A national outage is scaring the Indian population as millions are stranded on stand still trains and subways for hours and potential days.

Zapping Blackouts: India Is Giving Its National Grid An All-Seeing Eye

Since this blackout is the biggest one in history, the Indian government fears of riots and protests.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/31/india-blackout-electricity-power-cuts

Back to back blackouts have hit India, just when the power looked like it was going to restore Monday, there was another massive outage on Tuesday.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2012-07-31/reason-indias-massive-blackout-problems

The power has resurfaced in some areas, however, there are still millions in the dark and they don’t expect to be lit anytime soon.

Pictures of chaos as massive India blackout leaves 670 million without power

Everyone uses social media these days, whether it be for work or personal matters. Online quizzes have become very popular, especially in harsh times like these where we have nothing else to do! Well be careful because The Wisconsin Better Business Bureau issued that warning that, while many of them are fun and harmless, others could be used by scammers to harvest your personal information. The agency says that these quizzes might ask meaningless questions but can slip one that might be able to scam you like: “what’s your mothers maiden name” or “what street did you grow up on.” The link below gives some tips on how to avoid these social media scams.

https://www.nbc15.com/content/news/BBB-Scammers-using-social-media-quizzes-to-steal-personal-information-569624271.html

COVID-19 is a huge problem for the world, as of this posting some of the most recent numbers are estimated a little over 100,000 deaths in the whole world. We need solutions, and we need them as soon as possible. Many leaders in the field of robotics think that AI could be a potential solution. Most of what they plan on using robots for would be telemedicine, decontamination, delivering and handling of contaminated waste, and monitoring compliance with voluntary quarantine. This would help reduce the amount of confirmed cases, anything that can help with this epidemic should be looked into.

Deep Fake technology has been around for a few years. There are versions that superimpose a face on top of another face and there are also some that mimic your voice. Doublicat is using Generative Adversarial Network in order to put your face on top of GIF’s. While these app’s may be fun to use what are you giving up in return? There are many companies out there that collect personal data from people. Typically these companies do not advertise what they are doing, it might be in their terms and conditions but those are usually a very lengthy read. It will be interesting to see where governmental policies go with this type of technology.

While medical AI improvements have been happening in several sectors, there has been concern over an AI chat bot. Babylon Health has released a medical AI chat bot inside of their app GP at Hand. A Dr. Watkins has voiced opinions over the past couple of years that has stated this chat bot is dangerous. With every concern Babylon Health has been improving their AI, but when should they have to pull this from the market? Should the government let them keep making errors like this without a price?

While we know for a fact that efforts were made by the Russian Internet Research Agency to spread disinformation and spew divisive messages during the 2016 election cycle, we don’t really have clear indicator of how effective they were. To contextualize a little, the suspected reach of these internet trolls was around 126 million Americans. As a direct result of this discovery, Twitter, Facebook, and even the U.S. Senate released statements and have suggested changes. The problem is, are they really that dangerous?

A survey study comprised of 1,239 Twitter users from the Republican and Democrat political parties sought to do just this. Two surveys were used, one about the attitudes and behavior of the Twitter users while the other was about what accounts the Internet Research agency interacted with. It turns out that only around 19% of users surveyed came into contact with these Russian accounts. When the sets of data were compared, no conclusive evidence was found that these interactions changed people’s opinions or impacted their votes.

From this data, it seems like the impact of the Russian troll was much lesser than expected. Other sources have also echoed this sentiment, with a few scientists suggesting that the mictotargeting done by Cambridge Analytica didn’t do so much. However, it is important to understand that this data can’t say anything concrete about the 2016 election cycle since the data was collected after the fact. Despite this, it’s important information to keep in the back of your mind in case a situation like this arises again.

Fear of the spread of the COVID-19 virus has forced many businesses to close and stop production of goods and services. Because of this the global economy has come to a seemingly screeching halt, with some worries that it could lead to a catastrophic depression worse than what was seen in The Great Depression (1930s).

The worries of a depression have forced congress to pass the $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. This stimulus package promises to inject trillions of dollars into the economy, giving qualifying citizens checks of $1,200. However, with the increase in cyber crime in the past decade and the spike in attacks centered around the virus, this intersection of stimulus package and cybercrime is a recipe for fraudulent activity.

Experts are warning the public to be on the look out for more attacks and phishing scams as thieves look to take stimulus checks from people. More than likely these attackers will disguise themselves as government agencies in order to get people to cooperate with their plan. To learn more follow the link below:

https://www.nextgov.com/ideas/2020/04/intersection-cyber-crime-and-coronavirus-stimulus-perfect-storm-fraud/164552/