://onezero.medium.com/landlord-2-0-techs-new-rentier-capitalism-a0bfe4… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Election meddling by foreign powers already underway, says Canadian spy agency
by Alberto Cammozzo April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

I servizi in Canada e Israele sono preoccupati per gli interventi (russi e cinesi) nei social che mirerebbero ad accentuare la frammentazione politica e la polarizzazione sociale. *Election meddling by foreign powers already underway, says Canadian spy agency* <https://intelnews.org/2019/04/09/01-2527/> CSE CanadaThe manipulation of social media by foreign governments aiming to sow division in Canada ahead of the country’s federal election in October is growing, according to the country’s signals intelligence agency. In a report published Monday, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s national communications interception agency, warns that election meddling by foreign powers is already taking place. The report, titled “2019 Update: Cyber Threats to Canada’s Democratic Process”, says that voters, as well as specific political figures, have been targeted by foreign powers since 2015 in the North American country. The foreign intelligence agencies behind the efforts to manipulate Canada’s electoral process have systematically attempted to “polarize Canadians or undermine Canada’s foreign policy goals”, says the report. These efforts will continue and intensify in the run-up to October, claims the report, and concludes by warning that Canadians should expect to “encounter some form of foreign cyber interference ahead of, and during, the 2019 federal election”. However, foreign cyber interference on the scale that was experienced in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election in the United States is improbable, according to the CSE. Meanwhile, in an unrelated development, the former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Canada’s primary national intelligence service, said in an interview last week that Ottawa would have to be patient in dealing with Russia and —especially— China. Speaking at a public forum hosted by the Canadian International Council in Vancouver, Richard Fadden noted that neither China nor Russia wish to go to war with the West. What they want instead is to “fragment the West” and thus increase their own influence on the international scene, said Fadden, who directed the CSIS from 2009 to 2013. It would be fair for Canada to “poke back”, he said, but would have to be “careful how [to] do it”, he added. “We need to be realistic. We’re dealing with an emergent superpower and […] we’re going to have to be patient”, Fadden concluded. Anche qui: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/08/canada-election-meddling-soci…> *Why Are Israeli Elections Extremely Sensitive to Fake News?* <https://www.cfr.org/blog/why-are-israeli-elections-extremely-sensitive-fake…> [...] Political, economic, and social splits are the most important elements in the creation and distribution of fake news. Malicious actors tend to use fake news in order to heighten existing tensions between political, social, or religious groups. This weakened social cohesion makes societies more vulnerable to foreign influence campaigns. Many of the Russian trolls messages on social networks during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections did not focus on the presidential candidates, but rather were aimed at increasing tensions between American voters in the various issues of American society, especially between black and white Americans. By strengthening the conflicts, the Russian trolls sought to weaken the societal unity in the United States and public confidence in the U.S. democratic structure thereby influencing voting patterns. Israel’s inherent political instability, along with the great fragmentation of Israeli society, makes the country particularly vulnerable to foreign influence activities. Those who want to influence Israeli politics and foreign policy by disseminating fake news on social networks will be able to invest relatively limited and short-term efforts to exploit the existing divisions within the country. At the end of January, the technology firm Vocativ unveiled Iranian influence efforts, mainly on Twitter, which reached an estimated target audience of half a million Israeli users a month. The bots often rephrased authentic news headlines in a controversial manner to incite divisive responses from the electorate, focusing on issues such as wealth inequality, sexual harassment, poverty in Israel, and undermining of the Supreme Court. If successful, these efforts could lead to a shift of three or four seats on the electoral map, which may be very significant for determining the winning candidate of the upcoming elections. The Israeli answer to disinformation activities Despite the fateful potential of foreign influence campaigns, Israel - the "startup nation" - is lagging behind other countries in dealing with these campaigns. While some countries have developed coherent strategies for dealing with fake news, such as Denmark’s establishment of an inter-ministerial task force to counter influence operations in 2017, the current Israeli steps against online disinformation campaigns rely only on ad-hoc measures. For example, since the beginning of the election campaign, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has worked with Twitter to identify and block more than 400 accounts that spread fake news. But what will happen after April 9? It can be assumed that regardless of the level of the foreign involvement in the upcoming elections, proposals to establish a permanent and long-term policy for dealing with foreign disinformation campaigns will be discussed. Based on worldwide experience and taking into account the Israeli reality, there are two steps that can be considered for effective Israeli policy. In 2017, the Central Elections Committee formulated recommendations to update the Propaganda Methods Law, which had not been updated since 1959. The recommendations included creating a duty of transparency for political publications on social networks (a step now being implemented by the Chairman of the Central Elections Committee, Judge Hanan Melcer), the prohibition of advertising of sponsored ads on networks on election day, the explicit prohibition to publish racist content during the elections, and improving the transparency of published election surveys. The legislative process for approving the recommendations was stalled, so its completion is vital. The second measure should be educational. In countries such as Canada, Belgium, and Croatia, there are varied media literacy campaigns and the Luxembourgian government implemented a national digital education strategy within its education system. Online influence operations for political needs are not limited to election campaigns and are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Therefore, it is important that the Israeli government formulate and implement relevant policies as soon as possible.

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Police Body Cameras Aren't Having the Effects Many Expected
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

https://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-body-camera-effe… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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A Year Later, Cybercrime Groups Still Rampant on Facebook
by Alberto Cammozzo April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

<https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-groups-still-ra…> Almost exactly one year ago, KrebsOnSecurity reported that a mere two hours of searching revealed more than 100 Facebook groups with some 300,000 members openly advertising services to support all types of cybercrime, including spam, credit card fraud and identity theft. Facebook responded by deleting those groups. Last week, a similar analysis led to the takedown of 74 cybercrime groups operating openly on Facebook with more than 385,000 members. Researchers at Cisco Talos discovered the groups using the same sophisticated methods I employed last year — running a search on Facebook.com for terms unambiguously tied to fraud, such as “spam” and “phishing.” Talos said most of the groups were less than a year old, and that Facebook deleted the groups after being notified by Cisco. Talos also re-confirmed my findings that Facebook still generally ignores individual abuse reports about groups that supposedly violate its ‘community standards,’ which specifically forbid the types of activity espoused by the groups that Talos flagged. “Talos initially attempted to take down these groups individually through Facebook’s abuse reporting functionality,” the researchers found. “While some groups were removed immediately, other groups only had specific posts removed.” But Facebook deleted all offending groups after researchers told Facebook’s security team they were going to publish their findings. This is precisely what I experienced a year ago. Not long after Facebook deleted most of the 120 cybercrime groups I reported to it back in April 2018, many of the groups began reemerging elsewhere on the social network under similar names with the same members. Instead of reporting those emergent groups directly to people at Facebook’s public relations arm — something most mere mortals aren’t able to do — KrebsOnSecurity decided to report the re-offenders via Facebook’s regular abuse reporting procedures. What did we find? KrebsOnSecurity received a series of replies saying that Facebook had reviewed my reports but that none of the groups were found to have violated its standards. KrebsOnSecurity later found that reporting the abusive Facebook groups to a quarter-million followers on Twitter was the fastest way to get them disabled. How else have Facebook’s public statements about its supposed commitment to security and privacy been undermined by pesky facts over the past few weeks? KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that Facebook developers wrote apps which stored somewhere between 200 million and 600 million Facebook user passwords in plain text. These plaintext passwords were indexed by Facebook’s data centers and searchable for years by more than 20,000 Facebook employees. It emerged that Facebook’s new account signup page urges users to supply the password to their email account so Facebook can harvest contact details and who knows what else. Yes, that’s right: Facebook has been asking new users to share their email password, despite decades of consumer advice warning that is exactly what phishers do. Cybersecurity firm UpGuard discovered two troves of unprotected Facebook user data sitting on Amazon’s servers, exposing hundreds of millions of records about users, including their names, passwords, comments, interests, and likes. Facebook is making users searchable by marketers and others via phone number, even when that phone number was only provided solely for the purposes of multi-factor authentication. [...]

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Codecademy vs. The BBC Micro
by Giacomo Tesio April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

https://twobithistory.org/2019/03/31/bbc-micro.html In an audacious move, the BBC, a public service broadcaster funded by the government, decided that it would solve Britain’s national competitiveness problems by helping Britons everywhere overcome their aversion to computers. It launched the Computer Literacy Project, a multi-pronged educational effort that involved several TV series, a few books, a network of support groups, and a specially built microcomputer known as the BBC Micro. The project was so successful that, by 1983, an editor for BYTE Magazine wrote, “compared to the US, proportionally more of Britain’s population is interested in microcomputers.” The editor marveled that there were more people at the Fifth Personal Computer World Show in the UK than had been to that year’s West Coast Computer Faire. Over a sixth of Great Britain watched an episode in the first series produced for the Computer Literacy Project and 1.5 million BBC Micros were ultimately sold. [...] If you google “learn to code,” the first result you see is a link to Codecademy’s website. If there is a modern equivalent to the Computer Literacy Project, something with the same reach and similar aims, then it is Codecademy. “Learn to code” is Codecademy’s tagline. I don’t think I’m the first person to point this out—in fact, I probably read this somewhere and I’m now ripping it off—but there’s something revealing about using the word “code” instead of “program.”

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