Did Putin Direct Russian Hacking?

And Other Big Questions. This article in The Atlantic, dated Jan. 6, after a “declassified version of a highly classified assessment” was released, where the U.S. intelligence community laid out its judgment that “Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” with the specific goal of harming Hillary Clinton’s “electability and potential presidency.” The report went on: “We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

Who else has been hacked?
According to the article, Thomas Rid, writing in Esquire in October, noted that Russia began hacking the U.S. as early as 1996, five years after the demise of the Soviet Union, and added that the DNC hack concealed an even bigger prize for the Russians: the National Security Agency, whose secret files were dumped this August on Github and other file-sharing sites.

Then there is Germany. In May, BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, said hackers linked to the Russian government had targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party, as well as German state computers. Read the article for more details.

John Oliver posted about this at length recently, and the question of whether Putin directed Russian hacking is a topic that one student is posing for her tech briefing.  I post it here for your viewing pleasure.

Can Airbnb and Lyft Finally Get Americans to Trust Each Other?

But can we trust them?

One student is investigating racial bias in Airbnb.  Here is a Dec., 2016 HBR paper by Ray Firman and Michael Luca, both of Harvard University, on Fixing Discrimination in Online Marketplaces


It begins:

The first generation of online marketplaces, including eBay, Amazon, and Priceline, made it hard for sellers to discriminate. Transactions were conducted with relative anonymity. A user could negotiate a purchase without providing any identifying information until the seller had agreed to the deal. As a New Yorker cartoon famously put it, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” 

Except that platforms—and now their users—do know whether you’re black or white, male or female, human or canine [my emphasis]. And the internet has recently been revealed as a source of discrimination, not an end to it: With their identities uncovered, disadvantaged groups face many of the same challenges they have long confronted in the off-line world, sometimes made worse by a lack of regulation, the salience photos give to race and gender, and the fact that would-be discriminators can act without ever personally confronting their victims.

What happened, and what can we do about it?  Read the article to find out about smarter market design principles to consider.

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Another article written two years earlier exclaims, How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other.  It argues that he sharing economy has come on so quickly and powerfully that regulators and economists are still grappling to understand its impact (see article above). But one consequence is already clear: Many of these companies have us engaging in behaviors that would have seemed unthinkably foolhardy as recently as five years ago.

We are hopping into strangers’ cars (Lyft, Sidecar, Uber), welcoming them into our spare rooms (Airbnb), dropping our dogs off at their houses (DogVacay, Rover), and eating food in their dining rooms (Feastly). We are letting them rent our cars (RelayRides, Getaround), our boats (Boatbound), our houses (HomeAway), and our power tools (Zilok). We are entrusting complete strangers with our most valuable possessions, our personal experiences—and our very lives. In the process, we are entering a new era of Internet-enabled intimacy.

Do you agree or is this unregulated market only useful for those who are allowed in?

IoT @ Microsoft

I think this is an easier way to share the blogs I post on our class blog (though if you read them, there are great articles on autonomous cars, AI, and much more about IoT). Here is an example from Microsoft.  For example, here is an article on "How IoT and AI are transforming cars with intelligent mobility."

According to the article, buy a new car, and you’re really buying a datacenter on wheels. By 2025, 100 percent of new cars will be connected cars, up from 35 percent today. And by 2030, 15 percent of new cars will be autonomous — and all will send, receive and analyze vast amounts of data.

Here are links to the keynote speakers who recently attended DesignCon, 2017. You can click on their talks. There are also videos there, though I haven't looked around the site extensively.  The optimistic tone is where the industry is going is expected on a Microsoft IoT blog, but there are good resources you can check out here.

What You Will Do In Your Self-Driving Car?

For those students exploring the autonomous car subject, here is an interesting twist.  Discussions of autonomous vehicles have become so commonplace that by the time driverless cars are widely available, the public’s excitement may be long over. It is time to ask what might be the impacts of autonomous vehicles on business and society? And if driving is left to the robots, will we also be inventing a new ridership economy?

The Auto Insurance Center recently conducted a survey that asked that very question. While this is clearly not the first such study, and most assuredly will not be the last, the findings present some interesting data.  Here is the top ten list of activities that 2,000 drivers from around the world said they will do when they are freed from the wheel (the survey link has more than 10):

1. Read a book
2. Catch up with friends and family via phone
3. Get work done outside of the office
4. Watch a television show
5. Watch a movie
6. Eat
7. Play video games
8. Sleep
9. Engage in sexual activity
10. Pray

It's hard to imagine that our time will be so "free to do what we want," especially given the security challenges facing this industry.  The article does talk about the ridership economy.  Does any of this seem real?

Purpose of this blog

The idea behind this blog is to offer links and articles that may benefit some of you in your search for resources, or that adds more information posted by students.  Rather than clutter your tech briefings on the class blog, I wanted a place to inform you of tech news I found interesting.  You can add your comments here as well.