So,
what's next? (Because the hackers are having way too much fun to
leave them alone.)
Sony
restores Playstation but doubts linger
Ending
several days of interruption, Sony Corp on Sunday finally restored
services to its PlayStation online gaming network after a Christmas
Day cyber attack shuttered access to large numbers of customers,
including holiday recipients of new game consoles.
…
"It's not yet clear whether it's just an outage of the
PlayStation Network or if some personal data has been stolen too,"
Hideki Yasuda, a Tokyo-based analyst at Ace Research Institute, said.
Once
upon a time: “On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog!” That
had a certain appeal.
Now:
“On the Internet, everyone thinks you're a terrorist!”
Ben
Westcott reports:
Innovative Australian online mental health providers could be
deserted by clients under the government’s controversial new
metadata laws.
One of the developers of a widely used Canberra-based online mental
health program said the new
policy would affect the site’s ability to provide anonymity
and freedom from stigma.
But the Attorney-General’s Department said the government was
limiting metadata access to agencies with a clear operational or
investigative need.
The Abbott government has introduced a bill to make it mandatory for
telecommunications companies to store customer information for two
years.
Read
more on Sydney
Morning Herald.
You
are worth too much to these companies, they can't let you opt out.
Do
Not Track is History?
New
York Times: “Four years ago, the Federal Trade Commission
announced, with fanfare, a plan
to let American consumers decide whether to let companies track their
online browsing and buying habits. The plan would let users opt out
of the collection of data about their habits through a setting in
their web browsers, without
having to decide on a site-by-site basis. The idea, known as “Do
Not Track,” and modeled on the popular “Do Not Call” rule
that protects consumers from unwanted telemarketing calls, is simple.
But the details are anything but. Although many digital advertising
companies agreed
to the idea in principle, the debate over the definition,
scope and application of “Do Not Track” has been raging for
several years. Now, finally, an industry working group is expected
to propose detailed rules governing how the privacy switch should
work. The group includes
experts but is dominated by Internet giants like Adobe, Apple,
Facebook,
Google and Yahoo. It is poised to recommend a carve-out
that would effectively free them from honoring “Do Not Track”
requests. If regulators go along, the rules would allow the largest
Internet giants to continue scooping up data about users on their own
sites and on other sites that include their plug-ins, such as
Facebook’s “Like” button or an embedded YouTube video. This
giant loophole would make “Do Not Track” meaningless.”
(Related)
For my Business Intelligence and Data Mining students. Multiple
business opportunities! If the current price is $2,000 per website
per month, what is the software worth?
Priceonomics
Launches a Platform to Crawl and Analyze Web Data
Priceonomics
has launched a new offering that enables developers to crawl and
analyze web pages on a large scale.
…
Once a web page is crawled, the Priceonomics Analysis Engine
analyzes the data it contains using applications that, for instance,
can extract email addresses and phone numbers or retrieve information
about where and how much the page has been shared on social media.
…
Currently, Priceonomics is offering free access to its Analysis
Engine. Developers can either use a shared API key that may produce
slow results, or sign up for a private API key that is limited to
1,500 requests per day.
Data
is the gold of the digital age and scraping is increasingly akin to
gold mining. According to Priceonomics, "Tech companies and
hedge funds pay us between $2K
to $10K per month to crawl web pages, structure the
information, and then deliver it to them in analyzed form. This is a
pretty significant amount of money because acquiring
data is a burning problem for some companies."
…
Because data is so valuable and scraping
it can be such a challenging task, a growing number of companies are
hoping to build big businesses by offering self-serve tools that
essentially allow anyone to turn web pages into APIs.
…
Right now, it looks as if the market is large enough to support
multiple companies but as more and more companies come face to face
with the fact that their data is being scraped and incorporated into
unofficial
APIs, it's possible that offerings like Priceonomics' Analysis
Engine will eventually have the ironic effect of encouraging
companies to build official APIs that they can control and monetize.
Something
for my Criminal Justice students?
Social
Media Directory – DHS
“The
Department of Homeland Security and its component agencies use
numerous social media accounts to provide you with information in
more places and more ways [the listing is quite long – what
appears below is only a portion of the total]. The Department uses
non-government sites to make information and services more widely
available.
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