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Auto Electronic Faults May Be Untraceable, Need More Oversight, Panel Says – Bloomberg (Angela Greiling Keane)

January 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

U.S. regulators were justified in closing a probe into unintended acceleration of Toyota Motor Corp. (7203) vehicles without finding electronic causes, a National Academy of Sciences panel said while emphasizing it wasn’t ruling out such failures in the future.

Software and other electronic failures may not leave traces that investigators are equipped to find, so the Washington-based National Highway Traffic Safety Administration must “become more familiar with and engaged in” setting automotive- electronics standards, the panel said today in a report.

“It’s impossible to prove a complete negative, but all the data available to us indicated the conclusion that there was no electronic or software problem” that may have caused the Toyota unintended acceleration reports, Louis Lanzerotti, a New Jersey Institute of Technology physics professor and chairman of the panel, said today on a conference call with reporters.

Toyota recalled more than 8 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles worldwide in 2009 and 2010, a record, after reports of unintended acceleration. NHTSA and Toyota investigated the electronic throttle controls, which send signals from the accelerator to the engine. They blamed the incidents on sticky gas pedals or floor mats that might jam them.

via Auto Electronic Faults May Be Untraceable, Need More Oversight, Panel Says – Bloomberg.

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Lie-Detection Software Is a Research Quest – NYTimes.com

December 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

SHE looks as innocuous as Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s famous detective.

But also like Miss Marple, Julia Hirschberg, a professor of computer science at Columbia University, may spell trouble for a lot of liars.

That’s because Dr. Hirschberg is teaching computers how to spot deception — programming them to parse people’s speech for patterns that gauge whether they are being honest.

For this sort of lie detection, there’s no need to strap anyone into a machine. The person’s speech provides all the cues — loudness, changes in pitch, pauses between words, ums and ahs, nervous laughs and dozens of other tiny signs that can suggest a lie.

Dr. Hirschberg is not the only researcher using algorithms to trawl our utterances for evidence of our inner lives. A small band of linguists, engineers and computer scientists, among others, are busy training computers to recognize hallmarks of what they call emotional speech — talk that reflects deception, anger, friendliness and even flirtation.

Programs that succeed at spotting these submerged emotions may someday have many practical uses: software that suggests when chief executives at public conferences may be straying from the truth; programs at call centers that alert operators to irate customers on the line; or software at computerized matchmaking services that adds descriptives like “friendly” to usual ones like “single” and “female.”

The technology is becoming more accurate as labs share new building blocks, said Dan Jurafsky, a professor at Stanford whose research focuses on the understanding of language by both machines and humans. Recently, Dr. Jurafsky has been studying the language that people use in four-minute speed-dating sessions, analyzing it for qualities like friendliness and flirtatiousness. He is a winner of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship commonly called a “genius” award, and a co-author of the textbook “Speech and Language Processing.”

via Lie-Detection Software Is a Research Quest – NYTimes.com.

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Don’t Blame The IQ, Blame The Carrier | TechCrunch

December 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

You couldn’t swing a cat this week without hitting a story about Carrier IQ, which (if you have somehow avoided this information) is a bit of software installed on millions of phones that has access to a huge amount of user data. As developers hinted for months and eventually proved on camera, the software is aware of SMS content, secure web traffic, contacts, key presses, and more.

Naturally there has been an outcry. Who are these people? What phones is the software on? How do you remove it? What can’t it do?

The surprising thing is that the ire has been directed at Carrier IQ themselves. Why? If someone runs you over in their car, you don’t write a stern letter to Ford. Carrier IQ made and sold an invasive piece of software, certainly. But they didn’t install it on your phone. Sprint did.

No doubt that part of the problem is simply yet to be addressed, but I have to say I genuinely sympathize with Carrier IQ, a company that sells a legitimate and potentially useful product, and is now facing the rage of the entire internet, and what’s worse, Al Franken.

Who wrote the contracts the users signed? The carriers. Who handled the phones? The carriers. Who added bloatware and special services and skins and branding to the OS? The carriers, the carriers, the carriers. And who called Carrier IQ in the first place and said “Hi, we’d like a surreptitious method of peeking at certain user habits”? That’s right, the carriers.

Who should have informed their customers of this tracking software and its capabilities, regardless of what information they intended to collect, or what was turned on or off by default? The carriers. Who would own the information scraped from the millions of phones being monitored? The carriers. And who should be the object of the internet’s rage right now? You’re damn right it’s the carriers.

What makes the whole thing even worse is that it wasn’t just some marketing deal Sprint had where they would collect stats from, say, Samsung phones running Android. T-Mobile and AT&T have used the software as well, and it’s not much of a leap of faith to suggest that Verizon and smaller carriers have something similar in place. Hell, Apple had a (mostly harmless) version of it, though understandably RIM was careful to note it avoided the software entirely.

via Don’t Blame The IQ, Blame The Carrier | TechCrunch.

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Software Necessary to View Files Subject to Production under NY Freedom of Information Law : Electronic Discovery Law

December 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

TJS of New York, Inc. v. New York State Dep’t of Taxation and Fin., 932 N.Y.S.2d 243 (N.Y. App. Div. Nov. 3, 2011)

In this case, the court determined that the software program necessary to view certain files produced to the petitioner subject to New York’s Freedom of Information Law was a “record” for purposes of the law and was thus subject to production itself.

Pursuant to New York’s Freedom of Information Law, Petitioner requested and received records in connection with a sales tax audit performed by the Department of Taxation and Finance.  However, certain data could not be viewed without a copy of the Department’s Audit Framework Extension software, which the Department refused to provide.  Accordingly, Petitioner moved to compel production.  The motion was denied, as was Petitioner’s motion for reconsideration.  Petitioner appealed.

Taking up the question, the court provided the broad definition of a “record” under the law, namely “any information kept, held, filed, produced, or reproduced by, with or for an agency …, in any physical form whatsoever ….”  The Department argued that the software was not a record because it contained no information.  Petitioner disagreed.

via Software Necessary to View Files Subject to Production under NY Freedom of Information Law : Electronic Discovery Law.

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Senator Seeks Answers About Phone Logging Software | NPR

December 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Yesterday, we reported about the tempest brewing about Carrier IQ, a secret software a researcher says has been installed on millions of phones and is capable of logging websites a user visits, the contents of voice and text messages and even the content of online searches.

Today Sen. Al Franken, a Democrat for Minnesotta, sent a letter to the company asking for a detailed explanation of the kind of information the company’s software logs.

“The revelation that the locations and other sensitive data of millions of Americans are being secretly recorded and possibly transmitted is deeply troubling,” Franken said in a statement. “This news underscores the need for Congress to act swiftly to protect the location information and private, sensitive information of consumers. But right now, Carrier IQ has a lot of questions to answer.”

As we said yesterday, Carrier IQ denies that its software is used to snoop. Instead, the company says, it is used to diagnose problems.

Today, Forbes picks up the story and adds that the company, as well as the telephone carriers that allowed the software on their customer’s phones could be facing a costly class action lawsuit, because of the possibility that the software violates federal wiretap laws.

via Senator Seeks Answers About Phone Logging Software : The Two-Way : NPR.

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Software to Rate How Drastically Photos Are Retouched – NYTimes.com

December 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic. Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Their work is intended as a technological step to address concerns about the prevalence of highly idealized and digitally edited images in advertising and fashion magazines. Such images, research suggests, contribute to eating disorders and anxiety about body types, especially among young women.

The Dartmouth research, said Seth Matlins, a former talent agent and marketing executive, could be “hugely important” as a tool for objectively measuring the degree to which photos have been altered. He and his wife, Eva Matlins, the founders of a women’s online magazine, Off Our Chests, are trying to gain support for legislation in America. Their proposal, the Self-Esteem Act, would require photos that have been “meaningfully changed” to be labeled.

“We’re just after truth in advertising and transparency,” Mr. Matlins said. “We’re not trying to demonize Photoshop or prevent creative people from using it. But if a person’s image is drastically altered, there should be a reminder that what you’re seeing is about as true as what you saw in ‘Avatar,’ ” the science-fiction movie with computer-generated actors and visual effects.

The algorithm developed by Dr. Farid and Mr. Kee statistically measures how much the image of a person’s face and body has been altered. Many of the before-and-after photos for their research were plucked from the Web sites of professional photo retouchers, promoting their skills.

The algorithm is meant to mimic human perceptions. To do that, hundreds of people were recruited online to compare sets of before-and-after images and to determine the 1-to-5 scale, from minimally altered to starkly changed. The human rankings were used to train the software.

via Software to Rate How Drastically Photos Are Retouched – NYTimes.com.

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Defending the Use of E-Discovery Software | Law.com

November 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

There are several good strategies for defending the use of e-discovery software, panelists said last week at the Georgetown Law Center Advanced eDiscovery Institute.

Judges, opposing counsel, and juries may sometimes ask lawyers about the limitations of concept and keyword searching, the extent to which quality control was performed, and the reasons why results aren’t perfect, noted moderator Conor Crowley, of Crowley Law Office in McLean, Va.

Important cases in which software use was defended include Victor Stanley v. Creative Pipe, Disability Rights Council of Greater Washington v. Wash Metropolitan Transit Authority, Gross Construction Association v. American Manufacturers Mutual Insurance, and Datel Holdings v. Microsoft, Crowley said.

One of the best responses is for attorneys to understand and articulate how such technologies work at the process level, the panelists agreed.

That understanding need not extend to technical levels — “I haven’t a clue how the plane works. What I care about is it gets me safely to my destination. Let’s not get so obsessed with how the algorithms work,” attorney Maura Grossman said, of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, in New York. “Frankly, most of us could not understand the answer,” added District Court Judge Elizabeth Laporte, of San Francisco.

via Defending the Use of E-Discovery Software.

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Allen Systems Group (ASG) Acquires Intelligent Search Firm RiverGlass – MarketWatch

October 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

ASG Software Solutions, a leader in IT infrastructure, content management and cloud computing software solutions for global enterprises, announced today that it has acquired RiverGlass, a leading provider of eDiscovery, advanced information collection, data management and analysis solutions. The integration of RiverGlass’ robust intelligent search technologies with ASG’s content management solutions will provide ASG customers with improved capabilities in data collection, management of structured and unstructured data, and access to meaningful analytics.

“At ASG our mission is to help customers optimize their IT environments by providing solutions to enhance efficiency, minimize risk and manage costs. It is critical for enterprises to have easy to deploy tools that manage ongoing data growth,” said Arthur Allen, president and chief executive officer at ASG. “By integrating RiverGlass’ technologies into our portfolio, we can help our customers gain control and better visibility into their business data.”

RiverGlass was formed in 2003 and is based in Champaign, Illinois. The RiverGlass offering was built leveraging eight years and $20mm of R&D efforts from the former Mosaic development teams at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Their intelligent search solutions provide search and monitoring capabilities across internal (customer) databases and repositories as well as structured and unstructured web based data. These tools are currently at work in government, law enforcement agencies, law firms, e-discovery service providers and major corporations.

via Allen Systems Group (ASG) Acquires Intelligent Search Firm RiverGlass – MarketWatch.

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Tickle The Wire » Oracle Investigation Latest in Trend in Foreign Corrupt Practice Act Crackdown by Justice Dept.

September 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The Software company Oracle is being investigated by the FBI, reports the Guardian, in what some see as a trend in the increase of prosecutions under the foreign corrupt practices act (FCPA), which forbids U.S. companies from paying bribes to foreign government officials or employees of state-owned companies.

“Every week there seem to be more and more companies going through what Oracle is going through,” said Butler University professor Mike Koehler, who maintains a blog on the subject, according to The Guardian.

Koehler cited increasing globalization and the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which brought stricter corporate disclosure requirements, for the increase. He said  FCPA actions in 2010 accounted for 50% of the fines levied by the Justice department’s criminal division.

via Tickle The Wire » Oracle Investigation Latest in Trend in Foreign Corrupt Practice Act Crackdown by Justice Dept..

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Amazon releases secure cloud for government | Software, Interrupted – CNET News

August 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced AWS GovCloud, a new AWS Region designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.

Amazon’s move reflects the ongoing adoption of public cloud services by government entities, including the U.S. Treasury’s Recovery Accountability and Transparency board, which hosts Recovery.gov and Treasury.gov on AWS, as well as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which processes telemetry data and high-resolution images on an array of EC2 cluster compute instances.

via Amazon releases secure cloud for government | Software, Interrupted – CNET News.

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