Monday, December 31, 2018

Think of it as a work in progress.
Hackers use a fake wax hand to fool vein authentication security
Vein authentication, a biometric security method that scans the veins in your hand, has been cracked, reports Motherboard. Using a fake hand made out of wax, Jan Krissler and Julian Albrecht demonstrated how they were able to bypass scanners made by both Hitachi and Fujitsu, which they claim covers around 95 percent of the vein authentication market. The method was demonstrated at Germany’s annual Chaos Communication Congress.
While imprints of fingerprints can often be left behind on surfaces just by touching them, vein patterns cannot, and are considered to be much more secure as a result.




Is this in time to ensure the 2020 election is influence free?
Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
DuckDuckGo Blog: “Over the years, there has been considerable discussion of Google’s “filter bubble” problem. Put simply, it’s the manipulation of your search results based on your personal data. In practice this means links are moved up or down or added to your Google search results, necessitating the filtering of other search results altogether. These editorialized results are informed by the personal information Google has on you (like your search, browsing, and purchase history), and puts you in a bubble based on what Google’s algorithms think you’re most likely to click on. The filter bubble is particularly pernicious when searching for political topics. That’s because undecided and inquisitive voters turn to search engines to conduct basic research on candidates and issues in the critical time when they are forming their opinions on them. If they’re getting information that is swayed to one side because of their personal filter bubbles, then this can have a significant effect on political outcomes in aggregate…
Now, after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and other recent elections, there is justified new interest in examining the ways people can be influenced politically online. In that context, we conducted another study to examine the state of Google’s filter bubble problem in 2018…”




Facebook is certainly being vilified like they are responsible.
Facebook Data Scandals Stoke Criticism That a Privacy Watchdog Too Rarely Bites
Last spring, soon after Facebook acknowledged that the data of tens of millions of its users had improperly been obtained by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, a top enforcement official at the Federal Trade Commission drafted a memo about the prospect of disciplining the social network.
Lawmakers, consumer advocates and even former commission officials were clamoring for tough action against Facebook, arguing that it had violated an earlier F.T.C. consent decree barring it from misleading users about how their information was shared.
But the enforcement official, James A. Kohm, took a different view. In a previously undisclosed memo in March, Mr. Kohm — echoing Facebook’s own argument — cautioned that Facebook was not responsible for the consulting firm’s reported abuses. The social network seemed to have taken reasonable steps to address the problem, he wrote, according to someone who read the memo, and most likely had not broken its promises to the F.T.C.




Perspective.
Smart speakers hit critical mass in 2018
... The smart speaker market reached critical mass in 2018, with around 41 percent of U.S. consumers now owning a voice-activated speaker, up from 21.5 percent in 2017.




This was the activity on my blog yesterday. Strange that once again more Russians are reading the blog than anyone else. And why can’t Google identify the country 116 users are connecting from?
Pageviews by countries.


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