30
Apr
2019
Apr
2019
Huawei backdoor
categories: Cybersecurity, information technology
Vodafone discovers hidden backdoors in Italy’s Huawei infrastructure
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48103430
January 31, 2018
Searching for "security"
24
Apr
2019
Apr
2019
Jennifer Newstead privacy Facebok
categories: Facebook
Facebook’s new general counsel is a Trump adviser who helped author Patriot Act
infamous former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo wrote in his 2006 book that Newstead was the “day-to-day manager of the Patriot Act in Congress”.
The Patriot Act was passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and brought in a series of new federal crimes related to terrorism. The legislation was broad and much of the government’s expanded surveillance powers stemmed from parts of the act. It enabled, among other things, the controversial Section 215, which was used to justify the National Security Agency’s phone records collection programme.
It also had a “roving wiretap” provision, which allowed government to place a tap on all of an individual’s personal devices based purely on the approval of the notoriously permissive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
As The Verge points out, the Patriot Act also initiated the practice of “national security letters”, a procedure by which intelligence agencies can informally request data without any kind of court or ex parte authorisation, citing threats to national security. Facebook fields thousands of these requests every year, the content of which is generally subject to gag orders and therefore remains publicly unknown. In her capacity as general counsel, Newstead will be able to approve or deny these requests.
https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-makes-official-who-helped-write-patriot-act-its-top-lawyer/
+++++++++++++++
more on privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/04/22/data-interference/
22
Apr
2019
Apr
2019
data interference
Think You’re Discreet
APRIL 21, 2019 Zeynep Tufekci
Because of technological advances and the sheer amount of data now available about billions of other people, discretion no longer suffices to protect your privacy. Computer algorithms and network analyses can now infer, with a sufficiently high degree of accuracy, a wide range of things about you that you may have never disclosed, including your moods, your political beliefs, your sexual orientation and your health.
There is no longer such a thing as individually “opting out” of our privacy-compromised world.
In 2017, the newspaper The Australian published an article, based on a leaked document from Facebook, revealing that the company had told advertisers that it could predict when younger users, including teenagers, were feeling “insecure,” “worthless” or otherwise in need of a “confidence boost.” Facebook was apparently able to draw these inferences by monitoring photos, posts and other social media data.
In 2017, academic researchers, armed with data from more than 40,000 Instagram photos, used machine-learning tools to accurately identify signs of depression in a group of 166 Instagram users. Their computer models turned out to be better predictors of depression than humans who were asked to rate whether photos were happy or sad and so forth.
Computational inference can also be a tool of social control. The Chinese government, having gathered biometric data on its citizens, is trying to use big data and artificial intelligence to single out “threats” to Communist rule, including the country’s Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic group.
+++++++++++++
Zeynep Tufekci and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: Privacy is over
https://www.centreforideas.com/article/zeynep-tufekci-and-seth-stephens-davidowitz-privacy-over
+++++++++++
Zeynep Tufekci writes about security and data privacy for NY Times, disinformation’s threat to democracy for WIRED
++++++++++
more on privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy
22
Apr
2019
Apr
2019
Huawei funded by Chinese Military
categories: Digital literacy, educational technology
CIA Offers Proof Huawei Has Been Funded By China’s Military And Intelligence
the Times reported that such evidence exists, it has just not been openly published.
Joy Tan, Huawei’s chief global communicator, told methat “the assumption that the Chinese government can potentially interfere in Huawei’s business operation is completely not true. Huawei is a private company. The Chinese government does not have any ownership or any interference in our business operations.”
The CIA has now directly refuted this.
Tan insisted that “China does not have any law to force any company or business to install a back door. Premier Li Keqiang said that openly several weeks ago, the Chinese government would never do that, make any company spy.”
According to the Times source, “only the most senior U.K. officials are believed to have seen the intelligence, which the CIA awarded a strong but not cast-iron classification of certainty.” But the newspaper also reports a separate U.S. course as saying that there is a view within the U.S. intelligence community that “the Chinese ministry of state security — its principal security and espionage organization — had approved government funding for Huawei.”
02
Apr
2019
Apr
2019
Role of the Chief Academic Technology Officer
What’s the Role of the Chief Academic Technology Officer?
Research from the Center for Higher Education CIO Studies (CHECS) has been transferred to EDUCAUSE, including a report on the role of the Chief Academic Technology Officer and its differences and similarities to other higher ed IT tech executives.
https://library.educause.edu/resources/2019/1/the-center-for-higher-education-cio-studies-reports-2003-2018 Friday, January 18, 2019
The Center for Higher Education CIO Studies (CHECS) was a nonprofit organization founded by Dr. Wayne A. Brown, dedicated to the education and development of technology leaders in higher education. CHECS produced the CIO Study, the Technology Leadership (TL) Study, the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Study and the Higher Education Chief Academic Technology Officer Study.
The Chief Information Officer (CIO) study provides information about higher education CIOs’ attributes, education, experience and effectiveness. The CIO study was conducted from 2003 to 2018. Find all the CIO reports here.
The Technology Leadership (TL) study surveyed those in the next organizational layer down from the CIO. The TL study examines the demographics of the TL, where they have worked, and the activities they are undertaking to prepare themselves to become CIOs. The TL study was study was conducted from 2009 to 2018. Find all the TL reports here.
The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) study examines the demographics of the higher education CISO, the career route they have taken to their role, and the activities and attributes needed for a CISO according to the CISO and the CIO. The CISO study was study was conducted from 2014 to 2017. Find all the CISO reports here.
The Higher Education Chief Academic Technology Officer Study, 2018 canvassed CIOs, known CATOs and academic technology leaders, as well as deans and provosts to understand changes happening across institutions of higher education in academic technology.
28
Feb
2019
Feb
2019
Chief Privacy Officers
Chief Privacy Officers: The Unicorns of K-12 Education
By Emily Tate Feb 25, 2019
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-02-25-chief-privacy-officers-the-unicorns-of-k-12-education
Last month, the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) published a report arguing schools and districts should go the way of other industries and hire a Chief Privacy Officer to oversee their organization’s privacy policies and practices.
But the reality is that Chief Privacy Officers in K-12 education are about as common as unicorns.
Two years ago, Denver Public Schools created a new role, the Student Data Privacy Officer, after the Colorado legislature passed a law to promote student data privacy and transparency.
27
Feb
2019
Feb
2019
edtech implementation failures
5 All-Too-Common Ways Edtech Implementations Fail
Chris Liang-Vergara and Kerry Gallagher (Columnist) Apr 6, 2017
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-04-06-5-all-too-common-ways-edtech-implementations-fail
End users are too often removed from the decision-making process during procurement. Educators argue that too many products don’t actually meet the needs of teachers or students. Still others worry that it is too easy to implement new and popular technology without considering whether it is research-based and effective.
Only 33 percent of parents surveyed by the Learning Assembly said their child’s school did an excellent job using technology to tailor instruction.
Insufficient Modeling of Best Practices
A survey from Samsung found that 37 percent of teachers say they would love to use technology but don’t know how, and 76 percent say they would like a professional development day dedicated to technology.
implementations should start with the “why” and then address the “how.” Trainings should first model the best pedagogical approach, and how technology fits into this approach to support a learning objective. How to effectively use and troubleshoot the tool itself is also important, but it’s not the only factor.
How teachers integrate technology into their own teaching practices can have a dramatic impact on the results, even when they’re all using the same edtech tool. Videos that focus on scaling and modeling best practices (produced by places like the Teaching Channel and The Learning Accelerator) can help teachers and schools do this.
Teachers face initiative fatigue: They are constantly being asked to implement new programs, integrate new technologies, and add on layers of responsibility.
take the time to learn from the challenges of other schools, and recruit a coalition of the willing.
Real-World Usability Challenges
Relying on multiple devices (remote, clicker, iPad, computer mouse) to launch or navigate technology can be difficult. Additionally, teachers may start to use a tool, only to realize it is not flexible enough to meet their original needs, fit into the constraints of their particular school or classroom, or allow them to integrate their own content or supplemental resources.
The Right Data to Track Progress
Sometimes tech implementations fail because the products themselves don’t have the right depth of data for teachers or a workable interface. And sometimes they fail when eager IT directors lock down hardware and networks for security purposes in a way that makes the tool far less valuable for instructors.
22
Feb
2019
Feb
2019
Machine Learning and the Cloud Rescue IT
categories: information technology
How Machine Learning and the Cloud Can Rescue IT From the Plumbing Business
SPONSORED CONTENT FROM AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS)
By Andrew Barbour Feb 19, 2019
Many educational institutions maintain their own data centers. “We need to minimize the amount of work we do to keep systems up and running, and spend more energy innovating on things that matter to people.”
what’s the difference between machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI)?
Jeff Olson: That’s actually the setup for a joke going around the data science community. The punchline? If it’s written in Python or R, it’s machine learning. If it’s written in PowerPoint, it’s AI.
machine learning is in practical use in a lot of places, whereas AI conjures up all these fantastic thoughts in people.
What is serverless architecture, and why are you excited about it?
Instead of having a machine running all the time, you just run the code necessary to do what you want—there is no persisting server or container. There is only this fleeting moment when the code is being executed. It’s called Function as a Service, and AWS pioneered it with a service called AWS Lambda. It allows an organization to scale up without planning ahead.
How do you think machine learning and Function as a Service will impact higher education in general?
The radical nature of this innovation will make a lot of systems that were built five or 10 years ago obsolete. Once an organization comes to grips with Function as a Service (FaaS) as a concept, it’s a pretty simple step for that institution to stop doing its own plumbing. FaaS will help accelerate innovation in education because of the API economy.
If the campus IT department will no longer be taking care of the plumbing, what will its role be?
I think IT will be curating the inter-operation of services, some developed locally but most purchased from the API economy.
As a result, you write far less code and have fewer security risks, so you can innovate faster. A succinct machine-learning algorithm with fewer than 500 lines of code can now replace an application that might have required millions of lines of code. Second, it scales. If you happen to have a gigantic spike in traffic, it deals with it effortlessly. If you have very little traffic, you incur a negligible cost.
++++++++
more on machine learning in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=machine+learning
12
Feb
2019
Feb
2019
Russia disconnect Internet
Russia ‘successfully tests’ its unplugged internet
24 December 2019
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50902496
“Increasingly, authoritarian countries which want to control what citizens see are looking at what Iran and China have already done.
“It means people will not have access to dialogue about what is going on in their own country, they will be kept within their own bubble.”
In Iran, the National Information Network allows access to web services while policing all content on the network and limiting external information. It is run by the state-owned Telecommunication Company of Iran.
One of the benefits of effectively turning all internet access into a government-controlled walled garden, is that virtual private networks (VPNs), often used to circumvent blocks, would not work.
Another example of this is the so-called Great Firewall of China. It blocks access to many foreign internet services, which in turn has helped several domestic tech giants establish themselves.
Russia already tech champions of its own, such as Yandex and Mail.Ru, but other local firms might also benefit.
The country plans to create its own Wikipedia and politicians have passed a bill that bans the sale of smartphones that do not have Russian software pre-installed.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Russia Is Considering An Experiment To Disconnect From The Internet
February 11, 20194:50 PM ET SASHA INGBER
Russia is considering a plan to temporarily disconnect from the Internet as a way to gauge how the country’s cyberdefenses would fare in the face of foreign aggression, according to Russian media.
It was introduced after the White House published its 2018 National Security Strategy, which attributed cyberattacks on the United States to Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Russia’s Communications Ministry also simulated a switching-off exercise of global Internet services in 2014, according to Russian outlet RT.
Russia’s State Duma will meet Tuesday to consider the bill, according to RIA Novosti.
Roskomnadzor has also exerted pressure on Google to remove certain sites on Russian searches.
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told Congress last month that Russia, as well as other foreign actors, will increasingly use cyber operations to “threaten both minds and machines in an expanding number of ways—to steal information, to influence our citizens, or to disrupt critical infrastructure.”
My note: In the past, the US actions prompted other countries to consider the same:
Germanty – https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2014/07/01/privacy-and-surveillance-obama-advisor-john-podesta-every-country-has-a-history-of-going-over-the-line/
++++++++++++
more on cybersecurity in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cybersecurity
more on surveillance in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=surveillance
11
Feb
2019
Feb
2019
American AI Initiative
categories: announcement
Trump creates American AI Initiative to boost research, train displaced workers
The order is designed to protect American technology, national security, privacy, and values when it comes to artificial intelligence.
STEPHEN SHANKLAND,SEAN KEANE FEBRUARY 11, 2019
https://www.cnet.com/news/trump-to-create-american-ai-initiative-with-executive-order/
President Donald Trump on Monday directed federal agencies to improve the nation’s artificial intelligence abilities — and help people whose jobs are displaced by the automation it enables.
t’s good for the US government to focus on AI, said Daniel Castro, chief executive of the Center for Data Innovation, a technology-focused think tank that supports the initiative.
Silicon Valley has been investing heavily in AI in recent years, but the path hasn’t always been an easy one. In October, for instance, Google withdrew from competition for a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract, saying it might conflict with its principles for ethical use of AI.
Trump this week is also reportedly expected to sign an executive order banning Chinese telecom equipment from US wireless networks by the end of February.
++++++++++++
more on AI in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence