Lex Cybernetica Podcast

Prof. Aviv Zohar is an associate prof. at The School of Engineering and Computer Science at The Hebrew University and The Chief Scientist at QED-it. His research interests include the economics of computational systems and protocols, cryptocurrencies, multi-agent systems, game theory, mechanism design, and networks. In his interview, Zohar gives a Cryptocurrency-101, then explains some of the cyberthreats they are susceptible to, including brute force attacks, double spending, exchange raids, stolen cold wallets, and 51% attacks. He also talks about the regulatory problems with cryptocurrencies - for example, if the bank, or exchange, loses all your crypto - whose responsibility is it to compensate you? The state comptroller’s warning that ministers ought to refrain from owning crypto, as that would constitute a conflict of interest should they legislate crypto, is strange, Zohar claims, as any such legislation would have very minor affect, if any, on the value of global, non-central-bank controlled currenc

Fake news is not a new concept, but it has been amplified by the internet and technology ecosphere. Fake news, such as the infamous Pizzagate story, can travel halfway around the World Wide Web in first-class seats while the truth is putting on its leather journalism shoes. The proliferation – or, to load the terminology, propagation – of the black-and-white-and-read-all-over plague has a clear culprit: Facebook. To its credit, Facebook, while stubbornly insisting it’s a tech and not a media company, and whose founder Mark Zuckerberg downplayed fake news’s effect on the presidential elections, does attempt to kill fake news on its eponymous social network in various ways, including allowing users to report it, decreasing its frequency on the feed, promoting news literacy, hiring human news curators, working with fact checkers, prioritizing personal posts over news posts, prioritizing news from user trusted sources, economically disincentivizing fake news purveyors, alerting users to disputed stories, siccing

Late last year, a Palestinian man was arrested by Israeli police, who found out that he had posted an image of himself on Facebook next to a tractor, a work vehicle weaponized by Palestinian lone wolf attackers to lethal affect in recent years, and captioned it with an a threat of a slaughter, presumably of Jews. What perfect pre-crime profiling. Profiling is something we do all the time. As soon as we see a person (or an animal), we immediately, automatically, subconsciously make a profile in our head – are they a friend or a foe, will they try to kill us, and are they stronger or weaker than us? This is an evolutionary mechanism designed to protect ourselves from possible threats. The science of predictive profiling seeks to analyze data on criminals, identify recurring patterns, then apply them to people who haven’t transgressed yet and obtain threat assessments on them, predicting which of them are most likely to commit such crimes. This information can be utilized by security forces, who use the pre-cri

Identified only by his surname, Ao was caught in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, 90 kilometers from his Zhangshu home. He was reportedly shocked when police got hold of him, because he was singled out by facial recognition technology at a Jacky Cheung concert, which he complacently attended with his wife and a 50-thousand strong audience. He said he wouldn’t have gone had he known the police would be able to Where’s Waldo him. Another shocking, tech-driven privacy invading was at the center of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the personal Facebook data of 87 million users’ were compromised, among them the data of a 33-year-old American by the name of Mark Zuckerberg. Privacy is a relatively new concept in human history. Companies and organizations that wish to breach our privacy for their purposes, be these making money, keeping social order or achieving world dominance, are usually better funded, and oftentimes far more tech savvy, than those fighting the good privacy fight, while the general public seem

No paying of bills online. No appealing of fines. No reporting of hazards. No court sessions. No applying for municipal positions. No free WiFi for tourists at the airport. This is what life was like for Atlantans for over a week after a ransomware cyberattack was waged on the city government of the capital of Georgia, USA, on March 22, 2018. Cybersec experts hired by the city claim the attackers come from the SamSam hacking crew. And what did the initiators of what the New York Times called “one of the most sustained and consequential cyberattacks ever mounted against a major American city” ask for in return for the antidote? Six Bitcoin, at the time worth a measly $50,000 or so. Similar but smaller cyberattacks recently targeted Dallas, Texas, Birmingham, Ala., North Carolina, New Mexico, and Colorado. One cannot help speculating that a few grand aren’t really what’s behind similar cyberaggressions, but rather a red herring to cover the tracks of an offensive by a state actor. It’s not only that it’s hard