Category: Technology

Lawmaker Proposes to Ban AI and Its Discriminatory Impact

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.governing.com/security/Lawmaker-Proposes-to-Ban-AI-and-Its-Discriminatory-Impact.html

Excerpt:

The Washington state Legislature, which has proposed legislation in the past to tackle issues such as data privacy and the use of facial recognition tech, is now reviewing a bill that would regulate the use of “automated decision systems” and AI technology within state government.

According to the bill, these systems use algorithms to analyze data to help make or support decisions that could result in discrimination against different groups or make decisions that could negatively impact constitutional or legal rights.

As a result, Senate Bill 5116 aims to regulate these systems to prevent discrimination and ban government agencies from using AI tech to profile individuals in public areas.

Author(s): KATYA MARURI, GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY

Publication Date: 26 February 2021

Publication Site: Governing

Citi Can’t Have Its $900 Million Back

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-can-t-have-its-900-million-back

Excerpt:

I wonder how many Highly Regulated Excel Spreadsheets there are in the financial industry. Thousands, surely. There you are, doing your job, in your Highly Regulated Excel Spreadsheet. And you get some result you don’t like and you say, well, I dunno, I’ll just multiply everything by 1.02, that seems fine. And then years later regulators are like, no no no, that was a Highly Regulated Excel Spreadsheet, the column labels were sacrosanct, you can’t just type whatever you want there. But of course you could just type whatever you wanted there, because it was in Excel and that’s how Excel works.

Author(s): Matt Levine

Publication Date: 17 February 2021

Publication Site: Bloomberg

North Korea Reportedly Tried to Hack Pfizer Servers to Steal Coronavirus Vaccine

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/north-korea-kim-jong-un-hack-steal-pfizer-coronavirus-covid-vaccine.html

Excerpt:

North Korea, along with the usual suspects of Russia and China, have all been accused of trying to swipe vaccine data from pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and others. “Although it claims to be free of the virus, North Korea has requested coronavirus vaccines and is set to receive nearly two million doses of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, according to the Gavi Alliance, part of the United Nations-backed Covax effort which aims to deliver vaccines to the world’s most vulnerable people,” the Washington Post reports. “The statement by South Korean officials is the latest in a string of accusations against North Korean hackers for attempting to steal vaccine technology, highlighting Pyongyang’s ongoing campaign to obtain sensitive information through nefarious means and its growing cyber capabilities.”

Author(s): Elliot Hannon

Publication Date: 16 February 2021

Publication Site: Slate

Improving on perfection — where next for the spreadsheet?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://medium.com/dawn-capital/improving-on-perfection-where-next-for-the-spreadsheet-7e15c99e7e5c

Graphic:

Excerpt:

The sheer versatility and accessibility of the spreadsheet has made it the Swiss Army Knife of modern day productivity, inserting itself into almost every workflow across every industry. Over the past three decades, spreadsheets have become the de facto way for information to be collected, distributed and analysed.

But, as our operational and computational needs become ever greater, the limits of Excel become clear, and opportunities emerge for companies and tools to replace the spreadsheet.

Author(s): Dawn Capital

Publication Date: 16 December 2021

Publication Site: Medium

Spreadsheet Wars: Excel vs Lotus 1-2-3

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://archive.org/details/CC606_spreadsheet_wars

Excerpt:

Excel now dominates the spreadsheet world, but once upon a time there was actual competition among spreadsheet products. This program looks at Quattro 1.0, Allways 1.0, Lotus 1-2-3 3.0, Ashton-Tate’s Full Impact, and Excel 2.1. Guests include Gary Kildall, Jan Lewis, and Jared Taylor of PC Magazine. Originally broadcast in 1988.

Author(s): PBS – Computer Chronicles

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Chronicles

Publication Date: 1988

Publication Site: PBS at archive.org

When Adobe Stopped Flash Content From Running It Also Stopped A Chinese Railroad

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://jalopnik.com/when-adobe-stopped-flash-content-from-running-it-also-s-1846109630

Excerpt:

Adobe’s Flash, the web browser plug-in that powered so very many crappy games, confusing interfaces, and animated icons of the early web like Homestar Runneris now finally gone, after a long, slow, protracted death. For most of us, this just means that some goofy webgame you searched for out of misplaced nostalgia will no longer run. For a select few in China, though, the death of Flash meant being late to work, because the city of Dalian in northern China was running their railroad system on it.Yes, a railroad, run on Flash, the same thing used to run “free online casinos” and knockoff Breakout games in mortgage re-fi ads.

….

The railroad’s technicians did get everything back up and running, but the way they did this is fascinating, too. They didn’t switch the rail management system to some other, more modern codebase or software installation; instead, they installed a pirated version of Flash that was still operational. The knockoff version seems to be known as “Ghost Version.”

Author(s): Jason Torchinsky

Publication Date: 22 January 2021

Publication Site: Jalopnik

People are fed up with broken vaccine appointment tools — so they’re building their own

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/01/1016725/people-are-building-their-own-vaccine-appointment-tools/

Excerpt:

That very day, January 2, Craver worked from 3 in the afternoon until 11:30 at night to create Covid19 Vaccine TX, a site listing possible vaccination locations across the state. As a digital product designer, she knew that a site like this would have to be easy to read, intuitive to navigate, and quick to update. The idea was that people could upload information about vaccination sites, with each entry answering three questions: Was the vaccine available that day? Was the location taking appointments? Was there a wait list?

Craver loaded the project on the cloud-based spreadsheet service Airtable, posted a link on Reddit, and went to bed. When she woke up the next morning at 7 a.m., one entry was filled out. “At least somebody cares,” she remembers thinking. She spent the rest of the day manually inserting information for about 1,400 locations in the state. “I’ve been going nonstop since,” she says, estimating that she puts in about 40 hours of her free time every week to maintain the site. It has received 50,000 total visitors since launch.

Author(s): Tanya Basu

Publication Date: 1 February 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review