Small, but impactive.
TALKTALK
HACKED: 4 million customers affected, stock plummeting, 'Russian
jihadist hackers' claim responsibility
British
broadband provider TalkTalk has been hacked for the third time, the
company announced late Thursday, and customers' data — including
credit card details — may have been stolen.
In
a statement, TalkTalk called the attack "significant and
sustained." Up
to 4
million customers
may be affected, according to the Financial Times.
[See below.
Did they get every account? Bob]
… TalkTalk shares have plummeted 9% on the
news. [Unusual, Bob]
It's not clear who is behind the hack yet, but a
group claiming to be a Russian jihadist cyberterrorist group is
claiming responsibility. BuzzFeed
has spoken to a TalkTalk customer included in an apparent
preliminary dump of customer data, and it appears to be legitimate —
although the hacker's stated political affiliation could well be
false.
… The
company has around 4 million UK customers.
The
BBC is reporting that TalkTalk's website was targeted by a DDoS
attack — overwhelming servers with traffic. This on its own
wouldn't give the attacker access to internal data, however.
… It's not yet clear whether the hackers
gained access to customers' full credit card details, or if they were
at least partially encrypted (if they weren't, it'd be a major
security issue). The company says that "not all of the data was
encrypted" — had it been, it would be very difficult for the
attacker to make any sense of.
Better late than never? The original collector of
Big Data has finally realize they can use all that data they
insist on gathering! But of course since they have never done
anything with that data, they don't know what to do with it. (This
is apparently so obvious that it only take 2 pages to report
everything they already knew?)
Federal
Investment in Big Data Applications Heads for Liftoff
U.S. government agencies appear to have gotten the
memo: Big data is good for you.
Federal agencies' acquisition, storage, processing
and management of almost unimaginably large chunks of information
will drive the government to use big data technologies, according to
a recent survey of federal information technology managers.
In addition, the use of big data analytics to
productively maximize the value of all this information will become a
major goal of government agencies, the survey showed.
To accomplish those goals, federal IT managers
increasingly are seeking the support of the private sector.
Forty-six percent of respondents planned to
increase use of third-party contractors or consultants to assist with
big data projects, according to the survey, which was sponsored by
Unisys
Federal. Another 52 percent intended to maintain their current level
of engagement with outside providers.
[The 2
page “report”:
[An
infographic:
http://assets.unisys.com/Documents/Federal/INFO_20151001_UnisysBigDataInfographic.pdf
(Related) “Hackathon” sounds really cool, but
this looks more like a technology showcase – buy my product/service
because it will make your life easier! No staffers will be writing
code.
House leaders are hosting a "hackathon"
on Capitol Hill intended to find ways for technology to help
congressional staffers with their jobs.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)
and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) are hosting the event
Friday, which follows a similar gathering in late 2011 that was
summarized in an 18-page
report.
Tech
company employees are scheduled to meet with congressional staff and
other open government advocates to "brainstorm" ideas to
modernize hearings, as well as ease legislative workflow, constituent
services and outreach.
The Open Government Foundation recently
estimated about 12 percent of the government's budget
goes to tech spending, including IT staff, technical support,
maintenance and software. Still many have criticized Congress, and
the government in general, for being far behind the private sector in
adopting new technology.
Because humans don't think like a computer? Will
that be a good thing? I'd like some say on how machine learning
reorganizes my life.
Google says
it's 'rethinking everything' around machine learning
… New Google CEO Sundar Pichai took part in
his first earnings call, and in between discussing the numbers he
revealed how important Google thinks machine learning is to its
future.
”Machine learning is a core, transformative way
by which we’re rethinking everything we’re doing,” he said.
He was putting the spotlight on a branch of
artificial intelligence that’s getting more attention lately. It
involves using computer algorithms that can “learn” over time. A
common example is its use in email, where machine learning figures
out from watching users’ behavior which emails are spam and which
should be let through.
… He didn’t give examples, but it’s not
hard to imagine where it might turn up. He mentioned machine
learning in the context of mobile, for example, where machine
learning could determine if a user is at work, at home or in their
car, so that their phone can deliver information accordingly.
Probably unethical.
How to Get
Free Access to Academic Papers on Twitter
Most academic journals charge expensive
subscriptions and, for those without a login, fees
of $30 or more per article. Now academics are using the hashtag
#icanhazpdf to freely share copyrighted papers.
Scientists are tweeting a link of the paywalled
article along with their email address in the hashtag—a riff on the
infamous
meme of a fluffy cat’s “I Can Has Cheezburger?” line.
Someone else who does have access to the article downloads a pdf of
the paper and emails the file to the person requesting it. The
initial tweet is then deleted as soon as the requester receives the
file.
Andrea Kuszewski, a San
Francisco-based cognitive scientist who started the hashtag,
tells Quartz that “the biggest rule is that you don’t
thank people.” Those who willingly share papers are, in most
cases, breaking copyright laws. But Kuszewski says it’s an
important act of “civil disobedience,” adding “it’s not an
aggressive act but it’s just a way of saying things need to
change.”
For my Statistics (and Marketing) students.
Correlation.
Customers
Who Like Santa Also Like…Nicotine Gum?
Social media is a
limitless focus group. Each tweet, like, post, or comment
represents an active decision by a person to interact with another
person, brand, or TV program culminating in a detailed individual
profile. The data provides marketers the opportunity to observe
people in their native environments — their own social groups and
with brands — while also tracking shifts in taste and behavior over
time. Combining trillions of these data points provides
unprecedented insight into consumer interests and predictive
associations.
… it turns out that social media turns up all
sorts of unpredictable and unexpected correlations.
In addition to providing a more holistic
understanding of a brand’s consumers, these non-obvious
relationships enable marketers to reach untapped consumers in an
addressable way and at a reduced cost. For ambitious marketers, this
means tailoring campaigns around each high priority interest.
(Related) Try it yourself?
… Because Facebook commands the lion's share
of our time spent online, it hosts a huge percentage of the links we
share from around the web and the discussions we have around news,
personal interests, and other moments in our lives. Facebook's
search team is now turning that firehose of human interaction, which
already generates 1.5
billion daily searches, into a vast repository of
discussion, searchable by anyone.
Is this Wall Street Journal column pro-Republican
or merely anti-Hillary? (Worst case? They she is being completely
neutral.)
She Knew
All Along
Thanks to Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony
on Thursday, we now understand why the former secretary of state
never wanted anyone to see her emails and why the State Department
sat on documents. Turns out those emails and papers show that the
Obama administration deliberately misled the nation about the deadly
events in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.
(Related) These GIFs are more likely to do
Hillary harm. Are these the reactions of a serious politician or an
amateur actor?
Free phone service for my students? (I'm still
waiting for them to pay me.)
The 10
Cheapest Mobile Phone Plans in the US Right Now [Cheat Sheet
Included]
… Two quick notes: first, for the purposes of
this article, I’ll only be looking at plans that include at least
some mobile data. If you’re looking for a plan that only includes
calling and texting, or just calling, you can find even cheaper plans
than these. Second, many of these plans are based around an idea
called “Wi-Fi first” which means that if you’re connected to
Wi-Fi, your calls and messages will be routed via the Wi-Fi instead
of through your cellular network.
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