[continued from previous message]

Subject: Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
(RISKS-33.36)

It's worth reading the paper and not just the press release.

The study is well designed. They picked a representative set of Irish
supreme court cases, wrote articles about them, added half the articles to Wikipedia, and indeed the cases they added got more citations and the
citations resembled the articles.

This does not mean that anything bad happened. Partly it's a statistical question, since they didn't distinguish citations that used language from
the original cases, which should be OK, rather than from the summaries,
which might not be.

To create these articles, first they went through and selected important
cases, then they had law students write the summaries, which were overseen
and edited by law faculty. The summaries should have been good and the cases were important -- why wouldn't you want a judge to use them?

Beyond that, Wikipedia has a process to remove articles about topics
that aren't sufficiently notable, but it is quite slow, and they'd
have to wait a long time to see whether their added articles stayed
or were deleted.

To test whether judges just used the articles without checking the
actual decisions, they'd have to add articles with deliberately wrong summaries, or summarize fake cases, but that kind of human
experimentation has ethical issues.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4174200

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2022
From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: Kids Are Back in Classrooms and Laptops Are Still Spying on Them
(WiReD)

As the post-Roe era underscores the risks of digital surveillance, a new
survey shows that teens face increased monitoring from teachers nd police.

https://www.wired.com/story/student-monitoring-software-privacy-in-schools/

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2022 16:25:38 -0400
From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: Re: School Surveillance Will Never Protect Kids From Shootings
(WiReD)

If we are to believe the purveyors of school surveillance systems, K-12
schools will soon operate in a manner akin to some agglomeration of Minority Report, Person of Interest, and Robocop. "Military grade" systems would
slurp up student data, picking up on the mere hint of harmful ideations, and dispatch officers before the would-be perpetrators could carry out their
vile acts. In the unlikely event that someone were able to evade the
predictive systems, they would inevitably be stopped by next-generation weapon-detection systems and biometric sensors that interpret the gait or
tone of a person, warning authorities of impending danger. The final layer might be the most technologically advancedâsome form of drone or maybe even
a robot dog, which would be able to disarm, distract, or disable the
dangerous individual before any real damage is done. If we invest in these systems, the line of thought goes, our children will finally be safe.

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2022 10:06:01 +0200
From: Lars-Henrik Eriksson <lhe@it.uu.se>
Subject: Re: "Dr. Birx ADMITS She 'Knew' COVID-19 Vaccines 'Were Not
Going to Protect Against Infection' (RISKS-33.35)

"Overwhelming", you say? But you might check out the website "How Bad Is
My Batch", which if you you check your batch numbers, points out
something else: 5% of the Pfizer and Moderna batches are apparently
responsible for 80% of the bad reactions including deaths and permanent
disablement from the vaccines. So maybe only 95% of the batches do what
you say. PGN]

"How Bad Is My Batch" is clearly an anti-vaccine conspiracy site. While it
is entirely possible that different batches have different effectiveness and even that some have more side effects (after all, that's why we keep track
of batches) this website suggests that some batches are *deliberately* made "toxic". See https://www.howbadismybatch.com/allnothing.html.

A criticism of the web site pointing out more issues and also notes other disturbing comments made by the person behind the web site can be found on https://www.thedailybeast.com/craig-paardekoopers-shady-site-shows-covid-anti-vaxxers-will-believe-anything.

[Lars-Henrik, I an NEITHER an anti-vaxxer NOR a conspiracy theorist.
However, a criticism of your criticism is needed. There is so much
disinformation here that there may be no trees left in the forest. Your
"clearly" is *clearly* a gross overstatement. It has become almost
impossible to get to the truth when every truth gets shot down as a
conspiracy theory or fake news. A close personal friend was one of nine
more or less healthy people vaccinated one day in January lst year. Six
of them died shortly thereafter with rather *evident* correlation with the
vaccine. If that was one of the clearly bad batches in the website data,
then you are shooting yourself in the foot by condemning *everything* on
the website. I believe a conspiracy may be on the side of overhyping the
effectiveness of the vaccines and hiding some negative results -- perhaps
in false hopes of discouraging the anti-vaxxers. PGN]

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2022 15:20:42 -0700
From: Steve Lamont <spl@tirebiter.org>
Subject: Re: Dr. Birx ADMITS She 'Knew' COVID-19 Vaccines 'Were Not Going to
Protect Against Infection' (RISKS-33.36)

Dr Birx "admitted" no such thing.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jul/29/facebook-posts/no-deborah-birx-didnt-change-her-tune-covid-vaccin/

Birx's full comments show she said she believes the vaccines do work and
people should get them. PolitiFact found no record of Birx stating the
vaccine could provide complete protection against infection. During the
initial vaccine rollout, Birx said it was unclear the level of immunity
that the vaccine provided.

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2022 18:23:40 +0000
From: Douglas W Jones <douglas-w-jones@uiowa.edu>
Subject: Book Review: America's Biggest Lottery Scam by Bob Sand

[Reproduced with permission from another list. PGN]

I just finished an interesting book, America's Biggest Lottery Scam by Bob Sand. The author was the lead prosecutor in uncovering the rigging of
lottery equipment from the Multistate Lottery Association (MUSL) by their employee Eddie Tipton. This is a textbook example of an insider threat at
work in an organization that had what looked like really good internal
controls to guard against such things. When we talk about how difficult it would be to rig voting machines, that is because of similar kind of internal controls that might be vulnerable to similar insider threats.

The book is written as a narrative from the prosecutor's perspective, so
it's structured as a detective story. Viewed from that perspective, the
story is interesting because the statute of limitation was running out as
the first lottery rigging case reached the point where charges could
possibly be brought. Furthermore, that case was not strong. They get a conviction halfway through the book, and that is where things start getting interesting because only then did the scale of the lottery rigging become apparent, and only then did the technical detail s begin to come out. The
book ends with the first case being as good as thrown out on appeal at about the same time that Tipton agreed to a plea deal in the larger case that included a complete confession, allowing the various state lotteries that
had been defrauded to tighten their own defenses.

The technical details of the lottery technology dribble out slowly over the course of the book, but they are there. As is the case with election machinery, code for the sealed lottery computers was installed with
oversight from a third party testing organization that also examined the
source code. There was room for sleight of hand, though, allowing Eddy
Tipton to install hacked code in lottery computers while turning over clean code to the testing organization. The hack? On scattered but predictable dates, the lottery computers would be less than random, with a set of
possible winning numbers small enough that you could buy a manageable stack
of tickets and have a good chance of winning.

Rigged lottery computers from MUSL ended up in Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, Colorado, Ohio and possibly other states. Tipton gave away winning lottery tickets or notes on winning numbers to a number of friends and relatives.
Only two of the wins attracted investigations. When his brother won the Colorado lottery, he cashed the check and got a suitcase full of
consecutively numbered $100 bills. That spooked him and he tried to launder the money, attracting the FBI's attention. They couldn't identify the
crime, but the case was weird enough that the age nt involved remembered it
and became involved when Sand began to dig.

Sand was brought in because a multi-million dollar winning ticket in Iowa
went unclaimed for most of a year, and then two credible attempts were made
to claim it, neither of which involved someone who resembled the ticket purchaser --the law required the lottery ticket to be redeemed by the
person who purchased the ticket, and they had surveillance camera footage of the purchaser who seemed very intent on not being recognized.

On the downside, the author spends several chapters on autobiography and biography, talking about his upbringing and about Eddy Tipton, both who grew
up in small rural communities. Sand is very interested in the psychology of the crime, what would lead a bright programmer to rig the machines and then
use that rigging in a series of stolen jackpots, mostly benefiting others.
Sand also ends on an autobiographical note, describing how, after working as
an assistant attorney-general prosecuting white collar crime, he realized
that the job was changing him in ways he didn't like. So he ran for state auditor, a job he now holds. That means that this book can be seen as
campaign literature as well as an interesting true computer crime story.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2020 11:11:11 -0800
From: RISKS-request@csl.sri.com
Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

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