What is the FBI really telling us? Should we
assume they have all the other social networks covered? They need
more money for Social Network Analysts? People who make good
analysts would rather work for Twitter?
Exclusive:
FBI Says Twitter Needs to Do More to Combat Terrorism
Twitter isn’t doing enough to stop ISIS and
other terrorists, FBI officials in Washington, D.C. tell FOX
Business. Twitter “needs to do more in setting up teams to troll,
monitor and review all terrorist-related tweets and content. It
needs to build up its budget for these teams and let these teams grow
even bigger,” an FBI official tells FBN.
... “Authorities can request the info” on
terrorist activity a Twitter spokesman tells FBN, but adds, “Like
all of our technology industry peers, we do not proactively monitor
content."
Yesterday, Democrat presidential hopeful Hillary
Clinton said ISIS should be banned from Twitter and the Internet.
"We have got to shut
down their internet presence, which is posing the principal threat to
us," the former U.S. secretary of state said.
… FBI Director James Comey testified before
Senate Intelligence on July 8 that social media concerns do
voluntarily report to law enforcement when they catch terrorist
activity. "I do find in practice they are pretty good about
telling us what they see," the director had said. But there is
a sentiment inside the FBI that Twitter could do more.
(Related) Perspective. (Digest Item #1)
Facebook Is
Still Growing
Facebook is continuing to grow at an astonishing
rate, with 1.49
billion people now using the site on a monthly basis. This
figure, correct up to June 30th, represents a
13 percent year-on-year increase in the number of users
during the second quarter of 2015.
As BBC
News points out, with around 3
billion people estimated to be online, Facebook is used by half
of the whole population of the Internet. Which is no mean
feat. More impressive still is that fact that almost 1
billion of those people use Facebook every single day.
There have been several times when it seemed an
implosion was imminent at Facebook, with people angry at changes
being made and searching for a viable alternative. But no such
alternative has ever arrived. Sure, Google+
has its fans, but Ello
utterly failed to impress.
The result is that Facebook continues to go from
strength to strength, adding users and growing revenues. At this
point in time I’m not sure the Facebook juggernaut can be stopped,
so perhaps the 1.5 billion holdouts should just succumb
to its lure.
Legally right, tactically very very wrong.
Peter Howe reports:
Embattled
New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady has undoubtedly created
a public relations disaster for himself with new reports
that he had the smartphone he was using during the “Deflategate”
saga destroyed, apparently hours before he was called before
Deflategate investigator Ted Wells.
But
as a member of a powerful labor union using a personal phone, not one
issued by his employer, Brady appeared to be on solid ground legally
tossing the “broken Samsung.”
Read more on NECN.
For all my students!
How to
Encrypt and Set a SIM Card Lock on Any Mobile Device
… Encrypting
your data is (in most cases) so simple that not bothering is more
or less an open invitation to thieves and scammers to steal your data
and profit from it.
For my Ethical Hacking students.
Learn
ethical hacking and session hijacking on Pluralsight
Does Colorado's “Make my day” law apply? (Can
I use my heat seeking missile armed “Interceptor” drone?)
Cyrus Farivar reports:
The way William Merideth sees it, it’s pretty clear-cut: a drone flying over his backyard was a well-defined invasion of privacy, analogous to a physical trespassing.
Not knowing who owned it, the Kentucky man took out his shotgun and fired three blasts of Number 8 birdshot to take the drone out.
[…]
The Kentuckian was arrested Sunday evening in Hillview, Kentucky, just south of Louisville and charged with criminal mischief and wanton endangerment.
Read more on Ars
Technica.
The geography of the Internet.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a
luncheon honoring winners for best of the 2014-2015 Call for Papers
by the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) at its annual
conference. It featured Just Security‘s own Jen Daskal
for her excellent paper, The Un-Territoriality of Data,
which is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal.
… A link to Jen’s article can be found here.
Perspective. Health is expensive. This system
may be cheap, late and ultimately useless.
Pentagon
Awards $4.3 Billion Contract to Modernize Health Records
The Pentagon on Wednesday awarded a $4.3 billion
contract to modernize its health-records system to a team led by
Leidos Holdings
Inc. and
Cerner Corp.
the biggest federal information-technology project since the troubled
rollout of the HealthCare.gov insurance exchange in 2013.
The highly coveted project is expected
to take seven years to transfer records of 9.6 million
military personnel from a fragmented patchwork that still includes
paper files to a single electronic system.
The contract has attracted controversy because of
the … Pentagon’s reliance on a proprietary supplier of health
records to private hospitals rather than an Internet-based system
that can be upgraded more regularly.
… “This is really not an IT project, it’s
a business transformation project,” Dave Bowen, chief information
officer for the Pentagon’s Military Health System said in an
interview earlier this year.
… Health care accounts for around 10% of the
Pentagon’s total budget compared with 6% in 2000, and costs have
more than doubled over that period, according to the Congressional
Budget Office.
… “The business rationale that the Pentagon
is using probably will produce sub-standard results,” said Loren
Thompson at the Lexington Institute, a think tank part-funded by big
defense companies.
Perspective. Will this spread to other
industries?
Lufthansa
CFO believes other airlines will follow with GDS charge
Lufthansa believes other
airlines will follow its strategy of imposing a fee on bookings made
via third-party sites, part of plans to try to direct more customers
to its own website and offer them tailor-made tickets, it said on
Thursday.
Lufthansa will impose a
16 euro surcharge on bookings made using global distribution systems
(GDS) from Sept 1. It is seen as a risky move, given that the German
airline sells around 70 percent of its tickets via third party
channels using GDSs from providers such as Amadeus, Travelport and
Sabre.
You might want one of these (kept in the original
package) for your grandchildren. I suspect they will be replaced
very quickly by a generic version that knows where you are by talking
to things on the Internet of Things, and replacing this hardware with
software. But first, you might see them come in the package like a
prize in Cracker Jack.
Amazon
starts selling quick-buy Dash Buttons for $5 each
Amazon's Dash Buttons, interesting little devices
that allows you to easily order household items by simply pressing a
button, are now
available to Amazon Prime members for just $4.99 each.
When Amazon first
announced the Dash Buttons on March 31 this year, many suspected
the strange product was an April Fools' Day gag. However that's
clearly not the case, with Dash Buttons expected to reach the
doorsteps of Prime Members who buy them by July 31st.
There are currently 18
Dash Buttons available, most of which cover cleaning product
brands such as Tide, Glad, Cottonelle and Bounty, although you can
get Buttons that quickly send you more Kraft Macaroni and Cheese,
Gatorade, or Gillette razors.
Trust your politicians?
Here's Our
Tally of Donald Trump's Wealth
… The celebrity presidential candidate says
he’s worth more than $10 billion.
… Last month, Trump released a summary of his
net worth as of June 30, 2014, which calculated his fortune at $8.7
billion, including $3.3 billion for the value of his name.
… Based on an analysis that included the
candidate's 92-page personal financial disclosure form, his wealth is
closer to $2.9 billion.
(Related) Should you trust the local sports team?
No, every
person on Earth did not read about the 2014 Redskins training camp
… With the help of third-party media
monitoring services Meltwater and TVEyes, the team put out a fancy
13-page report on its findings. That report determined, among other
things, that there were “7,845,460,401 unique visitors of
print/online coverage of the 2014 Bon Secours Washington Redskins
Training Camp from July 24-Aug. 12.”
That’s a big number. To put it in perspective,
that’s considerably more than the population of Earth, which the
Census Bureau estimates
at 7.26 billion.
For my Computer Science students. Note that
neither the CIA nor the NSA are mentioned. Why is the FBI separate
from DHS?
Obama's New
Executive Order Says the US Must Build an Exascale Supercomputer
President Obama has established a new initiative
across multiple government agencies that will focus entirely on
creating the fastest supercomputers ever devised. The National
Strategic Computing Initiative will attempt to build the first ever
exascale computer, which would be more than 30 times faster than
today's fastest supercomputer, according
to an executive order issued Wednesday.
The initiative will primarily be a partnership
between the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and National
Science Foundation, which will be designing supercomputers primarily
for use by NASA, the FBI,
the National Institutes of Health, the
Department of Homeland Security, and NOAA. Each of those
agencies will be allowed to provide input during the early stages of
the development of these new computers.
For my International students (and me)
See the
world in your language with Google Translate
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jul 29, 2015
Google
Blog: “The Google
Translate app already lets you instantly visually translate
printed text in seven languages. Just open the app, click on the
camera, and point it at the text you need to translate—a street
sign, ingredient list, instruction manual, dials on a washing
machine. [Class assignments
Bob] You’ll see the text transform live on your
screen into the other language. No Internet connection or cell phone
data needed. Today, we’re updating the Google Translate app
again—expanding instant visual translation to 20 more languages
(for a total of 27!), and making real-time voice translations a lot
faster and smoother—so even more people can experience the world in
their language.”
Because I missed the live versions.
Three
Webinar Recordings - Blogger, Google Drive, and YouTube
Last week I presented three webinars on behalf of
Simple K12. If you couldn't attend the live sessions, you can now
access the recordings through Simple K12.
Click the links
below to access the webinar recordings and hand-outs.
Short notice. Sorry. I think this is free.
VACCINE
Webinar Focuses on Decision-Making and Counter Terrorism
“The most significant aspect of terrorism that
we’ll see evolve in the coming years is ideological
based terrorism … Once you identify the
ideology, you can then identify
the causes, the roots, the underpinnings of
that ideology – and that is going to determine the counter
terrorism measures to utilize,” stated Dr. James Hess, Faculty
Director & Associate Professor of Intelligence & Terrorism
Studies at American Military University (AMU).
Dr. Hess is co-presenting the upcoming VACCINE
Center series of counter terrorism-based webinars, co-sponsored by
Purdue University and AMU.
Established in July 2009 in partnership with
Purdue University, VACCINE is the Department of Homeland Security’s
(DHS) Center of Excellence in Visual and Data Analytics. Its mission
focuses on creating methods, tools, and applications to analyze and
manage vast amounts of information for all mission-critical areas of
homeland security in the most efficient manner.
The first
webinar, “Decision-Making and Counter
Terrorism: How the Visual Analytics of Data Can Help Save Lives” is
scheduled for July 31,
2015.
Anyone interested in registering for the first
seminar, may still do so by clicking here.
You were warned!
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