This could help me develop my role-playing game
for my Computer Forensics students.
Unmasked:
How Police Beat Shakespearean Cyber Thieves
Gal Frishman scours the Internet looking for
things most people try to avoid — malicious bits of software sent
out to spy or steal. On Aug. 25, 2011, sitting at his desk in Tel
Aviv, he found something he’d never seen before.
It was a banking Trojan, designed to sneak into a
computer and drain your bank account. This one had peculiar survival
instinct. It could hide or play dead, giving the impression it had
been deleted only to re-install itself later.
… By 2014, Shylock had infected more than
100,000 computers, mostly in the U.K., but also in the U.S. and
Italy. The malware was transferring millions of pounds a year from
unwitting bank customers to the Russian-speaking gang of computer
nerds who created it. A BAE Systems report
in 2013 called Shylock “one of the most sophisticated and fastest
growing threats posed by cybercriminals today.”
… Operation Disputed, the first malware
takedown led by Europeans, began on July 8, 2014, at Europol’s
headquarters in The Hague, Holland. This is its story.
Just in time for my IT Governance class, a
wonderful example of the “foreverness” of anything on the
Internet.
Heinz QR
porn code too saucy for ketchup customer
… The code, which people can scan using a
smartphone in order to access content online, was supposed to direct
browsers to a site where users could design their own label for a
bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup Hot, as part of a promotion by the
company.
Instead, the URL was hosting porn.
… He said he believed he bought the bottle
recently, but that the registration of the URL had lapsed because the
related promotion had ended.
… "It seems [Heinz] failed to renew their
registration of the domain name, so it slipped out of their hands and
was snatched up by an opportunistic porn site.
"Maybe in future they'll think of redirecting
any customers via heinz.com, rather than directly to a custom site
for a specific campaign."
Good, bad and creepy? Eventually, you plumber
will know your bathroom schedule. Still, this would be a nice
feature if I was the only one that saw the data.
Nexia Home
Intelligence says its free service can predict heating-and-air system
problems
Nexia Home Intelligence is offering a new opt-in
advanced diagnostic service that allows
your local dealer to remotely monitor your home’s heating and
cooling setup. Should there be a problem with your
heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system, you’ll
see an alert on your Trane or American Standard Wi-Fi enabled
thermostat. Your local installer will also be notified, so they can
proactively call you to schedule a service appointment.
Interesting. Perhaps we should start writing
childrens' book style, no more than 6 words per page. Or perhaps one
line of a limerick per page? (Do you think anyone will notice how
much your Kindle is telling Amazon about your reading habits?)
What If
Authors Were Paid Every Time Someone Turned a Page?
… Soon, the maker of the Kindle is going to
flip the formula used for reimbursing some of the authors who depend
on it for sales. Instead of paying these authors by
the book, Amazon will soon start paying authors based
on how many pages are read—not how many pages are downloaded,
but how many pages are
displayed on the screen long enough to be parsed.
… A system with per-page payouts is a system
that rewards cliffhangers and mysteries across all genres. It
rewards anything that keeps people hooked, even if that means putting
less of an emphasis on nuance and complexity.
An interesting article for my Data Analysis
students. Shouldn't this be how all review systems work?
Amazon
Wants New Customer Reviews System To Be More Helpful And Gain Your
Trust: Here's How
… The new system is currently being rolled
out, and while it may not make much of a difference initially, as it
goes it will start sorting reviews, giving more value to newer ones
and those made by verified Amazon customers.
… One of the great things about the new system
is that it will learn which reviews are more helpful over time,
hopefully becoming more useful as time goes on.
"The enhanced system will use a
machine-learned model to give more weight to newer, more helpful
reviews from Amazon customers. The system will continue to learn
which reviews are most helpful to customers and improve the
experience over time," said
an Amazon spokesperson.
I'll be very curious to see if this flys. A $600,
it's almost as much as an entry level DSLR. Are they counting on
people relying on their phones? Should the camera manufacturers add
a phone to their options?
DxO ONE
turns your iOS device into a DSLR
… With the DxO ONE, I could have a
DSLR-quality camera that’s small enough to fit in my pocket. You
just pop out its Lightning adapter and plug it into the iPhone or
iPad, and the ONE uses the iOS device and its app as the viewfinder
and user interface for the 20.2MP DxO ONE camera.
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