This week in Data Exploitation Issue 1*
*An irregular newsletter about data and exploitation
What is data exploitation? Watch this and read below.
10 April, 2017
This week in a nutshell: security nightmares — especially when you’re poor, drones on drones automation, using artificial intelligence to solve artificial intelligence privacy problems, surveillance of activists, fog computing is the new cloud computing, data selfies, and ‘moral’ machines.
__in the news
UK tourists to US may get asked to hand in passwords or be denied entry
Although mitigation options exist, lawyers warn attempts to protect personal data may be seen as ‘probable cause’ for searching
US government drops effort to unmask anti-Trump Twitter account
Attempt to reveal identity behind an account criticizing Trump’s immigration policy sparked an outcry from free speech advocates and a lawsuit from Twitter
Wonga data breach could affect nearly 250,000 UK customers
Personal details from hundreds of thousands of accounts may have been illegally accessed, admits payday lender
Australian anti-war activist ‘among victims of alleged UK police hacking’
Ciaron O’Reilly one of 10 people named by whistleblower as having had emails illegally monitored by Scotland Yard
NYPD officers accessed Black Lives Matter activists’ texts, documents show
Exclusive: Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal details of how police posed as protesters amid unrest following the death of Eric Garner.
Open sesame — unless you complain about your ‘smart’ door opener
Who needs horror films? We have the IoT. Or, more precisely, the IoST: the Internet of Scary Things!
Watch Hackers Use a Drone-Mounted Laser to Control Malware Through a Scanner
Researchers in Israel have shown off a novel technique that would allow attackers to wirelessly command devices using a laser light, bypassing so-called air gaps.
Hackers set off Dallas’ 156 emergency sirens over a dozen times
Twice the normal volume of 911 calls came into the system early Saturday morning.
20,000-bots-strong Sathurbot botnet grows by compromising WordPress sites
A 20,000-bots-strong botnet is probing WordPress sites, trying to compromise them and spread a backdoor downloader Trojan called Sathurbot as far and as wide as possible.
__analysis / opinion
Global Inequality in Your Pocket: How Cheap Smartphones and Lax Policies Leave Us Vulnerable to Hacking
The people who can least afford are often the most vulnerable to fraud and harassment when their digital privacy is violated.
Call for encryption ban puts Rudd against industry and colleagues
A previous plan to ban end-to-end encryption was dropped after widespread opposition, including from David Davis
Insurers Scramble to Put a Price on a Cyber Catastrophe
Trying to estimate the maximum cost of a devastating cyber event before one actually happens.
The Future Of Technology Isn’t Mobile, It’s Contextual
Next up: Machines that understand you and everything you care about, anticipate your behavior and emotions, absorb your social graph, interpret your intentions, and make life, um, “easier.”
Fog Computing Brings Big Data Back to Earth
Cisco generally gets the credit for the term fog computing, aka edge computing. A 2015 whitepaper explains, “Today’s cloud models are not designed for the volume, variety, and velocity of data that the IoT generates. Billions of previously unconnected devices are generating more than two exabytes of data each day. An estimated 50 billion ‘things’ will be connected to the Internet by 2020.”
You can’t spend a penny without being snooped on
Coins and notes with the Queen’s head on them, endorsed by a sovereign state, are no longer sufficient for British Airways. It needs to know who we are.
Enter the new commercially lucrative world of DroneVSDrone technology
Startup AirSpace claims its own drone defense system can use computer vision algorithms and some mild in-flight autonomy to let it command a fleet of defense drones that can identify hostile drones and automatically fire net-guns at them.
Evidence of trauma: the impact of human rights work on advocates
It’s time to think seriously about the effects of trauma on human rights activists. A contribution to the openGlobalRights debate on mental health and well-being in the human rights.
Hospitals Are Prescribing Home Surveillance to Save Lives
As the US healthcare system faces turmoil, hospitals around the country are changing the way they practice medicine. Using new monitoring technologies, doctors are beginning to get an uninterrupted view into the medical lives of their patients after they leave the office.
__long reads
A.I. versus M.D.
What happens when diagnosis is automated?
Banks and Tech Firms Battle Over Something Akin to Gold: Your Data
The big banks and Silicon Valley are waging an escalating battle over your personal financial data: your dinner bill last night, your monthly mortgage payment, the interest rates you pay.
How statistics lost their power — and why we should fear what comes next
The ability of statistics to accurately represent the world is declining. In its wake, a new age of big data controlled by private companies is taking over — and putting democracy in peril
__investigations
Minority Neighborhoods Pay Higher Car Insurance Premiums Than White Areas With the Same Risk
Our analysis of premiums and payouts in California, Illinois, Texas and Missouri shows that some major insurers charge minority neighborhoods as much as 30 percent more than other areas with similar accident costs.
__academic papers
Google Thinks It Can Solve Artificial Intelligence’s Privacy Problem
Google suggested a novel solution in a new blog and research paper this week, which explain what the company is calling “federated learning.” If all goes according to plan, Google will be able to train its deep learning AI on sensitive data from millions of phones without Google ever seeing the data itself.
When Apps Secretly Team Up to Steal Your Data
An analysis of the top 100,000 Android apps found tens of thousands of pairings that leak sensitive data.
Differential Privacy: A Primer for a Non-technical Audience
This document is a primer on differential privacy, which is a formal mathematical frame- work for guaranteeing privacy protection when analyzing or releasing statistical data. Recently emerging from the theoretical computer science literature, differential privacy is now in ini- tial stages of implementation and use in various academic, industry, and government settings. Using intuitive illustrations and limited mathematical formalism, this document provides an introduction to differential privacy for non-technical practitioners, who are increasingly tasked with making decisions with respect to differential privacy as it grows more widespread in use. In particular, the examples in this document illustrate ways in which social scientists can conceptualize the guarantees provided by differential privacy with respect to the decisions they make when managing personal data about research subjects and informing them about the privacy protection they will be afforded.
ActiVis: Visual Exploration of Industry-Scale Deep Neural Network Models
While deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art accuracies for many prediction tasks, understanding these models remains a challenge. Despite the recent interest in developing visual tools to help users interpret deep learning models, the complexity and wide variety of models deployed in industry, and the large-scale datasets that they used, pose unique design challenges that are inadequately addressed by existing work. Through participatory design sessions with over 15 researchers and engineers at Facebook, we have developed, deployed, and iteratively improved ActiVis, an interactive visualization system for interpreting large-scale deep learning models and results. By tightly integrating multiple coordinated views, such as a computation graph overview of the model architecture, and a neuron activation view for pattern discovery and comparison, users can explore complex deep neural network models at both the instance- and subset-level. ActiVis has been deployed on Facebook’s machine learning platform. We present case studies with Facebook researchers and engineers, and usage scenarios of how ActiVis may work with different models.
__cool projects
Welcome to the Moral Machine!
A platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving cars.
Data Selfies
This short piece examines Data Selfie, an open-source Chrome browser extension that collects and analyses data about your behaviour on facebook.com.
Launch: The Public Data Lab
The Public Data Lab seeks to facilitate research, democratic engagement and public debate around the future of the data society.
__new books and book reviews
Book Review: Self-Tracking by Gina Neff & Dawn Nafus
__past conferences #FOMO
We Robot 2017
International Journalism Festival
http://www.journalismfestival.com/
