Grant Gross
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Grant Gross
U.S. SEC Targets Unregulated Cryptocurrency Exchanges
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission could soon crack down on unregulated cryptocurrency trading platforms after the agency sent a strongly worded warning to them this week.
The SEC warned that unregulated online trading platforms may be misleading investors by calling themselves “exchanges,” which implies federal oversight. An SEC-related securities exchange, among other safeguards, has rules designed to prevent fraud and other manipulative practices, the SEC said in an advisory issued Wednesday.
The SEC advisory served as much as a warning to investors using cryptocurrency trading platforms as to the platforms themselves.
“The SEC staff has concerns that many online trading platforms appear to investors as SEC-registered and regulated marketplaces when they are not,” the advisory said. “Many platforms refer to themselves as ‘exchanges,’ which can give the misimpression to investors that they are regulated or meet the regulatory standards of a national securities exchange.”
The SEC does not review the trading protocols used by unregulated trading platforms, it said. “Although some of these platforms claim to use strict standards to pick only high-quality digital assets to trade, the SEC does not review these standards or the digital assets that the platforms select, and the so-called standards should Continue reading
The Week in Internet News: Working Toward a Better Internet
Fixing the Internet: Is the Internet broken? Politico’s EU site looks at the work of the Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network, which met in Ottawa, Canada, last week to discuss how to fix problems like poor cybersecurity, inaccurate information spread on social media, and other bad behavior. The Internet Society covered the first day of the Ottawa event.
The hills are alive with the sound of broadband: Motherboard has a story about the Los Angeles Community Broadband Project, which plans to deliver wireless broadband to parts of the city using inexpensive equipment and dish-shaped antennas on hilltops and rooftops.
AI joins the force: The Verge has a long story about a secretive AI-assisted policing effort that started in 2012 as a partnership between the New Orleans Police and Palantir Technologies, a data-mining company founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital firm. The program apparently used AI technologies for predictive policing, a controversial practice used to trace suspects’ ties to other gang members, analyze social media, and predict the likelihood targeted people would commit violence or become a victim. Science Magazine also has a story examining predictive policing.
Women wary of Blockchain bros: The New York Continue reading
Information Gatekeeping: Not a Laughing Matter
There’s a joke that goes something like this: How do you make a little money in the online news business?
The punchline: Start with a huge pile of money, and work your way down from there.
It seems the same joke would work for the online comedy business, judging by the layoff news coming out of Funny or Die in January. Recently, Splitsider.com published an interesting Q&A with comedy veteran Matt Klinman, and he talked about the woes of online comedy outlets.
Klinman focused his ire on Facebook and its role as an information gatekeeper, in which the site determines what comedy clips to show each of its users. But much of his criticism could have just as easily been targeted at a handful of other online gatekeepers that point Internet users to a huge percentage of the original content that’s out there.
As Klinman says about Facebook, these services have created their own “centrally designed Internet” in which they serve as “our editor and our boss. They hide behind algorithms that they change constantly.”
As a thrice-laid-off online journalist, I can sympathize. I’m pretty sure I can’t blame any of the current gatekeepers for my 2002 layoff Continue reading
International Cooperation Needed to Create an “Increasingly Beneficial Internet”
New norms of behavior are needed for Internet users, and it’s time for governments, companies, other organizations, and individuals to work together to define those standards, Internet advocates say.
Even as the Internet gives more and more people new ways to express themselves and improve their standard of living, it also creates problems that demand international and multistakeholder cooperation, speakers at the Global Internet and Jurisdiction Conference 2018 in Ottawa, Canada, said Monday.
The Internet has driven forward the ideas of globalization and equal opportunity for everyone, but technological advances have also created complexity that many people weren’t prepared for, said Kathy Brown, president and CEO of Internet Society.
“We now face enormous challenges as the pace of change has accelerated faster than did our human institutions, societal and existing global agreements,” she said during the first day of the conference.
Many governments have looked toward heavy regulation and censorship as a way to deal with this complex environment, Brown added.
Governments in some countries “are doubling down on what they know how to do — shut it down, shut it off, censor users, regulate creators,” she added. “The global Internet community, itself, is in danger of splintering into predictable commercial, Continue reading
The Week in Internet News: Blockchain Fights Slavery in the Seafood Industry
Blockchain vs. slavery: Provenance, a London NGO, is using Blockchain to add transparency to seafood supply chains, in an effort to reduce the practice of slavery in the seafood industry in Southeast Asia. Blockchain can create end-to-end traceability for seafood products by storing data on all kinds of transactional history. This can help NGOs track suppliers using slaves and abusive employment practices, reports Forbes.
AI joins the HR team: Artificial Intelligence may soon be assisting human resources departments, Inc. reports. Spoke, an AI startup, learns information about the deploying company and answers worker questions through a chatbot. Companies installing Spoke can program it with answers to the most-asked employee questions, but then the service can learn more about the company as time goes on. The Spoke software can also handle meeting room requests and equipment reservations, and it can prioritize IT requests.
The dark side of AI: Many AI experts are concerned about its malicious uses, including the sci-fi sounding scenarios of swarms of micro drones and autonomous weapons. Using AI to automate security tasks could also expand existing surveillance, persuasion, and deception threats, according to a new report, detailed on CNBC.com and in Motherboard.
Can SIM cards improve Continue reading
The Cost of Cybercrime
Most people paying attention would expect that the cost of cybercrime has gone up in recent years. But a new report has put a number on it: Worldwide cybercrime costs an estimated $600 billion USD a year.
That’s up from $500 billion USD in 2014, the last time security vendor McAfee and think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies released a similar study. The new estimate amounts to 0.8 percent of global GDP, up from 0.7 percent in 2014.
“Cybercrime is relentless, undiminished, and unlikely to stop,” writes report author James Lewis, senior vice president at CSIS. “It is just too easy and too rewarding, and the chances of being caught and punished are perceived as being too low.”
Lewis points to poorly-protected IoT devices as a particular problem. Insecure IoT devices “provide new, easy approaches to steal personal information or gain access to valuable data or networks,” he writes. They also power botnets that can create massive denial-of-service attacks.
Among the other reasons for the growth in the cost of cybercrime:
- Cybercriminals are embracing new attack technologies.
- Many new Internet users come from countries with weak cybersecurity.
- Online crime is becoming easier through cybercrime-as-a-service Continue reading
The Week in Internet News: Can Blockchain Improve IoT?
Blockchain merges with IoT? Could Blockchain technology help the Internet of Things become more resilient? IBM thinks so. The company is exploring ways to use Blockchain to build trust between devices and to accelerate transactions on the IoT. EETimes explores the issue.
Grand Theft IoT: Someone involved in the online community for the video game, “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” has spun up a new botnet made up of IoT devices, according to security firm Radware. For the price of $20, the botnet can supposedly launch a 300gbps Distributed Denial of Service attack, reports Motherboard.
AI on the rise: Nearly after of all CIOs have plans to implement artificial intelligence in the future, according to a recent Gartner survey. The IT research firm recommends that companies rolling out AI projects aim low to start, and focus augmenting workers instead of replacing them, according to a story on TechRepublic.
Where the jobs are: For a time, it appeared that actual deployments of Blockchain seemed to be lagging behind the buzz. But that appears to be changing, with Blockchain developers now in high demand, TechCrunch reports. Blockchain jobs are the second fastest growing category in the labor market, with 14 job openings Continue reading