Friday, December 22, 2017

Once upon a time, this would have been considered a huge breach.
Nissan Canada Informs 1.1 Million Customers of Data Breach
Nissan Canada revealed on Thursday that the personal information of some customers may have been compromised as a result of a data breach discovered by the company on December 11.
The incident affects individuals who have financed their vehicles through Nissan Canada Finance (NCF) and INFINITI Financial Services Canada. The exact number of impacted customers has yet to be determined, but Nissan is notifying all 1.13 million current and past customers.




Plodding through the muddle?
Intelligence Committee Outlines UK's Offensive and Defensive Cyber Posture
The UK Intelligence and Security Committee, which has oversight of the UK intelligence community, published its 2016-2017 annual report (PDF) on Wednesday. With the rider that the report was written prior to April 2017, but delayed in publication, it provides insight into the UK perspective on global cyber threats. Its discussion includes commentary on nation state adversaries, the potential impact of the Trump administration on UKUSA, and the effect of Brexit on GCHQ operations.
The primary cyber threats are perceived to come from state actors, organized criminals and terrorist groups.




I guess I see no problem with this as long as it is, “Is this the guy we’re looking for? No? Delete all records of this scan.” Unfortunately, that’s not how it will work.
Ron Nixon reports:
A new report concludes that a Department of Homeland Security pilot program improperly gathers data on Americans when it requires passengers embarking on foreign flights to undergo facial recognition scans to ensure they haven’t overstayed visas.
The report, released on Thursday by researchers at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University’s law school, called the system an invasive surveillance tool that the department had installed at nearly a dozen airports without going through a required federal rule-making process.
Read more on The New York Times.
[From the Report:
… DHS should not be scanning the faces of Americans as they depart on international flights—but DHS is doing it anyway.
… CBP recommends that its partners delete the matching results within 14 days . . . . However, once the images are shared with CBP, the airline or airport authority, along with their approved integrator or vendor, may choose to retain the newly-captured photos consistent with their contractual relationship with the traveler.




Is North Korea a naughty boy or a criminal? Why are we debating this question?
WannaCry and the International Law of Cyberspace
… Assuming that the ransomware attacks were attributable to North Korea, a topic discussed below, the question is whether the operation breached any international law obligations North Korea owed another State, such that it constituted an “internationally wrongful act.” In cases involving States, the international law rules most likely to be violated are the prohibition on the use of force, the prohibition on intervention into other States’ internal or external affairs, the obligation to respect the sovereignty of other States, and the obligation to exercise due diligence.
… The WannaCry attacks raise an interesting question of law that is not fully resolved in the cyber context. The extent to which the attacks were directed at particular entities is unclear. But, assuming for the sake of discussion that the attacks were indiscriminate, could they nevertheless qualify as uses of force vis-à-vis States that might have suffered qualifying consequences? In our view, they could, so long as the nature of the consequences was foreseeable, even if the attacker may not have known precisely where they would manifest. We hasten to add that this issue remains unresolved.




We could probably do better. Would you trust a courtroom designed and managed by Facebook?
New York State Courts Announce High-Tech Courtrooms
National Center for State Courts – “A state-of-the-art courtroom designed to speed the progress of complex commercial cases is now up and running in Westchester County Supreme Court’s Commercial Division, which serves as a forum for the resolution of complicated business disputes. The Division’s Integrated Courtroom Technology (ICT) part, located in Westchester County’s Supreme and County Courthouse in White Plains, has been specially outfitted to ease the handling of complex commercial cases, with such features as:
  • Atech-based evidence system that enhances the presentation of evidence, permitting attorneys to display physical and electronic evidence-and witnesses to annotate the evidence-in a controlled fashion to all court participants
  • Wireless internet access for all courtroom participants, including secure wi-fi access for judges with state-issued “smart” tablets and laptops
  • Advanced acoustical elements to ensure proper sound levels throughout the courtroom, including assistive-listening aids for hearing-impaired individuals
  • Real-time court reporting capabilities for instantaneous voice-to-text transcription•Advanced audio-recording equipment
  • Audio-visual conferencing capabilities
The White Plains ICT part seamlessly incorporates multiple high-tech components in a modular, user-friendly platform designed to ensure full access to all court participants. The New York Courts’ first ICT part opened in Westchester, in Yonkers Family Court in 2016. The new White Plains high-tech courtroom is the latest in a series of technological advances introduced over the years by the New York State Supreme Court’s Commercial Division, which in addition to Westchester County operates in Albany, Kings, Nassau, New York, Onondaga and Queens counties and in the State’s Seventh Judicial District and Eighth Judicial District….”




Perspective.
YouTube Now Clocks Over 100 Million Hours Watch-Time on TVs per Day
YouTube is now seeing over 100 million hours of watch time on living room devices every single day. The new data point was revealed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company’s Q3 2017 earnings call Thursday, where executives also once again called out the video service as a major revenue driver. “YouTube continues to see phenomenal growth,” said Pichai.
This was the first time Google specifically referenced the total watch time on smart TVs and other living room devices. Earlier this year, the company revealed that it now sees more than 1 billion hours of watch time across all devices.
This means that viewing on TV is accounting for roughly 10 percent of all YouTube watch time. The company previously said that more than half of its views come from mobile devices.




Perspective. “Ye Olde Internet”
Newly discovered map shows what internet looked like in 1973
What the Entire Internet Looked Like in 1973: An Old Map Gets Found in a Pile of Research Papers – “Modern “maps” of the internet can indeed look like sprawling clusters of star systems, pulsing with light and color. But the “weird combination of physical and conceptual things,” Betsy Mason remarks at Wired, results in such an abstract entity that it can be visually illustrated with an almost unlimited number of graphic techniques to represent its hundreds of millions of users. When the internet began as ARPANET in the late sixties, it included a total of four locations, all within a few hundred miles of each other on the West Coast of the United States. (See a sketch of the first four “nodes” from 1969 here.) By 1973, the number of nodes had grown from U.C.L.A, the Stanford Research Institute, U.C. Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah to include locations all over the Midwest and East Coast, from Harvard to Case Western Reserve University to the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science in Pittsburgh, where David Newbury’s father worked (and still works). Among his father’s papers, Newbury found the map above from May of ’73, showing what seemed like tremendous growth in only a few short years…”




For our Java students?




The real downside of technology?


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