Cyber Security's Yawning Gap: Our Routers

The Fall 2018 research by the American Consumer Institute found a glaring 83 percent of Wi-Fi routers sold in the U.S. to have security vulnerability. This is an easy door to open for hackers to get control over our devices, leading to malicious activity, identity theft, fraud or espionage. The research undertaken by the American Consumer Institute included 186 devices from 14 manufacturers. Out of that, a mind-blowing 155, or 83 percent, devices were found to have vulnerability in the router's software, with 172 vulnerabilities per router. The American Consumer Institute's research sample had an eye-popping 32,003 total vulnerabilities.

Not all the vulnerabilities are equally severe, and based on National Vulnerability Database's criteria, each vulnerability can be flagged either as a "Low", "Medium", "High", or "Critical" to reflect the degree of associated risk. In the sample used in the study, 28 percent of the vulnerabilities have been categorized as either "High" or "Critical". "High-risk" vulnerabilities require moderate degree of expertise for hackers to compromise the system, but, unlike "Critical" vulnerabilities, they don't entirely compromise the system. The American Consumer Institute study estimated that, on the average, a typical router includes 12 "Critical", 36 "High-risk" and 103 "Medium-risk" vulnerabilities, respectively.

Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to the problem as the responsibility lies equally on the consumer's shoulder. The average consumer, most likely, never thinks of updating their router's software. Since most of the consumers are not aware of updating router's software, the router manufacturers don't provide an easy-to-apply software update for the routers they sell. As a result, even consumers who are aware of security risks posed by outdated router software are likely to face not so "easy-to-update" experience while applying patches to any potential vulnerability in their routers.

Router security risk is all the more important as the usage of the IOT devices has increased multifold in recent years, and, according to Symantec, the IOT-related [devices] vulnerabilities have increased by a whopping 600 percent in 2017 alone, with routers the most common gateway having accounted for nearly 33.6 percent of all incidents. If this growing threat is to be mitigated, manufacturers have to commit more resources and provide easy-to-use patches and updates, while the consumers have to be aware and vigilant of the vulnerability in their Wi-Fi routers. 

Biased News vs. Biased Reader--A Telltale of Findings from a Double Blind Study

The recent Gallup Survey shows that Americans are becoming more distrustful of the media for potential bias in the news content. However, they should be also worried about their consumption habit and their own bias that distort their ratings of news content. In fact, people who are the most distrustful of the news media tend to be the most biased readers, according to a research in which Knight Foundation has partnered with the Gallup in 2017. That throws us to an equally vexing questions: how to study bias?

Data Scientists and Social Scientists have devised a number of ways to study, research and understand bias which is notoriously hard to measure. A well-renowned study conducted by economists Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse showed that the woman admittance rate to city orchestras had increased significantly when participants auditioned behind a curtain and evaluators were not allowed to see the auditioning musicians. The lesson from this and other similar studies is that to evaluate solely on the "quality" of auditioning musicians, the experiment needs to be double blind.

In the context of biased news, Gallup and Knight Foundation have partnered in 2017 to create an experimental news platform as part of a larger research endeavor. The platform pulled news content and related articles from diverse media outlets and invited a random sample of Americans who had taken Gallup surveys to participate in the rating the trustworthiness of the content. Half of the participants (Experimental Group) were not allowed to see the source of the content and news article, while the remaining half (Control Group) were allowed to see the source as they would do on a typical website. A total of 3,081 participants provided ratings of 1,645 different articles originally published by one of seven well-known sources.

The findings from the Gallup-Knight experiment were startling. Participants in the Experimental Group who identified themselves Republicans rated content from The New York Times and Vox more trustworthy than the self-identified Republicans in the Control Group who read the identical content knowing their sources. Ditto for the self-identified Democrats: participants in the Experimental Group rated content from Fox News more trustworthy than those in Control Group. Now, consider a reader's trustworthiness score as a sum of quality of article, reader's personal view and brand bias. Since Experimental Group and Control Group take into account the first two sources of variability--quality of the article and reader's personal view--as both groups are alike, leaving only the brand bias as the factor getting reflected in the score variability. An individual's (in Control Group) brand bias is thus estimated as the absolute difference in the her or his trustworthiness score and the mean trustworthiness score of the blind group, or Experimental Group, for the same article. On a scale of 1 to 5, 35 percent exhibit large bias, implying that their average trustworthiness score vary as high as 1.5 points on a scale of 1 to 5 compared to the respective participants in the blind group, or Experimental Group. Throw the names of Clinton and Trump, the trustworthiness ratings gap significantly jumps between Experimental Group and Control Group.

The bias is not a one way street. It's complex, and for a Data Scientist or a Social Scientist, to measure and interpret it becomes more of an art than science.

Chopping Helen Keller Does Disservice to Texas Students

The September 2018 decision of the Texas State Board of Education to drop Helen Keller from social studies curriculum in Texas public schools was a political stabbing at the Texas students as it was another of continuing actions of SBE to dilute the historic importance of public figures whose political and social bent might not sit well with the policymakers.

Among the public figures chopped off the curriculum were Hillary Clinton, Barry Goldwater and Helen Keller, one could identify the rationale--however specious it is--behind dropping Clinton and Goldwater. But, there is no basis for dropping Keller off the social studies curriculum. Helen Keller's (1880-1968) iconic life was--and is still continuing to be--an inspiration to millions of people worldwide as Keller, struck blind and deaf by illness before the age 2--was the first blind and deaf American to graduate from college in 1904. Hellen Keller's disabilities instilled a sense of determination in herself that propelled her--after graduating from Radcliffe College--to author 12 books, lecture in 35 countries and help change world's perception on blind and deaf. Her autobiography, The Story of My Life, was published in 1903, and had become a literary gem in the years since. Helen Keller's high school life chronicles another heroic figure's novel approach and dedication: that of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, who lifted a young Keller out of silence into a more outspoken advocate of millions of deaf and blind at the very early age. Anne taught her the sign language, first starting with water, and subsequently, teaching her how to read in Braille.

Helen Keller's articles and speeches are some of the most memorable ever that have inspired a generation of people all over the world, and her charitable work through the American Foundation for the Blind and other organizations has helped a broad section of people on the margin. She was a self-proclaimed "Democratic Socialist" who had fought hard for workers' right and free speech. She was also a co-founder of American Civil Liberties Union and a lifelong supporter of NAACP. But it is not for her politics that she has been recognized by the Time magazine as the one of the most influential people of the 20th century, it's her philanthropic work that changed the way world had come to perceive people with disabilities.

SBE may not be willing to restore Helen Keller into the social studies curriculum by scoring her 7 out of 20 on whether she had so called "watershed contribution" and essentially failing her on the impact on people's lives as an "essential" figure, I am confident that Texas educators will carve out time and space to illuminate our state's children with the exemplary life of Helen Keller. As Hellen Keller wrote in a 1933 article for The Home magazine that "A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships", and "the simplest way to be happy is to do good". That's a message worth hundreds time repeating, especially in this all-too-cynical age.

Make Workers Great Again

Labor Day weekend is not only a reminder of a beginning of fall sales blitz in retail industry, it also marks the reinforcement of workers' contribution to the fabric of American dreams. So, it's noteworthy to trace back the roots of Labor Day and how it has all started.

The first Labor Day was celebrated on September 5, 1882 in New York City and organized by the Central Labor Union, a predecessor of AFL-CIO. However, it's still unclear whose idea it was to mark the Labor Day as a Holiday. Historians are a divided lot, with some saying that it was an idea of American Federation of Labor co-founder Peter J. McGuire while others think that it came from Matthew Maguire, a machinist. Either way, Labor Day and International Workers' Day, marked on May 1, are historic in advancing the labor rights movement. Labor Day Holiday was first marked a federal Holiday in 1892. Many of the today's demands such as $15 an hour wage and also regulations at the state and federal levels have spawned directly from the workers' struggle in the late 19th- and early 20th century.

However, today's business challenges such as globalization and technological revolution pose both the risks and opportunities to our workforce. According to a 2017 McKinsey Global Institute report, "by 2030, 75 million to 375 million workers (3 percent to 14 percent of the global workforce) will need to switch occupational categories". To address this sort of disruption, governments and private enterprises need to provide enhanced training to the workforce on continuous basis and healthcare options need to be decoupled from specific employers. With the advent and dominance of AI, ML and dominance, "cobotics"--humans working alongside their new robotic colleagues--will be the foundation of work ecosystem. Policymakers and government officials need to hew their policies toward smoothing out the process of massive disruptions to be brought about by the technology of future and help workforce to adopt and adapt to automation without significant pains. 

New Zero Tolerance Policy Needs All of our Support

Zero Tolerance policy should be used not to separate families who had crossed the borders illegally. Instead, it should be applied to glaring and galling failures of the federal government to track at least 61,000 foster children, including 53,000 "runaway". How did more than 61,000 children disappear? No howl of cry! If you want to be a truly law and order administration, put your resources to track some of these missing children.

You need to show guts and grits to show and apply the so-called "Zero Tolerance" policy to plug the agency loopholes by funding adequate resources to reverse a horrendously high turnover rates of caseworkers.

The New Zero Tolerance means disapproving the action of a government to hide behind Romans 13 for your blundering inability to articulate a defense for an unpopular policy of family separation (for the non-believers, I would say that "keep reading Bible as there is lot of good stuff in there that applies to you personally", but "please don't use just for political ammunition".

New Zero Tolerance means absolute rejection to cherry-picking Bible verses to uphold administration policies.

Your "Zero Tolerance" policy may be standing between an illegal immigrant and the border, but the "New Zero Tolerance" policy is absolutely zero tolerance for brooking the idea of a government to allow it to stand between a mother and her child.

Unintended Consequence of a Poor Messaging

Often controversy is generated not because what is said, but how it is said. With the best possible intent from the purveyor and creator of the message, it is sometimes received negatively because of, among many reasons, failure to adjust the content and context with the changing time and consumer taste.

An example of that unintended consequence is American's Greetings' "Baby Daddy" Father's Day card, which had been pulled just on the eve of 2018 Father's Day weekend because of firestorm on social media over silhouette of a Black couple kissing and a pink letters underneath that reads "Baby Daddy". Baby Daddy and Baby Mamma are generally associated with negative connotation. Baby Daddy and Baby Mamma typically personify unwed fathers and mothers. That's the wrong message here, and especially when you put the minority faces there. Although the inside of the card reads: "You're a wonderful husband and father--and I'm so grateful to have you as my partner, my friend and my baby daddy! Happy Father's Day."

The problem here is that you see the front page, taken out of context, can communicate an unintentional meaning that most of us are strongly against perpetuating and is not consistent with our own value system. This is all about putting you in the shoes of others, and see what message it sends you.

NRA's Tortuous Journey from Non-controversial Past to Radical Present

The historic context of the birth of National Rifle Association is worth reminding as the country is in the swirl of gun control debate amidst a surge in fatal school shootings. NRA was born, literally, in the battlefield of the Civil War.

Two Union military leaders, Col. William Church and Gen. George Wingate, witnessed sheer lack of good marksmanship by many of their soldiers in battle against Confederate soldiers. After the Civil War was over, they took the initiative to launch in 1871 the National Rifle Association as a training platform for the country's young men to become better marksmen. NRA helped generations of kids to get interested in shooting and hunting. Ambrose Burnside was the first President of the NRA. His goal was to improve the edge of shooting skill of country's youth and make them better prepared for any eventuality in future.

NRA also espoused gun safety rules and education, and was behind the first meaningful gun control legislation. In 1920s, when Prohibition got underway, underground bootlegging operation was overtaken by criminal enterprises and thus the beginning of using guns to settle scores and stoke violence. In the wake of rising crime wave involving the use of the then-widespread Tommy guns, Thompson submachine guns, NRA pushed successfully for the 1934 passage of National Firearms Act. The measure all but banned automatic guns for public to own and carry. Four years later, NRA threw its support for another gun control measure, called the Federal Firearms Act of 1938, that required federal licensing of all gun dealers and banned convicted felons from buying guns.

It is in recent years that NRA has taken a sharp radical turn, and become from primarily a sports and shooting practice entity loved by gun enthusiasts to a political behemoth dominated by radical right.

Vertical Mergers in Telecom Industry Key to Making up Lost Analog Dollars with Bountiful Digital Dimes

As we are watching keenly the ongoing anti-trust lawsuit aimed at blocking the $109 billion merger between AT-and-T and Time Warner at the federal courthouse of U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, one wonders that the U.S. DOJ's mindset is stuck in the yesterday's business model and playbook that has been recently challenged by the online streaming content. As the telecommunication industry's traditional source of revenue such as wireless has been dwindling fast enough, the key to surviving and thriving is to expand the industry's tentacle into content domain. Any vertical merger thus makes the marriage between content and distribution, and help partly the telecommunication companies fend off cord-cutting syndrome of millennial consumers.

First, the loss of wireless revenue, despite holding on to almost same number of subscribers, has to be mitigated by diversifying the business portfolio. So, for companies such as AT-and-T and Verizon, it's a matter of survival to get out of its core business. Thus the arrival of so-called Pay TV services being offered by the legacy Telecom companies. However, Pay TV market---both cable and satellite-- itself is shrinking now because of digital challenge being posed by PlayStation Vue, YouTube TV, Hulu Live, Fubo TV and Philo, in addition to Dish Network's own online product, Sling TV. These online video services are cheaper and appealing to a whole new generation of young people accustomed to carrying and using smartphones. In 2017, the subscriber loss to Pay TV companies is steep and substantial, according to Leichtman Research Group:

Dish (-995,000)
U-verse (-624,000)
DirecTV (-554,000)
Charter (-239,000)
Frontier (-184,000)
Comcast (-151,000)
Verizon FiOS (-75,000)

In the last year (2017), online TV subscriber base has grown significantly, including DirecTV Now (855,000) and Sling TV (711,000). Many of the subscribers fleeing the Pay TV segment are ending up with the online TV services of the same company (example: Dish Network to Dish's Sling TV; DirecTV to DirecTV Now), but the migration does not bring the same amount of revenue. It's more like losing a dollar, and trying to make it up with pile of dimes. Unfortunately, to make up each dollar, companies have to become creative to generate new sources of revenue. That's why vertical merger between content provider and distribution channel makes absolute sense. It's not a marriage of convenience, but rather a marriage of compulsion.

Cloud may be Clouding the Judgment of Supreme Court Judges

When the Stored Communications Act 1986 was passed by Congress more than three decades ago, lawmakers surely didn't hear the tech word "cloud", leave alone considering the pitfall of "cloud". The law refers to both voluntary and compelled disclosures of "stored wire and electronic communications and transactional records".

Congress enacted this law to empower local and federal law enforcement agencies in order to fight the then-menacing drug epidemic that had been raging community after community. The law was passed to ensure that law enforcement agencies had the wherewithal and means to seek all the communications stored in the U.S. mainland and accessible by third-party (say, ISP) U.S.-based employees.

The scope of this law and the meaning of "cloud" are now being tested not in the technology world, but inside the ornate hall of the U.S. Supreme Court in a case that has pitted the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) against the technology behemoth Microsoft Corporation. The case in hand that's trying to address the issue is whether the federal government has the authority to force Microsoft to turn in communications stored on a "cloud server" that's residing in the Republic of Ireland. Microsoft's argument is simple, but compelling. Since the "cloud server" is based in Ireland, the act's jurisdiction is not automatically extended across the pond. The DOJ's argument is equally compelling too. Since the "cloud" works as a virtual hosting server, it may reside anywhere in the world, but the issue is who has legal access to it, who is steward of it and who is responsible for the upkeep of data. If  U.S.-based employees are the responsible parties irrespective of whether a "cloud server" resides in overseas or not, the 1986 act is still applicable to seek data related to targeted subjects.

After the first round of argument, the oldest U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg correctly stated that when the law was enacted, nobody had any clue about "cloud", underscoring the difficulties for our apex court's legal luminaries to fully grasp and grapple the present day challenges posed by present day's new necessity "cloud" in the context of an archaic law when internet was rarely available and only "cloud" most of us knew was the one up in the sky. 

Hospital Co-opts a Car Maker's Process Efficiency

It's almost unfathomable to see that there may be any functional synergy between a hospital and a car maker. That does not mean that one can not leverage other's forte on how to adhere best practices and accelerate changes to boost process efficiency.

When Toyota brought the best practices of Toyota Production System (TPS) to the doorstep of the Dallas-based Parkland Memorial Hospital, it was just more than reflection of a model corporate citizenry. It's an example of touching a human life by sharing the industry knowledge with the society.

TPS looked at Parkland's so-called discharge time, which is the time between when a doctor gives green light for a patient to go home and when the patient actually leaves the ER. Before TPS got involved, the average discharge time was about 54 minutes in January 2017. If the discharge time can be cut down, the bed would open up faster for a new patient. TPS looked at all elements, including paperwork and calling a social worker, to find areas of opportunity. What they found was a holding pattern for engaging a social worker. TPS then instituted a minor, but significant, change to the workflow of elements that constitute the discharge time by creating a pro-active alert message to engage with the social worker early in the cycle. As a result, the discharge time was reduced to 31 minutes in September 2017.

The cross-industry collaboration made Parkland's ER team more hands-on and proactive. Now, the Parkland is looking for opportunity to improve this key metric further, by reducing the discharge time to 15 minutes. What