AI and Microdirectives
Imagine a future in which AIs automatically interpret—and enforce—laws. All day and every day, you constantly receive highly personalized instructions for how to comply with the law, sent directly by your government ...
Commentary on the Implementation Plan for the 2023 US National Cybersecurity Strategy
The Atlantic Council released a detailed commentary on the White House’s new “Implementation Plan for the 2023 US National Cybersecurity Strategy.” Lots of interesting bits. So far, at least three trends emerge: ...
Tracking Down a Suspect through Cell Phone Records
Interesting forensics in connection with a serial killer arrest: Investigators went through phone records collected from both midtown Manhattan and the Massapequa Park area of Long Island—two areas connected to a “burner ...
Buying Campaign Contributions as a Hack
The first Republican primary debate has a popularity threshold to determine who gets to appear: 40,000 individual contributors. Now there are a lot of conventional ways a candidate can get that many ...
Wisconsin Governor Hacks the Veto Process
In my latest book, A Hacker’s Mind, I wrote about hacks as loophole exploiting. This is a great example: The Wisconsin governor used his line-item veto powers—supposedly unique in their specificity—to change ...
The AI Dividend
For four decades, Alaskans have opened their mailboxes to find checks waiting for them, their cut of the black gold beneath their feet. This is Alaska’s Permanent Fund, funded by the state’s ...
Class-Action Lawsuit for Scraping Data without Permission
I have mixed feelings about this class-action lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that it “scraped 300 billion words from the internet” without either registering as a data broker or obtaining consent ...
Self-Driving Cars Are Surveillance Cameras on Wheels
Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence: While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement and a ...
AI as Sensemaking for Public Comments
It’s become fashionable to think of artificial intelligence as an inherently dehumanizing technology, a ruthless force of automation that has unleashed legions of virtual skilled laborers in faceless form. But what if ...
Ethical Problems in Computer Security
Tadayoshi Kohno, Yasemin Acar, and Wulf Loh wrote excellent paper on ethical thinking within the computer security community: “Ethical Frameworks and Computer Security Trolley Problems: Foundations for Conversation“: Abstract: The computer security ...
