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Life hasnt been kind to social media giant TikTok recently. First, Congress grilled it over its privacy practices. Then the UK government fined it 12.7 million (about $15.8 million) for using childrens personal data without parental consent. The list of governmentsincluding the US, EU, Canada, New Zealand, and Australiathat ban its use by employees continues to grow. And in the US, users supporting a TikTok ban outnumber those who dont by two to one.

Tiktok isnt alone. Scrutiny of the tech sector is at an all-time high. And hating on Big Tech these days is arguably the one thing Republicans and Democrats can agree on. It is time for 2023, said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) on NBC News, when discussing recent bipartisan legislative efforts to rein in Big Tech. Let it be our resolution that we finally pass one of these bills.

In a word, it comes down to trust. For tech companies that resource is in short supply. Regaining it is now mission-critical.

Use benchmarking to compare how you rank against industry peers with a single, accurate, impact-based view of risk.

The problem: Trust requires ethical awareness, and most companiestech and nontech alikelack an ethical framework related to technology, according to Deloittes inaugural State of Ethics and Trust in Technology report, released in December.

The percentage of enterprises lacking ethical guidelines for the development and use of emerging technologies

It surveyed almost 1,800 professionals across eight sectors (including technology, financial services, healthcare, and government) on ethical approaches to emerging technologies such as autonomous vehicles, quantum computing, and augmented or virtual reality. It found 87% lacking or unaware of any ethical principles governing the development and use of emerging technology within their organizations.

While this finding applies to enterprises across the board, it is of vital importance to tech companies, now operating under heightened scrutiny and a tough economy.

Trust is the new currency in an increasingly competitive environment, says Rozita Dara, associate professor of computer science at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Trust gives organizations a competitive edge, she says.

Ethical gaps show up in different ways. TikToks manifested in its alleged misuse of data, and addictive qualities in the app that critics worry ensnare users. A Harvard University study revealed racial bias in facial recognition technology developed by IBM and Microsoft. And observers have identified gender bias in Google Translate and an Amazon AI-powered hiring recruitment system (which the company eventually scrapped).

Trust gives organizations a competitive edge.

Trust in a company depends on its commitment to the ethical use of technology. And that goes doubly for companies who actually create that technology.

We set up an expectation for what this technology is going to be and what its going to do, says Yasemin J. Erden, assistant professor at the University of Twentes Digital Society Institute in Enschede, Netherlands. In promoting the tech to users, theres a risk that the maker or vendor wont fully capture its implications. All of that impacts on the trust that people have in the technology.

We are seeing this play out now with regard to cognitive (AI) technology. In March, more than 1,100 computer scientists and other tech luminaries, including Elon Musk, signed an open letter asking all labs to suspend work on any training models more powerful than GPT-4, a large language model from research company OpenAI that powers its controversial ChatGPT service.

[Read also: Yes, ChatGPT will turbocharge hackingand help fight it, too]

Erden feels uncomfortable discussing the specifics of GPTs latest version because the makers have not been transparent enough. We dont know exactly how its doing what its doing, she warns, echoing complaints from other AI experts. So then how can we really assess the claims that are made about it? (The fact that this little-understood chatbot was quickly co-opted by cyber threat actors to create malware and other dangerous content doesnt help matters either.)

Standards and policies governing the technology industry are coming, theres no question about that. But until they take effect, it is critical that tech firms enact their own set of ethical principles, which may be used both internally (to guide the development of new trustworthy technologies) and externally (to win over consumers).

[Mozilla is] really transparenttheyre clear about what their aims are, what their limitations are, what theyre doing, and what theyre changing.

Deloittes report serves as a useful primer. It advises that company leaders meet with the actual teams completing the work. And to get the conversation started, it offers a seven-part framework to help diagnose the ethical health of a tech companys products and services. According to Deloittes technology trust ethics framework, any new technologies employed by a tech firm should be:

Defining the principles is just one part of the challenge. The other is executing them, points out Brian Green, director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. How do you actually make these things happen in the context of a corporation when youre creating new products? he asks.

The Markkula Center has a toolkit meant for engineers and technology designers to help tackle this process. It will shortly release a handbook on applying technology ethics.

[Read also: More companies are practicing privacy by design to prioritize data securityand avoid hefty fines. Heres why you should, too]

Dara cites ethics by design as a foundational best practice. It bakes ethics into the development of a product or service from the beginning, acknowledging its entire ecosystem, including the users rights and interests. Its like adding Eth to the DevSecOps team. Developers must consider ethics as they test the functionality of a tool, evaluating its reliability and applicability.

As Deloittes report points out, the application of specific ethical principles might vary across different technologies. AI has different implications, users, and technical characteristics than, say, quantum computing, blockchain, or virtual reality.

Ethicists should drill down on the specifics based on a companys individual parameters, which raises the question: Among the companies exploring this new ethical landscape, are any doing it right?

Erden nominates Mozilla, the California-based software maker that is part foundation, part corporation.

Theyre really transparenttheyre clear about what their aims are, what their limitations are, what theyre doing, and what theyre changing, she says. I think theres a lot of respect for their platforms, like Firefox, and their ambitions.

Mozilla also invests heavily in engagement, Erden points out. It has demonstrated its commitment to ethical technology in its manifesto, with initiatives such as its Responsible Computing Challenge, its educational material on how to navigate ethical issues in the tech industry, and now its Responsible AI Challenge. These just scratch the surface.

[Read also: Lacking an ethical framework is a business risk. Here are three other pressing risksand ways to reduce them]

Green co-authored a World Economic Forum case study on ethics at IBM and cites Big Blue as a leader here. The company established an AI ethics board in 2018, published its own principles for trust and transparency, and supported them with five pillars of trust, advocating values like privacy and fairness. It has also donated tools to the open-source community to help with adversarial robustnessthat is, defending AI against misuse by attackers.

He wrote a similar analysis on Salesforce, which in 2018 developed its Office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology, and another on Microsoft.

Of course, no company is perfect, which is why many experts in the thorny field of ethics try to avoid issuing blanket stamps of approval.

All we can do is assess individual practices, individual technologies, and individual steps, concludes Erden. Its a repetitive process that evaluates actions on their ethical merits, and should in theory encourage companies to keep striving to improve, product by product, new tech service by new tech service. Theres no end to that.

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What the Tech Sector Can Learn From TikTok: Trust Is Everything ... - Tanium Endpoint

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has announced that registration has opened for the CSA Summit 2023: Mission Critical (San Francisco, April 24) held in conjunction with the RSA Conference.

Tima Soni, Chief and Head of the Valencia office of the United Nations International Computing Centres (UNICC) Cybersecurity division, and New York States Chief Cyber Officer Colin Ahern will share their wealth of expertise in two keynote addresses.

The event will also feature a special keynote from a global financial services leader detailing how coordination with cloud providers is fundamental to being mission critical in the cloud.

Being mission critical in the cloud compels organizations to thoughtfully develop strategies composed of vetted best practices. It also means having a strong understanding of the latest technologies and knowing when to employ them to obtain security ROI and leverage over adversaries. It is in this spirit that the CSA Summit will go from AI to zero trust, and many topics in between. We look forward to releasing the first industry whitepaper about ChatGPT that addresses responsible enterprise adoption of the technology and how cybersecurity professionals can use it today, said Jim Reavis, CEO, Cloud Security Alliance.

The CSA Summit 2023: Mission Critical will examine the lessons learned from cloud becoming the primary IT and will provide attendees with a roadmap to the future. The event will explore the themes of resilience, compliance, and how to leverage benefits of solutions as zero trust, confidential computing, and more.

It will feature a special presentation AI and the Future of Security by Holly Stewart, Director, Messaging and Web Security Research, Microsoft.

Attendees will hear from government, enterprise, and cybersecurity industry thought leaders through such sessions as:

Panelists: Candy Alexander, CISO and Cyber Risk Practice lead, NeuEon; Rick Doten, VP, CISO/Healthcare Enterprises and International, Centene Corp.; Kris Rides, President/Americas, Via Resource; Scott Scheppers, Chief Experience Officer, AT&T Cybersecurity.

This panel on cybersecurity hiring will explore the challenges and strategies for recruiting and retaining skilled cloud security professionals in todays highly competitive job market. The discussion will cover topics such as the impact of the recent layoffs on the market, diversity and inclusion in cybersecurity hiring, and the importance of ongoing training and development for cybersecurity teams.

Speaker: Jay Chaudhry, CEO, Chairman, and Founder, Zscaler.

Learn how zero trust architecture secures users, workloads, and IoT/OT devices by addressing critical security shortcomings of legacy network architecture. This session covers key steps in a phased zero trust transformation journey, as well as advice for winning the support of organizational leadership.

Speaker: Merav Bahat, CEO, Dazz.

Attendees of this session will learn about modernizing cloud risk discovery and remediation to reduce risk windows from weeks to hours, improving the partnership between security and development teams.

Speaker: Corey Smith, Senior Director/Solution Architecture and Global Center of Excellence, Qualys.

This session will walk attendees through how attackers attempt to use ransomware in their cloud environments. Attendees will learn a few of the common ways ransomware gets onto and propagates in the cloud, and learn about the multi-faceted approach that is required for preventing ransomware in the cloud.

Speakers: Stacey Halota, VP, Information Security and Privacy, Graham Holdings; Jason Garbis, Principal and Founder, Numberline Security; Robert LaMagna-Reiter, VP, Information Security & Compliance/CISO, hudl; Carlos W. Moran, Jr., CISO, Toppan Merrill.

This session will examine how CISOs of organizations that have or are pursuing a zero trust strategy helped management and other internal stakeholders understand the positive impacts to cybersecurity operations, their continuing digital transformations, and their companies futures, as well as share tactics to getting much-needed support and the buy-in to actually execute and progress zero trust.

Speaker: TBD.

The Cloud Security Alliance has been a pioneer in promoting awareness of the quantum threat. As such, this presentation will provide a brief overview of the quantum computer and quantum threat, before delving into possible solutions, some based on new algorithms known as quantum-resistant algorithms.

These algorithms can be complemented with quantum solutions, which utilize the same peculiar properties of the quantum world to thwart the quantum computer threat. Together, they will be part of a new quantum-safe infrastructure, which will recover and even improve cloud security.

Speakers: Jeff Farinich, SVP/Technology and CISO, New American Funding; and Tina Thorstenson, VP/Industry Business Unit and Executive Strategist, CrowdStrike.

In this session, attendees will walk away with insights into cloud attack vectors and adversary techniques from the latest CrowdStrike Global Threat Report and the impact to their business. Learn best practices for modern cloud security strategies to defend multi-cloud environments and discover how New American Funding secured their environment and transformed its cloud environment to accelerate business.

Speakers: Rick Bosworth, Director/Product Marketing, SentinelOne; Ravi Ithal, Co-Founder and CTO, Normalyze; Jack Naglieri, Founder and CEO, Panther; Chris Pedigo, Global Field CTO, Lacework; John Yeoh, Global VP/Research, Cloud Security Alliance.

Panelists will discuss the challenges businesses face with visibility and no context, as well as how context, observability, and security strategies are helping organizations be successful in the cloud.

Speaker: Taylor Bianchi, Senior Offensive Security Researcher, Uptycs.

Organizations can meet compliance/regulatory responsibilities in the cloud, but still be susceptible to a threat actor escalating privileges, exfiltrating data, and targeting your company for ransomware. Threat actors today have become cloud experts. Their TTPs are evolving quicker than most want to believe. Attendees will learn to start thinking like threat actors and mimic the detection of their attack behavior.

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Cloud Security Alliance opens registration for the CSA Summit at ... - Help Net Security

In a first, scientists have shown that they can send light through "slits" in time.

The new experiment is a twist on a 220-year-old demonstration, in which light shines through two slits in a screen to create a unique diffraction pattern across space, where the peaks and troughs of the light wave add up or cancel out. In the new experiment, researchers created a similar pattern in time, essentially changing the color of an ultrabrief laser pulse.

The findings pave the way for advances in analog computers that manipulate data imprinted on beams of light instead of digital bits - it might even make such computers "learn" from the data. They also deepen our understanding of the fundamental nature of light and its interactions with materials.

For the new study, described April 3 in the journal Nature Physics (opens in new tab), the researchers used indium tin oxide (ITO), the material found in most phone screens. Scientists already knew ITO could change from transparent to reflective in response to light, but the researchers found it occurs much faster than previously thought, in less than 10 femtoseconds (10 millionths of a billionth of a second).

"This was a very big surprise and at the beginning it was something that we couldnt explain," study lead author Riccardo Sapienza (opens in new tab), a physicist at the Imperial College London, told Live Science. Eventually, the researchers figured out why the reaction happened so fast by scrutinizing the theory of how the electrons in ITO respond to incident light. "But it took us a long time to understand it."

English scientist Thomas Young first demonstrated light's wave-like nature using the now classic "double-slit" experiment in 1801. As light shines on a screen with two slits, the waves change direction, so that waves fanning out from one slit overlap with the waves coming through the other. The peaks and troughs of these waves either add up or cancel out, creating bright and dark fringes, called an interference pattern.

In the new study, Sapienza and colleagues recreated such an interference pattern in time by shining a "pump" laser pulse at a screen coated in ITO. While the ITO was initially transparent, the light from the laser changed the properties of the electrons within the material so that the ITO reflected light like a mirror. A subsequent "probe" laser beam hitting the ITO screen would then see this temporary change in optical properties as a slit in time just a few hundred femtoseconds long. Using a second pump laser pulse made the material behave as if it had two slits in time, an analog of light passing through spatial double slits.

Whereas passing through conventional spatial slits causes light to change direction and fan out, as the light passed through these twin "time slits," it changed in frequency, which is inversely related to its wavelength. It is the wavelength of visible light that determines its color.

In the new experiment, the interference pattern showed up as fringes, or additional peaks in the frequency spectra, which are graphs of the measured light intensity at different frequencies.Just like altering the distance between spatial slits changes the resulting interference pattern, the lag between the time slits dictates the spacing of the interference fringes in the frequency spectra. And the number of fringes in these interference patterns that are visible before their amplitude decreases to the level of background noise reveals how quickly the ITO properties are changing; materials with slower responses yield fewer detectable interference fringes.

This isn't the first time that scientists have figured out how to manipulate light across time, rather than space. For instance, scientists at Google say their quantum computer "Sycamore" created a time crystal, a new phase of matter that changes periodically in time, as opposed to atoms being arranged in a periodic pattern across space.

Andrea Al (opens in new tab), a physicist at The City University of New York who was not involved with these experiments but has done separate experiments that created reflections of light in time, described it as yet anotherneat demonstration of how time and space can be interchangeable..

"The most remarkable aspect of the experiment is that it demonstrates how we can switch the permittivity [which defines how much a material transmits or reflects light] of this material (ITO) very fast, and by a significant amount," Al told Live Science via email. "This confirms that this material can be an ideal candidate for the demonstration of time reflections and time crystals."

The researchers hope to use these phenomena to create metamaterials, or structures designed to alter the path of light in specific and often sophisticated ways.

So far these metamaterials have been static, meaning changing how the metamaterial affects lights path requires using a whole new metamaterial structure a new analog computer for each different type of calculation, for instance, Sapienza said.

"Now we have a material we can reconfigure, which means we can use it for more than one purpose," said Sapienza. He added that such technology could enable neuromorphic computing that mimics the brain.

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Scientists create 'slits in time' in mind-bending physics experiment - Livescience.com

Joint research and innovation agenda

CWI and Inria have already collaborated successfully over the past decades and have come to know each other as reliable research partners. Both institutes have an excellent scientific reputation. By strengthening their cooperation through a partnership agreement, both parties join forces to support their research on a European scale and thus achieve important scientific results.

This intensified collaboration will include a joint research and innovation agenda to strengthen networking, external partnership opportunities and funding. Scientific cooperation will be strengthened by creating joint projects as well as joint research teams, in areas like quantum computing, human interaction, energy, cryptography, digital health, machine learning and software engineering.

The more intensive cooperation of both institutes to create a powerful alliance within Europe, as expressed by President Macron during the state visit, fits in with a joint ambition of both institutes to to join forces to cope with major scientific and societal challenges.

Earlier today, Minister Sylvie Retailleau and Inria Chairman/CEO Bruno Sportisse visited CWI in the context of the state visit of President Macron to the Netherlands, where they received a presentation from Professor Peter Bosman about how mathematics and computer science can contribute to the treatment of cancer.

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French research institute Inria and Dutch CWI intensify their ... - Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)

"This is a pivotal milestone in our innovative partnership with IBM, as we explore new ways to apply the power of quantum computing to healthcare," said Tom Mihaljevic, M.D., CEO of Cleveland Clinic, in a press statement.

It is said to be the world's first quantum computer solely dedicated to healthcare research.

A quantum computer is a rapidly developing technology that uses quantum phenomena to solve complex problems that conventional computers cant handle.

The clinic's computer is noted to be five feet tall. It will be used to advance medicine development, identify treatments for complex diseases, find new molecules to create effective drugs, sequence genes for cancer research, and even create jobs in the technology sector.

"This technology holds tremendous promise in revolutionizing healthcare and expediting progress toward new cares, cures, and solutions for patients. Quantum and other advanced computing technologies will help researchers tackle historic scientific bottlenecks and potentially find new treatments for patients with diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes, said Mihaljevic.

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IBM unveils world's first quantum computer dedicated to healthcare research - Interesting Engineering