Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Another example of encryption poorly implemented?
Forever 21 reveals potential data breach
Forever 21 is investigating a potential data breach which may have compromised customer information and payment cards.
On Tuesday, the US clothing retailer said that the company recently received a tip from a third-party that there "may have been unauthorized access to data from payment cards" at a number of Forever 21 outlets.
… However, the company did reveal that as encryption and token-based authentication systems were implemented back in 2015, "only certain point of sale (PoS) devices in some Forever 21 stores were affected."
According to the firm, a potential compromise may have taken place when encryption "was not in operation" on certain PoS devices, which may suggest older systems or locations where the 2015 rollout did not occur may be at the heart of the security incident.




Overreach?
Michael Geist explains:
The Canada Revenue Agency has obtained a federal court order requiring PayPal to hand over years of transactional information from all business accounts in Canada. The scope of the order is incredibly broad, covering any business account holder who sent or received a payment over a nearly four year period from January 1, 2014 to November 10, 2017.
Read more on MichaelGeist.ca.




Dilbert points out a downside to health monitors.




This was never going to be easy.
'Way too little, way too late': Facebook's factcheckers say effort is failing
Journalists working for Facebook say the social media site’s fact-checking tools have largely failed and that the company has exploited their labor for a PR campaign.
Several fact checkers who work for independent news organizations and partner with Facebook told the Guardian that they feared their relationships with the technology corporation, some of which are paid, have created a conflict of interest, making it harder for the news outlets to scrutinize and criticize Facebook’s role in spreading misinformation.
The reporters also lamented that Facebook had refused to disclose data on its efforts to stop the dissemination of fake news.




Elections and social media. (and some excellent graphics)
Report – Manipulating Social Media to Undermine Democracy
Freedom House – Freedom of the Net 2017: Governments around the world have dramatically increased their efforts to manipulate information on social media over the past year. The Chinese and Russian regimes pioneered the use of surreptitious methods to distort online discussions and suppress dissent more than a decade ago, but the practice has since gone global. Such state-led interventions present a major threat to the notion of the internet as a liberating technology. Online content manipulation contributed to a seventh consecutive year of overall decline in internet freedom, along with a rise in disruptions to mobile internet service and increases in physical and technical attacks on human rights defenders and independent media. Nearly half of the 65 countries assessed in Freedom on the Net 2017 experienced declines during the coverage period, while just 13 made gains, most of them minor. Less than one-quarter of users reside in countries where the internet is designated Free, meaning there are no major obstacles to access, onerous restrictions on content, or serious violations of user rights in the form of unchecked surveillance or unjust repercussions for legitimate speech. The use of “fake news,” automated “bot” accounts, and other manipulation methods gained particular attention in the United States. While the country’s online environment remained generally free, it was troubled by a proliferation of fabricated news articles, divisive partisan vitriol, and aggressive harassment of many journalists, both during and after the presidential election campaign. Russia’s online efforts to influence the American election have been well documented, but the United States was hardly alone in this respect. Manipulation and disinformation tactics played an important role in elections in at least 17 other countries over the past year, damaging citizens’ ability to choose their leaders based on factual news and authentic debate. Although some governments sought to support their interests and expand their influence abroad—as with Russia’s disinformation campaigns in the United States and Europe—in most cases they used these methods inside their own borders to maintain their hold on power…”




Perspective. If the professional writers can’t get it right, what hope for my students?
American Press Institute – Time to reinvent social media in newsrooms
“…But as this report will detail, social media teams, on the front lines of both issues, still are largely doing what they’ve done for a decade. A new API survey of 59 U.S. newsrooms conducted for this report shows that posting links to their own content, mostly on Twitter and Facebook, is still by far the top activity of the average social media team. While organizations like Hearken, GroundSource and the Coral Project are working to help newsrooms use social media for audience engagement rather than just for clicks, there is still much progress to be made — in using social platforms as tools to understand communities and to bring audiences into news creation. What’s more, the majority of newsrooms only “sometimes” or “very rarely” address misinformation on social media and comment platforms, our survey shows. And long-term strategies and planning are rare…”




Reading is as hard as writing?
Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information
Wineburg, Sam and McGrew, Sarah, Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information (October 6, 2017). Stanford History Education Group Working Paper No. 2017-A1. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3048994
“The Internet has democratized access to information but in so doing has opened the floodgates to misinformation, fake news, and rank propaganda masquerading as dispassionate analysis. To investigate how people determine the credibility of digital information, we sampled 45 individuals: 10 Ph.D. historians, 10 professional fact checkers, and 25 Stanford University undergraduates. We observed them as they evaluated live websites and searched for information on social and political issues. Historians and students often fell victim to easily manipulated features of websites, such as official-looking logos and domain names. They read vertically, staying within a website to evaluate its reliability. In contrast, fact checkers read laterally, leaving a site after a quick scan and opening up new browser tabs in order to judge the credibility of the original site. Compared to the other groups, fact checkers arrived at more warranted conclusions in a fraction of the time. We contrast insights gleaned from the fact checkers’ practices with common approaches to teaching web credibility.”




Maybe I could Tweet instead of Blog?
Those new to Twitter are probably left with tons of questions. What is this site all about? How do I use it? And how can I make the most of it with advanced tips and tricks?
We’ll answer all these questions and more in our complete guide to Twitter. Let’s get started!




Not much on the evening news.
Zimbabwe's Mugabe 'under house arrest' after army takeover
Zimbabwe's military has placed President Robert Mugabe under house arrest in the capital Harare, South African President Jacob Zuma says.
Troops are patrolling the capital, Harare, after they seized state TV and said they were targeting "criminals".
The move may be a bid to replace Mr Mugabe with his sacked deputy, Emmerson Mnangagwa, BBC correspondents say.
Mr Mnangagwa's dismissal last week left Mr Mugabe's wife Grace as the president's likely successor.




Some of my students might be interested.
Free course targets candidates for network engineering jobs
NexGenT is new to the IT boot camp field, so it's promoting itself, offering up a course that helps people prepare for IT careers. The fee? A $5 charity donation.
… The monthlong course, which has a list price of $997, gets help desk technicians, network admins or other IT apprentices ready for CompTIA's Network+ certification, a useful, but not mandatory, credential for getting network engineering jobs.




Extreme, but then it probably has to be.
'Slaughterbots' film shows potential horrors of killer drones
Perhaps the most nightmarish, dystopian film of 2017 didn't come from Hollywood. Autonomous weapons critics, led by a college professor, put together a horror show.
It's a seven-minute video, a collaboration between University of California-Berkeley professor Stuart Russell and the Future of Life Institute that shows a future in which palm-sized, autonomous drones use facial recognition technology and on-board explosives to commit untraceable massacres.


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