Thursday, July 03, 2014

For every financial tool there are criminals. It's not the tool nor the “thrill of the chase” that attracts them, it's the money.
Brazilian ‘Boleto’ Bandits Bilk Billions
With the eyes of the world trained on Brazil for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, it seems a fitting time to spotlight a growing form of computer fraud that’s giving Brazilian banks and consumers a run for their money. Today’s post looks at new research into a mostly small-time cybercrime practice that in the aggregate appears to have netted thieves the equivalent of billions of dollars over the past two years.


Isn't this what I've been telling you?
Businesses Learn Security the Hard Way: Survey
Organizations consider defending against phishing and social engineering attacks a priority, worry about Web-facing applications, and know the importance of having an incident response plan, according to a survey of 200 senior-level IT and security professionals conducted by IT training firm TrainACE.
Some of the results painted a surprisingly rosy picture, with more than half, or 54 percent, of survey participants claiming their organizations had not been hacked or breached in the last 12 months. About 59 percent also claimed their organizations have a cyber-incident response plan. Approximately 81 percent of respondents said their companies followed a set of update guideline procedures, and 90 percent claimed to have formal password policies.
The situation was grimmer among the 17 percent who had been hacked or experienced a data breach, TrainACE found. In this group, nearly a fifth of the respondents said their companies did not have a cyber-incident response plan, but were considering one. Many of these respondents said they did not have set update guidelines and only 68 percent of the companies actually had password policies.
The full results of the survey are available online in PDF format.


No doubt this will become a legal specialization. Start studying now law school students.
Last month (and somewhat unnoticed — at least by many of us here), the International Law Committee of the NYC Bar Association released a report evaluating the legality of the U.S. drone program in the context of international law. Released on June 19, the 181-report covers a wide array of issues including related to jus ad bellum and jus in bello and evaluating the existence of an armed conflict.
… Interested readers can access the report and the executive summary from the NYC Bar Association’s website.


The Court must have realized that Google does not “create” content, and therefore only “Content Creators” are actually impacted. I wonder if there is a Google form for undoing the “Right to be Forgotten” or if they must apply to the Court?
BBC's Robert Peston: 'Why has Google cast me into oblivion?'
BBC economics editor Robert Peston has criticised Google after he said the search engine deleted some of his blogs to comply with European law.
Peston said received a “notice of removal” from Google, informing him that an article that he had published in 2007 about former Merrill Lynch boss Stan O'Neal would no longer be shown in European Google search results.
The article, “Merrill’s Mess” describes how O'Neal was forced to leave the investment bank after it endured significant losses on the back of careless investments.
… Peston pointed out on Wednesday, that this effectively means that no one will see the blog post from now on. “To all intents and purposes the article has been removed from the public record, given that Google is the route to information and stories for most people,” he wrote.
He questioned whether the content of the article was inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, and therefore whether Google was justified in removing it. He adds that the action will consolidate fears present among many that the new rule is detrimental to freedom of expression.


It looks like this is dying out – no angry mobs with pitchforks and torches... Besides, users are merely things on the vast Internet of Things.
Sheryl Sandberg not sorry for Facebook mood manipulation study
On Wednesday, Facebook’s second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg, expressed regret over how the company communicated its 2012 mood manipulation study of 700,000 unwitting users, but she did not apologize for conducting the controversial experiment. It’s just what companies do, she said.
… It seems that until now, Facebook data scientists have been pretty much free to do as they please. “There’s no review process, per se,” Andrew Ledvina, who worked at Facebook as a data scientist from 2012 to 2013, told the Journal. “Anyone on that team could run a test,” he said. “They’re always trying to alter people’s behavior.” Ledvina told the Journal that tests were so frequent that some data scientists worried that the same users might be used in different studies, tainting the results.


What is it with websites in Colorado? The Healthcare website is almost impossible to navigate and DMV can't handle a moderate volume. My students could have done better after an Intro class.
Colorado DMV website overwhelmed as noncitizens try to get driver's licenses
Late Wednesday, the Department of Motor Vehicles appointment website was still not working, the day after non U.S. citizens were allowed to start making appointments to get their driver's licenses.
… The DMV said the Schedule an Appointment website averaged 70,000 hits an hour with a high of 107,500 hits hourly.
A total of 823 appointments were scheduled.


For my Computer Science students. See why we teach so much Math?
The Hardest Roles to Hire For
Not all jobs are equally easy to fill. It’s an obvious point, but one that sometimes gets missed in the debate over whether the American economy is suffering from a “skills gap.” Companies complain that there is a shortage of talent, economists counter that if that were true it would be evidenced by rising wages. With wages stagnant, where’s the skills gap?
Into this debate comes a new report from Brookings that aims to get past discussion at the aggregate level, to determine where there are or are not skills shortages. Using U.S. job opening data collected by the firm Burning Glass, it argues persuasively that there are very real skills shortages in certain fields, namely computers and health care

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