ProPublica: “HomeVestors of America, the self-described largest home buyer in the country, is continuing to reform some of its business practices in the wake of a ProPublica investigation last year that revealed predatory tactics used by the company’s franchises toward homeowners in vulnerable situations. The company’s 1,100 “We Buy Ugly Houses” franchises will now be… Continue Reading
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Author Archives: Sabrina I. Pacifici
Inside a Global Phone Spy Tool Monitoring Billions
404 Media: “Hundreds of thousands of ordinary apps, including popular ones such as 9gag, Kik, and a series of caller ID apps, are part of a global surveillance capability that starts with ads inside each app, and ends with the apps’ users being swept up into a powerful mass monitoring tool advertised to national security… Continue Reading
Police Data Accessibility Project
Data is Plural: “The Police Data Accessibility Project is compiling a meta-dataset of police records: where to find them online, what time period they cover, how often they’re updated, and other characteristics. The searchable, downloadable dataset includes links to 1,700+ resources, such as traffic stop datasets, crime maps, use-of-force reports, contract and policy listings, and… Continue Reading
PFAS Maryland Fish Consumption Advisory Map
“Brent Walls, Upper Potomac Riverkeeper, has become an expert on the growing issue of PFAS – toxic “legacy” chemicals – which we are finding in more and more places. He has created a map which identifies monitoring locations where Maryland’s Department of the Environment (MDE) collected fish tissue samples from various species, oyster sampling and… Continue Reading
Buried But Not Forgotten: Coal Ash in the Chesapeake
Waterkeepers Chesapeake – “The Chesapeake Bay region has a problem it thought it could bury and forget. But the solution for coal ash is not so simple. Coal ash, also referred to as coal combustion residuals or CCRs, is produced primarily from the burning of coal in coal-fired power plants. Coal ash contains hazardous pollutants… Continue Reading
How Walmart’s Financial Services Became a Fraud Magnet
ProPublica: “Scammers have duped consumers out of more than $1 billion by exploiting Walmart’s lax security. The company has resisted taking responsibility while breaking promises to regulators and skimping on training…America’s largest retailer has long been a facilitator of fraud on a mass scale, a ProPublica investigation has found. For roughly a decade, Walmart has… Continue Reading
Ring Will No Longer Facilitate Police Requests for Footage from Users
EFF: “Amazon’s Ring has announced that it will no longer facilitate police’s warrantless requests for footage from Ring users. This is a victory in a long fight, not just against blanket police surveillance, but also against a culture in which private, for-profit companies build special tools to allow law enforcement to more easily access companies’… Continue Reading
Return-to-Office Mandates
Ding, Yuye and Ma, Mark (Shuai), Return-to-Office Mandates (December 25, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4675401 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4675401 “Using a sample of Standard and Poor’s 500 firms, we examine determinants and consequences of U.S. firms’ return-to-office (RTO) mandates. Results of our determinant analyses are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and… Continue Reading
Most Top News Sites Block AI Bots
Wired – Right-Wing Media Welcomes Them [read free]: “As media companies haggle licensing deals with artificial intelligence powerhouses like OpenAI that are hungry for training data, they’re also throwing up a digital blockade. New data shows that over 88 percent of top-ranked news outlets in the US now block web crawlers used by artificial intelligence… Continue Reading
The Continued Threat to Personal Data: Key Factors Behind the 2023 Increase
The Continued Threat to Personal Data: Key Factors Behind the 2023 Increase. Professor Stuart E. Madnick, Ph.D. December 2023: “Around the world, individuals’ most private, most personal data has become a target for cybercriminals. Attacks and data breaches across the globe continue to increase. Even as organizations work to fight back, cybercriminals are constantly finding… Continue Reading
A Lincoln Trove Lands at the Library (Pie Safe Included)
The New York Times: “The New York Public Library is acquiring the collection of Jonathan Mann, an Abraham Lincoln expert who died last summer after a random attack on the Manhattan Bridge…After considering several institutions, they went with the New York Public Library, in part because of its commitment to public access and digitization. “We… Continue Reading
Beyond AI Exposure: Which Tasks are Cost-Effective to Automate with Computer Vision?
futuretech January 22, 2024: “Neil Thompson along with Maja S. Svanberg and Wensu Li from the MIT FutureTech, Martin Fleming from The Productivity Institute, and Brian C. Goehring from IBM’s Institute for Business Value, have published a new article. This article introduces an innovative AI task automation model. It offers an end-to-end assessment framework, focusing… Continue Reading
