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Category: law – Page 53

U.S. company can keep hosting vast coronavirus-related project but must protect French citizens’ health data from American government, court rules.

A French court has ruled that Microsoft Corp. can continue hosting a government-run project aggregating citizens’ anonymous health data to use for AI-based research, but must guarantee no data will be sent to the U.S. or be shared with American intelligence authorities.

The ruling, handed down last week, contradicts the stance of France’s data protection authority, which told the court this month that any U.S. cloud provider could be forced to comply with U.S. surveillance laws and should therefore not be allowed to host sensitive health data. The regulator’s opinion could provide clues for other companies handling such data, legal experts say.

Companies are wrestling with tricky decisions about moving their data from the European Union to the U.S., following a court decision this summer that required personal data transferred there to include special guarantees against surveillance by the American government.

Continue reading “French Court Asks Microsoft for Safeguards Against U.S. Surveillance of Health Data” | >

In a newly published policy paper, a pair of Canadian scientists warn that the United States is angling to establish itself as the de facto gatekeeper of the moon and other celestial bodies.

Earlier this year, NASA published a new set of rules for lunar mining and other space activities, dubbing the voluntary guidelines the “Artemis Accords.”

Aaron Boley and Michael Byers, authors of the new Science paper, argue that the Artemis Accords are part of a concerted effort by the U.S. and NASA to set a legal precedent for space-based resource extraction.

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A short story.

A very short story with a long ending.

“What did you do in the Great Cyberwar daddy?”

What can I say? The answer is pretty much what everyone else did, which is try and s urvive. In other words, nothing. The first we all knew about it was when the electricity went off, and did not come back on again. Then other utilities, water, gas and phones. Then the Net itself went down and everyone was in the dark both literally and figuratively. All of that within the space of a few hours. For some it happened overnight and they awoke to a broken world. Most cars still ran, for a while, although GPS was also out. Self driving cars didn’t. When the fuel ran out the gas stations were not pumping (no electricity), the supermarkets along with everyone else could not buy or sell because the payment systems were offline. Within 24 hours looting broke out on a global scale from the richest nations to the poorest and martial law became the new norm.

Continue reading “Cyberwar 2025” | >

Negotiations are a central part of many human interactions, ranging from business discussions and legal proceedings to conversations with vendors at local markets. Researchers specialized in economics, psychology, and more recently, computer science have conducted several studies aimed at better understanding how humans negotiate with one another in the hope of shedding light on some of the dynamics of human decision-making and enabling the development of machines that can replicate these dynamics.

A research team at the University of Southern California has been exploring the possibility of building automated systems that can negotiate with humans. In a paper pre-published on arXiv and set to be presented at the IJCAI conference, they presented a virtual agent based on a framework called IAGO (Interactive Arbitration Guide Online), which can negotiate with humans in a three-round task. This virtual agent, called Pilot, is one of the finalists of the IJCAI conference’s global negotiation challenge (ANAC).

“Recently, researchers realized the potential applications of building automated systems that can negotiate with humans,” Kushal Chawla, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “These intelligent assistants can be really useful to augment current techniques for training people to have stronger social skills. Examples include teaching business students to negotiate for successful deals or lawyers to accurately assess settlement rates in legal proceedings.”

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Microsoft announced legal action Monday seeking to disrupt a major cybercrime digital network that uses more than 1 million zombie computers to loot bank accounts and spread ransomware, which experts consider a major threat to the U.S. presidential election.

The operation to knock offline command-and-control servers for a global botnet that uses an infrastructure known as Trickbot to infect computers with malware was initiated with an order that Microsoft obtained in Virginia federal court on Oct. 6. Microsoft argued that the crime network is abusing its trademark.

“It is very hard to tell how effective it will be but we are confident it will have a very long-lasting effect,” said Jean-Ian Boutin, head of threat research at ESET, one of several cybersecurity firms that partnered with Microsoft to map the command-and-control servers. “We’re sure that they are going to notice and it will be hard for them to get back to the state that the botnet was in.”

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In the dog days of last week, a shadowy group of secret sources in U.S. Cyber Command whispered to reporters that they’d disrupted a huge, ransomware-spewing botnet. Trickbot, closely related to Emotet and Ryuk, is believed to be managed by Russian criminals.

But today, Microsoft and friends are saying the disruption was actually down to them—awks. The consortium of industry players has developed a new legal mechanism to remove the botnet’s servers from the net and they say it’s working.

They’re basically using international copyright law to do takedowns, arguing that “malicious use” of Windows and Office is actionable in court. In today’s SB Blogwatch, we DMCA ur C2 and pwn ur zombies.

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August was the second-highest month for sales ever.

Colorado has seen over $1.1 billion in marijuana sales since the COVID-19 pandemic began in this country, according to figures from the state Department of Revenue.

Legal marijuana sales topped $200 million in August for the second month in a row, reaching the second-highest monthly total since recreational sales started in 2014. Counting back to March of this year, when Colorado and the rest of the nation began shutting down over the pandemic, dispensaries have sold over $1.1 billion in marijuana products — and that’s not counting sales in September and October.

Dispensaries sold over $218.6 million worth of marijuana products in August, DOR data shows. Recreational sales accounted for more than $176.5 million (also the second-highest monthly total since 2014), while medical marijuana sales remained strong at just over $42 million.

Continue reading “Colorado Marijuana Sales Top

August was the second-highest month for sales ever.

Colorado has seen over $1.1 billion in marijuana sales since the COVID-19 pandemic began in this country, according to figures from the state Department of Revenue.

Legal marijuana sales topped $200 million in August for the second month in a row, reaching the second-highest monthly total since recreational sales started in 2014. Counting back to March of this year, when Colorado and the rest of the nation began shutting down over the pandemic, dispensaries have sold over $1.1 billion in marijuana products — and that’s not counting sales in September and October.

Dispensaries sold over $218.6 million worth of marijuana products in August, DOR data shows. Recreational sales accounted for more than $176.5 million (also the second-highest monthly total since 2014), while medical marijuana sales remained strong at just over $42 million. Billion Since Pandemic Began” | >

International Business Machines, still the legal name of century-plus-old IBM, has managed over the years to pull off a dubious feat. Despite selling goods and services in one of the most dynamic industries in the world, the IT sector the company helped create, it has managed to avoid growing.

The company that was synonymous with mainframes, that dominated the early days of the personal computer (a “PC” once meant a device that ran software built to IBM’s technical standards), and that reinvented itself as a tech-consulting goliath, lagged while upstarts and a few of its old competitors zoomed past it.

What IBM excelled at more often was marketing a version of its aspirational self. Its consultants would advise urban planners on how to create “smart cities.” Its command of artificial intelligence, packaged into a software offering whose name evoked its founding family, would cure cancer. Its CEO would wow the Davos set with cleverly articulated visions of how corporations could help fix the ills of society.

What IBM did not do was grow or participate sufficiently in the biggest trend in business-focused IT, cloud computing. Now, in the words of veteran tech analyst Toni Sacconaghi of research shop Bernstein, new IBM CEO Arvind Krishna is pursuing a strategy of “growth through subtraction.” The company is spinning off its IT outsourcing business, a low-growth, low-margin portion of its services business that rings up $19 billion in annual sales. Krishna told Aaron and Fortune writer Jonathan Vanian that he plans to bulk back up after the spinoff via acquisitions. “We’re open for business,” he said.

The move is bold, if risky. The reason it took so long, and presumably a new leader, to jettison the outsourcing business is that it was meant to drive sales of IBM hardware and other services. But Krishna, promoted for his association with IBM’s nascent cloud-computing effort—just as Microsoft Satya Nadella ran his company’s cloud arm before taking the top job—recognizes that only by discarding a moribund business can IBM focus and invest properly in the one that matters.

Continue reading “IBM finally gets rid of some business to focus on the one that matters” | >

In 2020, slavery is not gone from this planet…

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador, interviews Bakary Tandia, Co-Founder of the Abolition Institute, a group working to promote awareness of, and dedicated to ending, the practice of slavery in the west African country of Mauritania.

Slavery and enslavement are defined of the state and condition of being a slave, where the individual cannot quit their service to another person and is treated like property.

Continue reading “How to Abolish Modern Day Slavery and Address its Effects” | >