Cyber Security

Did you know October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month? The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) invented it to highlight its collaborative effort between government and industry to raise awareness about the importance of cybersecurity and to ensure that all Americans have the resources they need to be safer and more secure online. In case Continue Reading →

We have entered the age of personalized politics, and it is very important for us to understand what that means. In practice, there are as many candidates in the 2020 presidential race as there are voters with online access in the United States. Every candidate is a customized persona created specifically for us by a complex set of algorithms that very few people fully understand. This means we are all test subjects in an unprecedented sociopolitical experiment that, quite frankly, scares the hell out of me. Continue Reading →

Mr. Zuckerberg went to Washington yesterday for private meetings with the President and several lawmakers. The meetings were private and Mr. Zuckerberg did not answer questions about specifics. However, according to the WSJ, Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) challenged Facebook’s CEO saying, “Prove that you’re serious… sell WhatsApp, and sell Instagram.” There is only hearsay Continue Reading →

Facebook is getting into the dating game. Deepfakes are getting better and better. Put them both together and they present a potential reality as sinister as it is deceitful. Imagine online dating in a world replete with deepfakes. Continue Reading →

I have been in an abusive relationship with Apple since the mid 80s. They keep torturing me and I keep buying their products. From the Apple II to the present, I have only cheated on them with some PCs in the 90s and some Samsung phones in the smartphone era. They are the company I love to hate, so you can imagine how weird it was for me to be defending Apple on television yesterday. Me? Defending Apple? Continue Reading →

An invitation to walk in the Labor Day Parade got me thinking about labor law as an alternative path to meaningful data privacy regulation. Think about this… Continue Reading →

The FTC and New York State reported that Google has agreed to pay a record $170 million penalty to settle accusations that YouTube broke the law when it knowingly tracked and sold ads targeted to children.  In agreeing to pay this fine, Google is essentially admitting that YouTube collected user info from kids in violation Continue Reading →

It has been just a week since my essay, Deepfakes 2.0: The Sequel Is Even Scarier. Now, Bloomberg is reporting about Zao, a next-generation deepfake facial replacement tool (a la FaceApp) that is taking China by storm (details below). When you see the results of this “anyone can do it at the tap of a Continue Reading →

On Thursday, Google Project Zero posted a notice: "Earlier this year Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) discovered a small collection of hacked websites. The hacked sites were being used in indiscriminate watering hole attacks against their visitors, using iPhone 0-day." Wired reports the issue was identified on February 1, 2019 and supposedly fixed by Apple on February 7, 2019 with the iOS 12.1.14 patch. This is interesting for a couple reasons: 1) there is a popular belief that Apple products are not vulnerable to viruses or hackers, and 2) most people believe that it is expensive to hack an iPhone -- even the FBI needed to hire outside consultants -- so victims must be high-value and carefully selected. As it turns out, neither of these popular assumptions are correct. Continue Reading →

For about 200,000 years, we have relied on our eyes and ears to separate truth from lies and fact from fiction. Even if we ignore the rise of fake news, technology is on the verge of making it impossible to know if what we are seeing and hearing is real or fake. Here’s a roundup of what’s new, what’s next, and what you can expect in time for the 2020 election. Continue Reading →