Tech Roundup - June 25, 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

5 companies named to Lincoln startup program

Lincoln Journal Star

• Five startup companies have been named to participate in this year's gBETA Lincoln program.
• The program which began June 3, is free for the companies and provides them with mentors and allows them to hone their business plans so they can pitch to investors at the gBETA Lincoln Pitch Night on July 28.
• The five companies are:

○     Corral Technologies: provides ranchers with a virtual fencing system that helps track and move cattle remotely;

○     Job Share Connect: provides software that helps people seeking job-sharing arrangements with companies that offer them;

○     Plug Sports: helps college athletic programs find athletes who have been overlooked in the traditional recruiting process;

○     Sub Guru: a mobile app that helps fitness centers coordinate substitute instructors for classes;

○     VIZN Stats: an app baseball coaches can use to evaluate and analyze their players.

 

Husker researchers propel NU to top 100 patents finish

Nebraska Today

• For the fourth consecutive year, the University of Nebraska system is ranked among the top 100 academic institutions worldwide in earning U.S. patents.
• A newly released report from the National Academy of Inventors and Intellectual Property Owners Association lists the NU system as tied at No. 77.

 

Prairie Roots monthly video magazine debuts on Silicon Prairie News

Silicon Prairie News

• “SPN is excited to launch this summer partnership with Prairie Roots. June, July and August will feature a new video magazine celebrating the people creating the future of Nebraska.”
• “We seek to tell the stories of breakthrough people so others who share their aspirations can discover, learn from, and find ways to collaborate with them. Instead of trying to launch a whole new empire, we’re doing it with an amazing array of production partners who are already producing compelling stories.”

 

Hay helps rural Nebraskans explore clean energy options

Nebraska Today

• Since 2007, John Hay has conducted workshops through Nebraska Extension to educate farmers, homeowners and rural business owners on the process of installing clean energy technology.
• During the in-person and online workshops, participants learn to run cost-analysis models, which evaluate installation, energy usage options, return value and more.

 

$960K USDA grant to advance research on crop, livestock traits

Nebraska Today

• The University of Nebraska–Lincoln and three partner institutions have received nearly $1 million to expand the Agricultural Genome to Phenome Initiative.
• The initiative aims to increase understanding of how genetic code affects physical and behavioral traits — or phenotypes — in crops and livestock.
• Ultimately, the project could lead to the speedier development of disease-, weather- and pest-resistant crops and livestock, which would directly benefit both agricultural producers and consumers.

 

Loophire secures $300,000 funding in seed round

Silicon Prairie News

• In its first open round of seed funding, Omaha startup Loophire recently secured an investment of $300,000 from Nebraska Angels to support the disruptive recruitment model that Loophire CEO and founder Chris Jones believes will shake up the recruitment industry.
• Under the Loophire model, employers only pay for the applicants they want to contact, and jobseekers can better discover what they’re looking for in a position and company, as Loophire provides applicants with an analysis of their job qualifications and the results of a personality test. At this point, Loophire introduces each job seeker to the companies that best match their skills, experiences and goals.

 

Local Startup Spotlight

VIDANYX

• “VidaNyx offers cloud based digital video evidence management solutions. The first release is designed for the specific needs of Child Advocacy Centers, to provide technology innovation that supports the victims of childhood sexual assault and abuse in a collective effort with the National Children’s Alliance, Project Harmony, FBI, and an advisory council with expert attorneys, prosecutors, therapists, forensic interviewers, Child Advocacy Centers across the U.S., Government Officials and Philanthropists.”

 

National/International

‘Grenade’ Antitrust Bill Advances

Bloomberg Law

• The House Judiciary Committee approved an antitrust bill that would force large technology companies like Amazon to exit certain businesses, a signature proposal within a package of measures aimed at reining in the companies and spurring competition in digital markets.
• Taken together, the bills represent the beginnings of an effort in Congress to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement against tech platforms by giving competition officials at the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission more tools to challenge conduct by the companies.
• “This is a very extreme measure,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who represents part of Silicon Valley, and voted against the proposal. The bill “would take a grenade and just roll it into the tech economy and just blow it up,” she said.

 

Protecting the Critical of Critical: What Is Systemically Important Critical Infrastructure?

Lawfare

• Writing for Lawfare, Tasha Jhangiani and Graham Kennis argue that “Much of the discussion around the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack has obscured a key point: The U.S. government does not have a reliable method to identify, support and secure the most ‘critical of critical’ infrastructure.”
• According to the authors, “The U.S. government is not completely aware of what is critical—as in which companies’ disruption could have devastating or cascading consequences for the economy, national security, or public health and safety.”

 

Progress on Transatlantic Data Transfers? The Picture After the US-EU Summit

Lawfare

• President Biden’s June 15 summit meeting in Brussels with EU leadership put cooperation on technology and trade at the forefront of the transatlantic relationship, but it did not yield a breakthrough in the ongoing negotiations to restore data transfers from Europe to the United States to a stable and durable footing.
• The negotiations began last year following the invalidation of the US-EU Privacy Shield Framework by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in its Schrems II judgment. That ruling found that U.S. surveillance law offered insufficient judicial protection for Europeans who suspected the U.S. National Security Agency had acquired their personal data, and has put the U.S. government on the spot to develop an improved system of redress.

 

Internet Entropy

Lawfare

• A handful of “edge computing providers” support many of the world’s most visited websites, and they have, for the most part, made using the internet snappier and less frustrating.
• However, when the accessibility of major sites depends on the performance of a single provider, that provider becomes a single point of failure for a broad swath of the internet. A difficult trade-off emerges, whereby websites utilizing edge computing tend to work better the vast majority of the time—but when they fail, they fail en masse. A comparatively stronger basket now holds all the eggs.

 

Ransomware Threat and Cybersecurity Regulation: What’s Next?

Bloomberg Law

• Recent large-scale ransomware attacks are increasing calls for greater federal cybersecurity regulation. Freshfield Bruckhaus Deringer attorneys Brock Dahl and Boris Feldman say that prohibiting ransomware payments, making information-sharing about attacks mandatory, and mandating security measures are ideas that seem to be gaining traction among policy makers and companies should prepare.

 

Baltimore Police Plane Data Search Ruled Invasion of Privacy

Bloomberg Law

• Baltimore’s police department lost its bid to block a lawsuit over surveillance planes in a Fourth Circuit ruling that found searching data collected by the planes amounts to an unconstitutional invasion of privacy.
• At issue is how much information the police planes equipped with cameras can collect on people. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said in a Thursday ruling that the planes go beyond other surveillance systems, like security cameras on city streets or police stakeouts at a home.

 

UK antitrust watchdog investigating Amazon and Google over fake reviews

The Verge

• The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is probing whether Amazon and Google broke consumer laws by failing to take action against fake reviews on their sites, the agency announced Friday.
• “We are investigating concerns that Amazon and Google have not been doing enough to prevent or remove fake reviews to protect customers and honest businesses,” Andrea Coscelli, the CMA’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Our worry is that millions of online shoppers could be misled by reading fake reviews and then spending their money based on those recommendations.”s.

 

Business is booming as regulators relax drone laws

The Economist

• A gradual relaxation of the strictures that aviation authorities, being naturally cautious about all these newfangled flying machines taking to the sky, have imposed on the industry, (is helping to expand the growth in uncrewed aerial vehicles).
• The value of this market reached $22.5bn last year, according to Drone Industry Insights, a German research firm with its eye on the business. By 2025 that figure is expected to exceed $42bn.

 

Crackonosh: How hackers are using gamers to become crypto-rich

BBC

• Gamers are being duped into helping hackers become rich, after downloading games laced with hidden malware.
• Versions of Grand Theft Auto V, NBA 2K19, and Pro Evolution Soccer 2018 are being given away free in forums.
• But hidden inside the code of these games is a piece of crypto-mining malware called Crackonosh, which secretly generates digital money once the game has been downloaded.

 

Apple claims 'sideloading' apps is 'serious' security risk

BBC

• Apple claims that allowing developers to distribute apps outside its official App Store would "expose users to serious security risks".
• A new report from the company argues strongly against allowing so-called sideloading of apps.The report suggests a range of hypothetical problems including ransomware and financial scams.
• It comes as Apple is under pressure from regulators and some developers over its App Store.

 

What We Are Reading

Elana Zeide, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Nebraska College of Law, responded to a recent U.S. Supreme Court Decision, Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., a case addressing the scope of student free-speech rights on online platforms.

 

Supreme Court sides with cheerleader who wrote profane social media post slamming her school

USA Today

• The Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with a former cheerleader who excoriated her school in a profanity-laced post on social media, holding that the punishment of her off-campus speech violated the First Amendment.
• The 8-1 ruling left unresolved the broader question of when schools may regulate off-campus speech and when such punishment is off-limits.

Zeide offered this reaction:

"The Supreme Court found that this student had free speech rights regarding off-campus speech that schools cannot encroach upon. The ruling is very narrow - primarily permitting students to make vulgar comments that rise to the level of harassment, bullying, or threats. But it is nevertheless a crucial step forward.

So much of students’ communication and expression today occurs out-of-school through social media or mobile communication apps. A ruling that made schools responsible for policing all this communication would not just be impracticable, but also risk chilling students’ intellectual, social, and civic development. The court recognized this in noting three factors that militate against school supervision of students’ off-campus speech: that doing so is primarily the role of parents rather than administrators, that continual surveillance undermines traditional free speech values, and that schools play an important role in teaching students that unpopular speech deserves constitutional protection."

 

 

Özgür M. Araz, Associate Professor of Supply Chain Management and Analytics at the University of Nebraska College of Business, commented on the following article regarding the placement of Electric Vehicle Chargers:

We Need to Build More EV Chargers, but Where?

Car and Driver

• An EV charging network is popping up across the country, driven by efforts from private companies and various government initiatives. But where will all those chargers go?
• Not every government or charging network is prioritizing equitable placement of charge stations. If you look at a map of existing chargers in the United States, there are often (depending on the station provider) big gaps in the middle of the country, especially in the upper Midwest and through the Rockies. That could be a signal that some of the biggest network providers, including ChargePoint and Electrify America, have so far focused on putting chargers where lots of people (and EVs) already go.

Özgür offered the following perspective:

“Yes, locating chargers is more complex than the accessibility problem. Infrastructure development for the emerging EV market is going to be a key policy concern and as new financial resources are made available to develop that, it will be important to understand demand across different locations and users’ expectations. Balancing driver waiting time expectations and maximum access to chargers with limited budget will be key. On the other hand, charger technology is also developing rapidly - therefore technology choice is another concern in designing such service networks.”

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