Computer Security fails?
There’s nothing like some dramatic numbers to
get attention to data breaches. Risk Based Security, Inc. has
released their 2017 statistics, and yes, some of the numbers are
dramatic. Here are just two snippets from their blog post about the
report:
There were 5,207 breaches recorded last year, surpassing 2015’s previous high mark by nearly 20%. The number of records compromised also surpassed all other years with over 7.8 billion records exposed, a 24.2% increase over 2016’s previous high of 6.3 billion.
[…]
In addition to the number of breaches and amount of data lost, 2017 stood out for another reason. For the past eight years, hacking has exposed more records than any other breach type. In 2017, breach type Web – which is largely comprised of accidentally exposing sensitive data to the Internet – took over the top spot compromising 68.8% or 5.4 billion records. Hacking still remained the leading breach type, account for 55% of reported incidents, but its impact on records exposed fell to the number two spot, with 2.3 billion records compromised. For the first time since 2008, inadvertent data exposure and other data mishandling errors caused more data loss than malicious intrusion into networks.
Read more on RBS,
where you can also learn how to obtain the full report.
I wish they had frequency data as well as
percentages so that I could try to compare their data from the
medical sector to what Protenus and DataBreaches.net found for our
U.S. health data. But it appears that both studies found that
hacking accounted for a smaller percentage of breached records in
2017 than they had in 2016, so there’s some consistency across
methods and findings on that. The fact that we found breached
records decreased in 2017 compared to 2016 differs from their overall
finding, but is not surprising because the business sector accounts
for so much of their data and findings and our data and findings are
restricted to health data breaches in the U.S. Also of interest to
me is their findings on internal-external. Our data in from health
data studies has fairly consistently found that internal and external
are fairly similar in frequency (although not in number of breached
records). RBS’s report shows many more external incidents than
internal ones.
Improving the Mark 1 Eyeball? Is this the
equivalent of the Automatic License Plate Recognition systems in US
Police cars or something far more sinister?
Chinese
Police Go RoboCop With Facial-Recognition Glasses
As hundreds of millions of Chinese begin traveling
for the Lunar New Year holiday, police are showing off a new addition
to their crowd-surveillance toolbox: mobile facial-recognition units
mounted on eyeglasses.
China is already a global leader in deploying
cutting-edge surveillance technologies based on artificial
intelligence. The mobile devices could expand the reach of that
surveillance, allowing authorities to peer into places that fixed
cameras aren’t scanning, and to respond more quickly.
(Related)
Rebecca Hill reports:
South Wales Police deployed facial recognition technology in Cardiff this weekend, making multiple arrests using the controversial kit.
The force has been using an automated facial recognition (AFR) system since June last year, when it launched a pilot during the Champions League finals week.
[…]
Campaigners have also voiced concerns about the fact innocent people’s faces are being scanned against criminal databases, arguing this is edging the UK closer to a surveillance state.
“It is a great infringement of fans’ rights,” said Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, adding that the police “have no clear basis” for using the tech.
Read more on The
Register.
You can’t even park
your car in private?
There are days when I think that if I keep reading
Joe Cadillic’s stuff, I will go totally paranoid. Then I realize
it’s not Joe who’s making me feel paranoid… it’s the police
state government tactics he’s reporting on. And maybe we should
all feel concerned about those.
Today, Joe writes:
As more and more cities and towns privatize everything, the use of smart meter parking apps (SMPA) continues to grow.
Which is a good thing right?
Wrong, cities and towns are using SMPA’s like ParkMobile, StreetLine, ParkMe, Park Smarter and SmartParking to collect all kinds of personal information.
According to numerous privacy policies, SMPA’s collect much more information than most people realize.
A look at ParkMobile’s privacy policy reveals the types of personal information SMPA’s collect.
Read more on MassPrivateI.
Thumbs up to Joe for looking at these apps’ privacy policies and
how lenient they are with respect to them turning over your personal
information to law enforcement.
[From
the article:
"Personal
Information consisting of, at a minimum, your name, email address,
mobile phone number, vehicle license tag number and issuing
jurisdiction, Payment Method, Payment Information, Username and
password. Over the course of your Use of the Platform, we may
collect additional Personal Information such as: your mailing
address, billing address, Transaction data; GPS data; information
that you voluntarily provide like User Content; information received
from your credit card provider, digital wallet, or financial
institution".
Perspective. This should not surprise anyone. (I
haven’t found the survey, yet.)
Survey says
– digital technology may not always improve worker productivity –
surprise!
Impact
of technology on productivity depends on company culture:
“Economists have been puzzled in recent years by the so-called
“productivity
paradox,” the fact that the digital revolution of the past four
decades hasn’t resulted in big gains in output per worker as
happened with earlier technological upheaval. Many developed
economies have actually seen productivity stagnate or decline. A
survey from Microsoft Corp. is bolstering one theory about this
disconnect. In a poll of 20,000 European workers released Monday,
Microsoft, which became one of the world’s most profitable
companies by marketing office productivity software, acknowledges new
digital technology can, in some circumstances, sometimes not lead to
any increase in productivity and actually result in less employee
engagement with their work.”
[From
the article:
The survey also found digital culture had a big
impact on how new technology changed employees’ feelings of
engagement with their work. In businesses with a strong digital
culture, increased use of technology also boosted employees’
feelings of passion and focus. But, in companies with a weak digital
culture, it had the opposite effect: the more technology the company
deployed, the less attached workers became.
How to win the next election?
Polarization,
Partisanship and Junk News Consumption over Social Media in the US
“What kinds of social media users read junk
news? We examine the distribution of the most significant sources of
junk news in the three months before President Donald Trump’s first
State of the Union Address. Drawing on a list of sources that
consistently publish political news and information that is
extremist, sensationalist, conspiratorial, masked commentary, fake
news and other forms of junk news, we find that the distribution of
such content is unevenly spread across the ideological spectrum. We
demonstrate that (1) on
Twitter, a network of Trump supporters shares the widest range of
known junk news sources and circulates more junk news than all the
other groups put together; (2) on Facebook, extreme hard
right pages—distinct from Republican pages—share the widest range
of known junk news sources and circulate more junk news than all the
other audiences put together; (3) on average, the audiences for junk
news on Twitter share a wider range of known junk news sources than
audiences on Facebook’s public pages.” Vidya Narayanan, Vlad
Barash, John Kelly, Bence Kollanyi, Lisa-Maria Neudert, and Philip N.
Howard. “Polarization,
Partisanship and Junk News Consumption over Social Media in the US.”
Data Memo 2018.1. Oxford, UK: Project on Computational Propaganda.
comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk
“The Computational Propaganda Research Project
(COMPROP) investigates the interaction of algorithms, automation and
politics. This work includes analysis of how tools like social media
bots are used to manipulate public opinion by amplifying or
repressing political content, disinformation, hate speech, and junk
news. We use perspectives from organizational sociology, human
computer interaction, communication, information science, and
political science to interpret and analyze the evidence we are
gathering. Our project is based at the Oxford Internet Institute,
University of Oxford.”
(Related)
Russian
Trolls Ran Wild On Tumblr And The Company Refuses To Say Anything
About It
Russian trolls posed as black activists on Tumblr
and generated hundreds of thousands of interactions for content that
ranged from calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” to supporting
Bernie Sanders and decrying racial injustice and police violence in
the US, according to new findings from researcher Jonathan Albright
and BuzzFeed News.
… “The evidence we've collected shows a
highly engaged and far-reaching Tumblr propaganda-op targeting mostly
teenage and twenty-something African Americans. This appears to have
been part of an ongoing campaign since early 2015,” said Albright,
research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at
Columbia University.
(Related) Harsh!
What to Do
When Social Media Inspires Envy
If we’re Facebook friends, I probably hate you.
Not all the time, but intermittently, and with the burning hatred
that only envy can inspire.
For teachers with an Android phone?
Vysor -
Mirror Your Android Device to Your Computer's Screen
Vysor
is a program that makes it easy to mirror your Android phone or
tablet to your Windows, Mac, Linux, or Chrome OS computer. To mirror
your Android device to your computer you do have to install the Vysor
software. After installing Vysor you can mirror your phone to your
computer by simply connecting the two with a USB cable.
Vysor
is offered in a free version and in a premium version. The free
version mirrors via USB cable. The free version will also display an
advertisement from time to time. I used the free version this
afternoon during an hour long webinar and the advertisement only
appeared twice. The premium version of Vysor offers wireless
mirroring, no advertisements, and a drag-and-drop file transfer
between your phone and computer.
Vysor
is a convenient tool to have at your disposal when you want to
demonstrate an Android app during a webinar as I did this afternoon.
Vysor is also useful if you don't have another way to project your
phone's or tablet's screen to an LCD projector. You can do that by
mirroring your phone to your computer that is connected to a
projector.
For my Pi Geeks.
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