Sunday, March 01, 2015

For my Computer Security students. As I understand the rules for finance companies, they must keep copies of their files that the average employee can not delete. “Recovery” should not be necessary.
Margot Roosevelt reports:
Last year, according to the Mount Olympus Mortgage Co. in Irvine, several of its officers secretly downloaded confidential information on hundreds of loan customers and transferred five gigabytes of data to a competitor.
The loan officers then deleted files and emails on their computers and went to work for that rival, Chicago-based lender Guaranteed Rate, which has offices in Irvine, Newport Beach and Santa Ana.
But Mount Olympus, a 38-employee operation also known as MOMco, recovered the information, including more than 1,000 emails between its former mortgage bankers and their soon-to-be new employer, according to a lawsuit it filed last year in Orange County Superior Court.
Read more on Orange County Register.


“On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.” or an imposter.
Identity Theft Tops FTC’s Consumer Complaint Categories Again in 2014
News release: “”Identity theft topped the Federal Trade Commission’s national ranking of consumer complaints for the 15th consecutive year, while the agency also recorded a large increase in the number of complaints about so-called “imposter” scams, according to the FTC’s 2014 Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book, which was released today. Imposter scams – in which con artists impersonate government officials or others – moved into third place on the list of consumer complaints, entering the top three complaint categories for the first time. The increase in imposter scams was led by a sharp jump in complaints about IRS and other government imposter scams. Debt collection held steady as the second-most-reported complaint. “While identity theft remains a huge issue, consumers should also keep a close eye out for imposter scams,” said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Whether it’s pretending to be the IRS during tax season, or making false promises of a lottery win, scammers are increasingly sophisticated in their efforts to deceive consumers, but the FTC will continue working to shut these scammers down.” The Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book is produced annually using complaints received by the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network. That includes not only complaints made directly by consumers to the FTC, but also complaints received by state and federal law enforcement agencies, national consumer protection organizations and non-governmental organizations.”


For my Intro to IT students.
Facebook Privacy: 25 Things The Social Network Knows About You
… If you volunteer this information, ie. either actively inputting data or simply sharing and liking topics and articles, these are a few things Facebook knows about you: Name; email address; gender; date of birth; family members; friends; education; sexual preference; relationship status; religious views; your job; your location; political standing; address of your own website or blog; favourite music, books, TV shows and films; phone number; messages you post on your own timeline; messages other people post on your timeline; contents of private messages; sites you frequent; topics you talk about; and what you look like.
On top of all of that, concerns have been expressed over Facebook’s mobile app listening in to a conversation – 15 seconds of it after you finish writing a status update anyway – and how the social networking site can be used by security agencies like the NSA and GCHQ. There are ample reasons to believe Facebook is used to spy on you.
… If Facebook’s grip on your data particularly worries you, there are measures you can take to protect yourself. And don’t forget to manage your Facebook app approvals.


A rather large PDF to tell us there is no standard of governance? This may apply to any “third party” we deal with, like Data Brokers for example. How do they govern themselves and what minimum standard should we expect.
Governance of Online Intermediaries: Observations from a Series of National Case Studies
Gasser, Urs and Schulz, Wolfgang, Governance of Online Intermediaries: Observations from a Series of National Case Studies (February 18, 2015). Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2015-5. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2566364 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2566364
Online intermediaries in various forms – including search engines, social media, or app platforms – play a constitutive role in today’s digital environment. They have become a new type of powerful institution in the 21st century that shape the public networked sphere, and are subject to intense and often controversial policy debates. This paper focuses on one particular force shaping the emergence and future evolution of online intermediaries: the rapidly changing landscape of intermediary governance at the intersection of law, technology, norms, and markets. Building upon eight in-depth case studies and use cases, respectively, this paper seeks to distill key observations and provide a high-level analysis of some of the structural elements that characterize varying governance regimes, with a focus on intermediary liability regimes and their evolution. Analyzing online intermediary governance issues from multiple perspectives, and in the context of different cultures and regulatory frameworks, immediately creates basic problems of semantic interoperability. Lacking a universally agreed-upon definition, the synthesis paper and its’ underlying case studies are based on a broad and phenomenon-oriented notion of online intermediaries, as further described below. In methodological terms, the observations shared in the synthesis paper offer a selective reading and interpretation by the authors of the broader take-ways of a diverse set of case studies examining online intermediary governance frameworks and issues in Brazil, the European Union, India, South Korea, the United States, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam. These case studies, in turn, have emerged in the context of an international research pilot by the Global Network of Internet & Society Research Centers (NoC), through a process of in-person consultations and remote collaborations among the researchers, and are based on a set of broader questions regarding the role of online intermediaries in the digital age.”


How like the KGB, whatever we call it now.
Fear Envelops Russia After Killing of Putin Critic Boris Nemtsov
About two weeks before he was shot and killed in the highest-profile political assassination in Russia in a decade, Boris Y. Nemtsov met with an old friend to discuss his latest research into what he said was dissembling and misdeeds in the Kremlin.
He was, as always, pugilistic and excited, saying he wanted to publish the research in a pamphlet to be called “Putin and the War,” about President Vladimir V. Putin and Russian involvement in the Ukraine conflict, recalled Yevgenia Albats, the editor of New Times magazine. Both knew the stakes.
Mr. Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, knew his work was dangerous but tried to convince her that, as a former high official in the Kremlin, he enjoyed immunity, Ms. Albats said.


I'm working with “student intelligence” (no pun intended) but this might work as part of our Business Intelligence project.
Google’s artificial intelligence breakthrough may have huge impact
Google researchers have created an algorithm that has a human-like ability to learn, marking a significant breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence. In a paper published in Nature this week, the researchers demonstrated that the algorithm could master many Atari video games better than humans, simply through playing the game and learning from experience.


A tool for my student researchers.
Become an Instapaper Power User With These 6 Cool Features
Instapaper is a lightweight web and mobile app that allows you to quickly and easily save all the online content you don’t have time for right now (no matter how fast you read), for later offline reading. The app is available for free on iOS, Android, and also within your browser.
Instapaper’s core features – like the removal of distractions from web pages – make it particularly adept at helping you to tackle your ever-expanding list of long-form articles.

No comments: