Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 2, 2020

American consumers get gun-shy after data breaches; The Brave browser adds feature to do Wayback Machine look-ups for missing web pages; Ex-Googler, Eric Schmidt, argues for massive investment in emerging technologies and intellectual capital; Another safety and feasibility trial finds that CRISPR gene editing is safe for cancer therapies; and a Steem post with photos of the ATLAS comet (Comet C/2019 Y4)

Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemPeak^*, StemGeeks.

1. One in four Americans won’t do business with data-breached companies - According to a video that leads this article, a data breach can drive down a corporation's share price by about 7%, and it can take up to 14 business days for the full impact to take hold. Even if share prices rebound, it goes on to note that the institutional health takes longer to recover, and breached companies can underperform for two years after a breach is disclosed. Additionally, the raw cost of a breach averages around $3 million, which can be amplified by law suits. After the video, the article goes on to discuss results from a recent survey of more than 1,000 people in the US. The study covered breaches in the US during calendar year 2018 where 500,000 records or more were compromised. Key findings include the observation that 1 in 4 people stop doing business with a company after a data breach, and that 92% agree that the breached firm is financially liable for damage to consumers. After a breach, 3 in five people made their passwords harder to guess, and almost half became reluctant to enter financial information online. At the individual level, to avoid losing data, the article suggests: "Securing our accounts with unique passwords will help to minimize the breach, and being cautious when accessing accounts from public Wi-Fi, too."


2. Private Brave Browser Integrates Auto Wayback Machine Lookup - I've been using Brave since it launched in January/2016, and it's had its rough patches. At this point, however, it's hard to understand why everyone isn't moving onto it. It's private. It shares advertising revenue with its users. And, as this article shows, it's innovative. Brave has partnered with the Internet archival organization, archive.org, and a new feature in the Desktop version of its browser now presents the user with historical versions of missing web pages. The new feature was announced in a blog post on February 25. According to the article, archive.org has archived, "900 billion URLs alongside 400 billion web pages" and continues adding millions of pages per day. The partnership between Brave and archive.org dates back to 2017, when the latter firm activated the ability for site visitors to contribute BAT tokens.


3. Eric Schmidt: I Used to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China. - Coincidentally or not, this article follows previous calls for a new Manhattan Project or a modern day Marshall Plan. Call me cynical, but it seems like maybe there's some coordinated messaging going on here. Anyway, Schmidt argues that Americans have put too much faith in the private sector and that as a result, America's lead over China in artificial intelligence (AI) is tenuous. This is important, he says, because AI is going to reshape the economy in sectors from banking to biotechnology and defense. Here is the crux of his argument:

   If current trends continue, China’s overall investments in research and development are expected to surpass those of the United States within 10 years, around the same time its economy is projected to become larger than ours.
   
   

   Unless these trends change, in the 2030s we will be competing with a country that has a bigger economy, more research and development investments, better research, wider deployment of new technologies and stronger computing infrastructure.

   His proposed solution?
   • The government should establish priorities for emerging technologies
   • The government should expand on a planned doubling of funding in AI and quantum information science by doubling it yet again
   • The government should make similar funding increases across an array of emerging fields including biotechnology
   • The government should incentivize a competitive alternative to Huawei products and technologies by giving more bandwidth to private companies
   • We (not clear who "we" is) should speed discovery by creating funding paths that are more flexible than today's red-tape and bureaucracy
   • The government should establish major efforts to train upcoming scientists and engineers by making it easier for talented scientists and engineers to get here from other countries and stay here after they finish training.
   • Unprecedented partnerships between government and industry should be established
   • We (there's that "we" again) need to address legitimate concerns around privacy, algorithmic bias, technical standards, and workforce displacement.
   
   

   -h/t Communications of the ACM: Artificial Intelligence.
   
   

4. CRISPR-engineered T cells in patients with refractory cancer - Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University have completed a safety and feasibility trial on three cancer patients using CRISPR gene editing. The team removed T lymphocytes from the patients, edited them in a way that was intended to strengthen the capability for antitumor immunity, cultivated them in the lab, and then administered the edited cells back into the patients. The team reports that the procedure was well tolerated and paves the way for future trials to expand on the capability. This seems to be a similar effort to Immune discovery 'may treat all cancer' that was reported in Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for January 30, 2020, -h/t Daniel Lemire


5. Steem @terrylovejoy: - In this post, the author shares two original photographs of the "Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS)". The photo was taken through a remote telescope that was located in Mayhill, New Mexico, USA. According to the post, the comet will be of interest to astronomers for the next couple of months, during which time it will be growing consistently brighter. One of the photos has labels for the comet and other objects that appear nearby in the sky. The other photo is unlabeled. Interestingly, the comet shares a nearly identical orbit with another comet that appeared in the skies about 175 years ago, in December of 1844. The Comet Creek and the town of Comet, in Queensland, Australia were both named after the previous object. It is believed that the two comets may be siblings that both splintered off from a single comet. The photos are not marked for reuse, so you'll have to click through to see them and read more details, and please consider leaving an upvote while you're there. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @terrylovejoy.)



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