In 2013, police officers in Wisconsin arrested a man driving a car that had been used in a recent shooting. The man, Eric Loomis, pleaded guilty to attempting to flee an officer, and no contest to operating a vehicle without the owner’s consent. Neither of his crimes mandates prison time.
On Sunday night, a gunman killed at least 59 people and injured 527 others on the Las Vegas Strip. The shooter, identified as Stephen Paddock, open fired from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino into a crowd of thousands below who were attending a country music festival.
The plan was to hack the hackers. Cybercriminals had targeted a global bank’s customers with phishing emails to break into their accounts. The legal option—waiting for law enforcement to investigate and perhaps apprehend the hackers—would have taken too long. So the bank was willing to try something else, and a team of security consultants offered to strike back.
In less than 30 seconds a hacker can install a $10 piece of pre-built hardware – easily purchased online – into a gas pump. This device is called a skimmer and it’s designed to get your credit card number when you use it at the pump.
From invading privacy to smuggling drugs over jail walls, more criminals are turning to flying drones forcing detectives to learn new skills to find them.
This sounds a little like Minority Report to us. China is looking into predictive analytics to help authorities stop suspects before a crime is committed.
“Code is law,” as described in Lawrence Lessig’s book ‘Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace’, refers to the idea that computer code has progressively established itself as a predominant way to regulate behavior to the same degree as legal code.
With the advent of blockchain technology, code is assuming an even stronger role in regulating people’s interactions.
However, while computer code can enforce rules more efficiently than legal code, it also comes with a series of limitations.
The digital revolution has not escaped the courts. The courtroom of tomorrow may no longer involve litigants and their lawyers pitching up armed with reams of papers to do battle before robed, bewigged judges. In fact, for many it may not involve a court at all. Judges could be replaced by computers and the courtroom with the internet to meet the needs of the 21st-century litigants.
Last month Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary Liz Truss unveiled the Prisons and Courts Bill. Aside from wide-ranging plans to reform prisons, the Bill contained proposals to enable people and businesses with claims worth up to £25,000 to use an online digital process instead of going to court.
People in Britain are more scared of the artificial intelligence embedded in household devices and self-driving cars than in systems used for predictive policing or diagnosing diseases. That’s according to a survey commissioned by the Royal Society, which is billed as the first in-depth look at how the public perceives the risks and benefits associated with machine learning, a key AI technique.
Bruce Schneier: Last year, on October 21, your digital video recorder — or at least a DVR like yours — knocked Twitter off the internet. Someone used your DVR, along with millions of insecure webcams, routers, and other connected devices, to launch an attack that started a chain reaction, resulting in Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, and many sites going off the internet. You probably didn’t realize that your DVR had that kind of power. But it does.
A future in which homeowners display “Beware of Drone” signs on their property may not be too far off. As CNN reports, Sunflower Labs, a startup based in Silicon Valley and Zurich, Switzerland, plans to beta test their drone-based home security system halfway through 2017.
In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Administration, the installation of mass surveillance equipment in cities across Europe, and disclosure of multiple massive user data leaks, people have been forced to confront the dystopian reality that big government has stepped into the role of Big Brother. What has been less discussed is the proliferation of little brothers, corporations that closely monitor their workers as a matter of course, using a variety of new technologies.