Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery With Daily Postings Since 2002
PopSci: “Picture a high school student who wants to go to college, likes to cheer on her school’s football team, and plays in a sport or two herself. . One day after school, she signs up for an official ACT account so she can schedule her college entrance exam and see what score she gets after taking …
Ars Technica: “Governments have been secretly tracking the app activity of an unknown number of people using Apple and Google smartphones, US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) revealed today. In a letter demanding that the Department of Justice update or repeal policies prohibiting companies from informing the public about these covert government requests, Wyden warned that …
IEEE Spectrum: “…We’re all hoping that companies will keep us safe, but it’s increasingly clear that they don’t, can’t, and won’t. We should stop expecting them to.” To ensure that cloud services do not learn more than they should, and that a breach of one does not pose a fundamental threat to our data, we …
The Record: “It is so easy to vacuum up private data from vehicles that Andrea Amico taught his daughter how to extract text messages from her mom’s car when she was only eight years old. Blue-haired and an engineer by training, Amico has a hacker’s mentality, which has manifested in giving drivers a way to …
Ars Technica: “The latest post on the Google Security blog details a new upgrade to Gmail’s spam filters that Google is calling “one of the largest defense upgrades in recent years.” The upgrade comes in the form of a new text classification system called RETVec (Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer). Google says this can help …
Rolling Stone: “Spying on presidents used to be a tough business. One of the great unsung heroes of American history was a formerly enslaved woman named Mary Bowser, a spy who infiltrated the family of Jefferson Davis as a domestic servant, and eventually landed a full-time job in the Southern White House, the political seat …
Ars Technica: “US Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is one of the more technologically engaged of our elected lawmakers. And like many technologically engaged Ars Technica readers, he does not like what he sees in terms of automakers’ approach to data privacy. On Friday, Sen. Markey wrote to 14 car companies with a variety of questions …
Schneier on Security – “…Interpersonal trust and social trust are both essential in society today. This is how it works. We have mechanisms that induce people to behave in a trustworthy manner, both interpersonally and socially. This, in turn, allows others to be trusting. Which enables trust in society. And that keeps society functioning. The …
PopSci: “In the last decade direct-to-consumer genetic tests like those from Ancestry.com and 23andMe have become ubiquitous in the US. These services cater to Americans looking for distant relatives, a missing piece of their history, or insight into their health. But if you can’t wait to swab your cheeks or spit into a plastic tube …
TechCrunch: “On Friday [December 1, 2023], genetic testing company 23andMe announced that hackers accessed the personal data of 0.1% of customers, or about 14,000 individuals. The company also said that by accessing those accounts, hackers were also able to access “a significant number of files containing profile information about other users’ ancestry.” But 23andMe would …
The November 2023 issue of LLRX has 9 new articles and 6 new columns: AI in Banking and Finance, November 30, 2023 ; AI in Banking and Finance – November 16, 2023 – This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government reports, industry white papers, academic papers and speeches on the subject of AI’s …
EFF: “State, federal, and international regulators are increasingly concerned about the harms they believe the internet and new technology are causing. The list is long, implicating child safety, journalism, access to healthcare data, digital justice, competition, artificial intelligence, and government surveillance, just to name a few. The stories behind them are important: no one wants …
