Are there devices that are not being used by the
police?
Potential
Spy Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over DC
MD VA
NBC
News4 I-Team – Washington, DC – “The technology can be as
small as a suitcase, placed anywhere at any time, and it’s used to
track cell phones and intercept calls. The News4 I-Team found dozens
of potential spy devices while driving around Washington, D.C.,
Maryland and Northern Virginia. “While you might not be a target
yourself, you may live next to someone who is. You could still get
caught up,” said Aaron Turner, a leading mobile security expert.
The device, sometimes referred to by the brand name StingRay, is
designed to mimic a cell tower and can trick your phone into
connecting to it instead. The News4 I-Team asked Turner to ride
around the capital region with special software loaded onto three
cell phones, with three different carriers, to detect the devices
operating in various locations. “So when you see these red bars,
those are very high-suspicion events,” said Turner. If you
live in or near the District, your phone has probably been tracked at
some point, he said. A recent report by the Department of
Homeland Security called the spy devices a real and growing risk.
And the I-Team found them in high-profile areas like outside the
Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue and while driving
across the 14th Street bridge into Crystal City. The I-Team got
picked up twice while driving along K Street — the corridor popular
with lobbyists. “It
looks like they don’t consider us to be interesting, so they’ve
dropped us,” Turner remarked looking down at one of his
phones. Every cellphone has a unique identifying number. The phone
catcher technology can harness thousands of them at a time. DHS has
warned rogue devices could
prevent connected phones from making 911 calls, saying,
“If this type of attack occurs during an emergency, it could
prevent victims from receiving assistance.” “Absolutely. That’s
a worry,” said D.C. Councilwoman Mary Cheh, adding that the spy
technology should be a concern for all who live and work in the
District. The I-Team’s test phones detected 40 potential locations
where the spy devices could be operating, while driving around for
just a few hours…”
I had not considered the benefits to this
‘industry.’
WaPo –
Technology has made the repo man ruthlessly efficient
Washington
Post – “Technology has made the repo man ruthlessly
efficient, allowing this familiar angel of financial calamity to
capitalize on a dark corner of the United States’ strong economy:
the soaring number of people falling behind on their car payments.”
“…Derek Lewis works for Relentless Recovery,
the largest repo company in Ohio and its busiest collector of license
plate scans. Last year, the company repossessed more than 25,500
vehicles — including tractor trailers and riding lawn mowers.
Business has more than doubled since 2014, the company said. Even
with the rising deployment of remote
engine cutoffs and GPS locators in cars, repo agencies remain
dominant. Relentless scanned 28 million license plates last year, a
demonstration of its recent, heavy push into technology. It now has
more than 40 camera-equipped vehicles, mostly spotter cars. Agents
are finding repos they never would have a few years ago. The
company’s goal is to capture every plate in Ohio and use that
information to reveal patterns… “It’s kind of
scary, but it’s amazing,” said Alana Ferrante, chief executive of
Relentless… Repo agents
are responsible for the majority of the billions of license plate
scans produced nationwide. But they don’t control
the information. Most of that data is owned by Digital
Recognition Network (DRN), a Fort Worth company that is the largest
provider of license-plate-recognition systems. And DRN
sells the information to insurance companies, private investigators —
even other repo agents. DRN is a sister company to Vigilant
Solutions, which provides the plate scans to law enforcement,
including police and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Both
companies declined to respond to questions about their operations…
For repo companies, one worry is whether they are producing
information that others are monetizing…”
I wonder if I could integrate Fakey into my
Computer Security class. (Probably, yes.)
3 new tools
to study and counter online disinformation
Indiana
University Bloomington: “Researchers at CNetS, IUNI,
and the Indiana
University Observatory on Social Media have launched upgrades to
two tools playing a major role in countering the spread of
misinformation online: Hoaxy
and Botometer.
A third tool Fakey
— an educational game designed to make people smarter news
consumers — also launches with the upgrades. Hoaxy is a search
engine that shows users how stories from low-credibility sources
spread on Twitter. Botometer is an app that assigns a score to
Twitter users based on the likelihood that the account is automated.
The two tools are not integrated so that one can now easily detect
when information is spreading virally, and who is responsible for its
spread. Hoaxy and Botometer currently process hundreds of thousands
of daily online queries. The technology has enabled researchers,
including
a team at IU, to study how information flows online in the
presence of bots. Examples are a
study on the cover of the March issue of Science that analyzed
the spread of false news on Twitter and an
analysis from the Pew Research Center in April that found that
nearly two-thirds of the links to popular websites on Twitter are
shared by automated accounts. Fakey
is a web and mobile news literacy game that mixes news stories with
false reports, clickbait headlines, conspiracy theories and “junk
science.” Players earn points by “fact-checking” false
information and liking or sharing accurate stories. The
project, led
by IU graduate student Mihai Avram, was created to help people
develop responsible social media consumption habits. An Android
app is available, and an iOS versions will launch shortly…”
Soon, all chatbot speech will be indistinguishable
from human speech.
Microsoft
acquires conversational AI startup Semantic Machines to help bots
sound more lifelike
Microsoft announced today that it has acquired
Semantic Machines, a Berkeley-based startup that wants to solve one
of the biggest challenges in conversational AI: making chatbots sound
more human and less like, well, bots.
Perspective. What is a good number? How much do
we spend to predict/prevent school shootings?
The Unknown
Cost of America’s Counterterrorism Efforts
A Stimson Center working group released a study
last week on the costs of America’s counterterrorism efforts, and
it found about what you’d expect: nearly 17 years after 9/11, we
still don’t know exactly how much we have spent, but it’s a ton.
Over $2.8 trillion, at least. The staggering numbers grabbed
headlines on Wednesday, as they should. With this struggle closing
in on the two-decade mark, we need to have a frank accounting of the
threats we face and how much spending
is enough to keep Americans safe. But beyond the matter of raw
dollars spent, the report raises deeper questions about what counts
as counterterrorism and whether our funding matches our strategy.
… What at first glance might appear to be a
bean counting exercise is anything but. At a deeper level, this is
about our strategy and priorities in what we once aptly called the
long war. For example, my working group colleague John Mueller sees
the terrorist threat as dramatically less severe than I do, but he
nonetheless makes strong points, grounded in economic analysis, to
argue that we are overspending compared to the threat. In Mueller’s
estimation, our counterterrorism efforts would need to have saved at
least 250,000 lives to justify the expenditures we have made. These
are direct costs only. Mueller goes further in arguing
that the indirect economic costs of, for example, longer lines at
airports and border crossings and increased security at high profile
venues have cost us many billions more dollars.
Perspective. The latest infographic.
How Much
Data Do We Create Every Day? The Mind-Blowing Stats Everyone Should
Read
The amount of data we produce every day is truly
mind boggling. There are
2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current
pace, but that pace is only accelerating with the growth of the
Internet of Things (IoT). Over the last two years alone 90 percent
of the data in the world was generated.
(Related) and this is just the UK.
Public can
now search UK government’s entire digital archive
BusinessCloud:
“The British government’s entire online presence comprising
billions of web pages has been indexed and digitally archived to the
cloud for the first time. Manchester
tech firm MirrorWeb has devised an all-new indexing to create an
accessible,
searchable and user-friendly resource for the public. The
National Archives’ gigantic 120TB
web archive encompasses billions of web pages – from every
government department website and social media account – from 1996
to the present. It took MirrorWeb
– named among our 101
Rising Stars of the UK Start-up Scene last year – just two
weeks to transfer the data from 72 hard drives at The National
Archives to internal hard drives before transferring and digitally
archiving more than two decades of government internet history to the
cloud. As part of a four-year contract, MirrorWeb was tasked
with both moving the data to the cloud using Amazon Web Services as
well as indexing it. Indexing the data meant that MirrorWeb had to
write a complete replacement for the UK Government Web Archives’
previous search functionality. As a result, 1.4bn
documents were indexed and are now accessible and
searchable to researchers, students and the members of the public who
need to use them, enabling them to view websites and social media
content in their original form as well as search for content on
specific topics. John Sheridan, digital director of The National
Archives, said: “We are preserving 1,000 years of British history
and a big part of that is preserving the digital record of government
today…”
One must choose nicknames carefully…
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