Monday, October 29, 2018

There’s good news and bad news. The good news is, this cost the bank a trivial amount. (Roughly $35,500) The bad news is, this looks like a hack by some amateur. North Korea would have tried to drain ALL the accounts.
Muhamed Bilal reports:
Bank Islami Pakistan has come under the biggest cyber attack in the history of Pakistan.
The incident came under the limelight when numerous customer of the bank complaint of an unusual activity – that their payments cards are being used in the different international countries. It is alleged that a group of hackers breached the data centre of Islami bank and made the transaction by stealing customer’s details.
The unknown transaction that had been made by card scheme was worth Rs. 2.6 million.
Read more on Daily Punch.




Some things I teach my students to avoid… (Is this really a ‘social network?’)
Joseph Cox reports:
Remini, a smartphone app that launched in 2013, aims to provide parents and educators with a social network to follow a child’s progress throughout school and their early life, documenting important milestones and letting parents share images with their child’s school.
But Remini exposed these, and the personal information of its users to the internet writ large, thanks to an API that let anyone pull the data without any sort of authentication. The data included email addresses, phone numbers, and the documented moments of the children as well as their profile photos, according to a researcher who discovered the issue.
Remini has since taken the exposed API offline, but only after multiple complaints from a user as well as the researcher. The company confirmed the security issue to Motherboard.
Read more on Motherboard.


(Related) Don’t do this either. No encryption?
Security Vulnerability in Internet-Connected Construction Cranes
This seems bad:
The F25 software was found to contain a capture replay vulnerability -- basically an attacker would be able to eavesdrop on radio transmissions between the crane and the controller, and then send their own spoofed commands over the air to seize control of the crane.
"These devices use fixed codes that are reproducible by sniffing and re-transmission," US-CERT explained.
"This can lead to unauthorized replay of a command, spoofing of an arbitrary message, or keeping the controlled load in a permanent 'stop' state."
Here's the CERT advisory.




This probably got the attention of Privacy experts everywhere. It even got my attention.
'City of surveillance': privacy expert quits Toronto's smart-city project
When it was announced last year that a district in Toronto would be handed over to a company hoping to build a model for new tech-driven smart city, critics were quick to voice concerns.
Despite Justin Trudeau’s exclamation that, through a partnership with Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs, the waterfront neighborhood could help turn the area into a “thriving hub for innovation”, questions immediately arose over how the new wired town would collect and protect data.
A year into the project, those questions have resurfaced following the resignation of a privacy expert, Dr Ann Cavoukian, who claimed she left her consulting role on the initiative to “send a strong statement” about the data privacy issues the project still faces.
“I imagined us creating a Smart City of Privacy, as opposed to a Smart City of Surveillance,” she wrote in her resignation letter.




Unfortunate that it takes something like the Pittsburgh shooting to get these companies to look at their customers.
Gab.com goes down after GoDaddy threatens to pull domain
Gab, the controversial social network with a far-right following, has pulled its website offline after domain provider GoDaddy gave it 24 hours to move to another service. The move comes as other companies including PayPal, Medium, Stripe, and Joyent blocked Gab over the weekend. It had emerged that Robert Bowers, who allegedly shot and killed eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, had a history of posting anti-Semitic messages on Gab.




Clearly this is coming. What are we going to do about it?
With No Laws To Guide It, Here's How Orlando Is Using Amazon's Facial Recognition Technology
… In the US, there are no laws governing the use of facial recognition, and there is no regulatory framework limiting its law enforcement applications. There is no case law or constitutional precedent upholding police use of the tech without a warrant; courts haven’t even decided whether facial recognition constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. The technology is still plagued by inaccuracies.
But that hasn't stopped law enforcement from piloting these systems. According to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News, the city of Orlando — which initially allowed its original Rekognition pilot to expire amid growing public outcry — just embarked on a second pilot that allows for an unspecified but “increased” number of additional cameras.
The documents, obtained by BuzzFeed News via a Freedom of Information request, show that Amazon marketed its facial recognition tools to Orlando’s police department, providing tens of thousands of dollars of technology to the city at no cost, and shielding the Rekognition pilot with a mutual nondisclosure agreement that kept its details out of the public eye. More broadly, they reveal the accelerated pace at which law enforcement is embracing facial recognition tools with limited training and little to no oversight from regulators or the public.




Perspective. IBM wants to own the Cloud?
IBM to Acquire Open Source Giant Red Hat for $34 Billion
IBM said Sunday it has reached a deal to buy open source software company Red Hat for $34 billion, among the biggest tech mergers in history which the computing giant said would enhance its cloud offerings.
If approved it will be the third biggest tech merger in history, according to business news site CNBC. Red Hat said it was the biggest involving a software company.
The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer. It changes everything about the cloud market," said Ginni Rometty, IBM's chairman, president and CEO.
"IBM will become the world's number one hybrid cloud provider, offering companies the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses."
Hybrid cloud relates to the linking of public and private cloud platforms.




For my geeks…
Google updates Firebase with enterprise-grade support, ML Kit Face Contours, Management API, and more
Google today updated Firebase, its service for helping developers build apps for Android, iOS, and the web. Firebase has gained paid enterprise-grade support, ML Kit Face Contours, a Firebase Management API, Test Lab for iOS, Performance Monitoring improvements, and Firebase Predictions.




Interesting, but I don’t think I could read all this information before the election. Maybe next time?
Ballotpedia is the digital encyclopedia of American politics and elections
Ballotpedia is the digital encyclopedia of American politics and elections. Our goal is to inform people about politics by providing accurate and objective information about politics at all levels of government. We are firmly committed to neutrality in our content; here’s why. As a nonprofit, our mission is to educate.
… Ballotpedia currently has over 276,000 encyclopedic articles and offers daily, weekly, and monthly email newsletters on a variety of specialized topics. See the full scope of what we cover...”




Another ‘arms race,’ this time in the grocery markets.
Sam's Club is ditching cashiers at a new store in Texas
Sam's Club is opening a location in Dallas that will allow customers to scan and pay for their groceries with an app — without a cashier or standing in the checkout line.
It comes at a time when many retailers, including Sam's Club owner Walmart, Target, Kroger and Macy's, are playing with technology in stores to appeal to customers, cut costs and grow sales.
… "We'll use all available technologies — including computer vision, augmented reality, machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, just to name a few — to redefine the retail experience," Iannone said in a blog post.
To pay after shopping the store, customers will simply scan a code with an exit host when leaving, bypassing the traditional checkout process. The Dallas store will eventually be equipped with roughly 700 cameras to help facilitate inventory and layout management, Sam's Club said. The retailer also says it plans to take much of the new technology nationwide over time.
Amazon reportedly could open as many as 3,000 cashierless stores by 2021, putting intense pressure on its competitors to respond with their own initiatives or risk losing sales for lack of convenient options. Kroger has a "Scan, Bag, Go" app similar to Sam's Club, while Walmart decided to pull the plug on its mobile express scan-and-go offering earlier this year. It had been in as many as 120 Walmart stores across the U.S.




My students predict that eventually self-driving cars will not need traffic signals. They will negotiate right of way in real time, and never slow down. (But what about older cars, Bob? After market self-driving add on kits!)
Cars and traffic signals are talking to each other
Cars and traffic signals are talking to each other, leaving the driver — if there even is one — out.
Top automakers including Volkswagen, Honda, Ford and BMW are experimenting with technology that allows cars and traffic lights to communicate and work together to ease congestion, cut emissions and increase safety.
… The idea is that the system will be able to tell the driver (or a self-driving car in the future) when to expect a wave of green lights. The goal is to eventually make the system work with a range of cars and brands.




Interesting resource.
TinEye Reverse Image Search
  • “Using TinEye, you can search by image or perform what we call a reverse image search. You can do that by uploading an image or searching by URL. You can also simply drag and drop your images to start your search.
  • TinEye constantly crawls the web and adds images to its index. Today, the TinEye index is over 32.1 billion images.
  • When you search with TinEye, your image is never saved or indexed. TinEye adds millions of new images from the web every day—but your images belong to you. Searching with TinEye is private, secure, and always improving…”


(Related) ...and a few more.
13 Alternatives to Google Image Search - Chart


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