NEWS FLASH...ICYMI: Arizona Sheriffs Request Immediate Action From Senators Sinema And Kelly To Mitigate Border Crisis

Looks like Governor Ducey is lining up in-state from local county sheriffs

"The Arizona Sheriff's Association yesterday released a letter to Senators Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, echoing Governor Doug Ducey’s calls to Arizona’s congressional delegation to act now on border security.

 The letter followed an agreement from 11 county sheriffs during a meeting last week to support draft federal legislation prepared by the Governor’s Office that outlined a series of specific steps to bolster border security.

Read the full letter below:

Arizona Sheriffs Request Immediate Action From Senators Sinema And Kelly To Mitigate Border Crisis

Arizona Sheriff's Association January 19, 2022

Dear Senators Sinema and Kelly: As we enter a new year, we urge you to take action and not wait another day to address the border crisis in our home state. It is negligent to let another day, week, month, or year pass without Arizona’s US Senators leading on a solution to solve the revolving door border policy that negatively affects our state.  As Arizona’s elected law enforcement leaders across the state, we continue to see the border situation deteriorate and it is having real impacts on all of our communities. The border crisis is a clear national security concern, humanitarian crisis, public health crisis, and it’s fueling the drug epidemic in every state. We are sure you know the record-breaking statistics from this past year of failed border policies, but here are a few highlights to better understand the totality of the circumstances: This past year the US broke the record for most drug overdose deaths, with over 100,000 Americans dying of drug overdoses, an increase of 28.5% from the previous year. These drugs are coming through in massive quantities because of federal inaction. In FY21 CBP alone arrested illegal border crossers with dangerous previous convictions that include: 1,178 people with previous convictions for assault, 2,138 for illegal drug possession or trafficking, 825 for burglary, 1,629 for driving under the influence, 336 for illegal weapons possession, 60 for homicide, and 488 for sexual offenses. Just how many records have to be broken before the US Senate takes action to protect our Arizona communities? From the Yuma County farmers who have to throw away an entire field of crops due to illegal immigrants trespassing through their fields, to the parents in Pinal County dealing with the death of their teenagers due to fentanyl overdoses, to the Cochise County family of a woman killed in a car crash which was caused by a human smuggler transporting people illegally, these heartbreaking consequences are preventable.  Governor Ducey has drafted federal legislation that the Arizona Sheriff’s Association supports. We urge you to take immediate action to introduce it and work with your colleagues to get it to the President’s desk.  This legislation provides the minimal action that needs to be taken before any other effort to address our country’s drug problem will be effective. It includes the following provisions: Completion of the border wall, physical barriers and virtual surveillance; A requirement that asylum seekers who have traveled through another country must have attempted to claim asylum in that country; A requirement for asylum seekers to claim asylum at a port of entry; An increase in immigration judges; Additional funding for local law enforcement and humanitarian efforts; and That the federal government or its representatives must make clear that the United States’ borders are not open for immigration except through a port of entry and through legal means.  As the highest elected law enforcement leaders, we are calling on you for action. We have spent countless time briefing and giving tours to engaged congressional members from around the country who travel thousands of miles to learn from professionals about a border crisis, so we know there’s genuine interest in solving this problem. Now we need to hear from our United States Senators that you’re willing to engage and fix this problem. We need your support and we need it now! We stand ready to enforce the rule of law in Arizona and committed to protecting our counties, state, and nation, and we want you to join us. "

View the full letter online

Thank you, Governor's Office ======================================================================= NEWS FLASH ( Reference: https://www.azsheriffs.org/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=26 ) Posted on: January 19, 2022 ARIZONA SHERIFFS REQUEST IMMEDIATE ACTION FROM SENATORS SINEMA AND KELLY TO MITIGATE BORDER CRISIS January 19, 2022   Dear Senators Sinema and Kelly: As we enter a new year, we urge you to take action and not wait another day to address the border crisis in our home state. It is negligent to let another day, week, month, or year pass without Arizona’s US Senators leading on a solution to solve the revolving door border policy that negatively affects our state. . . Here's the sign-off: We stand ready to enforce the rule of law in Arizona and committed to protecting our counties, state, and nation, and we want you to join us.   Sincerely,                       Mark Dannels                                                 Mark Lamb President Arizona Sheriff’s Association                 Vice-President Arizona Sheriff’s Association Cochise County Sheriff                                     Pinal County Sheriff

Have Some Face Time...New Req for Filing IRS Taxes Online

You might like to know this

Cybersecurity

The IRS will soon make you use facial recognition to access your taxes online

The agency is using private company ID.me to verify taxpayers’ identities

By Kim Lyons@SocialKimLy Jan 20, 2022, 6:07pm EST

The Verge |

"The Internal Revenue Service will require people who access and pay their taxes online to enroll in a third-party facial recognition company starting this summer (h/t Krebs on Security). Even those who have already registered on IRS.gov with a username and password will have to provide a government ID, a copy of a utility bill, and a selfie to ID.me, the Virginia-based identity verification company. You’ll take a video selfie with whatever webcam or mobile device you’re using to sign up, which seems likely to cause problems for people with older hardware or who don’t have access to one.

According to the IRS, ID.me is a “trusted technology provider” of identity verification services. Anyone who already has an ID.me account from another government agency can sign in with those credentials. Brian Krebs created a new ID.me account and wrote in his post that the sign-up process was time-consuming and glitchy. He got stuck about halfway through the process and had to start again from the beginning, then was prompted to join a video call with an ID.me representative — with a wait time of nearly three and a half hours.

In its “privacy bill of rights,” ID.me says it doesn’t “sell, lead, or trade biometric data to any third parties or derive any profit from the sale, lease or trade of biometric data.”

> It can share information with its partners with users’ explicit permission, according to its website, and when you register for an ID.me account, you have to accept the company’s biometric consent policy.

> The company collects facial and voice biometrics to verify identity and protect against fraudulent behavior and to “comply with a request from law enforcement or government entities where not prohibited by law.”

> And even if you delete your ID.me account, the company may retain your biometric data for several years, depending on “the nature of the data and relevant legal or operational retention needs.”

You may remember ID.me from earlier in the pandemic; more than two dozen states use the company to verify people applying for unemployment benefits. Motherboard reported in June 2021 that ID.me failed to identify some applicants and that they had difficulty reaching anyone at the company to remedy their problem. ID.me CEO Blake Hall told The Verge at the time that it uses a system similar to Apple’s FaceID or the way a TSA agent would compare a passenger’s face to their ID at an airport."

RELATED CONTENT

Face Recognition Is Being Banned—but It’s Still Everywhere

Two dozen cities and states prohibit use of the tech. But it’s on phones and is increasingly used in airports and in banks. 

Tom Simonite

Wired |

"In November, voters in Bellingham, Washington, passed a ballot measure banning government use of face recognition technology. It added to a streak of such laws that started with San Francisco in 2019 and now number around two dozen.

The spread of such bans has inspired hope from campaigners and policy experts of a turn against an artificial intelligence technology that can lead to invasions of privacy or even wrongful arrest. Such feelings got a boost when Facebook unexpectedly announced on the day of the Bellingham vote that it would shutter its own face recognition system for identifying people in photos and videos, due to “growing societal concerns.”

[...] At least seven states adopted face recognition to verify the identity of people applying for assistance such as unemployment benefits. Even Facebook’s headline-grabbing shutdown of its face recognition features came with a caveat: The company said it will retain the underlying technology, because it might be useful in the future as a way to unlock devices or secure financial services.

This is the paradox of face recognition in 2021: The technology is banned in some places but increasingly normalized in others. That’s likely to continue, because face recognition is unregulated in most of the US, as there’s no federal law covering the technology. . .

> Apple’s Face ID phone unlock system may be the most widely deployed and used face recognition system, but US airports are forerunners in normalizing its use in public spaces and interactions with the government.

> CBP first deployed the technology in 2016 in partnership with Delta Air Lines at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta to check the identity of people boarding international flights. The program has steadily expanded since, but it accelerated in 2021, in part because the agency determined that touchless technology was more valuable during a pandemic.

At the end of 2020, CBP had implemented face recognition gates for incoming travelers at 17 airports. This year it added the technology at 182 airports, which the agency estimates will cover 99 percent of inbound air travel to the US. The program stems from legislation passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks requiring biometric identity checks for anyone entering or exiting the US. Facial recognition is used to check outgoing international travelers at 32 US airports. CBP says it has processed more than 100 million travelers using face recognition and prevented more than 1,000 “imposters” from entering the US at air and land borders. . .

> Finance companies are also showing interest in face recognition to speed identity checks.

> Incode, an identity verification startup based in San Francisco, says its face recognition checked more than 140 million identities in 2021, roughly four times as many as in the previous three years combined. The company’s customers include HSBC and Citigroup, and it recently raised $220 million in funding from investors including JP Morgan.

Caitlin Seeley George, a campaign director at nonprofit Fight for the Future, finds the spread of face recognition in airports and other areas of daily life concerning. “We need to ban all facial recognition, because the harms of this technology far outweigh any benefits,” she says.

George considers seemingly benign or careful uses of the technology dangerous because they help normalize collection of personal and biometric data that can be hacked or exploited. “The more places people see it, the more comfortable people feel,” she says. “When we do things for convenience we may not be thinking through all the repercussions.”

At the same time, George is optimistic about containing face recognition. She points to Facebook’s decision to shut its tagging system, the spread of local bans, and legislation introduced to both houses of Congress this year by a group of Democratic lawmakers and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) that would ban use of face recognition by federal agencies. Similar bills were introduced in 2020 but did not proceed to a vote."

 

BE PREPARED: Data-Wiping Cyber Attacks

iiii

CISA urges US orgs to prepare for data-wiping cyberattacks

Lawrence Abrams

BleepingComputer |

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) urges U.S. organizations to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses against data-wiping attacks recently seen targeting Ukrainian government agencies and businesses.

As reported by BleepingComputer, Ukraine government agencies and corporate entities suffered coordinated cyberattacks last Friday where websites were defaced, and data-wiping malware was deployed to corrupt data and cause Windows devices to become inoperable.

Sources told cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter that the attackers likely conducted the website defacements using the CVE-2021-32648 vulnerability in the OctoberCMS platform. The Ukraine Cyber Police say they are investigating the use of Log4j vulnerabilities and stolen credentials as another means of access to the networks and servers.

CNN also reports that a Ukrainian I.T. services company that helped develop many of these sites was also a victim, raising concerns about a supply-chain attack.

The website defacements and data-wiping malware attacks were originally thought to be different attacks. However, Ukraine issued a press release yesterday stating that entities were hit by both attacks, leading them to believe they were coordinated.

"Thus, it can be argued with high probability that the interface (replacement of displayed information) of websites of attacked government agencies and destruction of data by Viper are part of a cyber attack aimed at causing as much damage to the infrastructure of state electronic resource," the Ukraine government announced yesterday.

Ukraine blames these attacks on Russia, with some security experts attributing the attacks to Ghostwriter, a state-sponsored hacking group with ties to Belarus.

CISA urges US orgs to defend against similar attacks

CISA is now urging business leaders and U.S. organizations to take the following steps to prevent similar destructive attacks on their networks.

"This CISA Insights is intended to ensure that senior leaders at every organization in the United States are aware of critical cyber risks and take urgent, near-term steps to reduce the likelihood and impact of a potentially damaging compromise," warns a new CISA Insights bulletin.

"All organizations, regardless of sector or size, should immediately implement the steps outlined below."

While CISA's recommendations are in response to the recent cyberattacks on Ukraine, the following suggested steps are also good advice to prevent any network intrusion, including those leading to ransomware attacks. . .

Reduce the likelihood of a damaging cyber intrusion:

• Validate that all remote access to the organization’s network and privileged or administrative access requires multi-factor authentication.
• Ensure that software is up to date, prioritizing updates that address known exploited vulnerabilities identified by CISA.
• Confirm that the organization’s IT personnel have disabled all ports and protocols that are not essential for business purposes.
• If the organization is using cloud services, ensure that IT personnel have reviewed and implemented strong controls outlined in CISA's guidance.
• Sign up for CISA's free cyber hygiene services, including vulnerability scanning, to help reduce exposure to threats.

Take steps to quickly detect a potential intrusion:

• Ensure that cybersecurity/IT personnel are focused on identifying and quickly assessing any unexpected or unusual network behavior. Enable logging in order to better investigate issues or events.
• Confirm that the organization's entire network is protected by antivirus/antimalware software and that signatures in these tools are updated.
• If working with Ukrainian organizations, take extra care to monitor, inspect, and isolate traffic from those organizations; closely review access controls for that traffic
• Designate a crisis-response team with main points of contact for a suspected cybersecurity incident and roles/ responsibilities within the organization, including technology, communications, legal and business continuity.
• Assure availability of key personnel; identify means to provide surge support for responding to an incident.
• Conduct a tabletop exercise to ensure that all participants understand their roles during an incident.

Maximize the organization's resilience to a destructive cyber incident:

______________________________________________________________________"

READ MORE DETAILS/ Use this link: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cisa-urges-us-orgs-to-prepare-for-data-wiping-cyberattacks/

OVER-ARCHING TRENDS: Sustainable Workplaces as Tools for Change

Intro: No doubt all-too-the-positive good for Google in these forms following a function to accomplish a pledge: The firm says the finished buildings will have 90,000 tiles which form a “solar skin” roof, which its designers have named “dragonscale” and estimate will generate almost 7 megawatts of energy or 40% of the electricity needs of the campus. It sees this as part of its efforts to hit the pledge made by CEO Sundar Pichai that Google will run every data center and campus on carbon-free energy by 2030.

But as the author points out, ". . .With its pledge to become carbon free, Google is attempting a bold feat. The goal is a steep one, especially since it’s not only responsible for the output of its campuses, but massive data centers housing its servers. It’s worth noting that Google’s plan does not account for the company’s scope 3 emissions – emissions that tie back to the company, but that the company may not control. . ."

Google’s ‘dragonscale’ solar-powered roof signals growing demand for sustainable workspaces

Carly Olson

the Guardian |

"Tightening regulations and a growing eco-conscious workforce are major factors in heralding green office campuses.

About 40 miles south of San Francisco, three futuristic structures rise from the earth. With sloping roofs clad in thousands of overlapping tiles, the buildings could be mistaken for the world’s most architecturally advanced circus tent.

They are, in fact, part of Google’s new Bay View campus, which is due to welcome employees this year – pandemic allowing – and is situated a few miles east of its existing HQ campus in Mountain View. . .

[...]

Corporations have never been under more pressure to follow through and make meaningful progress on carbon emissions from regulators and amid greater scrutiny around “greenwashing” from environmentalists – and their own employees.

Demand for low-emission offices is larger than it ever has been, according to several US architects the Guardian spoke to. That’s especially true in California, where manifestations of the climate crisis are obvious: hotter summers, drought and an annual wildfire season.

“Buildings are awful for the environment,” said Eric Corey Freed, the sustainability director at architecture firm CannonDesign. “If we’re going to solve climate change, we have to fix our buildings.”

Workers constructing the ‘solar skin’ roof in Mountain View, California. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

In the US, buildings consumed around 40%of the country’s electricity in 2020, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration, and are also one of the planet’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses, accounting for 37% of the world’s energy-related CO2 emissions. That’s not including all the emissions from refrigerants – chemicals that maintain air conditioning systems and refrigerators – which have a global warming potential that’s hundreds to thousands of times higher than carbon dioxide.

Designers must consider the “operational carbon” of running the building and the “embodied carbon” of creating it, such as the emissions from producing materials, constructing the project and transporting waste offsite. . ."

> NOTE: “There are carbon emission laws where building owners are being required to essentially increase their carbon efficiency … and if they don’t, they’re being fined,” said Chatto, the architect at ZGF.

These signals are changing how investors think about their buildings. “At least some of our clients are recognizing they’re going to hold on to the building for 10 years. Then when they want to sell and recoup and make a profit on their investment, it could be a very, very different world 10 years from now,” he said.

> NOTE: With its pledge to become carbon free, Google is attempting a bold feat. The goal is a steep one, especially since it’s not only responsible for the output of its campuses, but massive data centers housing its servers. It’s worth noting that Google’s plan does not account for the company’s scope 3 emissions – emissions that tie back to the company, but that the company may not control. These include the manufacturing, production materials, and transport of Chromebooks and Pixel, according to Grist.

Though this isn’t foul play, it’s a shortcoming of the net-zero metric and applies to companies across the board. . ."

OPEN NARRATIVE: Finding Common Ground in Historical Contradictions @ Davos World Economic Forum 2022

Intro: Readers of this blog can find the Chinese President's entire speech in an earlier post.

PLEASE NOTE: Excerpts in this post scratch the surface of details outlined by the author, Bradley Blankenship. You are encouraged to access the source in the provided below.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Despite attempts by Washington to alienate China, Beijing is leading the world economic recovery. It’s time Western countries take China’s positions on the most important issues seriously in order to expedite humanity’s progress.

He quoted a famous Chinese saying, “The momentum of the world either flourishes or declines; the state of the world either progresses or regresses" – and that history flows by means of contradictions. In this vein, he brought up three crucial points for the world that are based on fundamental contradictions and put forward a solution on how to address them. 

> The first is obviously the pandemic

> Secondly, he said that the world has to cooperate on the global economic recovery. This means working together on emerging supply chain crises and surging energy costs, which are inflating prices around the world. 

> Xi also called on major economies to resist the urge to slam on the brakes economically by making a U-turn in monetary policy that could destabilize the global financial environment, disproportionately hurting developing countries.

> The Chinese leader also called on countries to lean into globalization and seek further integration rather than decoupling, again clearly aimed at Washington. He said that the existing global trade system, led by the World Trade Organization (WTO), should adopt new rules for the growing digital economy and create an “open, just and non-discriminatory environment” for innovation. 

> Finally, Xi called on bridging the development gap. He noted that the human development index (HDI) declined for the first time in 30 years and that the world’s poor population has increased by 100 million, plus nearly 800 million people live in hunger. . .He mentioned climate change as a specific issue, . .

> Xi also mentioned that zero-sum approaches to international relations that create blocs, polarize the world and over-stretch the definition of national security to hold back other countries is contrary to history. Instead, he called on peaceful development and win-win cooperation. 

The West shouldn't dismiss Xi Jinping’s WEF speech

Image caption: Klaus Schwab listen Chinese President Xi Jinping seen on the TV screen speaking remotely at the opening of the WEF Davos Agenda virtual sessions at the WEF's headquaters in Cologny near Geneva on January 17, 2022. © Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP

RT International

"Chinese President Xi Jinping recently gave a speech to the World Economic Forum. This time, he wasn’t just representing the world’s second-largest economy, but the world’s global economic recovery engine.

Chinese President Xi Jinping gave a keynote speech on January 17 during the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) latest online summit, sharing an optimistic appraisal of the future during an otherwise dark time.

Xi’s speech comes in the context of a slew of economic data from the Chinese government that makes it clear that Beijing is leading the world’s economic recovery, giving a ton of weight to Xi’s words to the WEF. .."

About the author: Bradley Blankenship is a Prague-based American journalist, columnist and political commentator. He has a syndicated column at CGTN and is a freelance reporter for international news agencies including Xinhua News Agency. Follow him on Twitter @BradBlank_

Reference: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/546321-xi-xinping-world-economic-forum/

All-in-The-Game

Two ways - taken from Techdirt

1

Daily Deal: The Complete GameGuru Unlimited Bundle

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Wed, Jan 19th 2022 10:40am — Daily Deal

GameGuru is a non-technical and fun game maker that offers an easy, enjoyable and comprehensive game creation process that is designed specifically for those who are not programmers or designers/artists. It allows you to build your own game world with easy to use tools. Populate your game by placing down characters, weapons, and other game items, then press one button to build your game, and it's ready to play and share. GameGuru is built using DirectX 11 and supports full PBR rendering, meaning your games can look great and take full advantage of the latest graphics technology. The bundle includes hundreds of royalty-free 3D assets. It's on sale for $50.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

 

 

2

Join Our Game Jam In An Hour With The Help Of Story Synth

Culture

from the easy-peasy dept

Wed, Jan 19th 2022 3:42pm — Randy Lubin

Gaming Like It's 1926: The Public Domain Game Jam

Randy Lubin is a game designer who partners with Techdirt and The Copia Institute on many of our game-related projects, including our public domain game jam. He's also the developer of Story Synth, a free and easy to use platform for building narrative games. Story Synth makes it easy for even inexperienced designers to quickly build a game, so it's a perfect way to get involved in the jam. We invited Randy to share some details on how the platform works and what you can do with it.

We’re in the middle of our fourth annual public domain game jam: Gaming Like It’s 1926. If you’re thinking about designing a game, Story Synth is a free platform on which you can design a browser based game in under an hour, with no technical skill or prior experience needed. In this post, I’ll give a quick overview of what Story Synth is and how to design a game with it.

 

With Story Synth, you can design prompt-driven storytelling games by authoring the content in a Google Sheet and then uploading the sheet at storysynth.org. The platform then automatically builds your game, complete with a homepage for your game that you can share online. The platform has live multiplayer: players in the same session will see the same prompts at the same time.

Story Synth supports a wide variety of formats inspired by tabletop RPGs such as The Quiet Year and For the Queen. Other formats enable players to generate collections of random prompts and to explore a map of hexagons. You also have plenty of options to customize your game, from tweaking the visual appearance to adding on extensions such as dice rollers, editable lists, shared journals, and more. You can learn more about all of this in the Story Synth guide, or the video tour.

You can get started with your design by copying a template Google Sheet. You can grab a link for the format you want at the Story Synth Formats page. Once you make a copy, start editing and adding prompts in the numbered rows. When you’re ready to upload your game, set the Sheet to publicly viewable and then paste the sheet URL in the Story Synth homepage and the site will build your game. Once your game is built, you can launch a new session and test it out; when you refresh the page, Story Synth reloads the content from your Google Sheet; that means that you can keep editing your sheet and immediately testing the changes.

If you’re making a game for the Gaming Like It’s 1926 jam, then you can create an Itch.io page that links to your game on Story Synth and then submit it to the jam. Here are more detailed instructions for publishing Story Synth games on Itch.

For inspiration on works entering the public domain, check out Duke University’s overview. To get a sense of what Story Synth games are like, try playing fantasy travel game Around the Realm and Seven Samurai inspired Clash at Ikara, or browse the gallery for more options.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop by the Story Synth Discord.

Filed Under: game jam, story synth

World Economic Forum: COVID-19: What’s Next? | Davos Agenda 2022