Are there Best
Practices for my Ethical Hackers? Somewhere between notifying the
'target' and making the exploit public must be alerting the tech
media and user group blogs to bring public pressure.
Remember how I posted
about how some frustrated researchers at Gibson Security had gone
public with a SnapChat
vulnerability that the firm allegedly hadn’t addressed?
Well, now it seems 4.6
million SnapChat users’usernames and phone numbers have been
leaked.
(Related)
Chris Ziegler reports:
The individual or team claiming responsibility for SnapchatDB
has responded to The Verge‘s requests for comment the
morning after the database went online, containing a leaked
collection of some 4.6 million apparent Snapchat usernames and
partial phone numbers. “Our motivation behind the release was to
raise the public awareness around the issue, and also put public
pressure on Snapchat to get this exploit fixed,” they say.
“Security matters as much as user experience does.”
Read more on The
Verge.
Violet Blue writes that
this incident shows that responsible
disclosure has failed, while Marcia Hofmann and I both noted that
perhaps the FTC and/or California Attorney General should investigate
SnapChat’s response to the responsible disclosure:
GMTA
RT @marciahofmann:
I hope @FTC &
@calagharris
look into Snapchat’s failure to respond to responsible disclosure.
http://t.co/E2ranKb4Kf
—
Dissent Doe (@PogoWasRight) January
2, 2014
Even if it doesn't
exactly automate the lawyering function, it does cut the time and
money that used to be spent in backroom analysis.
Law
firms look for an edge in leveraging big data with innovative
applications
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on January 1, 2014
How
new tech can help lawyers rethink their jobs in the big data age,
Derrick
Harris: ”The legal profession has undergone a lot of unpleasant
changes since the Great Recession struck in 2008. New data-analysis
technologies and a new approach to thinking about data could help
firms operate leaner, meaner and better.”
[From
the article:
… Last year, for
example, we wrote
about a software vendor called Recommind that uses machine
learning to do what it calls predictive coding, a process that saves
firms time and money by helping lawyers sort through all those files
to figure out which ones are relevant.
… We’ve covered
another company, PureDiscovery,
that applies
semantic analysis techniques to e-discovery documents in order to
achieve largely the same result.
… Lex
Machina is a startup that aims to give intellectual property
attorneys statistical data that could help them make better decisions
about their cases.
… The “big”
part of big data gets a lot of attention, but for most industries and
companies — law firms included — the variety part is probably the
most important aspect. Data isn’t just about numbers anymore. Our
Structure
Data conference in March is focused on just this idea — that
every document, social media post, photo, video, website, and pretty
much anything is
now a source of data just waiting to be analyzed and turned into
information.
For example, people do
a lot of talking on social media today, so maybe a lawyer could use
something like ScraperWiki
to download a witness’s Twitter connections and activity (check out
what I’ve done with it here,
here
and here).
There are free tools like etcML
(and paid services like AlchemyAPI)
that can analyze any type of text file, be it tweets or email logs,
to determine
sentiment or extract key concepts.
And even for
more-traditional numerical data (say, for example, a record of car
accidents and locations that might be relevant to a personal injury
case) there is no
shortage of easy tools available to help analyze and
visualize it. Tools like import.io
make it easy to actually
extract data from websites (say, the changes in price for real
estate listings over time) and turn it into tables.
Just a small part of
the “Personal Budget” spreadsheet I make my Excel students
create.
2012
Edition of AAA’s Your Driving Costs brochure
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on January 1, 2014
“AAA has published
‘Your
Driving Costs’ since 1950. That year, driving a car 10,000
miles per year cost 9 cents per mile, and gasoline sold for 27 cents
per gallon. Clearly, that is no longer the case. In 2012 the
average costs rose 1.1 cents per mile to 59.6 cents per mile, or
$8,946 per year, based upon 15,000 miles of annual driving. AAA’s
analysis covers vehicles equipped with standard features and optional
equipment including automatic transmission, air conditioning, power
steering, antilock brakes and cruise control. Rising fuel prices are
a key factor in this year’s ‘Your Driving Costs’ study. Paying
more at the pump is not only increasing the operational costs of
vehicles, but it’s also affecting depreciation
values. [For some reason, those 8 miles
per gallon monsters aren't as popular as they used to be. Bob]
With the growing appeal of more fuel efficient vehicles, small
sedans are experiencing less depreciation and are holding their value
longer, while there is a rise in depreciation costs of less
fuel-efficient vehicles.”
- See also this AAA news release – “With today being the last day of 2013, the national retail average price of gasoline continues to hover just above the same date last year, and motorists will almost certainly ring in 2014 with the highest price on record for New Year’s Day. This will be the fifth consecutive January 1 that Americans have paid more at the pump than the year prior and the fourth straight year with a new record to start the year. The national average prices to begin 2011, 2012 and 2013 were $3.07, $3.28 and $3.29 respectively.”
Something for my
Statistics students.
Digest
of Education Statistics, 2012
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on January 1, 2014
“The 48th in a series
of publications initiated in 1962, the Digest’s purpose is to
provide a compilation of statistical information covering the broad
field of education from prekindergarten through graduate school. The
Digest contains data on a variety of topics, including the number of
schools and colleges, teachers, enrollments, and graduates, in
addition to educational attainment, finances, and federal funds for
education, libraries, and international comparisons.”
- Digest of Education Statistics, 2012 – released December 31, 2013.
Apparently a useful
tool for the basics, but I prefer to use pizza for teaching fractions
(I grew up with a lot of Italian friends)
Thinking
Blocks - Model Math Problems on iPads, Interactive Whiteboards, and
in Your Browser
Thinking
Blocks is a nice site for elementary and middle school
mathematics teachers. Thinking Blocks provides interactive templates
in which students use brightly colored blocks to model and solve
problems. As students work through the problems they are provided
with feedback as to whether or not they are using the correct
sequence to solve each problem. There are templates and problems
for addition, multiplication, fractions, and ratios. You can
also develop your own problems using the modeling tool.
Thinking Blocks is also
available as a set of four
free iPad apps.
An Infographic for my
students! (Note that you can barely see the bottom line.)
The
Hierarchy Of Digital Distractions
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