Friday, March 30, 2018

That Thing (on the Internet of Things) you are wearing is connected to another thing that just got hacked. (Pretty quick announcement.)
Chloe Aiello reports:
Shares of Under Armour dropped 3.8 percent, before paring losses, after the active-wear company informed users of its online fitness and nutrition website their data had been compromised.
Under Armour announced on Thursday that the breach affected an estimated 150 million users of its food and nutrition application, MyFitnessPal.
The investigation indicates that affected information may include usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords.
Read more on CNBC.
[From the article:
Under Armour first became aware of a potential breach on March 25, when company discovered an unauthorized party had accessed MyFitnessPal user data in February.




What are they looking for? Could the searches be automated? How will they search 14 million applications otherwise? How do you detect bogus accounts?
U.S. to seek social media usernames and details from all visa applicants
The State Department wants to require all U.S. visa applicants to submit their social media usernames, previous email addresses and phone numbers, vastly expanding the Trump administration's enhanced vetting of potential immigrants and visitors. In documents to be published in Friday's Federal Register, the department said it wants the public to comment on the proposed new requirements, which will affect nearly 15 million foreigners who apply for visas to enter the U.S. each year.
… The new rules would apply to virtually all applicants for immigrant and non-immigrant visas. The department estimates it would affect 710,000 immigrant visa applicants and 14 million non-immigrant visa applicants, including those who want to come to the U.S. for business or education, according to the documents.
The documents were posted on the Federal Register's website on Thursday but the 60-day public comment period won't begin until Friday's edition is published.




Perspective. Will the world change when everyone has access to broadband?
FCC approves SpaceX plan for 4,425-satellite broadband network
SpaceX has a green light from the FCC to launch a network of thousands of satellites blanketing the globe with broadband. And you won’t have too long to wait — on a cosmic scale, anyway. Part of the agreement is that SpaceX launch half of its proposed satellites within six years.
… The proposed service, which will be called Starlink, was opposed by several existing satellite operators like OneWeb and Spire. They’re rightly concerned that another operator in space — especially one that wants to launch thousands of satellites — will crowd both spectrum and orbit.
… SpaceX eventually plans to launch 12,000 of the things, but this authorization is for the high-altitude group of 4,425; a separate authorization is necessary for the remaining number, since they’ll be operating at a different altitude and radio frequency.




For those not lucky enough to be my students…
JSTOR’s free read-only access gets simpler
“JSTOR has made its free read-only access more flexible. Now, anyone with a MyJSTOR account can read up to six journal articles online every 30 days. Designed primarily for people who are not affiliated with an institution, JSTOR’s read-only service offers a way for independent researchers to explore more than 2,000 scholarly journals. Need access? Sign up for a free account.”




For my next spreadsheet class.
Excel is getting smarter
… the Excel team has spent the last few months adding new machine learning-powered features to the application and starting today, Office 365 users who opt in to the Office Insiders program will get to experience the first crop of these new features.
The general idea here is to make Excel smart enough to understand some of your entries and offer you additional information. For now, this applies to geographical data like the names of cities, states and countries (but also Zip codes), as well as stocks.


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