Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Any publicity is good publicity? Nobody died so it's worth the risk? What (if anything) are they thinking?
Ashley Madison surges back, says 4.6M have joined infidelity website since data breach
… The extramarital affair website Ashley Madison says it has gained nearly 4.6 million members since hackers posted the names of the website's users in August. A counter on the site's front page claimed more than 43.4 million “anonymous members” Tuesday — up from about 38.9 million Aug. 18, the day hackers posted users' private information online.




I thought Microsoft and others wanted to get out of the “We can decrypt it” boondoggle?
ONE OF THE EXCELLENT FEATURES of new Windows devices is that disk encryption is built-in and turned on by default, protecting your data in case your device is lost or stolen. But what is less well-known is that, if you are like most users and login to Windows 10 using your Microsoft account, your computer automatically uploaded a copy of your recovery key — which can be used to unlock your encrypted disk — to Microsoft’s servers, probably without your knowledge and without an option to opt out.




Someone has been collecting useful tips & tricks.
How to delete your personal info. from the internet




What did they know that we didn't know? What did we know that we were worried they might know? Did they have a better argument than we did? Did they have fact that we didn't? (Should I believe that Israeli security is so poor their Prime Minister does not use an encrypted phone?)
US snooping on Israel also caught talks with lawmakers: report
The U.S. captured communications from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his aides and swept up the content of private conversations with U.S. lawmakers, giving the Obama administration insight into Israel's lobbying efforts against the international nuclear deal with Iran, according to a new report.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the National Security Agency (NSA) swept up information that White House officials considered valuable as it sought to counter Netanyahu's vocal opposition to the nuclear deal between Iran, the U.S. and other world leaders.
… The Journal also reported that White House officials were worried about the politics of asking for swept-up communications between Israeli officials and members of Congress, allowing the NSA to decide what to share.
"We didn't say, 'Do it,' " a senior U.S. official told the Journal. "We didn't say, 'Don't do it.' " [Oh, that makes everything okay then. Bob]




How much is 'not enough?'
Twitter cracks down on harassment by rearranging paragraphs in its terms of service
In the wake of former CEO Dick Costolo admitting the company "suck[s] at dealing with abuse," Twitter has devoted many blog posts to explaining how seriously it takes the issue. It hired more people to enforce its abuse policies, and added new tools for reporting harassment. And to cap off the year, today the company rearranged some paragraphs in its terms of service, and celebrated the move in a new blog post.
"The updated language emphasizes that Twitter will not tolerate behavior intended to harass, intimidate, or use fear to silence another user's voice," Megan Cristina, the company's director of trust and safety, wrote in a blog post. "As always, we embrace and encourage diverse opinions and beliefs — but we will continue to take action on accounts that cross the line into abuse." That sounded like a good thing, but when I pulled up Twitter's new rules, they looked an awful lot like Twitter's old rules.
The one significant addition is a new section that bans "hateful conduct" that targets users on the basis of their race, nationality, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, disability, or disease. The rule also bans creating multiple accounts for the primary purpose of inciting harm toward others based on those categories. At the same time, the old harassment rules likely prevented this sort of behavior as well.
The truth is that updated rules are meaningless unless the company strictly enforces them.




Perspective. Something for my Data Management class? Interesting points.
At our Enterprise Information and Master Data Management Summit this year (back in the Spring) we mentioned, as part of the keynote, the phrase, “from information asset to information access”. See Information is the new source of economic value, May 2015. This perhaps innocuous phrase captures a significant part of the message from the keynote: the digital, now algorithm economy, will herald significant economic shifts.




Perspective. You have to ask, “Could this happen here?”
Amazon is about to go head-to-head with Britain's struggling supermarkets
… The news that Amazon is to ramp up its grocery delivery business will come as a blow to the “big four” supermarket chains – Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons – which are already under pressure as a result of changing shopping habits. Large grocers have been battling falling sales as households abandon the weekly shop in favour of discount supermarkets, regular local top-up shopping and online ordering.




For e-tourists.
Google provides digital walk through of British Museum exhibits
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on Dec 29, 2015




For readers.
32 Places to Get Free Kindle Books


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