#It Services Provider Company Virginia

[vague-humanoid]

At the California Institute of the Arts, it all started with a videoconference between the registrar’s office and a nonprofit.

One of the nonprofit’s representatives had enabled an AI note-taking tool from Read AI. At the end of the meeting, it emailed a summary to all attendees, said Allan Chen, the institute’s chief technology officer. They could have a copy of the notes, if they wanted — they just needed to create their own account.

Next thing Chen knew, Read AI’s bot had popped up inabout a dozen of his meetings over a one-week span. It was in one-on-one check-ins. Project meetings. “Everything.”

The spread “was very aggressive,” recalled Chen, who also serves as vice president for institute technology. And it “took us by surprise.”

The scenariounderscores a growing challenge for colleges: Tech adoption and experimentation among students, faculty, and staff — especially as it pertains to AI — are outpacing institutions’ governance of these technologies and may even violate their data-privacy and security policies.

That has been the case with note-taking tools from companies including Read AI, Otter.ai, and Fireflies.ai.They can integrate with platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teamsto provide live transcriptions, meeting summaries, audio and video recordings, and other services.

Higher-ed interest in these products isn’t surprising.For those bogged down with virtual rendezvouses, a tool that can ingest long, winding conversations and spit outkey takeaways and action items is alluring. These services can also aid people with disabilities, including those who are deaf.

But the tools can quickly propagate unchecked across a university. They can auto-join any virtual meetings on a user’s calendar — even if that person is not in attendance. And that’s a concern, administrators say, if it means third-party productsthat an institution hasn’t reviewedmay be capturing and analyzing personal information, proprietary material, or confidential communications.

“What keeps me up at night is the ability for individual users to do things that are very powerful, but they don’t realize what they’re doing,” Chen said. “You may not realize you’re opening a can of worms.“

The Chronicle documented both individual and universitywide instances of this trend. At Tidewater Community College, in Virginia, Heather Brown, an instructional designer, unwittingly gave Otter.ai’s tool access to her calendar, and it joined a Faculty Senate meeting she didn’t end up attending. “One of our [associate vice presidents] reached out to inform me,” she wrote in a message. “I was mortified!”

[mariacallous]

On Saturday, an Associated Press investigation revealed that OpenAI's Whisper transcription tool creates fabricated text in medical and business settings despite warnings against such use. The AP interviewed more than 12 software engineers, developers, and researchers who found the model regularly invents text that speakers never said, a phenomenon often called a “confabulation” or “hallucination” in the AI field.

Upon its release in 2022, OpenAI claimed that Whisper approached “human level robustness” in audio transcription accuracy. However, a University of Michigan researcher told the AP that Whisper created false text in 80 percent of public meeting transcripts examined. Another developer, unnamed in the AP report, claimed to have found invented content in almost all of his 26,000 test transcriptions.

The fabrications pose particular risks in health care settings. Despite OpenAI’s warnings against using Whisper for “high-risk domains,” over 30,000 medical workers now use Whisper-based tools to transcribe patient visits, according to the AP report. The Mankato Clinic in Minnesota and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles are among 40 health systems using a Whisper-powered AI copilot service from medical tech company Nabla that is fine-tuned on medical terminology.

Nabla acknowledges that Whisper can confabulate, but it also reportedly erases original audio recordings “for data safety reasons.” This could cause additional issues, since doctors cannot verify accuracy against the source material. And deaf patients may be highly impacted by mistaken transcripts since they would have no way to know if medical transcript audio is accurate or not.

The potential problems with Whisper extend beyond health care. Researchers from Cornell University and the University of Virginia studied thousands of audio samples and found Whisper adding nonexistent violent content and racial commentary to neutral speech. They found that 1 percent of samples included “entire hallucinated phrases or sentences which did not exist in any form in the underlying audio” and that 38 percent of those included “explicit harms such as perpetuating violence, making up inaccurate associations, or implying false authority.”

In one case from the study cited by AP, when a speaker described “two other girls and one lady,” Whisper added fictional text specifying that they “were Black.” In another, the audio said, “He, the boy, was going to, I’m not sure exactly, take the umbrella.” Whisper transcribed it to, “He took a big piece of a cross, a teeny, small piece … I’m sure he didn’t have a terror knife so he killed a number of people.”

An OpenAI spokesperson told the AP that the company appreciates the researchers’ findings and that it actively studies how to reduce fabrications and incorporates feedback in updates to the model.

Why Whisper Confabulates

The key to Whisper’s unsuitability in high-risk domains comes from its propensity to sometimes confabulate, or plausibly make up, inaccurate outputs. The AP report says, "Researchers aren’t certain why Whisper and similar tools hallucinate," but that isn't true. We know exactly why Transformer-based AI models like Whisper behave this way.

Whisper is based on technology that is designed to predict the next most likely token (chunk of data) that should appear after a sequence of tokens provided by a user. In the case of ChatGPT, the input tokens come in the form of a text prompt. In the case of Whisper, the input is tokenized audio data.

The transcription output from Whisper is a prediction of what is most likely, not what is most accurate. Accuracy in Transformer-based outputs is typically proportional to the presence of relevant accurate data in the training dataset, but it is never guaranteed. If there is ever a case where there isn't enough contextual information in its neural network for Whisper to make an accurate prediction about how to transcribe a particular segment of audio, the model will fall back on what it “knows” about the relationships between sounds and words it has learned from its training data.

According to OpenAI in 2022, Whisper learned those statistical relationships from “680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web.” But we now know a little more about the source. Given Whisper's well-known tendency to produce certain outputs like "thank you for watching," "like and subscribe," or "drop a comment in the section below" when provided silent or garbled inputs, it's likely that OpenAI trained Whisper on thousands of hours of captioned audio scraped from YouTube videos. (The researchers needed audio paired with existing captions to train the model.)

There's also a phenomenon called “overfitting” in AI models where information (in this case, text found in audio transcriptions) encountered more frequently in the training data is more likely to be reproduced in an output. In cases where Whisper encounters poor-quality audio in medical notes, the AI model will produce what its neural network predicts is the most likely output, even if it is incorrect. And the most likely output for any given YouTube video, since so many people say it, is “thanks for watching.”

In other cases, Whisper seems to draw on the context of the conversation to fill in what should come next, which can lead to problems because its training data could include racist commentary or inaccurate medical information. For example, if many examples of training data featured speakers saying the phrase “crimes by Black criminals,” when Whisper encounters a “crimes by [garbled audio] criminals” audio sample, it will be more likely to fill in the transcription with “Black."

In the original Whisper model card, OpenAI researchers wrote about this very phenomenon: "Because the models are trained in a weakly supervised manner using large-scale noisy data, the predictions may include texts that are not actually spoken in the audio input (i.e. hallucination). We hypothesize that this happens because, given their general knowledge of language, the models combine trying to predict the next word in audio with trying to transcribe the audio itself."

So in that sense, Whisper "knows" something about the content of what is being said and keeps track of the context of the conversation, which can lead to issues like the one where Whisper identified two women as being Black even though that information was not contained in the original audio. Theoretically, this erroneous scenario could be reduced by using a second AI model trained to pick out areas of confusing audio where the Whisper model is likely to confabulate and flag the transcript in that location, so a human could manually check those instances for accuracy later.

Clearly, OpenAI's advice not to use Whisper in high-risk domains, such as critical medical records, was a good one. But health care companies are constantly driven by a need to decrease costs by using seemingly "good enough" AI tools—as we've seen with Epic Systems using GPT-4 for medical records and UnitedHealth using a flawed AI model for insurance decisions. It's entirely possible that people are already suffering negative outcomes due to AI mistakes, and fixing them will likely involve some sort of regulation and certification of AI tools used in the medical field.

[mercurygray]

Friends, I have failed you all. I've seen a lot of posts over the last week with a lot of great biographical detail about many of the flyers and aircrew who've been name-dropped so far in Masters of the Air - and I haven't seen a single thing about the one name that is directly in the center of this blog's lane.

In Part 2, returning from their mission to Trondheim, Cleven and Egan walk into the Interrogation hut and Egan accepts a cup of coffee from a woman he thanks as Tatty. Later on, at the dance, James Douglass remarks that he will be 'coming in hot' on one of the American Red Cross women on the other side of the room, and one of his friends asks "General Spaatz's daughter? Or the other one?"

Katherine "Tatty" Spaatz was a member of the American Red Cross Clubmobile service and the daughter of General Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, who commanded the Eighth Air Force on its move to England. (General Spaatz later moved to overall command of the entire Army Air Forces in the Europe Theatre of Operations, or ETO. He is, as the kids say, rather important.)

But we're not talking about him here. We're talking about her.

Katherine was 22 years old when she arrived in Europe with the Red Cross. (One of her traveling companions that trip was Kathleen Kennedy, daughter of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph P Kennedy Sr., also coming to serve overseas with the ARC.)

The American Red Cross's mission in Europe had many facets during the Second World War - in addition to activities we might think of today, like collecting blood, providing disaster relief at home and running first aid seminars, they were responsible for collecting and distributing packages for Prisoners of War.

They also operated large canteens like the Rainbow Corner club, a recreational facility in London where soldiers on leave could get a room for the weekend, a bite to eat, and a number of other amenities. Smaller clubs called Donut Dugouts provided a space where a serviceman could always be assured of a cup of hot coffee, a donut, and a pretty girl to talk to, specially recruited for being friendly, fair, approachable, and specially trained to be the girl next door overseas. In addition to these more permanent installations, they also operated the Clubmobile service, a mobile version of their popular Dugouts that moved operations into retooled Green Line Bus Company buses to take donuts and a taste of home to the front line.

Tatty, as she was called, worked on the Clubmobile "North Dakota" along with Julia "Dooley" Townsend, Virginia "Ginny" Sherwood, and Dorothy "Mike" Myrick. Life Magazine did a full article on their clubmobile in February of 1943, which you can read online at the link. There is another lovely blog post with pictures here. She also worked for a time in a more permanent post at the USAAF base at Snetterton Heath, and was later sent to France. You can read a little bit more about her and see more pictures at her bio page at the American Air Museum in Britain website.

If you'd like more information about Tatty, Helen, and women like them, as well as the Clubmobile service, consider reading the following:

Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys by James H. Madison Battlestars & Doughnuts: World War II Clubmobile Experiences of Mary Metcalfe Rexford War through the Hole of a Donut, by Angela Petesch Goodnight, Irene (fiction) - Although this is a novel, it is based on Luis Alberto Urrea's mother's time as a Clubmobile worker and her personal papers.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Greedflation, but for prisoners

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Apr 21) in TORINO, then Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Today in "Capitalists Hate Capitalism" news: The Appeal has published the first-ever survey of national prison commissary prices, revealing just how badly the prison profiteer system gouges American's all-time, world-record-beating prison population:

https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-commissary-prices/

Like every aspect of the prison contracting system, prison commissaries – the stores where prisoners are able to buy food, sundries, toiletries and other items – are dominated by private equity funds that have bought out all the smaller players. Private equity deals always involve gigantic amounts of debt (typically, the first thing PE companies do after acquiring a company is to borrow heavily against it and then pay themselves a hefty dividend).

The need to service this debt drives PE companies to cut quality, squeeze suppliers, and raise prices. That's why PE loves to buy up the kinds of businesses you must spend your money at: dialysis clinics, long-term care facilities, funeral homes, and prison services.

Prisoners, after all, are a literal captive market. Unlike capitalist ventures, which involve the risk that a customer will take their business elsewhere, prison commissary providers have the most airtight of monopolies over prisoners' shopping.

Not that prisoners have a lot of money to spend. The 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of convicted criminals, and so even though many prisoners are subject to forced labor, they aren't necessarily paid for it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Six states ban paying prisoners anything. North Carolina caps prisoners' pay at one dollar per day. Nationally, prisoners earn $0.52/hour, while producing $11b/year in goods and services:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

So there's a double cruelty to prison commissary price-gouging. Prisoners earn far less than any other kind of worker, and they pay vastly inflated prices for the necessities of life. There's also a triple cruelty: prisoners' families – deprived of an incarcerated breadwinner's earnings – are called upon to make up the difference for jacked up commissary prices out of their own strained finances.

So what does prison profiteering look like, in dollars and sense? Here's the first-of-its-kind database tracking the costs of food, hygiene items and religious items in 46 states:

https://theappeal.org/commissary-database/

Prisoners rely heavily on commissaries for food. Prisons serve spoiled, inedible food, and often there isn't enough to go around – prisoners who rely on the food provided by their institutions literally starve. This is worst in prisons where private equity funds have taken over the cafeteria, which is inevitable accompanied by swingeing cuts to food quality and portions:

https://theappeal.org/prison-food-virginia-fluvanna-correctional-center/

So you have one private equity fund starving prisoners, and another that's gouging them on food. Or sometimes it's the same company. Keefe Group, owned by HIG Capital, provides commissaries to prisons whose cafeterias are managed by other HIG Capital portfolio companies like Trinity Services Group. HIG also owns the prison health-care company Wellpath – so if they give you food poisoning, they get paid twice.

Wellpath delivers "grossly inadequate healthcare":

https://theappeal.org/massachusetts-prisons-wellpath-dentures-teeth/

And Trinity serves "meager portions of inedible food":

https://theappeal.org/clayton-county-jail-sheriff-election/

When prison commissaries gouge on food, no part of the inventory is spared, even the cheapest items. In Florida, a packet of ramen costs $1.06, 300% more inside the prison than it does at the Target down the street:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24444312-fl_doc_combined_commissary_lists#document/p6/a2444049

America's prisoners aren't just hungry, they're also hot. The climate emergency is sending temperatures in America's largely un-air-conditioned prisons soaring to dangerous levels. Commissaries capitalize on this, too: an 8" fan costs $40 in Delaware's Sussex Correctional Institution. In Georgia, that fan goes for $32 (but prisoners are not paid for their labor in Georgia pens). And in scorching Texas, the commissary raised the price of water by 50% last summer:

https://www.tpr.org/criminal-justice/2023-07-20/texas-charges-prisoners-50-more-for-water-for-as-heat-wave-continues

Toiletries are also sold at prices that would make an airport gift-shop blush. Need denture adhesive? That's $12.28 in an Idaho pen, triple the retail price. 15% of America's prisoners are over 55. The Keefe Group – sister company to the "grossly inadequate" healthcare company Wellpath – operates that commissary. In Oregon, the commissary charges a 200% markup on hearing-aid batteries. Vermont charges a 500% markup on reading glasses. Imagine spending decades in prison: toothless, blind, and deaf.

Then there's the religious items. Bibles and Christmas cards are surprisingly reasonable, but a Qaran will run you $26 in Vermont, where a Bible is a mere $4.55. Kufi caps – which cost $3 or less in the free world – go for $12 in Indiana prisons. A Virginia prisoner needs to work for 8 hours to earn enough to buy a commissary Ramadan card (you can buy a Christmas card after three hours' labor).

Prison price-gougers are finally facing a comeuppance. California's new BASIC Act caps prison commissary markups at 35% (California commissaries used to charge 63-200% markups):

https://theappeal.org/price-gouging-in-california-prisons-newsom-signature/

Last year, Nevada banned any markup on hygiene items:

https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/82nd2023/Bill/10425/Overview

And prison tech monopolist Securus has been driven to the brink of bankruptcy, thanks to the activism of Worth Rises and its coalition partners:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/

When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. Prisons show us how businesses would treat us if they could get away with it.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/20/captive-market/#locked-in

[felassan]

Article: 'EA’s BioWare will lay off 50 and cut ties with unionized Keywords playtesting group'

[BioWare Blog post for reference]

Excerpts:

"The layoffs are a blow to morale at the studio and have made the environment difficult, said Gary Mckay, general manager of the developer, in a statement to employees today. He said EA is trying to make BioWare into a more agile and more focused studio. EA has an estimated 12,000 to 13,000 employees, and BioWare had perhaps 250 people. The moves come with a couple of related or perhaps coincidental events. A spokesperson for EA said that the company was unable to come to an agreement with a part of Keywords, a big game services firm, that provides playtesting services. In June 2022, this small part of Keywords had a group of contractors who voted to unionize. EA said it was unable to create a new contract and so will let that current one expire on September 27. It’s not clear what will happen to the contractors without the EA contract, but it’s fair to guess that some jobs will likely be lost over at Keywords unless they find other work. An industry source said EA has renewed work orders with Keywords Studios since their employees voted to unionize in June 2022. But the source added that, in this instance, the two companies simply couldn’t agree to terms. The Keywords contract requirements exceeded what EA/BioWare needed given the change in development approach at the studio.  The layoff also comes about three months after EA moved production of its massively multiplayer online game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, to a third-party publisher, Broadsword, in Reston, Virginia. The game debuted way back in 2011 and has entered maintenance mode. Broadsword has also taken over games like Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot so players can keep playing them. McKay’s leadership will not be affected. Michael Gamble, who recently returned to BioWare, serves as head of the Mass Effect team, and pre-production continues on the next Mass Effect game. Corinne Busche and John Epler, two leaders on Dragon Age, also continue in their roles. Andrew Wilson, CEO of EA, announced back in March that the company would cut about 6% of its total workforce, and these cutbacks are related to that move. EA has not said when Dragon Age: Dreadwolf will ship."

[source and full article]

[rjzimmerman]

Insurers Are Deserting Homeowners as Climate Shocks Worsen. (New York Times)

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

Since 2018, more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts nationwide have been dropped — “nonrenewed,” in the parlance of the industry. In more than 200 counties, the nonrenewal rate has tripled or more, according to the findings of a congressional investigation released Wednesday.

As a warming planet delivers more wildfires, hurricanes and other threats, America’s once reliably boring home insurance market has become the place where climate shocks collide with everyday life.

The consequences could be profound. Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home. Communities that are deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values, which means less tax revenue for schools, police and other basic services. As insurers pull back, they can destabilize the communities left behind, making their decisions a predictor of the disruption to come.

Now, for the first time, the scale of that pullback is becoming public. Last fall, the Senate Budget Committee demanded the country’s largest insurance companies provide the number of nonrenewals by county and year. The result is a map that tracks the climate crisis in a new way.

The American Property Casualty Insurance Association, a trade group, said information about nonrenewals was “unsuitable for providing meaningful information about climate change impacts,” because the data doesn’t show why individual insurers made decisions. The group added that efforts to gather data from insurers “could have an anticompetitive effect on the market.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and the committee’s chairman, said the new information was crucial. In an interview, he called the new data as good an indicator as any “for predicting the likelihood and timing of a significant, systemic economic crash,” as disruption in the insurance market spreads to property values.

“The climate crisis that is coming our way is not just about polar bears, and it’s not just about green jobs,” Mr. Whitehouse said Wednesday during a hearing on the investigation’s findings. “It actually is coming through your mail slot, in the form of insurance cancellations, insurance nonrenewals and dramatic increases in insurance costs.”

The map of dropped policies shows how the crisis in the American home insurance market has spread beyond well-known problems in Florida and California. The jump in nonrenewals now extends along the Gulf Coast, through Alabama and Mississippi; up the Atlantic seaboard, through the Carolinas, Virginia and into southern New England; inland, to parts of the plains and Intermountain West; and even as far as Hawaii.

[beautifullache]

🦄The Sims 4🦄

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Foodlion

Food Lion based in Salisbury, North Carolina since 1957. By leveraging its longstanding heritage of low prices and convenient locations, Food Lion is working to own the easiest full shop grocery experience in the southeast, anchored by a strong commitment to affordability, freshness and the communities it serves.We have more than 1,000 stores in 10 Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic States.We employ more than 60,000 associates.

Customer Lead

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Sales Associate Cashier

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Harris Teeter

Harris Teeter Supermarkets, LLC., also known as Harris Teeter Neighborhood Food & Pharmacy, is an American supermarket chain based in Matthews, North Carolina, a suburb of Charlotte. As of February 2024, the chain operates 259 stores in seven South Atlantic states and Washington, D.C.

Cashier

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Deli Bakery Clerk

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Grocery Manager

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Lowes Foods

Founded in 1954, Lowes Foods employs approximately 9,000 people and operates nearly 100 full-service supermarkets in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. Locally owned and operated, Lowes Foods is truly a homegrown company committed to bringing community back to the table, by providing customers with the freshest and most innovative local products from local suppliers. The company maintains a strong focus on exceptional attention to our guests, with services like Lowes Foods-To-Go personal shopping and gas rewards discounts. To learn more, visit lowesfoods.com or follow Lowes Foods on Facebook or Twitter. Lowes Foods, LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Alex Lee, Inc.

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Sam's Club

Sam’s Club is home to more than 100,000 associates in more than 660 locations all working together to provide great service and value to our members. By providing innovative products, a shopping experience infused with digital solutions such as Scan & Go and Club Pickup and support to the communities we serve, we truly differentiate our company in the marketplace. The constant pursuit to surprising and delight our members drives our business every day.

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Walmart

Walmart store managers are the best leaders in retail, and we’re investing in them – simplifying their pay structure and redesigning their bonus program, giving them the opportunity to earn an annual bonus up to 200% of their base salary.

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[beardedmrbean]

Dec. 28 (UPI) -- Chinese hackers called Salt Typhoon have infiltrated a ninth telecommunications firm, gaining access to information about millions of people, U.S. cybersecurity officials say.

The FBI is investigating the Salt Typhoon attacks, which are spurring new defensive measures, deputy U.S. national security adviser Anne Neuberger told reporters on Friday.

"As we look at China's compromise of now nine telecom companies, the first step is creating a defensible infrastructure," she said.

The hackers primarily are targeting individuals and organizations involved in political or governmental activities and a significant number of hacking victims are located in the Washington D.C.-Virginia area.

The hackers can geolocate millions of people in the United States, listen to their phone conversations and record them whenever they like, Politico reported.

Among recent victims are President-elect Donald Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance and several Biden administration officials.

Neuberger did not name the nine telecommunications firms that have been hacked, but said telecommunications firms and others must do more to improve cybersecurity and protect individual customers.

"We wouldn't leave our homes, our offices unlocked," she said. "Yet, the private companies owning and operating our critical infrastructure often do not have the basic cybersecurity practices in place that would make our infrastructure riskier, costlier and harder for countries and criminals to attack."

She said companies need better management of configuration, better vulnerability management of networks and better work across the telecom sector to share information when incidents occur.

"However, we know that voluntary cybersecurity practices are inadequate to protect against China, Russia and Iran hacking our critical infrastructure," Neuberger said.

Australian and British officials already have enacted telecom regulations "because they recognize that the nation's secrets, the nation's economy relies on their telecommunications sector."

Neuberger said her British counterparts told her they would have detected and contained Salt Typhoon attacks faster and minimized their spread and impact.

"One of the most concerning and really troubling things we deal with is hacking of hospitals [and] hacking of healthcare data," Neuberger said. "We see Americans' sensitive healthcare data, sensitive mental health procedures [and] sensitive procedures being leaked on the dark web with the opportunity to blackmail individuals with that."

She said federal regulators are updating existing rules and implementing new ones to counteract the cyberattacks and threats from Salt Typhoon and others.

The Department of Justice on Friday issued a rule prohibiting or restricting certain types of data transactions with certain nations or individuals who might have an interest in that data.

The protected information includes those involving government-related data and bulk sensitive personal data of individuals that could pose an unacceptable risk to the nation's national security.

The Department of Health and Human Services likewise issued a proposed rule to improve cybersecurity and protect the nation's healthcare system against an increasing number of cyberattacks.

The proposed HHS rule would require health insurers, most healthcare providers and their business partners to improve cybersecurity protections for individuals' information that is protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

"The increasing frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks in the healthcare sector pose a direct and significant threat to patient safety," HHS Deputy Secretary Andrea Palm said Friday.

"These attacks endanger patients by exposing vulnerabilities in our healthcare system, degrading patient trust, disrupting patient care, diverting patients and delaying medical procedures."

The proposed rule "is a vital step to ensuring that healthcare providers, patients and communities are not only better prepared to face a cyberattack but are also more secure and resilient," Palm added.

Neuberger estimated the cost to implement improved cybersecurity to thwart attacks by Salt Typhoon and others at $9 billion during the first year and $6 billion for years 2 through 5.

"The cost of not acting is not only high, it also endangers critical infrastructure and patient safety," she said, "and it carries other harmful consequences."

The average cost of a breach in healthcare was $10.1 million in 2023, but the cost is nearing $800 million from a breach of Change Healthcare last year.

Those costs include the costs of recovery and operations and, "frankly, in the cost to Americans' healthcare data and the operations of hospitals affected by it," Neuberger said.

The Federal Communications Commission also has scheduled a Jan. 15 vote on additional proposed rules to combat Salt Typhoon and other hackers.

[theoszczepanski]

The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed on behalf of former detainees in 2008 against Virginia-based defense company CACI Premier Technology Inc., according to a press release from the Center for Constitutional Rights – the organization representing the plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs alleged the company was hired by the US government following the US invasion of Iraq to provide interrogation services at Abu Ghraib, a US Army detention facility where Iraqi detainees were brutally tortured.

The plaintiffs, Suhail Al Shimari, a middle school principal, Asa’ad Zuba’e, a fruit vendor, and Salah Al-Ejaili, a journalist, each received $3 million in compensatory damages and $11 million in punitive damages, according to the release and court documents.

[iww-gnv]

Communications Workers of America (CWA) members with Frontier Communications in West Virginia and Ashburn, Virginia said in a Sunday press release they will extend their current contract through August 19th. The contract for about 1,400 CWA-represented employees was set to expire at midnight Saturday and members had voted to strike without gaining a fair settlement.     The union said major bargaining issues include job security provisions that keep jobs local and limit the use of subcontractors in expanding broadband in West Virginia.  Chad Leggett, President of CWA Local 2009 released a statement: “We want a contract that delivers quality jobs so that we can deliver quality service to our customers. That means using experienced, local technicians to bring broadband to our communities instead of subcontractors who often do not have adequate training. It means offering affordable healthcare so that we can take care of our families. “I am hoping that we do not have to go on strike at all. We are still at the bargaining table, and Frontier executives have a choice to do the right thing for their employees and all West Virginians. They can agree to a fair contract so that we can all stay focused on providing quality service to our customers and building fiber connections to as many homes and businesses as possible. We’re here to work hard, but we will stand together if necessary, just like we did in 2018. “We believe that public dollars should be used to fund high-quality networks and to create family-supporting jobs in our communities – that means using a well-trained, union workforce. We’re invested in this company and our communities, and we’re eager to get to work.“

[tundrakatiebean]

This is such bullshit. They’ve decided that there’s too much money going to causes that don’t align with corporate interests so they’re going to only give to things they agree with - including their own disaster relief.

Transcript of the email under the cut

[image transcript:

Dear customer,

In 2013, we launched AmazonSmile to make it easier for customers to support their favorite charities. However, after almost a decade, the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped. With so many eligible organizations—more than 1 million globally—our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin.

We are writing to let you know that we plan to wind down AmazonSmile by February 20, 2023. We will continue to pursue and invest in other areas where we’ve seen we can make meaningful change—from building affordable housing to providing access to computer science education for students in underserved communities to using our logistics infrastructure and technology to assist broad communities impacted by natural disasters.

To help charities that have been a part of the AmazonSmile program with this transition, we will be providing them with a one-time donation equivalent to three months of what they earned in 2022 through the program, and they will also be able to accrue additional donations until the program officially closes in February. Once AmazonSmile closes, charities will still be able to seek support from Amazon customers by creating their own wish lists.

As a company, we will continue supporting a wide range of other programs that help thousands of charities and communities across the U.S. For instance:

Housing Equity Fund: We’re investing $2 billion to build and preserve affordable housing in our hometown communities. In just two years, we’ve provided funding to create more than 14,000 affordable homes—and we expect to build at least 6,000 more in the coming months. These units will host more than 18,000 moderate- to low-income families, many of them with children. In one year alone, our investments have been able to increase the affordable housing stock in communities like Bellevue, Washington and Arlington, Virginia by at least 20%.

Amazon Future Engineer: We’ve funded computer science curriculum for more than 600,000 students across over 5,000 schools—all in underserved communities. We have plans to reach an additional 1 million students this year. We’ve also provided immediate assistance to 55,000 students in our hometown communities by giving them warm clothes for the winter, food, and school supplies.

Community Delivery Program: We’ve partnered with food banks in 35 U.S. cities to deliver more than 23 million meals, using our logistics infrastructure to help families in need access healthy food – and we plan to deliver 12 million more meals this year alone. In addition to our delivery services, we’ve also donated 30 million meals in communities across the country.

Amazon Disaster Relief: We’re using our logistics capabilities, inventory, and cloud technology to provide fast aid to communities affected by natural disasters. For example, we’ve created a Disaster Relief Hub in Atlanta with more than 1 million relief items ready for deployment, our Disaster Relief team has responded to more than 95 natural disasters, and we’ve donated more than 20 million relief products to nonprofits assisting communities on the ground.

Community Giving: We support hundreds of local nonprofits doing meaningful work in cities where our employees and their families live. For example, each year we donate hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations working to build stronger communities, from youth sport leagues, to local community colleges, to shelters for families experiencing homelessness.

We’ll continue working to make a difference in many ways, and our long-term commitment to our communities remains the same—we’re determined to do every day better for our customers, our employees, and the world at large.

End transcript]

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@swradiogram 23NOV24 7780 AM 2300z Before RSID: <<2024-11-23T23:01Z MFSK-32 @ 7780000+1500>> 

Welcome to program 379 of Shortwave Radiogram.

I'm Kim Andrew Elliott in Arlington, Virginia USA.

Here is the lineup for today's program, in MFSK modes as noted:

1:45 MFSK32: Program preview (now) 2:53 MFSK32: Social platform Bluesky welcomes X users 7:29 MFSK64: Germany assumes sabotage after data cable damaged* 10:44 MFSK64: This week's images* 27:33 MFSK32: Closing announcements

with image(s)

Please send reception reports to radiogram@verizon.net

And visit http://swradiogram.net

We're on X/Twitter now: @SWRadiogram

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From AP via TechXplore.com:

What is Bluesky, the fast-growing social platform welcoming fleeing X users?

November 16, 2024

Disgruntled X users are again flocking to Bluesky, a newer social media platform that grew out of the former Twitter before billionaire Elon Musk took it over in 2022. While it remains small compared to established online spaces such as X, it has emerged as an alternative for those looking for a different mood, lighter and friendlier and less influenced by Musk.

What is Bluesky?

Championed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky was an invitation-only space until it opened to the public in February. That invite-only period gave the site time to build out moderation tools and other features. The platform resembles Musk's X, with a "discover" feed and a chronological feed for accounts that users follow. Users can send direct messages and pin posts, as well as find "starter packs" that provide a curated list of people and custom feeds to follow.

Why is Bluesky growing?

Bluesky said in mid-November that its total users surged to 15 million, up from roughly 13 million at the end of October, as some X users look for an alternative platform to post their thoughts and talk to others online. The post-election uptick in users isn't the first time Bluesky has benefited from people leaving X. The platform gained 2.6 million users in the week after X was banned in Brazil in August—85% of them from Brazil, the company said. About 500,000 new users signed up in one day in October, when X signaled that blocked accounts would be able to see a user's public posts.

Across the platform, new users—among them journalists, left-leaning politicians and celebrities—have posted memes and shared that they were looking forward to using a space free from advertisements and hate speech. Some said it reminded them of the early days of Twitter more than a decade ago.

Despite Bluesky's growth, X posted after the election that it had "dominated the global conversation on the U.S. election" and had set new records.

Beyond social networking

Bluesky, though, has bigger ambitions than to supplant X. Beyond the platform itself, it is building a technical foundation—what it calls "a protocol for public conversation"—that could make social networks work across different platforms—also known as interoperability—like email, blogs or phone numbers.

Currently, you can't cross between social platforms to leave a comment on someone's account. Twitter users must stay on Twitter and TikTok users must stay on TikTok if they want to interact with accounts on those services. Big Tech companies have largely built moats around their online properties, which helps serve their advertising-focused business models.

Bluesky is trying to reimagine all of this and working toward interoperability.

Shortwave Radiogram now changes to MFSK64 …

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This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK64

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From Deutsche Welle:

Germany assumes sabotage after Baltic Sea data cable damaged

November 19, 2024

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on Tuesday that the damage to an undersea data cable running from Germany to Finland was likely due to sabotage.

The damage to the C-Lion1 cable was first reported on Monday with officials saying the 1,173-kilometer (729-mile) line had been cut, although the impact would probably not be noticeable for most people.

Sweden's Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin also reported on Monday that a second undersea cable had been damaged, according to the French press agency AFP.

The incident occurred in the same maritime region where the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged in 2022 following Russia's invasion of Ukraine earlier that year.

'Can't all just be coincidences'

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Europe would remain united in light of the hybrid threats following the cut in the fiber-optic cables in the Baltic Sea.

"We are now also experiencing this in Germany … with cyber attacks, with the surveillance of critical infrastructure, parcels suddenly exploding when transported on planes and yesterday … a data cable between Finland and Germany which probably also affected Sweden," said Baerbock. "These can't all just be coincidences."

What else did Germany say about the damaged Baltic Sea cable?

"No one believes that these cables were cut accidentally. I also don't want to believe in versions that these were anchors that accidentally caused damage over these cables," Pistorius said before a meeting with EU defense ministers in Brussels.

"Therefore, we have to state, without knowing specifically who it came from, that it is a 'hybrid' action. And we also have to assume, without knowing it yet, that it is sabotage," he added.

While Pistorius was unable to produce any evidence for his suspicions, his Estonian counterpart Hanno Pevkur also said it was not a "natural cause" based on their preliminary information.

A joint statement from the German and Finnish Foreign Ministers on Monday evening said: "Our European security is not only under threat from Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors."

Additional reporting by Teri Schultz.

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Image: Map showing route of the CLion1 cable between Germany and Finland …

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This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK64

Please send your reception report to radiogram@verizon.net

This week's images …

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From the Microscopic Photo Competition: The crystalline pattern of a big cotton padded jacket. https://tinyurl.com/2b4zbozm …

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Banded demoiselle damselflies perching on a blade of grass. https://tinyurl.com/27karzm4 …

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A fruit seller opens early in the morning as smog covers Lahore, Pakistan, November 14. https://tinyurl.com/277b5kz8 ….

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The Xiling Gorge Estuary, in the Yangtze River, at sunrise in Yichang city, Hubei province, China, November 10. https://tinyurl.com/24uqw9of …

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The sunrise sky and a ship on the forth as seen from Kirkcaldy Prom, Scotland. https://tinyurl.com/239h3eq4 …

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Looking like an abstract painting, Chris Fukuda's photo of the Beaver Supermoon taken from the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey. https://tinyurl.com/26ownd64 …

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Last of the autumn colors at the Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire, England. https://tinyurl.com/26oz2ryu …

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At the Morton Arboretum near Chicago, the "Winter Radiance" display pays tribute to the big bluestem prairie grass native to the Midwest, using "eco-friendly" LEDs. https://tinyurl.com/26r36cwm …

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Our art of the week is a geometric icon design by Dalius Stuoka. https://tinyurl.com/26fovkcw …

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Shortwave Radiogram returns to MFSK32 …

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[mariacallous]

Top officials from Google, Apple, and Meta testified Wednesday before the United States Senate Intelligence Committee about each of their company’s ongoing efforts to identify and disrupt foreign influence campaigns ahead of the country’s November elections.

The hearing, chaired by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, served largely to impress upon the companies the need for more extensive safeguards against the disinformation campaigns being funded by foreign entities with an eye on influencing US politics.

“This is really our effort to try to urge you guys to do more. To alert the public that this has not gone away,” Warner said.

Warner, a proponent of expanding cooperation between the government and Silicon Valley to root out campaigns by Russia, Iran, and China, among other legally designated rivals, described the recent efforts by Russia as both “effective and cheap.”

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control placed sanctions this month on 10 Russian citizens, several of them employees of the state-funded news outlet RT, formerly Russia Today. US secretary of state Antony Blinken on Friday accused the Russian outlet of working hand-in-hand with the country’s intelligence services, conducting influence and cyber operations meant to covertly spread Kremlin propaganda on more than three continents. And earlier this month, US authorities accused RT employees of bankrolling right-wing influencer network Tenet Media.

Warner noted—almost as an aside—that Elon Musk’s X had refused to send a representative to testify Wednesday. A spokesperson for Warner told WIRED that X’s former chief of global affairs, Nick Pickles, had previously agreed to appear before the committee; however, he resigned from the company roughly two weeks later. X then declined to provide a replacement. (Pickles could not be immediately reached for comment.)

Warner received the companies that did appear amicably, praising the “positive role” they’ve played during the government’s recent actions: Meta’s recent decision, for example, to ban RT and its subsidiary Sputnik from its platforms. Warner also highlighted recent decisions at Google and Microsoft to publicly reveal information about foreign election threats, keeping the public and government better informed.

In addition to the Tenet Media indictment, the Department of Justice revealed this month in an FBI affidavit that it had seized 32 internet domains allegedly tied to the Kremlin and related entities. The websites, with names like fox-news.top, were created to imitate popular media and news brands, including CNN, spreading content favorable to Russia. One fake Fox News story, for instance, declared that Ukraine has “no particular value to the US” and that squaring off with Russia is “too great” a risk.

The operation, dubbed “Doppelganger,” allegedly relied on influencers and paid social media advertisements, as well as fake accounts that mimicked US citizens—in some cases with the help of artificial intelligence. In private documents obtained by the FBI, the operation’s principal director—a little-known Russian political strategist named Ilya Gambashidzer—is alleged to have stated plainly: “They are expecting fake news from us every day.”

Marco Rubio, the committee's Republican vice chair, argued on the behalf of Americans whom, he said, should not be punished for holding views that align with the Kremlin’s. “The question becomes, is that disinformation or is that misinformation, is that an influence operation, because that preexisting view is being amplified?” Decisions by companies to remove the amplified information is "problematic and complicated," he said, adding that he believes it risks "stigmatiz[ing]” Americans holding those views.

Andy Carvin, the managing editor and research director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab, tells WIRED that his organization, which conducts a vast amount of research into disinformation and other online harms, has been tracking Doppelganger for more than two years. The scope of the operation should surprise few, he says, given the fake news sites follow an obvious template and that populating them with AI-generated text is simple.

“Russian operations like Doppelganger are like throwing spaghetti at a wall,” he says. “They toss out as much as they can and see what sticks.”

Meta, in a written statement on Tuesday, said it had banned RT’s parent company, Rossiya Segodnya, and “other related entities” globally across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads for engaging in what it called “foreign interference activity.” (“Meta is discrediting itself,” the Kremlin replied Tuesday, claiming the ban has endangered the company’s “prospects” for “normalizing” relations with Russia.)

Testifying on Wednesday, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, stressed the industry-wide nature of the problem facing voters online. “People trying to interfere with elections rarely target a single platform,” he said, adding that Meta is, nevertheless, “confident” in its ability to protect the integrity of “not only this year’s elections in the United States but elections everywhere.”

Warner appeared less than fully convinced, noting the use of paid advertisements in recent malign influence campaigns. “I would have thought,” he said, “eight years later, we would be better at at least screening the advertisers.”

He added that, seven months ago, over two dozen tech companies had signed the AI Elections Accord in Munich—an agreement to invest in research and the development of countermeasures against harmful AI. While some of the firms have been responsive, he said, others have ignored repeated inquiries by US lawmakers, many eager to hear how those investments played out.

While talking up Google’s efforts to “identify problematic accounts, particularly around election ads,” Alphabet’s chief legal officer, Kent Walker, was halted mid-sentence. Citing conversations with the Treasury Department, Warner interrupted to say that he’d confirmed as recently as February that both Google and Meta have “repeatedly allowed Russian influence actors, including sanctioned entities, to use your ad tools.”

The senator from Virginia stressed that Congress needed to know specifically “how much content” relevant bad actors had paid to promote to US audiences this year. “And we’re going to need that [information] extraordinarily fast,” he added, referring as well to details of how many Americans specifically had seen the content. Walker replied to say that Google had taken down “something like 11,000 efforts by Russian-associated entities to post content on YouTube and the like.”

Warner additionally urged the officials against viewing Election Day as if it were an end zone. Of equal and great importance is the integrity of the news that reaches voters, he stressed, in the days and weeks that follow.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

From Houston to the moon: Johnson's thermal vacuum chamber tests lunar solar technology

Imagine designing technology that can survive on the moon for up to a decade, providing a continuous energy supply. NASA selected three companies to develop such systems, aimed at providing a power source at the moon's South Pole for Artemis missions.

Three companies were awarded contracts in 2022 with plans to test their self-sustaining solar arrays at the Johnson Space Center's Space Environment Simulation Laboratory (SESL) in Houston, specifically in Chamber A in building 32. The prototypes tested to date have undergone rigorous evaluations to ensure the technology can withstand the harsh lunar environment and deploy the solar array effectively on the lunar surface.

In the summer of 2024, both Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company from Altadena, California, and Astrobotic Technology from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania put their solar array concepts to the test in Chamber A.

Each company has engineered a unique solution to design the arrays to withstand the harsh lunar environment and extreme temperature swings. The data collected in the SESL will support refinement of requirements and the designs for future technological advancements with the goal to deploy at least one of the systems near the moon's South Pole.

The contracts for this initiative are part of NASA's VSAT (Vertical Solar Array Technology) project, aiming to support the agency's long-term lunar surface operations. VSAT is under the Space Technology Mission Directorate Game Changing Development program and led by the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, in collaboration with Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

"We foresee the moon as a hub for manufacturing satellites and hardware, leveraging the energy required to launch from the lunar surface," said Jim Burgess, VSAT lead systems engineer. "This vision could revolutionize space exploration and industry."

Built in 1965, the SESL initially supported the Gemini and Apollo programs but was adapted to conduct testing for other missions like the Space Shuttle Program and Mars rovers, as well as validate the design of the James Webb Space Telescope. Today, it continues to evolve to support future Artemis exploration.

Johnson's Front Door initiative aims to solve the challenges of space exploration by opening opportunities to the public and bringing together bold and innovative ideas to explore new destinations.

"The SESL is just one of the hundreds of unique capabilities that we have here at Johnson," said Molly Bannon, Johnson's Innovation and Strategy specialist. "The Front Door provides a clear understanding of all our capabilities and services, the ways in which our partners can access them, and how to contact us. We know that we can go further together with all our partners across the entire space ecosystem if we bring everyone together as the hub of human spaceflight."

Chamber A remains as one of the largest thermal vacuum chambers of its kind, with the unique capability to provide extreme deep space temperature conditions down to as low as 20 Kelvin. This allows engineers to gather essential data on how technologies react to the moon's severe conditions, particularly during the frigid lunar night where the systems may need to survive for 96 hours in darkness.

"Testing these prototypes will help ensure more safe and reliable space mission technologies," said Chuck Taylor, VSAT project manager. "The goal is to create a self-sustaining system that can support lunar exploration and beyond, making our presence on the moon not just feasible but sustainable."

The power generation systems must be self-aware to manage outages and ensure survival on the lunar surface. These systems will need to communicate with habitats and rovers and provide continuous power and recharging as needed. They must also deploy on a curved surface, extend 32 feet high to reach sunlight, and retract for possible relocation.

"Generating power on the moon involves numerous lessons and constant learning," said Taylor. "While this might seem like a technical challenge, it's an exciting frontier that combines known technologies with innovative solutions to navigate lunar conditions and build a dynamic and robust energy network on the moon."

IMAGE: The Honeybee Robotics prototype during lunar VSAT (Vertical Solar Array Technology) testing inside Chamber A at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Credit: NASA/David DeHoyos

[lboogie1906]

Brigadier General Francis Xavier Taylor (October 22, 1948) is a senior military leader, intelligence and security expert, and American diplomat. Born in DC., he was raised by his mother Virginia Taylor, who worked as an administrator in the Department of the Army. He enrolled at the University of Notre Dame, joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps, and received his BA and his MA.

He began his official military career in the Air Force. He held multiple staff and command positions on US soil and abroad. These included assignments with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, and the Pentagon. He was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General, and on July 21, 2001, he retired.

President George W. Bush appointed him as Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism and Director of, the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at the State Department, with the rank of Ambassador-at-Large. This role took on a higher profile following the September 11 attacks.

He was appointed as Assistant Secretary of, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and Director of, the Office of Foreign Missions at the State Department, with the rank of Ambassador. He directed the law enforcement function of the Bureau, including the special agents that protect the Secretary of State and foreign dignitaries visiting the U.S. He provided in expanding the chapters of the Overseas Security Advisory Council in US embassies from 40 to more than 100.

He ensured that US diplomatic and consular missions abroad, and their personnel, were treated equitably and fairly; led State Department interactions with US-based foreign missions; and, provided services and assistance to the foreign mission community.

He joined the private sector as Vice President and Chief Security Officer for the General Electric Company. He was the Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis. He received the Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Service Medal, and the Legion of Merit.

He is married with three children. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

Nationalize the grid

Regulators let utilities charge their customers enough money to cover what they spend on assets like combustion turbines and wires, plus a generous rate of return (up to 10 percent) for their investors. This longstanding arrangement incentivizes power providers to build expensive things whether society needs them or not, in lieu of lower-cost, cleaner options, and to invoke their duty to keep the lights on as a post hoc rationalization. PAYWALL (sorry): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/opinion/electricity-demand-surging.html MORE (because paywall): Nearly a decade ago, Dominion and Duke partnered to build a 600-mile-long pipeline across West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina, largely to supply their own new power plants. Back then, the companies cited their own forecasts of rising energy demand and claimed more gas supply was needed to back up intermittent wind- and solar-generated power coming onto the grid. But it soon became clear that there wasn’t any need for those plants, and most were canceled. The pipeline’s core premise had proved to be a mirage. And in 2020, faced with relentless grass-roots opposition, Dominion and Duke finally abandoned it…

But utilities aren’t like other shareholder-owned companies. They are granted the right to be monopolies in exchange for providing essential services to society. And regulators’ job is to hold them accountable to the public interest. This century-old model is in dire need of an upgrade, so that utilities can be compensated for achieving goals — such as using clean, affordable energy and building a resilient grid — that are in everyone’s interest.