UNESCO Just Named 42 New World Heritage Sites. "Among the newly inscribed group are an archaeological cemetery site in South Korea, a roadside inn in Iran, and a famed hop-growing region in Czechia."
Cities Should Act NOW to Ban Predictive Policing
EFF: “Sound Thinking, the company behind ShotSpotter—an acoustic gunshot detection technology that is rife with problems—is reportedly buying Geolitica, the company behind PredPol, a predictive policing technology known to exacerbate inequalitiesby directing police to already massively surveilled communities.
Sound Thinking acquired the other major predictive policing technology—Hunchlab—in 2018. This consolidation of harmful and flawed technologies means it’s even more critical for cities to move swiftly to ban the harmful tactics of both of these technologies. ShotSpotter is currently linked to over 100 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. PredPol, on the other hand, was used in around 38 cities in 2021 (this may be much higher now).
Shotspotter’s acquisition of Hunchlab already lead the company to claim that the tools work “hand in hand;” a 2018 press release made clear that predictive policing would be offered as an add-on product, and claimed that the integration of the two would “enable it to update predictive models and patrol missions in real time.” When companies like Sound Thinking and Geolitica merge and bundle their products, it becomes much easier for cities who purchase one harmful technology to end up deploying a suite of them without meaningful oversight, transparency, or control by elected officials or the public. Axon, for instance, was criticized by academics, attorneys, activists, and its own ethics board for their intention to put tasers on indoor drones. Now the company has announced its acquisition of Sky-Hero, which makes small tactical UAVS–a sign that they may be willing to restart the drone taser program that led a good portion of their ethics board to resign. Mergers can be a sign of future ambitions…”
Your Online Account May Have Been Breached? Don’t Just Sit There. Do Something.
WSJ via MSN: “How do consumers respond when their online accounts are exposed to hackers? Many of them simply don’t. Data breaches at major firms have become all too common, with more than 110 million user accounts exposed in just the second quarter of 2023. Yet our research found that nearly two-thirds of U.S. consumers would return to a site after they were notified of a breach—with only the bare minimum of precautions, like changing their passwords. Almost a quarter of the roughly 200 people we surveyed said they would return to the compromised website with no changes to their behavior at all.
Only 10% said they wouldn’t go back. Even people who had cybersecurity training within the past 90 days—in other words, people who should be primed to protect themselves—took risks. In this subsequent study, over a quarter of roughly 500 people said they would return to the breached website while taking the absolute minimum security measures, and only about 9% would take more-complicated steps such as setting up two-factor authentication. And they would do that only if they experienced real financial consequences, like fraudulent charges on their credit cards. Why wouldn’t people protect themselves?
Many of the consumers we surveyed believed that there were few—if any—alternatives to the websites they used frequently, and all websites seemed to be affected by data breaches. Why bother beefing up security? Likewise, some people said they would stick with a compromised site because they had put so much time and effort into their presence on it—a classic sunk-cost fallacy…”
