Tuesday, February 21, 2012


How should I read this? It took him 8,000,000 attempts to find 400 accounts? £350,000 sounds so small I'm inclined to call him Dr. Evil...
UK: Computer whizz faces jail for writing programme to steal personal details of 8 MILLION people, including 400 PayPal accounts
February 20, 2012 by admin
Chris Parsons reports:
A computer expert who ‘plotted a £350,000 fraud’ is facing jail today after admitting he stole the personal details of more than eight million people.
Edward Pearson, 23, also admitted he illegally obtained the credit card details of 400 PayPal customers in an 18-month scam.
Read more on The Daily Mail. Sadly, there are no details on the software he wrote to amass the 8 million individuals’ details.


I'm sure the government will do a much better job...
Small medical practices facing serious security issues
According to a study from Ponemon and MegaPath, negligent employees and failure to meet compliance needs are the key reasons that more than 90-percent of the small healthcare networks included in the study suffered a breach last year.
… 'Surprisingly, only 30 percent agree that they have adequate resources to ensure that privacy and data security requirements are met.'
Moreover, there is a clear lack of definition when it comes to responsibility, as one-third of those who took part in the MegaPath-funded study said that no one person has overall responsibility for protecting patent data. This is on top of the 70-percent in the study that reported that their organizations lack the funding to meet governance, risk management and compliance requirements.
The full report is online, but registration is required.


...but it is okay for Facebook to provide free facial recognition, right?
Ca: Court order required to use facial recognition to identify Stanley Cup rioters
February 21, 2012 by Dissent
Jonathan Fowlie reports:
The Insurance Corp. of British Columbia cannot use facial recognition to identify Stanley Cup rioters without a court order, B.C.’s privacy commissioner said in a report released Friday.
Commissioner Elizabeth Denham launched an investigation into ICBC’s use of facial recognition technology shortly after the June 2011 Stanley Cup riots, when the corporation — the provincial Crown corporation that provides auto insurance, driver and vehicle licensing and registration to B.C. motorists — offered to match external photographs of alleged rioters against its driver’s licence database.
Read more on Vancouver Sun.


An answer to the growing concern over drones? And a question: what is the “Law of Drones?” A drone a 30,000 feet is virtually undetectable, but how low can they be before they become a hazard, an intrusion or a target?
Animal rights group says drone shot down
A remote-controlled aircraft owned by an animal rights group was reportedly shot down near Broxton Bridge Plantation Sunday near Ehrhardt, S.C.
Steve Hindi, president of SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness), said his group was preparing to launch its Mikrokopter drone to video what he called a live pigeon shoot on Sunday when law enforcement officers and an attorney claiming to represent the privately-owned plantation near Ehrhardt tried to stop the aircraft from flying.
"It didn't work; what SHARK was doing was perfectly legal," Hindi said in a news release. "Once they knew nothing was going to stop us, the shooting stopped and the cars lined up to leave."
He said the animal rights group decided to send the drone up anyway.
"Seconds after it hit the air, numerous shots rang out," Hindi said in the release. "As an act of revenge for us shutting down the pigeon slaughter, they had shot down our copter."
He claimed the shooters were "in tree cover" and "fled the scene on small motorized vehicles." [Or wandered away when they realized there were no more targets? Bob]


Making money on Ubiquitous Surveillance?
Crowdsourcing As A Service: Citizen Reporters, Mystery Shoppers and Intelligence Gathering
Smartphones aren’t just great devices for communication and consumption; they’re also incredibly powerful tools for gathering information. Once you cross from hardware to software, it almost doesn’t matter what kind of information it is. What matters is mobilizing that huge network of machines and making sense of the information they’re sharing.
This, at least, is Engagement Media Technologies’ central premise. E MT makes mobile apps and backend services for three very different industries: citizen journalism, retail brand engagement, and intelligence and security operations.


A market for my “Write like Shakespeare” app? “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”
"Arvind Narayana writes: What if authors can be identified based on nothing but a comparison of the content they publish to other web content they have previously authored? Naryanan has a new paper to be presented at the 33rd IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Just as individual telegraphers could be identified by other telegraphers from their 'fists,' Naryanan posits that an author's habitual choices of words, such as, for example, the frequency with which the author uses 'since' as opposed to 'because,' can be processed through an algorithm to identify the author's writing. Fortunately, and for now, manually altering one's writing style is effective as a countermeasure."
In this exploration the algorithm's first choice was correct 20% of the time, with the poster being in the top 20 guesses 35% of the time. Not amazing, but: "We find that we can improve precision from 20% to over 80% with only a halving of recall. In plain English, what these numbers mean is: the algorithm does not always attempt to identify an author, but when it does, it finds the right author 80% of the time. Overall, it identifies 10% (half of 20%) of authors correctly, i.e., 10,000 out of the 100,000 authors in our dataset. Strong as these numbers are, it is important to keep in mind that in a real-life deanonymization attack on a specific target, it is likely that confidence can be greatly improved through methods discussed above — topic, manual inspection, etc."


Interesting study...
February 20, 2012
Encyclopedia of the future of news, by Nieman Journalism Lab
"Encyclo is an encyclopedia of the future of news, produced by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University...our main site emphasizes new developments and the latest news. We think there’s great value in a resource that steps back a bit from the daily updates and focuses on background and context. What is it about Voice of San Diego that people find interesting? How has The New York Times been innovating? What model is Politico trying to achieve? Those kinds of questions are why we decided to build Encyclo — a resource on the most important organizations and issues in journalism’s evolution... Our initial focus is on the companies and organizations that are having a big impact on the future of news. That includes a lot of traditional news organizations doing innovative work (like The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and CNN) and a lot of newcomers whose business models are made possible by the Internet (like Talking Points Memo, GlobalPost, and West Seattle Blog). Some are nonprofits focusing on high-end investigative and watchdog work..."


Tweets are like blogs are like newspapers are like...
February 20, 2012
Who Gives A Tweet? Evaluating Microblog Content Value
Who Gives A Tweet? Evaluating Microblog Content Value, Paul André - Carnegie Mellon; Michael Bernstein - MIT, and Kurt Luther - Georgia Tech, February 2012
  • "While microblog readers have a wide variety of reactions to the content they see, studies have tended to focus on extremes such as retweeting and unfollowing. To understand the broad continuum of reactions in-between, which are typically not shared publicly, we designed a website that collected the first large corpus of follower ratings on Twitter updates. Using our dataset of over 43,000 voluntary ratings, we find that nearly 36% of the rated tweets are worth reading, 25% are not, and 39% are middling. These results suggest that users tolerate a large amount of less-desired content in their feeds. [Is this so different from earlier media? Bob] We find that users value information sharing and random thoughts above me-oriented or presence updates. We also offer insight into evolving social norms, such as lack of context and misuse of @mentions and hashtags. We discuss implications for emerging practice and tool design."


Perspective What do these two groups have in common?
Age, income dial up smartphone ownership rates
People 24 to 34 are most likely to own a smartphone, but those 55 to 64 making more than $100,000 are also front-runners, Nielsen finds.


Perspective
The Post-Office Generation
A recent post on MinimalMac posits an interesting case for the slow, growing sense of the irrelevance
of Microsoft, at least in the applications space.
… with the rise of tablets, office workers have suddenly noticed that they don’t need Office anymore. All they need is an email app, a notepad, and something like Dropbox. You can open Office docs on any device, you can edit text on nearly any tablet, and $9.99 gets you a capable word processor on the iPad. In short, Office is becoming irrelevant.


Now you can use language gooder!
LibreOffice, an off-shoot of OpenOffice founded by former contributors to the OpenOffice project in 2010, has just been updated to 3.5. Several new features are part of the update including a new grammar checking tool which is included in Writer.
The goal of the new utility is to check sentences for grammatical errors more accurately. False alarms have always been a problem. The changes, which are explained in a blog post on the LibreOffice website, aim to reduce the chance that unusual spacing or capitalization (such as that used in an abbreviation) is wrongly flagged as incorrect.

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