Fri, 06/11/2021
Welcome to ‘Tech Roundup,’ where we highlight some of the most significant/thought-provoking news items from the world of tech, especially at the nexus of law and technology. We are particularly interested in foregrounding tech news that is happening in Nebraska, and our region more broadly. If you have a news item you would like to see in the Roundup, please email neil.rutledge@unl.edu.
Local/Regional
Russian ransomware attack against JBS affects Grand Island, cattlemen
KHGI/KFXL
- The world's largest meatpacker, and Grand Island's top employer, appears to be the victim of a Russian ransomware attack.
- "I'm really interested to see how long the impact is going to be," said Elliott Dennis, a livestock economist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He said much depends on how long the shutdown lasts. The day after the attack saw a 20 percent drop in the nation's daily cattle slaughter.
'Silicon Prairie' Ready for Quantum Leap
Campus Technology
- The National Science Foundation is betting on the Cornhusker State to help lead a high-stakes era of innovation as America gets ready for next-generation computer and security technology.
- That bet takes the form of a $20 million grant, spread over 5 years, to be shared by four universities in Nebraska. The foundation's program was created to stimulate competitive research that targets scientists in certain areas -- currently 25 states and three U.S. territories -- who have the ambition and expertise to conduct field-changing research but who have been typically overlooked in favor of larger centers on the coasts.
newsy
- Agriculture has been seeing the impacts of climate change for years. Experts say cover crops can help fight climate change because they capture carbon from the atmosphere.
- "If we have well-established cover crops, then the cover crops can withstand intense rainstorms because the rainstorm is going to cause what? Is going to cause a lot of erosion," Humberto Blanco, an agronomy and horticulture professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said. "So it can mitigate that, the effects of climate change."
University works with Native Americans to improve nutrition, fight disease
Nebraska Today
- An effort to tackle health challenges and improve nutrition among Native Americans, who suffer disproportionately from a variety of diseases, encompasses several University of Nebraska–Lincoln research and extension initiatives across the country that range from training future health care workers to promoting production of traditional tribal crops.
- To achieve this goal, researchers and extension educators work directly with the communities they serve and incorporate important cultural elements into programs that encourage health and wellness.
Mag-neato: Team advances understanding, control of magnetic droplets
Nebraska Today
- In a series of theory-backed experiments and simulations recently detailed in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists including Robert Streubel, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, showed that a droplet containing magnetic and non-magnetic nanoparticles could be created such that it produces stronger or more responsive magnetism in some directions that others.
- Refining control over the size and distribution of those patches might eventually allow for, say, the design of miniature liquid robots whose droplet-composed components could be independently magnetically manipulated. It might also lend itself to adaptive lenses or mirrors, Streubel said, allowing engineers to modify the refraction or reflection of light on the fly by magnetically altering the opacity or location of individual droplets.
Quiñones puts coding expertise, global perspectives to use
Nebraska Today
- Quiñones is using a computer vision technique called co-segmentation to focus on one plant throughout many images and separate the plant from the background. She develops algorithms to couple co-segmentation and plant phenotyping to identify plant phenotypes more accurately in large data image sets.
- She said she expects that the algorithms will help agronomists and plant scientists develop plants more resilient to drought, frost and other changes in the climate and environment.
Local Startup Spotlight
- “Bulu creates private label Subscription Box solutions ranging from fulfillment to software solutions from small to big brands like Disney, Clorox and Buzzfeed. Created in 2011 and launched in 2012, and pioneering the Subscription Box industry, our flagship program Bulu Box was one of the first Subscription Boxes to the market.”
National/International
Google Seeks to Break Vicious Cycle of Online Slander
New York Times
- For many years, the vicious cycle has spun: Websites solicit lurid, unverified complaints about supposed cheaters, sexual predators, deadbeats and scammers. People slander their enemies. The anonymous posts appear high in Google results for the names of victims. Then the websites charge the victims thousands of dollars to take the posts down.
- The company plans to change its search algorithm to prevent websites, which operate under domains like BadGirlReport.date and PredatorsAlert.us, from appearing in the list of results when someone searches for a person’s name.
- Google also recently created a new concept it calls “known victims.” When people report to the company that they have been attacked on sites that charge to remove posts, Google will automatically suppress similar content when their names are searched for.
Sanctions for Trade Secret Thieves Part of Senate-Passed Bill
Bloomberg Law
- A bill aimed at boosting U.S. competition with China that the Senate passed overwhelmingly includes a requirement for the president to sanction foreign trade secrets thieves.
- Every six months, the president must report to Congress foreign companies or individuals engaged in trade secrets theft likely to cause “significant threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economic health or financial stability of the United States.”
- The president must then impose at least five sanctions on those entities from a list of 12, including freezing U.S.-based assets, barring transactions with U.S. banks, and securing U.S. government contracts.
Pipeline Investigation Upends Idea That Bitcoin Is Untraceable
New York Times
- The F.B.I.’s recovery of Bitcoins paid in the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack showed cryptocurrencies are not as hard to track as it might seem.
- For the growing community of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investors, the fact that federal investigators had tracked the ransom as it moved through at least 23 different electronic accounts belonging to DarkSide, the hacking collective, before accessing one account showed that law enforcement was growing along with the industry.
Amazon Faces Possible $425 Million EU Privacy Fine
Wall Street Journal
- A European Union privacy regulator has proposed a fine of more than $425 million against Amazon.com Inc., part of a process that could yield the biggest-yet penalty under the bloc’s privacy law, people familiar with the matter said.
- The Luxembourg case relates to alleged violations of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, linked to Amazon’s collection and use of personal data.
Apple’s Moves to Tighten Flow of User Data Leave Advertisers Anxious
Wall Street Journal
- Digital advertisers are studying new Apple Inc. measures that they fear will limit access to data about users, changes industry participants see as an escalation of the tech giant’s crackdown in the name of consumer privacy.
- Apple’s changes, unveiled during its developer conference Monday, threaten to restrict companies’ abilities to track users’ web behavior and gather information on them from third parties such as data brokers. The announcement comes months after Apple’s curbs on in-app tracking roiled the digital-ad industry, and the changes will be part of a new version of Apple’s operating system this fall.
Why China’s Cracking Down Now on Education-Tech Firms: QuickTake
Bloomberg Law
- China’s private education companies have for years been the darlings of investors from New York to Shanghai, building a $100 billion industry on the promise of the world’s largest and arguably most-competitive schooling system.
- The industry’s rise, and potential fall, hinges on two of the most powerful -- and anxiety-inducing -- forces in China today: the pursuit of wealth and status, and the Communist Party’s enduring obsession with maintaining social order.
The Economist
- Following a public comment period, the Federal Trade Commission has approved a final administrative consent order against Amazon, which has agreed to pay more than $61.7 million to settle charges that it failed to pay Amazon Flex drivers the full amount of tips they received from Amazon customers over a two and a half year period.
- The FTC’s complaint alleges that Amazon also assured its customers that 100 percent of any tips they paid would go to the driver. According to the complaint, the company stopped the challenged conduct only after becoming aware of the FTC’s investigation in 2019.
Facebook remote working plan extended to all staff for long term
BBC
- Facebook will let all employees who can work away from the office do so after the Covid pandemic is over. The company has told employees "anyone whose role can be done remotely can request remote work".
- Rival big tech firms Apple and Google have recently reversed pandemic working conditions, telling staff to return to the office in the coming months.
US delays tariffs in 'tech tax' row
BBC
- The US has announced and immediately suspended tariffs on about $2bn (£1.4bn) of imports in retaliation for taxes on its tech firms.
- It comes after a year-long US investigation into digital services taxes put in place by the six countries, which tax tech firms on their revenues, rather than profits.
America’s wary approval of an Alzheimer’s drug offers hope to millions
The Economist
- News that America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted conditional approval to a new drug, aducanumab, to be marketed as Aduhelm, for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, has understandably been greeted as a huge breakthrough.
- But the benefits it will offer remain uncertain, and the FDA’s decision is controversial.
Nebraska Governance and Technology Center
Tech Refactored Ep. 23 - Patents: The Good, The Bad, and COVID Vaccine
- Christal Sheppard and Sam Zyontz join Tech Refactored again to discuss patents: what they are, how they work, and how they impact innovation. Of course, we can't cover patents without discussion of the COVID vaccine and patent waivers in the news recently.
What We Are Reading
Elsbeth Magilton, Executive Director of the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center, highlighted this story regarding a milestone in unmanned aviation:
US Navy, Boeing conduct first-ever aerial refueling with unmanned tanker
Defense News
- The U.S. Navy conducted its first-ever aerial refueling between a manned aircraft and an unmanned tanker on June 4, with a Boeing-owned MQ-25 Stingray test vehicle performing its first midair tanking mission with a Navy F/A-18E-F Super Hornet.
- Once fielded, the MQ-25 will operate from aircraft carriers, refueling the air wing operating at sea and relieving the Super Hornet fleet of the tanking mission, which the Navy has said can at times account for more than one-third of Super Hornet flight hours during carrier air wing operations.
Elsbeth offered this reflection:
“This is an impressive proof case for crewed and uncrewed team missions. The proximity of flight is wild - these are the kind of small incremental advances that may seem inconsequential on their own, but in the aggregate change modern capabilities.”
Returning to a US Supreme Court decision that we highlighted last week, Justin Firestone, Assistant Professor of Practice in the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management and in the Department of Computer Science and Faculty at the NGTC offered his perspective on Van Buren v. United States. That decision concerned the Computer Fraud and Abuses Act of 1986 (CFAA):
Supreme Court of the United States
- As Christiana Wayne, writing for Lawfare, explained: “Ruling against the government, the justices held 6-3 that an individual who uses an authorized computer to access permissible areas of the computer—such as files, folders and databases—does not violate the “exceeds authorized access” clause of the CFAA, even if the individual uses the accessed information for a prohibited purpose.”
Firestone offered this perspective:
“So, we can all thank SCOTUS for decriminalizing the use of a work laptop to send personal emails, but by focusing so much on the word ‘so’ and avoiding the key technical issues regarding access and authorization, the details and nuances of which are so critical to understanding the contours of the CFAA, the opinion might have pleased Peter Gabriel so much more than anyone else.”
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