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Category: policy – Page 28

While the University of Hawai’i has until 2028 to officially hand off its management duties to the group, locals like native activist Noe Noe Wong-Wilson are optimistic about the change. She and others note that it feels like policy makers are finally listening to Native Hawaiians’ voices regarding the stewardship and care of their own community.

“This is the first time with the new authority that cultural practitioners and community members will actually have seats in the governing organization,” says Wong-Wilson, who is the executive director of the Lālākea Foundation, a nonprofit Native Hawaiian cultural organization. Wong-Wilson, who is a member of the working group that helped develop the bill proposal, says that the choice to bring in people and ideas from all over the community is what helped make the new law a reality.

She adds that the law’s mutual stewardship model takes into account all human activities on the mountain, and is designed to help “protect Mauna Kea for future generations,” as Native Hawaiians believe the mountain is a sacred place—a part of their spirituality as well as their culture. But years of mismanagement has created a mistrust in the state’s stakeholders, which included the University and Hawaiian government officials, and deepened a rift between Indigenous culture and western science.

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Microsoft has chosen to add specific security measures against brute force attacks against RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol). These security improvements have been introduced in the most recent builds of Windows 11. Given the evolution of this type of attack abusing RDP, Microsoft decided to add the security measure in the latest Insider Preview22528.1000. This system automatically locks accounts for 10 minutes after 10 invalid login attempts. The news was broken by David Weston (VP of OS & Enterprise Security) on Twitter last week.

These kinds of attacks against RDP are quite common in human operated ransomware. With this relatively simple measure, it is possible to complicate brute force attacks, being quite effective in discouraging them. However, it was already possible to activate this measure in Windows 10, so the novelty is really enabling it by default.

On the other hand, it is expected that, as happened with the blocking of VBA macros for Office documents, it will also be implemented for previous versions of Windows and Windows Server. Aside from malicious macros, brute force RDP access has long been one of the most popular methods used in cyberattacks. This strategy was successful in gaining initial unauthorized access to Windows systems. Among other ransomware, LockBit, Conti, Hive, PYSA, Crysis, SamSam, and Dharma are known to rely on these types of attacks to gain initial access to victims’ computers.

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Microsoft is now taking steps to prevent Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) brute-force attacks as part of the latest builds for the Windows 11 operating system in an attempt to raise the security baseline to meet the evolving threat landscape.

To that end, the default policy for Windows 11 builds – particularly, Insider Preview builds 22528.1000 and newer – will automatically lock accounts for 10 minutes after 10 invalid sign-in attempts.

“Win11 builds now have a DEFAULT account lockout policy to mitigate RDP and other brute-force password vectors,” David Weston, Microsoft’s vice president for OS security and enterprise, said in a series of tweets last week. “This technique is very commonly used in Human Operated Ransomware and other attacks — this control will make brute forcing much harder which is awesome!”

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Intel ((INTC) — Get Intel Corporation Report ) is the bearer of additional bad news.

The chip giant will give an extra blow to consumers and businesses concerned about the health of the economy. For several weeks in fact, consumers have seen their bills for groceries and other products increase. The price of gasoline at the pump has jumped when they go to fill up their car.

And the situation is not getting any better since inflation remains at its highest for forty years, which should push the Federal Reserve to be even more aggressive in raising rates. However, economists have already warned that this monetary policy would plunge the economy into recession.

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White House asks the public for ideas on what to do when we return to the Moon and cislunar space.

The U.S. has plans to return to the moon by the middle of this decade through NASA’s Artemis Program. But going back to the lunar surface and cislunar space isn’t just about putting boots on the ground. That’s why the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on behalf of the Cislunar Science and Technology Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council has issued a request for ideas (RFI) with a deadline of Wednesday, July 20, 2022, for interested parties to make submissions.

The U.S. government has defined cislunar space as the entire region beyond Earth’s geostationary orbit subject to the gravity of both our planet and the Moon. The RFI covers both orbiting and lunar surface activities.

The government is seeking help in creating research priorities, technical standards and the development of a sustainable presence for human activity in cislunar space.

Continue reading “U.S. Government’s Office of Science and Technology Issues Call for Cislunar Strategies” | >

A team of researchers at DeepMind, London, working with colleagues from the University of Exeter, University College London and the University of Oxford, has trained an AI system to find a policy for equitably distributing public funds in an online game. In their paper published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the group describes the approach they took to training their system and discuss issues that were raised in their endeavor.

How a society distributes wealth is an issue that humans have had to face for thousands of years. Nonetheless, most economists would agree that no system has yet been established in which all of its members are happy with the status quo. There have always been inequitable levels of income, with those on top the most satisfied and those on the bottom the least satisfied. In this latest effort, the researchers in England took a new approach to solving the problem—asking a computer to take a more logical approach.

The researchers began with the assumption that , despite their flaws, are thus far the most agreeable of those tried. They then enlisted the assistance of volunteers to play a simple resource allocation —the players of the game decided together the best ways to share their mutual resources. To make it more realistic, the players received different amounts of resources at the outset and there were different distribution schemes to choose from. The researchers ran the game multiple times with different groups of volunteers. They then used the data from all of the games played to train several AI systems on the ways that humans work together to find a solution to such a problem. Next, they had the AI systems play a similar game against one another, allowing for tweaking and learning over multiple iterations.

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In an unexpected move, on Wednesday, European lawmakers voted to declare some gas and nuclear energy projects “green.” They also agreed that these projects should receive access to cheap loans and even state subsidies, according to a report by The New York Times.

The proposal was made by the European Commission and the lawmakers present at the European Parliament meeting in Strasbourg, France, voted in favor of accepting it, with 328 votes backing the proposal and 278 against it. This decision was much to the dismay of detractors who argue that these projects are not environmentally friendly.

The policy, known as the “taxonomy,” will give the bloc, a group of 27 industrialized and wealthy nations, support as it struggles to replace Russian energy sources in order to penalize the Kremlin for its invasion of Ukraine. It will also aim to thwart “greenwashing”, the practice of labeling projects green that are not truly so.

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Joseph DearMinority Report was a matter of policy, not AI. As long as we have the good sense to not try to prosecute for crimes they didn’t do or attempt, and instead use this for prevention, we can have the best of both worlds.

Omuterema AkhahendaAdmin.

When life imitates art.

Continue reading “Minority Report (2002) Official Trailer #1 — Tom Cruise Sci-Fi Action Movie” | >

Hear from Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna on the four ways that CRISPR gene editing technologies will revolutionize healthcare.

In her 31 March talk at the Frontiers Forum, Prof Jennifer Doudna outlined how CRISPR-based therapies are already transforming the lives of patients with previously limited treatment options. She also gave her vision for how her serendipitous discovery will revolutionize healthcare for us all. The session was attended by over 9,200 representatives from science, policy and business across the world.

Jennifer’s keynote talk was followed by a discussion with global experts on access and ethical considerations:
• Prof Andrea Crisanti, Imperial College London.
• Prof Françoise Baylis, Dalhousie University.
• Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist, World Health Organization.

2022 marks the 10th anniversary of Jennifer’s groundbreaking development of CRISPR-Cas9 as a genome-engineering technology, with collaborator Prof Emmanuelle Charpentier. The two earned the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work, which has forever changed the course of human and agricultural genomics research. Jennifer Doudna is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair and a Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute.

Continue reading “Jennifer Doudna | Four ways that CRISPR will revolutionize healthcare” | >