Friday, January 18, 2019

Things go wrong. That’s why we teach people to check. Apparently, not everyone learned this in school.
Twitter bug revealed some Android users’ private tweets
Twitter accidentally revealed some users’ “protected” (aka, private) tweets, the company disclosed this afternoon. The “Protect your Tweets” setting typically allows people to use Twitter in a non-public fashion. These users get to approve who can follow them and who can view their content. For some Android users over a period of several years, that may not have been the case — their tweets were actually made public as a result of this bug.
The company says that the issue impacted Twitter for Android users who made certain account changes while the “Protect your Tweets” option was turned on.
For example, if the user had changed their account email address, the “Protect your Tweets” setting was disabled.
… What’s fairly shocking is how long this issue has been happening.
Twitter says that users may have been impacted by the problem if they made these account changes between November 3, 2014, and January 14, 2019 — the day the bug was fixed.




Not fool-proof (because we can always build a bigger fool) but worth sharing.
How to Protect Your Business from Phishing Scams
1. Spelling and grammar mistakes
2. Unwarranted sense of urgency
3. Threatening messages
4. Strange attachments




Start surveillance early! Get out the (enter political party here) message while they’re young! “Big Brother loves you!”
Toying with Privacy: Regulating the Internet of Toys
Haber, Eldar, Toying with Privacy: Regulating the Internet of Toys (December 8, 2018). Ohio State Law Journal, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3298054: “Recently, toys have become more interactive than ever before. The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) makes toys smarter and more communicative: they can now interact with children by “listening” to them and respond accordingly. While there is little doubt that these toys can be highly entertaining for children and even possess social and educational benefits, the Internet of Toys (IoToys) raises many concerns. Beyond the fact that IoToys that might be hacked or simply misused by unauthorized parties, datafication of children by toy conglomerates, various interested parties and perhaps even their parents could be highly troubling. It could profoundly threaten children’s right to privacy as it subjects and normalizes them to ubiquitous surveillance and datafication of their personal information, requests, and any other information they divulge. While American policymakers acknowledged the importance of protecting children’s privacy online back in 1998, when crafting COPPA, this regulatory framework might become obsolete in face of the new privacy risks that arise from IoToys. Do fundamental differences between websites and IoToys necessitate a different legal framework to protect children’s privacy? Should policymakers recalibrate the current legal framework to adequately protect the privacy of children who have IoToys? Finally, what are the consequences for children’s privacy of ubiquitous parental surveillance through IoToys — allegedly granted to safeguard children from online risks? And how might children’s privacy be better framed and protected in this context?
This Article focuses on the privacy concerns that IoToys raise. Part I briefly outlines the evolution of IoToys while examining their capacity to collect and retain data. Then, in reference to the legal framework chosen to protect children from online datafication twenty years ago, the next part discusses the American perception of children’s privacy, focusing on COPPA. Through this analysis, this part will show how key market players currently comply with COPPA regulation, and evaluate whether such compliance is relevant to IoToys’ dangers and challenges. Part III revisits COPPA, challenges it, and in calling for its recalibration offers some practical solutions to IoToys’ privacy threats. Thereafter Part IV normatively evaluates children’s conception of privacy and argues that IoToys’ monitoring practices could jeopardize the parent-child relationship and calls for recalibrating children’s privacy in the digital era. The final part summarizes the discussion and concludes that children’s privacy matters today perhaps more than ever before, and that the potential movement toward a ubiquitous surveillance era should not lead to its demise. [h/t Mary Whisher]
  • See also the Tech Policy Lab’s paper, Toys That Listen (2016): – “Hello Barbie, Amazon Echo, and the home robot Jibo are part of a new wave of connected toys and gadgets for the home that listen. Different than the smartphone, these devices are always on, blending into the background until needed by the adult or child user. We do not yet know all the information our new toys are collecting, storing, or disclosing. With an intended audience of designers and regulators, this project brings an interdisciplinary group of experts together to build a set of consumer protection best practices for design and user control of connected devices in the home.” View PDF »




Yes, I am not very active on social media, but my students are.
How to Monitor Your Social Media Mentions: 5 Listening Tools
Social Media Examiner: “Need help monitoring your company’s mentions on social media? Looking for tools to simplify the process? In this article, you’ll discover five social media monitoring tools to help you better engage online.”
  1. Enhance Customer Service: Agorapulse
  2. Understand Your Customers: Awario
  3. Handle a Reputation Crisis: Talkwalker Alerts
  4. Identify Brand Advocates: Mention
  5. Analyze Competitors: Brand24




I’m thinking that these two companies can manage their data more easily than the Facebooks or Googles. Then again, perhaps we’re just doing this alphabetically?
Acxiom, a huge ad data broker, comes out in favor of Apple CEO Tim Cook's quest to bring GDPR-like regulation to the United States
… "Acxiom, like Mr. Cook, also supports a national privacy law for the US, such as GDPR provides for the European Union," said the company in a statement to Business Insider. You can read the full statement below.
These comments were made in response to remarks made by Apple CEO Tim Cook in Time Magazine on Thursday. The Apple exec argued that the US needs to rein in data brokers in order to give people true privacy when it comes to their data.




Useful in many classes.
The Route of a Text Message
the scott blog irregular: “This is the third post in my full-stack dev (f-s d) series on the secret life of data. This installment is about a single text message: how it was typed, stored, sent, received, and displayed. I sprinkle in some history and context to break up the alphabet soup of protocols, but though the piece gets technical, it should all be easily understood. The first two installments of this series are Cetus, about the propagation of errors in a 17th century spreadsheet, and Down the Rabbit Hole, about the insane lengths one occasionally needs to go through to track down the source of a dataset…”




Perspective. Oh my, how will we ever get Senior Lawyers without the Darwinian competition among Junior Lawyers? (Didn’t the clerks do 90 percent of this work anyway?)
Artificial intelligence putting junior lawyers’ jobs at risk
An Australian legal technology company has used Amazon’s Alexa to build a prototype virtual lawyer that it says can create legal documents instantly like a real human, threatening the jobs of junior lawyers.
Smarter Drafter’s Alexa Skill – driven by the company’s Real Human Reasoning AI engine – asks questions a lawyer would and then drafts a legal document that considers the context, facts, jurisdiction and best practice. It takes a few minutes for the interview to take place and the legal document to appear by email.
… “We mapped the decision making process of expert lawyers in excruciating detail to create a tool that would perform at the level of a human lawyer. Lawyers already delegate legal drafting to other experts – now they can give those same instructions to software and have the job done in moments without any human errors. Here we’re testing whether we can put the same power in the hands of the document’s end user,” Long said.
Smarter Drafter is already used in more than 150 law firms across Australia but is currently only accessible to lawyers.
… “In the future, those that work with the robots are the ones that will thrive as they find efficiencies and better ways to serve their clients. For them, there’s an opportunity in spending more time with clients and demonstrating empathy, a skill that computers are a long way from having, instead of spending their time hacking away in Microsoft Word,” Long says.




Perspective. Broadcast TV gave ground to Cable. Now the Internet based services are grabbing a share.
Netflix is finally sharing (some of) its audience numbers for its TV shows and movies. Some of them are huge.
Netflix has more than 130 million customers watching its TV shows and movies. But for years, it refused to tell outsiders how many of those customers watched any particular show or movie.
Now that’s starting to change.
… Netflix estimates that it now accounts for 10 percent of TV screen time in the US. (Its math here: Netflix says it streams 100 million hours a day to TV screens in the US, and it figures those TVs — which include more than one TV per household, plus sets in bars, hotels, etc. — are on for a billion hours a day.) Netflix says it owns a smaller share of mobile screens, which makes sense, since Netflix says the vast majority of its viewing happens on TV screens.
… That Bird Box number is big, no matter how you parse it. And if you’re a Hollywood star, you may well end up concluding that it makes sense to try making a movie with Netflix, even though they are still relatively new at it: They’ll pay you whatever you would get (and perhaps even more) from a conventional Hollywood studio, and you don’t need to worry about the show disappearing into a pile of unseen documentaries and reruns. Netflix would be happy if you, and/or your agents/managers/lawyers, reach this conclusion.




Perspective. Use your smartphone to lace your sneakers? Should make an interesting hacking target.
Nike’s auto-laced future
Why does the world need a self-lacing shoe?
Haven’t you heard of Velcro?
How will you tie your shoes when the Wi-Fi is down?
That’s the gist of the instant response I got when I mentioned the new Adapt BB, a shoe from Nike with, yes, powered laces that tighten to a wearer’s foot automatically. The shoe is an evolution of the Nike HyperAdapt 1.0, which is itself a commercialization of the Air Mag — a self-lacing vanity project that realized the self-lacing shoes mocked up for Back to the Future II.
… And, honestly, I get it. It’s a hard sell to say that the solution to a laceless design is to add about half of the hardware that goes into your smartphone and the ability to talk to your shoes with your phone.
But the Adapt BB is really working on two levels, and to tease out whether there is a there there when it comes to connected shoes, you have to consider the context.
… If, however, you want to use the shoes free of the app you can. If your foot is in the shoe you can single tap to jump to desired tightness or tap and hold a button to bump them back to “wide open.” You can also make micro adjustments by tapping the buttons.
… The buttons, it should be noted, are pretty much mandatory in the NBA where phones are outlawed on the bench.




A Security Event.
SnowFROC 2019
Thu, March 14, 2019 7:00 AM – 6:00 PM MDT Tickets are $75
SnowFROC (Front Range OWASP Conference) is Denver's premier application security conference and is taking place Thursday March 14th, 2019. Our keynote speaker is Troy Hunt. Troy is an Australian web security expert known for public education and outreach on security topics.
The location of this event is The Cable Center on the University of Denver campus near I-25 and University. The Cable Center is across from a light rail station for convenience. We will have parking available at the site. [Parking at DU is normally impossible. Bob]




Really cheap travel. (Create your own Fake News!)
Picture Yourself in Front of Any Landmark With Remove.BG and Google Slides
Last weekend I published a video about Remove.bg and it has certainly been a hit with many readers. I've received a lot of comments and questions about it in my email, Facebook pages, and on Twitter. This morning a reader named Marni sent me a question that was typical of what I've been seeing this week.
I love the remove.bg site. I can see my teachers using this for creative projects with students. My question is, do you have any suggestions regarding how to add new backgrounds to the modified pics? Is there a program I can share with teachers that allows students to, in essence, “relocate” themselves?
What I suggested to Marni and have suggested to others is to use Google Slides or PowerPoint to create a slide in which you layer the Remove.bg file over a background on the slide. Then export the slide as a PNG or JPEG. In the following video I demonstrate how to use Remove.bg, Google Slides, and Pixabay to put yourself in front of any world landmark.




Opinions vary.
Russia's top Orthodox bishop says the internet is a tool of the Antichrist


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