Monday, July 30, 2012


An order of magnitude smaller than the “Big Ones” but still large enough to show on my radar... Note that the victim isn't blameless!
8.7 million KT mobile customers’ data hacked in S. Korea
July 29, 2012 by admin
Bae Ji-sook reports:
Police on Sunday arrested two hackers for stealing and selling on the personal information of 8.7 million KT users.
Investigators said they would also investigate KT on suspicion of negligent management of firewalls and personal data as the number of victims accounts for nearly half of its subscribers.
According to the National Police Agency, a telemarketing business operator and his coworker in February created a computer program that could penetrate KT’s firewalls. From then through July 15, the hackers harvested information related to mobile phone users and took advantage of the list in telemarketing activities, encouraging subscribers to switch to another mobile phone or pricing program.
The stolen information included the name, mobile phone number, membership number, personal identification number and mobile phone serial number of each subscriber.
The suspects also reportedly sold the information and the program to other telemarketers.
Read more on The Korea Herald.


What happens when ubiquitous surveillance returns a 'no information available?'
"According to this article printed in tagesspiegel.de, not having a Facebook account could be the first sign that you are a mass murderer.(German) As examples they use Norwegian shooter Anders Breivik, who used MySpace instead of Facebook and the newer Aurora shooter who used adultfriendfinder instead of Facebook. They already consider those with Facebook accounts, who lack friends to be suspicious, but now they are suggesting that anyone who abstains from Facebook altogether may be even more suspicious."


For the Criminal Justice students taking my Statistics class: If we can predict what people will buy, we can predict what people will steal.
"A growing number of law enforcement agencies, in the US and elsewhere, have been adopting software tools with predictive analytics, based on algorithms that aim to predict crimes before they happen. From the article: 'Without some of the sci-fi gimmickry, police departments from Santa Cruz, California, to Memphis, Tennessee, and law enforcement agencies from Poland to Britain have adopted these new techniques. The premise is simple: criminals follow patterns, and with software — the same kind that retailers like Wal-Mart and Amazon use to determine consumer purchasing trends — police can determine where the next crime will occur and sometimes prevent it.'"


Grasping at the obvious?
July 29, 2012
Pew - The Future of Higher Education
The Future of Higher Education, by Janna Anderson, Jan Lauren Boyles, Lee Rainie. July 27, 2012
  • "For a millennium, universities have been considered the main societal hub for knowledge and learning. And for a millennium, the basic structures of how universities produce and disseminate knowledge and evaluate students have survived intact through the sweeping societal changes created by technology—the moveable-type printing press, the Industrial Revolution, the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and computers. Today, though, the business of higher education seems to some as susceptible to tech disruption as other information-centric industries such as the news media, magazines and journals, encyclopedias, music, motion pictures, and television. The transmission of knowledge need no longer be tethered to a college campus. The technical affordances of cloud-based computing, digital textbooks, mobile connectivity, high-quality streaming video, and “just-in-time” information gathering have pushed vast amounts of knowledge to the “placeless” Web. This has sparked a robust re-examination of the modern university’s mission and its role within networked society."

(Related) ...at least I think they are related.
July 29, 2012
IBM - Capitalizing on the smarter consumer
Capitalizing on the smarter consumer, IBM Institute for Business Value, July 2012
  • "The consumer is digital. Smarter consumers take technology completely for granted. Nearly half the people we surveyed are eager to use two or more technologies to shop. Younger consumers are particularly keen – and teenage “twitterati” have now escaped the parental leash.
  • The household is “virtual.” Many consumers are shopping for a much wider range of family members, as the number of mutigenerational households rises. Thanks to the Internet, consumers can easily shop for adult parents who may or may not live nearby.
  • Incomes and shopping attitudes are diverging. Between a fifth and a quarter of all consumers search for sale goods and only buy what they need, no matter how affluent they are or how optimistic they feel about their financial future."


Humor is where you find it. 6 out of four political scientists agree!
"Andrew Hacker, a professor of Political Science at the City University of New York and author of Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It, attempts to answer this question in the negative in today's New York Times Sunday Review. His primary claim is that mathematics requirements are prematurely and unreasonably limiting the level of education available to otherwise capable students ."

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