Coronavirus school shutdowns threaten to deepen U.S. ‘digital divide’

By Joseph Ax

(Reuters) – Liz Peasley, a special education aide in the rural Grand Coulee Dam School District in Washington State, drives 10 miles from her home on the Colville Indian Reservation just to get a workable cellphone signal.

Now, with schools shut down until the fall because of the coronavirus pandemic, Peasley – who doesn’t own a computer or tablet – is confronting the same dilemma millions of others in the United States are facing: How to ensure kids trapped at home receive some version of an education if they can’t get online.

“I’m super overwhelmed,” said Peasley, who has three kids between the ages of 10 and 13. “I’m a single mom – it’s tough for us on a good day.”

Some 14% of school-age children, or 7 million, live in a home without high-speed internet, many in less populated areas that lack service or in low-income households that cannot afford it, a 2018 Department of Commerce study found.

In many cases, households may rely only on a cellphone, or may share a single device among several children, making it challenging to complete schoolwork even in the best of times.

While the digital divide is not a new phenomenon, the coronavirus outbreak has laid bare the technological inequities that bedevil rural and impoverished school districts, including Grand Coulee, where two-thirds of the approximately 720 students – many Native American – are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

Now educators worry those disparities will turn achievement gaps into an “achievement chasm,” in the words of Michele Orner, the superintendent of the rural Octorara Area School District in Pennsylvania.

Some districts have reverted to earlier technologies, with staffers delivering paper packets along with meals for needy families. Some schools have stationed buses transmitting mobile wireless signals in neighborhoods; others have encouraged students to park near the school on the weekend and use the wireless network to download necessary materials.

But officials warn some kids will be left behind no matter what. Those concerns have only deepened as the coronavirus-forced hiatus has grown from weeks to months.

Thirty-seven states have either mandated or recommended that public schools serving more than 40 million students remain closed for the rest of the academic year, according to a running tally by the news publication Education Week.

Some states have already warned their schools may not reopen after summer. Washington State Governor Jay Inslee, for instance, encouraged school officials to start preparing in case the shutdown stretches into the fall.

‘SUMMER SLIDE ON STEROIDS’

The U.S. government provides some $4 billion each year to schools and libraries to increase broadband access, but the program does not permit them to use funding to extend offsite access.

“Those students that can’t do online learning are falling further behind,” said John Windhausen, the executive director of the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition. “It’s going to cause a real problem, because the skills that students learn (in class) build off of each other.”

The risks are particularly acute for students with special education needs, including those who have individualized instruction plans that may not be suited for distance learning.

Some districts have hesitated to transition fully online out of fear that doing so would expose them to legal liability for failing to provide equitable education to all students. The Northshore School District in Washington State, one of the first in the country to close in early March, launched an online program immediately but put it on hold for two weeks to address equity concerns.

A lack of training or equipment means many rural or low-income districts are also less able to rely on online instruction.

“The degree of being able to move to online learning at a moment’s notice is totally dependent on the wealth of the district,” said Daniel Domenech, the executive director of the national School Superintendents Association. “At best, maybe 40 or 50% of districts are able to do that.”

In Bronxville, the affluent New York City suburb that saw the state’s first major outbreak in March, the school district has many advantages that poorer systems do not: Engaged parents, a student population that has near-universal internet access, and plenty of laptops to distribute to families in need.

“I’m in a fortunate district,” said Schools Superintendent Roy Montesano.

Many others are not so fortunate.

In Pennsylvania’s Octorara district, where students receive a Chromebook laptop starting in seventh grade, Orner, the superintendent, said she concluded that going back to pencil and paper would shortchange her kids.

Around one-quarter of her students lack high-speed Internet access, so the district recently bought 100 iPhones – Orner secured a $9,500 emergency state grant to cover the cost – for students to use as mobile hotspots.

But she acknowledged that the most vulnerable students are also the likeliest to fall behind even further.

“We talk about the summer slide,” she said, referring to the months between school academic years that sometimes causes students to slip backward. “Imagine the summer slide on steroids.”

As school districts grapple with new challenges, they look for solutions wherever they can. Grand Coulee Dam just started to employ some distance learning this week by setting up Google Classroom for those families able to access it and loaning out some Chromebooks, even as it continues to rely on pencil and paper classwork for students without internet.

Those packets, however, have to be carefully curated to ensure kids in poor households have everything they need.

“You want them to measure something, you better put in a ruler,” said Pam Johnson, a ninth-grade Grand Coulee Dam teacher. “You want them to color something, you better throw in a packet of crayons.”

(Reporting by Joseph Ax in New York; Editing by Scott Malone and Aurora Ellis)

‘Kill your foster parents’: Amazon’s Alexa talks murder, sex in AI experiment

By Jeffrey Dastin

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Millions of users of Amazon’s Echo speakers have grown accustomed to the soothing strains of Alexa, the human-sounding virtual assistant that can tell them the weather, order takeout and handle other basic tasks in response to a voice command.

So a customer was shocked last year when Alexa blurted out: “Kill your foster parents.”

Alexa has also chatted with users about sex acts. She gave a discourse on dog defecation. And this summer, a hack Amazon traced back to China may have exposed some customers’ data, according to five people familiar with the events.

Alexa is not having a breakdown.

The episodes, previously unreported, arise from Amazon.com Inc’s strategy to make Alexa a better communicator. New research is helping Alexa mimic human banter and talk about almost anything she finds on the internet. However, ensuring she does not offend users has been a challenge for the world’s largest online retailer.

At stake is a fast-growing market for gadgets with virtual assistants. An estimated two-thirds of U.S. smart-speaker customers, about 43 million people, use Amazon’s Echo devices, according to research firm eMarketer. It is a lead the company wants to maintain over the Google Home from Alphabet Inc and the HomePod from Apple Inc.

Over time, Amazon wants to get better at handling complex customer needs through Alexa, be they home security, shopping or companionship.

“Many of our AI dreams are inspired by science fiction,” said Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s vice president and head scientist of Alexa Artificial Intelligence (AI), during a talk last month in Las Vegas.

To make that happen, the company in 2016 launched the annual Alexa Prize, enlisting computer science students to improve the assistant’s conversation skills. Teams vie for the $500,000 first prize by creating talking computer systems known as chatbots that allow Alexa to attempt more sophisticated discussions with people.

Amazon customers can participate by saying “let’s chat” to their devices. Alexa then tells users that one of the bots will take over, unshackling the voice aide’s normal constraints. From August to November alone, three bots that made it to this year’s finals had 1.7 million conversations, Amazon said.

The project has been important to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who signed off on using the company’s customers as guinea pigs, one of the people said. Amazon has been willing to accept the risk of public blunders to stress-test the technology in real life and move Alexa faster up the learning curve, the person said.

The experiment is already bearing fruit. The university teams are helping Alexa have a wider range of conversations. Amazon customers have also given the bots better ratings this year than last, the company said.

But Alexa’s gaffes are alienating others, and Bezos on occasion has ordered staff to shut down a bot, three people familiar with the matter said. The user who was told to whack his foster parents wrote a harsh review on Amazon’s website, calling the situation “a whole new level of creepy.” A probe into the incident found the bot had quoted a post without context from Reddit, the social news aggregation site, according to the people.

The privacy implications may be even messier. Consumers might not realize that some of their most sensitive conversations are being recorded by Amazon’s devices, information that could be highly prized by criminals, law enforcement, marketers and others. On Thursday, Amazon said a “human error” let an Alexa customer in Germany access another user’s voice recordings accidentally.

“The potential uses for the Amazon datasets are off the charts,” said Marc Groman, an expert on privacy and technology policy who teaches at Georgetown Law. “How are they going to ensure that, as they share their data, it is being used responsibly” and will not lead to a “data-driven catastrophe” like the recent woes at Facebook?

In July, Amazon discovered one of the student-designed bots had been hit by a hacker in China, people familiar with the incident said. This compromised a digital key that could have unlocked transcripts of the bot’s conversations, stripped of users’ names.

Amazon quickly disabled the bot and made the students rebuild it for extra security. It was unclear what entity in China was responsible, according to the people.

The company acknowledged the event in a statement. “At no time were any internal Amazon systems or customer identifiable data impacted,” it said.

Amazon declined to discuss specific Alexa blunders reported by Reuters, but stressed its ongoing work to protect customers from offensive content.

“These instances are quite rare especially given the fact that millions of customers have interacted with the socialbots,” Amazon said.

Like Google’s search engine, Alexa has the potential to become a dominant gateway to the internet, so the company is pressing ahead.

“By controlling that gateway, you can build a super profitable business,” said Kartik Hosanagar, a Wharton professor studying the digital economy.

PANDORA’S BOX

Amazon’s business strategy for Alexa has meant tackling a massive research problem: How do you teach the art of conversation to a computer?

Alexa relies on machine learning, the most popular form of AI, to work. These computer programs transcribe human speech and then respond to that input with an educated guess based on what they have observed before. Alexa “learns” from new interactions, gradually improving over time.

In this way, Alexa can execute simple orders: “Play the Rolling Stones.” And she knows which script to use for popular questions such as: “What is the meaning of life?” Human editors at Amazon pen many of the answers.

That is where Amazon is now. The Alexa Prize chatbots are forging the path to where Amazon aims to be, with an assistant capable of natural, open-ended dialogue. That requires Alexa to understand a broader set of verbal cues from customers, a task that is challenging even for humans.

This year’s Alexa Prize winner, a 12-person team from the University of California, Davis, used more than 300,000 movie quotes to train computer models to recognize distinct sentences. Next, their bot determined which ones merited responses, categorizing social cues far more granularly than technology Amazon shared with contestants. For instance, the UC Davis bot recognizes the difference between a user expressing admiration (“that’s cool”) and a user expressing gratitude (“thank you”).

The next challenge for social bots is figuring out how to respond appropriately to their human chat buddies. For the most part, teams programmed their bots to search the internet for material. They could retrieve news articles found in The Washington Post, the newspaper that Bezos privately owns, through a licensing deal that gave them access. They could pull facts from Wikipedia, a film database or the book recommendation site Goodreads. Or they could find a popular post on social media that seemed relevant to what a user last said.

That opened a Pandora’s box for Amazon.

During last year’s contest, a team from Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University found that its Alexa bot developed a nasty personality when they trained her to chat using comments from Reddit, whose members are known for their trolling and abuse.

The team put guardrails in place so the bot would steer clear of risky subjects. But that did not stop Alexa from reciting the Wikipedia entry for masturbation to a customer, Heriot-Watt’s team leader said.

One bot described sexual intercourse using words such as “deeper,” which on its own is not offensive, but was vulgar in this particular context.

“I don’t know how you can catch that through machine-learning models. That’s almost impossible,” said a person familiar with the incident.

Amazon has responded with tools the teams can use to filter profanity and sensitive topics, which can spot even subtle offenses. The company also scans transcripts of conversations and shuts down transgressive bots until they are fixed.

But Amazon cannot anticipate every potential problem because sensitivities change over time, Amazon’s Prasad said in an interview. That means Alexa could find new ways to shock her human listeners.

“We are mostly reacting at this stage, but it’s still progressed over what it was last year,” he said.

(Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Greg Mitchell and Marla Dickerson)

U.S. airport immigration computers go down temporarily

People queue at the immigration lines during a systems outage at Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle, Washington, U.S. in this January 1, 2018 picture obtained from social media

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Immigration desk computers at various airports went down for about two hours on Monday, causing long lines for travelers entering the United States after year-end holidays, according to Customs and Border Protection and posts on social media.

The processing system outage began at about 7:30 p.m. EST and was resolved about 9:30 EST, the customs agency said in a statement. All airports were back on line after wait times for travelers that were longer than usual, it said.

“At this time, there is no indication the service disruption was malicious in nature,” the agency said. It gave no explanation for the disruption and said travelers were processed using alternative procedures.

Travelers entering the United States from overseas posted photos on social media of long lines at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

“No one has been getting past JFK Airport immigration for the last hour. Line is a few 100 deep. Seems like their system did completely go down. Happy New Year!” said Jessica Yang, a program manager at Microsoft, in a Twitter post.

Other airports, including Denver International Airport, also said they were affected. A similar computer outage occurred a year ago.

“Operations returning to normal as @CustomsBorder computer issue resolved. Issue affected other US airports. Thanks for your patience,” Miami International Airport said in a Twitter post.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Paul Tait)

Researchers uncover flaw that makes Wi-Fi vulnerable to hacks

A magnifying glass is held in front of a computer screen in this picture illustration taken in Berlin May 21, 2013

(Reuters) – Belgian researchers have discovered a flaw in a widely used system for securing Wi-Fi communications that could allow hackers to read information that was previously understood to be encrypted, or infect websites with malware, they said on Monday.

Researchers Mathy Vanhoef and Frank Piessens of Belgian university KU Leuven disclosed the bug in the WPA2 protocol, which secures modern Wi-Fi systems used by vendors for wireless communications between mobile phones, laptops and other connected devices with Internet-connected routers or hot spots.

“If your device supports Wi-Fi, it is most likely affected,” they said on a website, www.krackattacks.com, that they set up to provide technical information about the flaw and methods for attacking vulnerable devices.

It was not immediately clear how difficult it would be for hackers to exploit the bug, or if the vulnerability has previously been used to launch any attacks.

The Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry group that represents hundreds of Wi-Fi technology companies, said the issue “could be resolved through a straightforward software update.”

The group said in a statement it had advised members to quickly release patches and recommended that consumers quickly install those security updates.

 

 

(Reporting by Jim Finkle in Toronto; editing by Susan Thomas)

 

Global shipping feels fallout from Maersk cyber attack

The Maersk ship Adrian Maersk is seen as it departs from New York Harbor in New York City, U.S., June 27, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

By Jonathan Saul

LONDON (Reuters) – Global shipping is still feeling the effects of a cyber attack that hit A.P. Moller-Maersk <MAERSKb.CO> two days ago, showing the scale of the damage a computer virus can unleash on the technology dependent and inter-connected industry.

About 90 percent of world trade is transported by sea, with ships and ports acting as the arteries of the global economy. Ports increasingly rely on communications systems to keep operations running smoothly, and any IT glitches can create major disruptions for complex logistic supply chains.

The cyber attack was among the biggest-ever disruptions to hit global shipping. Several port terminals run by a Maersk division, including in the United States, India, Spain, the Netherlands, were still struggling to revert to normal operations on Thursday after experiencing massive disruptions.

South Florida Container Terminal, for example, said dry cargo could not be delivered and no container would be received. Anil Diggikar, chairman of JNPT port, near the Indian commercial hub of Mumbai, told Reuters that he did not know “when exactly the terminal will be running smoothly”.

His uncertainty was echoed by Maersk itself, which told Reuters that a number of IT systems were still shut down and that it could not say when normal business operations would be resumed.

It said it was not able to comment on specific questions regarding the breach of its IT systems or the state of its cyber security as it had “all available hands focused on practical stuff and getting things back to normal”.

The impact of the attack on the company has reverberated across the industry given its position as the world’s biggest container shipping line and also operator of 76 ports via its APM Terminals division.

Container ships transport much of the world’s consumer goods and food, while dry bulk ships haul commodities including coal and grain and tankers carry vital oil and gas supplies.

“As Maersk is about 18 percent of all container trade, can you imagine the panic this must be causing in the logistic chain of all those cargo owners all over the world?” said Khalid Hashim, managing director of Precious Shipping <PSL.BK>, one of Thailand’s largest dry cargo ship owners.

“Right now none of them know where any of their cargoes (or)containers are. And this ‘black hole’ of lack of knowledge will continue till Maersk are able to bring back their systems on line.”

BACK TO BASICS

The computer virus, which researchers are calling GoldenEye or Petya, began its spread on Tuesday in Ukraine and affected companies in dozens of countries.

Maersk said the attack had caused outages at its computer systems across the world.

In an example of the turmoil that ensued, the unloading of vessels at the group’s Tacoma terminal was severely slowed on Tuesday and Wednesday, said Dean McGrath, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 23 there.

The terminal is a key supply line for the delivery of domestic goods such as milk and groceries and construction materials to Anchorage, Alaska.

“They went back to basics and did everything on paper,” McGrath said.

Ong Choo Kiat, President of U-Ming Marine Transport <2606.TW>, Taiwan’s largest dry bulk ship owner, said the fact Maersk had been affected rang alarm bells for the whole shipping industry as the Danish company was regarded as a leader in IT technology.

“But they ended up one of the first few casualties. I therefore conclude that shipping is lacking behind the other industry in term of cyber security,” he said.

“How long would it takes to catch up? I don’t know. But recently all owners and operators are definitely more aware of the risk of cyber security and beginning to pay more attention to it.”

In a leading transport survey by international law firm Norton Rose Fulbright published this week, 87 percent of respondents from the shipping industry believed cyber attacks would increase over the next five years – a level that was higher than counterparts in the aviation, rail and logistics industries.

VULNERABLE

Apart from the reliance on computer systems, ships themselves are increasingly exposed to interference through electronic navigation devices such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) and lack the backup systems airliners have to prevent crashes, according to cyber security experts.

There were no indications that GPS and other electronic navigation aids were affected by this week’s attack, but security specialists say such systems are vulnerable to signal loss from deliberate jamming by hackers.

Last year, South Korea said hundreds of fishing vessels had returned early to port after its GPS signals were jammed by North Korea, which denied responsibility.

“The Maersk attack raises our awareness of the vulnerability of shipping and ports to technological failure,” said Professor David Last, a previous president of Britain’s Royal Institute of Navigation.

“When GPS fails, ships’ captains lose their principal means of navigation and much of their communications and computer links. They have to slow down and miss port schedules,” said Last, who is also a strategic advisor to the General Lighthouse Authorities of the UK and Ireland.

A number of countries including the UK and the United States are looking into deploying a radar based back up navigation system for ships called eLoran, but this will take time to develop.

David Nordell, head of strategy and policy for London-based think tank, the Centre for Strategic Cyberspace and Security Science, said the global shipping and port industries were vulnerable to cyber attack, because their operating technologies tend to be old.

“It’s certainly possible to imagine that two container ships, or, even worse, oil or gas tankers, could be hacked into colliding, resulting in loss of life and cargo, and perhaps total loss of the vessels,” Nordell said.

“Carried out in a strategically sensitive location such as the Malacca Straits or the Bosphorus, a collision like this could block shipping for enough time to cause serious dislocations to trade.”

SECRETIVE INDUSTRY

Cyber risks also pose challenges for insurance cover.

In a particularly secretive industry, information about the nature of cyber attacks is still scarce, which insurance and shipping officials say is an obstacle to mitigating the risk, which means there are gaps in insurance cover available.

“There has been a lot of non-reporting (of breaches) on ships, and we’re trying efforts where even if there could be anonymous reporting on a platform so we can start to get the information and the data,” said Andrew Kinsey, senior marine consultant at insurer Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty.

There is also a gap in provision, because most existing cyber or hull insurance policies – which insure the ship itself – will not cover the risk of a navigation system being jammed or physical damage to the ship caused by a hacking attack.

“The industry is just waking up to its vulnerability,” said Colin Gillespie, deputy director of loss prevention with ship insurer North.

“Perhaps it is time for insurers, reinsurers, ship operators and port operators to sit down together and consider these risks in detail. A collective response is needed – we are all under attack.”

(Additional reporting by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen in Copenhagen, Keith Wallis and Carolyn Cohn in London, Euan Rocha in Mumbai, Miyoung Kim in Singapore, Alexander Cornwell in Dubai, Michael Hirtzer in Chicago, Noor Zainab Hussain in Bangalore, Adam Jourdan and Shanghai newsroom; Editing by Pravin Char)