Thursday, September 08, 2016

Was this just a ploy to manipulate the stock price?  Is St. Jude certain the claims are false?  If not, are they doomed?   Stay tuned!
St. Jude Medical Sues Short Seller Over Device Allegations
St. Jude Medical Inc. on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Muddy Waters Capital LLC, claiming the research firm intentionally made false and misleading claims about its heart devices in order to profit from a decline in its stock.
The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Minnesota, also names MedSec, a cybersecurity startup whose work was cited by Muddy Waters, and some executives at both Muddy Waters and MedSec.
“We felt this lawsuit was the best course of action to make sure those looking to profit by trying to frighten patients and caregivers, and by circumventing appropriate and established channels for raising cybersecurity concerns, do not use this avenue to do so again,” St. Jude Chief Executive Michael Rousseau said.


For my Ethical Hacking students.
USB Hacking Devices Can Steal Credentials From Locked Computers
Many users might think that leaving their computer unattended does not pose any security risks as long as the device is locked.  However, researcher Rob Fuller has demonstrated that an attacker with physical access to the targeted device can capture its login credentials in just seconds as long as the machine is logged in.
The expert has tested the attack method using USB Armory and Hak5 LAN Turtle, two flash drive-size computers designed for penetration testing and various other security applications.
Fuller demonstrated how either of these devices can be set up to capture credentials from a locked, logged-in system by disguising them as a USB Ethernet adapter.  Configuring the USB device to look like a DHCP server tricks the connected computer into communicating with it.  These network communications, which include usernames and passwords, can be captured by installing Responder, an open source passive credential gathering tool, on the hacking gadget.


You know the rules don’t apply to them!
Eric Katz reports:
Customs and Border Protection released the personally identifiable information, including Social Security numbers, of thousands of individuals to dozens of federal agencies during an investigation of cheating on polygraph tests.
CBP violated some aspects of the Privacy Act in distributing the information across government, the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general found in its report.  The agency collected and distributed information such as Social Security numbers, email and mailing addresses, and phone numbers of individuals who had purchased materials from two individuals who helped job applicants pass polygraphs.
Read more on Government Executive.


Should the insurance industry support this study?
Katie Courage reports on some research by Yashwant Malaiya, professor of computer science in the College of Natural Sciences at Colorado State University and Abdullah Algarni, a doctoral researcher in the same department.
Their research is oriented to developing a standard, public – and evolving – model that will permit more rigorous study on the costs of a breach.
Their work on the topic was published for the Second International Conference on Information Management earlier this year in London.
Read more on CSU.


Security consultants may be the way to go.  Are you ready to invest enough to provide “adequate” security?  (Is that the business you are in?) 
Managed Security Services, a Mission and Service Evolution
   To address these new requirements for threat detection and incident response, as well as to help organizations overcome the challenges they face, new managed security services have emerged.  Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services differ from traditional managed security services in three ways: speed, accuracy, and focus.  Here’s how.


Why can’t governments manage application development?  Should they even try?  That is not why they exist!  Another topic my IT Architecture students will debate.
Mike Lindblom reports:
Seattle’s new billing system for utilities, already afflicted by delays and cost overruns, launched Monday morning with a data flaw that sent 3,041 customers a link to other customers’ bills, including their names, addresses and energy or water use.
Along with the privacy breakdown, the city sent six to 12 redundant email notices to those same customers, marking new trouble for a computer update, nearly a year late, $34 million over budget, and expected to reach $100 million.
Read more on Government Technology.


The new normal?  Didn’t Mickey lose a finger this way? 
Sandra Pedicini reports:
Walt Disney World has begun requiring children from 3 to 9 years old to have their fingers scanned when they enter the theme parks, just like older kids and adults.
Disney said the new process will help block the use of stolen and shared tickets.  Previously, kids’ tickets would have been easy to transfer because they had no finger images attached to them.
Parents who feel uncomfortable with having their kids’ fingers scanned can use their own instead.
Read more on Orlando Sentinel.


Will this make it harder for our students to research terrorism?  If they persist, will they be flagged as security risks? 
How Google aims to disrupt the Islamic State propaganda machine
   Jigsaw, the advanced research outfit created by Google, has developed a technology that would redirect anyone searching terms and phrases associated with supporting the Islamic State (known as IS or ISIS) to instead see antiextremist messages and videos.
   The effort dubbed the “Redirect Method” placed Islamic State-related search results next to ads that include links to videos denouncing the terrorist groups and its tactics from leading Muslim clerics.


Interesting, but unlikely.  Still, something for my IT Architecture students to consider. 
The Next Industrial Revolution
A “crisis of abundance” initially seems like a paradox.  After all, abundance is the ultimate goal of technology and economics.  But consider the early history of the electric washing machine.  In the 1920s, factories churned them out in droves.  (With the average output of manufacturing workers rising by a third between 1923 and 1929, making more washing machines was relatively cheap.)  But as the decade ended, factories saw they were making many more than American households demanded.  Companies cut back their output and laid off workers even before the stock market crashed in 1929.  Indeed, some economists have said that the oversupply of consumer goods like washing machines may have been one of the causes of the Great Depression.
What initially looked like abundance was really something more harmful: overproduction.  In economics, as in anything, too much of a good thing can be problematic.
That sentiment is one of the central theses of The Wealth of Humans, a new book by the Economist columnist Ryan Avent about how technology is changing the nature of work.  In the next few years, self-driving cars, health-care robots, machine learning, and other technology will complement many workers in the office.  Counting both humans and machines, the world’s labor force will be able to do more work than ever before.  But this abundance of workers—both those made of cells and those made of bits—could create a glut of labor.  The machines may render many humans as redundant as so many vintage washing machines.


Another Architecture article.
India's richest man offers free 4G to one billion people
Indian consumers are already celebrating the arrival of Mukesh Ambani's new Reliance Jio service, seizing on the billionaire's promise to deliver rock bottom prices and download speeds that will enable streaming video.
The 4G network, which reaches more than 80% of the country, officially went live Monday with a set of generous introductory offers.  Indians will be able to use Jio for free until the end of 2016, and pay as little as 149 rupees ($2.25) a month for data after that.
   It's a market that tech industry giants desperately want to crack. Google (GOOG) has installed free Wi-Fi at train stations across India, and Facebook (FB, Tech30) tried to offer a free version of its platform.
   Rival networks have responded to the launch of Reliance Jio with special offers of their own, making a price war a near certainty.  Airtel has slashed its prices for 3G and 4G service by 80%, and Vodafone (VOD) has boosted the amount of data in its plans by nearly 70%.


For my geeks.


If it is not as successful as Pokémon, is it a failure?
Super Mario's iPhone Surprise Sends Nintendo Shares Soaring
   Investors are betting the new game, Super Mario Run, will be another mobile hit for the Japanese company akin to the wildly popular Pokemon GO, as it moves away from its console-focused strategy and embraces on-the-go gaming.


Is that new term really new?
Google Books Ngram Viewer Overview
The Google Books Ngram Viewer is a search tool that displays when and how often a term appears in books indexed by Google Books.  By using the Ngram Viewer you can discover when a term starts to appear in literature, how often a term appears, and when a term loses popularity in literature.


Video Cliff Notes?
Two Crash Courses on Classic Literature
A few years ago John Green started a Crash Course series on classic literature.  The early episodes featured Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, and The Odyssey amongst about a dozen other works.  That series is embedded below.
This summer John Green began publishing a new set of Crash Course literature videos.  The new series includes videos about Huckleberry Finn, Lord of the Flies, and 100 Years of Solitude.  The new series is included in an oddly constructed playlist that for some unclear reason includes videos about physics, the Olympics, and gaming.  Sort through the playlist and you'll find the literature lessons.
All of these videos include Green's commentary on the stories along with the summaries of key points in the plots. Much like Cliff Notes, watching these videos is not a replacement for actually reading the stories.  You may also want to remind your students that Green's opinions about the stories are just that, opinions.


This makes me feel old.
Star Trek’s 50th Star Date Anniversary

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