As our society has become increasingly dependent on information infrastructures that reach into our pockets, homes and workplaces, we have become increasing vulnerable to attacks on and through these systems. Cybersecurity is perhaps one of the most important modern threats that we don't talk enough about. Adversaries range from specialist military government teams attacking infrastructure and penetrating state organisations, or managing large scale organised theft of commercial secrets, state sponsored and commercial criminal groups that stealing personal data, run ransomware attacks on hospitals and business, through to teenage hackers doing simple denial of service attacks on their friends, or even spying via home webcams. Why do our systems have these vulnerabilities? How can we improve legal, technical and human dimensions of design and use to ensure future protection and resilience?
Dr Lachlan Urquhart , School of Law
Clever Computing through Accountable Design: Cybersecurity in smart homes
Dr Tariq Elahi, School of Informatics
Plugging the holes in the Privacy Blanket
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Abstracts and readings for both talks can be found on the series wiki pages.
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Further information
In person venue: Newhaven Lecture Theatre 13-15 South College Street
Doors open 15:00, event starts at 15:10
Online platform: Zoom (online users are encouraged to ensure they use latest version app/software). Those registered to attend online will receive joining details by email. Please keep an eye on junk folders in case the email ends up there.
This talk is part of a series running 26th Jan-5 April 2024; more details can be found here: https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/CIDS/Controversies+in+the+Data+Society+Home
A public, postgraduate lecture series offered by the Edinburgh Futures Institute and Science Technology and Innovation Studies, highlighting current research from across the University of Edinburgh
Series brief:
The extraordinary growth and pervasiveness of born-digital big data from administrative and commercial systems, the deployment of data science an computational modelling shaping every sort of decision making, and a whole series of extraordinary and unnerving developments labelled 'AI' are generating fierce controversy. During 2023 the immense possibilities of generative AI were revealed with subsequent high levels of hype over ‘AI Safety’ and the intensification of international competition. However there are also many other deep controversies: The debate over end to end encryption and child abuse images; the unprecedented dataveillance powers provided by the UK Investigatory Powers Act; Europe, the UK and China all introducing new laws and regulation to govern the big platforms and AI; and the model of personalised targeted ads and risk scoring under severe attack in the courts; There is a new push for the widespread implementation of facial recognition in policing; we see more profiling and sorting of immigrants using social media data; the ‘sharing’ of large-scale data sets of health records without consent; growing fears over AI replacing jobs; global trade wars over technological dominance; the sustained use of social media platforms for political and government influence; and the protests, continued court cases and legislation around algorithmically-mediated services such as Uber or Airbnb, the intensification of cyberwarfare; the digitisation of economies and governments around the world, including the growth of a non-US centred technological colonisation of the global south.