The Trump administration might be building walls between America and some countries, but it is eager to forge alliances when it comes to shaping the course of artificial intelligence....
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a coalition of countries dedicated to promoting democracy and economic development, has announced a set of principles for artificial intelligence. The announcement came at a meeting of the OECD Forum in Paris.
The OECD does not include China, and the principles outlined by the group seem to contrast with the way AI is being deployed there, especially for face recognition and surveillance of ethnic groups associated with political dissent.
Speaking at the event, America’s recently appointed CTO, Michael Kratsios, said, “We are so pleased that the OECD AI recommendations address so many of the issues which are being tackled by the American AI Initiative.”
The OECD Principles on AI read as follows:
Many of the biggest political organizations in the US still have awful cyber hygiene ahead of next year’s election....
The news: Researchers at cybersecurity firm SecurityScorecard spent the first quarter of 2019 analyzing the anti-hacking defenses of the parties, including both the US Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). They found that both have some serious holes to address.
The dirty truth: The flaws include exposed personal data about employees that could be used to create fake identities; older versions of software that could let hackers steal usernames and passwords fairly easily; and malicious software, or malware, that could be used to spy on party activities and compromise user accounts.
Why this matters: Ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, hackers penetrated the DNC’s systems and stole e-mails and other data to cause chaos. With European Union parliamentary elections looming and the US about to enter another presidential election year, more attacks on political organizations are inevitable.
Bigger is (somewhat) better: The researchers acknowledge that the RNC and DNC have put significant effort into bolstering their cyber defenses since 2016 but say they still found some (undisclosed) weaknesses. Another, smaller party was using a tool that leaked voter names, dates of birth, and addresses. This flaw was fixed after the party was told what SecurityScorecard had found.
This celebrity biohacker is under investigation for practicing medicine without a license
He taunted the health authorities. Now he stands accused of pretending to be one.
Advertisement