Showing posts with label security concerns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label security concerns. Show all posts

Monday, November 4, 2019

Scientists With Links to China May Be Stealing Biomedical Research, U.S. Says; The New York Times, November 4, 2019

, The New York Times; Scientists With Links to China May Be Stealing Biomedical Research, U.S. Says

""The investigations have fanned fears that China is exploiting the relative openness of the American scientific system to engage in wholesale economic espionage. At the same time, the scale of the dragnet has sent a tremor through the ranks of biomedical researchers, some of whom say ethnic Chinese scientists are being unfairly targeted for scrutiny as Washington’s geopolitical competition with Beijing intensifies...

The alleged theft involves not military secrets, but scientific ideas, designs, devices, data and methods that may lead to profitable new treatments or diagnostic tools.

Some researchers under investigation have obtained patents in China on work funded by the United States government and owned by American institutions, the N.I.H. said. Others are suspected of setting up labs in China that secretly duplicated American research, according to government officials and university administrators...

The real question, [Dr. Michael Lauer, ] added, is how to preserve the open exchange of scientific ideas in the face of growing security concerns. At M.D. Anderson, administrators are tightening controls to make data less freely available."

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Complex Car Software Becomes the Weak Spot Under the Hood; New York Times, 9/26/15

David Gelles, Hiroko Tabuchi, and Matthew Dolan, New York Times; Complex Car Software Becomes the Weak Spot Under the Hood:
“We should be allowed to know how the things we buy work,” Mr. Moglen of Columbia University said. “Let’s say everybody who bought a Volkswagen were guaranteed the right to read the source code of everything in the car,” he said.
“Ninety-nine percent of the buyers would never read anything. But out of the 11 million people whose car was cheating, one of them would have found it,” he said. “And Volkswagen would have been caught in 2009, not 2015.”
Automakers aren’t buying the idea...
Volkswagen, through its trade association, has been one of the most vocal and forceful opponents of an exemption to a copyright rule that would allow independent researchers to look at a car’s source code, said Kit Walsh, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group for user privacy and free expression.
“If copyright law were not an impediment,” he said, “then we could have independent researchers go in and look at the code and find this kind of intentional wrongdoing, just as we have independent watchdogs that check vehicle safety with crash-test dummies.”"

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Penguin Suspends E-Book Availability to Libraries; New York Times, 11/22/11

Julie Bosman, New York Times; Penguin Suspends E-Book Availability to Libraries:

"Another major publisher has pushed back against making its e-books available to library users. Penguin Book Group said it would “delay the availability” of new e-books to libraries because of security concerns."