Something for my Computer Security students to
ponder. How do you check third party source code?
FBI
Software For Analyzing Fingerprints Contains Russian-Made Code,
Whistleblowers Say
In a secret deal, a
French company purchased code from a Kremlin-connected firm,
incorporated it into its own software, and hid
its existence from the FBI, according to documents and two
whistleblowers. The allegations raise concerns that Russian hackers
could compromise law enforcement computer systems.
… Cybersecurity experts said the danger of
using the Russian-made code couldn’t be assessed without examining
the code itself.
How will they do this? Lots of “fake news?”
Vietnam
unveils 10,000-strong cyber unit to combat 'wrong views'
HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam has unveiled a new,
10,000-strong military cyber warfare unit to counter “wrong”
views on the Internet, media reported, amid a widening crackdown on
critics of the one-party state.
… The number of staff compares with the 6,000
reportedly employed by North Korea. However, the general’s
comments suggest its force may be focused largely on domestic
internet users whereas North Korea is internationally focused because
the internet is not available to the public at large.
… Cyber security firm FireEye Inc said Vietnam
had “built up considerable cyber espionage capabilities in a region
with relatively weak defenses”.
… “Cyber espionage is increasingly
attractive to nation states, in part because it can provide access to
a significant amount of information with a modest investment,
plausible deniability and limited risk,” he added.
Interesting. Too much data?
The Library
of Congress will no longer archive every tweet
The Library of Congress just
announced some changes to its long-running plan to archive all of
Twitter. On December 31st, 2017, it will stop archiving all tweets
and instead choose certain tweets to archive on a “very selective
basis,” Gizmodo
reports. The decision was announced in a recently published
white
paper that reads “the tweets collected and archived will be
thematic and event-based, including events such as elections, or
themes of ongoing national interest, e.g. public policy.”
The LOC first
announced its plans to create a single searchable archive of
every public tweet more than seven years ago, but the project has
stalled for a few years. In 2013, the organization published
a white paper attributing the delay to budget issues and a lack
of software. Twitter’s terms of agreement also prohibits
“substantial proportions” of its website from being made
downloadable.
By 2016, the archive still
hadn’t launched. At the time, The
Atlantic reported that no engineers had been assigned to the
project, which was massive and messy. And as the number of tweets
posted daily grew from 55 million in 2010 to 500 million in 2012, the
project grew even more unwieldy, according to The Atlantic.
In this month’s white
paper, the LOC attributes the decision to narrow the project’s
scope to the fact that “the nature of Twitter has changed over
time.” As Gizmodo points out, the LOC also had only been
collecting text, which renders a large number of tweets with photo
and video essentially worthless to the archive.
This is a joke, right? Please?
Seen on Twitter:
My aunt got a
google home for Xmas & she already has “Alexa”. This morning
we were messing around with the google home and asked, “okay google
what do you think of Alexa” and it answered “I like her blue
light” and from across the room Alexa turned on and said “thanks”.
im scared
You can read more of the thread that tweet started
here.
So, at some point, I may need a phone or one of
those wrist band fitness thingies to pay?
Is it legal
for a business in US to refuse cash as a form of payment?
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System:
Is
it legal for a business in the United States to refuse cash as a form
of payment? [Useful information – I generally pay with cash and
have increasingly encountered the response – we take credit/debit
cards or you can use an app]
“Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled “Legal
tender,” states: “United States coins and currency [including
Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks
and national banks] are legal tender for all debts, public charges,
taxes, and dues.” This statute means that all United States money
as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts
when tendered to a creditor. There
is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a
person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment
for goods or services. Private businesses are free to
develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is
a state law which says otherwise.”
See also The New York Times – Cash
Might Be King, but They Don’t Care. [h/t Pete Weiss]
Another trend I’m not following. Not sure if
that’s because I don’t care or just because I’m old. I’m
going with “don’t care.”
The Echo
Dot was the best-selling product on all of Amazon this holiday season
...and it looks like I’m still using another
obsolete technology. Dang!
The Rise
and Fall of the Blog
New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof
was one
of the first to start blogging for one of the most well-known
media companies in the world. Yet on December 8th, he declared his
blog was being shut down, writing, “we’ve decided that the
world has moved on from blogs—so this is the last post here.”
The death knell of blogs might seem surprising to
anyone who was around during their heyday. Back in 2008, Daniel W.
Drezner and Henry Farrell wrote in Public Choice, “Blogs
appear to be a staple of political commentary, legal analysis,
celebrity gossip, and high school angst.” A Mother Jones
writer who “flat out declared, ‘I hate blogs’…also admitted,
‘I gorge myself on these hundreds of pieces of commentary like so
much candy.'”
Blogs exploded in popularity fast. According to
Drezner and Farrell, in 1999, there were an estimated 50 blogs dotted
around the internet. By 2007, a blog tracker theorized there were
around seventy million.
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