Who are these people and
how do we make them understand? NOTE: This is not only a “Dutch”
problem...
"In Holland, a major ISP (KPN)
has found a major
security flaw for their customers. It seems that all customers
have had the same default password of 'welkom01'. Up to 140,000
customers had retained their default passwords. Once inside
attackers could have found bank account and credit card numbers. KPN
has since changed all the passwords of the 140,000 customers with
weak passwords. [Was
this 'required' because they found a security flaw? Bob]
They also do not believe anyone has actually been burglarized since
discovering this weak spot in security."
For my Business Continuity
class. See, there are costs to inadequate backups...
Dating
Site Breaks Up With Amazon Over Broken Cloud
Netflix, Pinterest, and Instagram may
be sticking with Amazon’s cloud after last weekend’s outage, but
for Brandon Wade’s online dating site, the Friday night crash was
the last straw. He’s going off of Amazon now. After two outages
in June, he says Amazon is simply not reliable enough
for romance. [Catchy. I see this as a marketing catch phrase. Bob]
The paying users of his website,
Whatsyourprice.com, are
“very impatient, and relatively intolerant of such
failures,” he says. “Some people’s lives were
interrupted in a big way.”
(Related) It's “How much do we
need?” not “What can we get away with?” Perhaps there is a
place for Best Practices that are not related to the local culture?
"The predominant narrative of
the Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear disaster has been that the accident was caused by
a
one-in-a-million tsunami, an event so unlikely that TEPCO could
not reasonably have been expected to plan for it. However, a
Parliamentary inquiry in Japan has concluded that this description is
flawed — that the disaster was
preventable through a reasonable and justifiable level of
preparation, and that initial responses were horribly bungled.
The inquiry report points a finger at collusion
between industry executives and regulators in Japan
as well as 'the worst conformist conventions of Japanese culture.'
It also raises the question of whether the failed units at Fukushimi
Daiichi were already damaged by the earthquake before the tsunami
even hit, going so far as to say that 'We
cannot rule out the possibility that a small-scale LOCA
(loss-of-coolant accident) occurred at the reactor No 1 in
particular.' This is an explosive
question in quake-prone Japan, appearing in the
news just as Japan begins to restart reactors that have been shut
down nationwide since the disaster."
(Related) Are location
apps part of your business strategy?
Drone
Hijacking? That’s Just the Start of GPS Troubles
On the evening of June 19, a group of
researchers from the University of Texas successfully
hijacked a civilian drone at the White Sands Missile Range in New
Mexico during a test organized by the Department of Homeland
Security.
The drone, an Adaptive
Flight Hornet Mini, was hovering at around 60 feet, locked into a
predetermined position guided by GPS. Then, with a device that cost
around $1,000 and the help of sophisticated software that took four
years to develop, the researchers sent a radio signal from a hilltop
one kilometer away. In security lingo, they carried out a spoofing
attack.
“We fooled the UAV (Unmanned Aerial
Vehicle) into thinking that it was rising straight up,” says Todd
Humphreys, assistant professor at the Radionavigation Laboratory at
the University of Texas.
Deceiving the drone’s GPS receiver,
they changed its perceived coordinates. To
compensate, the small copter dove straight down, thinking
it was returning to its programmed position. If not for a safety
pilot intervening before the drone hit the ground, it would have
crashed.
… What’s worse, the experiment at
White Sands shows that drone-jacking is “just the tip of the
iceberg of a much bigger security issue we have in this country,”
according to Logan Scott, a GPS industry consultant who has worked
for defense giants like Lockheed Martin.
In other words, it’s not only about
drones, it’s GPS in general that is not safe.
Makes me wonder what
technology he traded for this deal.
‘The
Analyzer’ Gets Time Served for Million-Dollar Bank Heist
Ehud Tenenbaum, aka “The Analyzer,”
was quietly sentenced in New York this week to time served for a
single count of bank-card fraud for his role in a sophisticated
computer-hacking scheme that federal officials say scored $10 million
from U.S. banks.
He was also ordered to pay restitution
in the amount of $503,000 and was given three years probation.
… It’s not clear how long
Tenenbaum was in custody after he was extradited. The U.S. Marshal
Service told Threat Level in August 2010 that he’d been released on
bond in March of that year, after Tenenbaum had agreed to plead
guilty on the access device charge. The sequence of events, the
lengthy time that the case remained inactive, and the quiet
sentencing suggest that part of the plea agreement may have involved
cooperation with authorities, something that is a condition of many
plea agreements that involve hacking and bank fraud.
“Good morning Mr Bond.
How's all that secret agent stuff working for you?”
British
Airways Borders On Creepy With “Know Me” Google Identity Check
British Airways is using Google Images
to develop passenger dossiers for checking people out as they come
through the gate. Now that’s what you call customer service.
At least that’s British Airways spin.
Privacy advocates have a different take.
According to The
Evening Standard, the airline is facing considerable backlash
today after it announced a plan to launch a program called “Know
Me.” The new intelligence tool uses Google Images to find pictures
of passengers for staff to use so they can approach them as they
arrive at the terminal or plane.
This should be
interesting. A “Rodney King App?” Perhaps there would be a
market for an App that connected you to a lawyer in real time?
Secretly
Monitor Cop Stops With New ACLU App
The American Civil Liberties Union of
New Jersey is unveiling an Android app allowing citizens to secretly
record audio and video of police stops, and have the footage sent to
the group’s servers for review.
“This app provides an essential tool
for police accountability,” ACLU-NJ Executive Director Deborah
Jacobs said
in a statement. “Too often incidents of serious misconduct go
unreported because citizens don’t feel that they will be believed.
Here, the technology empowers citizens to place a check on police
power directly.”
The Police
Tape app is among a growing number of apps aimed at empowering
citizens in their encounters with police activity. The New York
chapter of the ACLU released a similar
app last month, and others enable protesters to
notify family, friends and attorneys if they’ve been arrested.
On the other hand, cops
can use their 'e-Sting' Apps...
Court:
Cops can read suspect’s texts, spring text trap
July 6, 2012 by Dissent
Elinor Mills reports:
Police did not
violate the privacy rights of a Washington state man who responded to
a text message from the iPhone of his suspected drug dealer only to
get arrested on drug charges after arranging to meet up, a Washington
appeals court says.
Read more on CNET.
Have I mentioned recently that we
really really really need to update ECPA and decimate third party
doctrine?
We have the technology to
suppress dissidents, but only the US can use it?
July 05, 2012
Pew
- The Future of Corporate Responsibility
The
Future of Corporate Responsibility - by Janna Anderson, Lee
Rainie. July 5, 2012: "Experts are divided about the role
Western technology companies will play in helping monitor and thwart
dissident activity in the future. Some hope the open Internet and
the prospect of consumer backlash will minimize businesses’
cooperation with authoritarian governments; others believe the urge
for profits and for global reach across all cultures will compel
firms to allow their digital tools to be used against critics of the
status quo."
How does your liability increase as
user continue to violate your “Terms of Service” without any
action on your part? “Yes, we have a record of the kidnapper
sending the ransom note, but we didn't think it was important.”
Cisco
Hit With Backlash Over Home Router ‘Cloud’ Service
Cisco is facing a backlash over its
decision to update the embedded software on some its home Wi-Fi
routers so that they’re managed via a new “cloud” service it
offers over the net.
Some
customers are concerned that Cisco is invading their privacy by
requesting personal data via the service, while others felt that the
fine print barred them from surfing the net for “obscene,
pornographic, or offensive purposes.” Cisco has moved
to quell at least some of these fears, but it didn’t stop the
complaints from reverberating over the net over the holiday week.
In some ways, this is a tempest in a
teacup. But on another level, it works as a metaphor for the
company’s attempts to stay relevant in the age of cloud computing.
The company is facing increasing pressure from companies that are
seeking to redefine networking in the proverbial cloud with
technologies such as OpenFlow and virtual networking, which seek to
reduce
the importance of brand-name hardware.
There are none so blind as those who
will not see...
"In a twist that will surprise
no one except the RIAA, MPAA, BREIN, and other anti-piracy lobbies,
the amount of BitTorrent traffic has stayed
the same or increased in Europe following the blockade of The
Pirate Bay in the UK, Netherlands, and other countries. This news
comes from XS4All, one of the largest European ISPs, which has
published a graph of the network traffic associated with the
BitTorrent protocol — and sure enough, since the Dutch Pirate Bay
blockade began in February 2012, traffic has stayed the same or
increased slightly. There are probably a few reasons for this: a)
The European blockades created a lot of publicity (and no publicity
is bad publicity); b) TPB isn't the only torrent site out there, and
many of its torrents are available elsewhere; and c) Internet
denizens are a lot more savvy (proxies, VPNs, etc.) than the MPAA and
co give them credit for."
Ah, them zoomies are a
hoot! Remember, no texting while piloting!
Air
Force Wants Apps for Training Flyboys
Manuals are so analog. The Air Force
is thinking about turning some of its training programs into apps for
reservists’ smartphones.
According to a recent call for industry
input, the Air Force Reserve Command’s Development and Training
Flights want to “obtain
a smartphone application that allows all participating Reserve
members the opportunity to engage in training and gaming activities
with other members.”
It doesn’t look like full training
manuals would be digitized. Suggested functionality includes apps to
teach “Air Force Core Values,” and “Fitness and Nutrition
Principles,” as well as games to memorize M-16 components and
military songs (“Name that Military Tune”). [“Into the air,
junior birdmen...” Bob
For my Data Analysis
entrepreneurs... Hey, maybe that statistics class was worthwhile.
Will
Data-as-a-Platform Deliver New Opportunity?
In his post over at GigaOm,
Oestreich writes Thursday:
And, if the data
is becoming so valuable, then analyzing and mining it ought to
provide incremental revenue streams beyond the traditional
product-based business model. But consider going one step further:
If treated right, access to enough quality data would be valuable to
others outside of your enterprise too — assuming the correct
federation and business models were constructed.
Global Warming! Global
Warming! So this is nothing new and seems to be related to normal
climate cycles, but it is still evidence of man made changes? Help
me! I have a pain in my logic circuits...
Coral
clues to climate: Reefs vanished for 2,500 years
Coral reefs along Panama's Pacific
coast completely collapsed for 2,500 years due to
natural climate cycles, researchers reported in a study
Thursday, adding that there's a lesson in the data for man-made
climate change: ease up on greenhouse gasses and reefs will restore
themselves.
… The researchers reconstructed
6,000 years of coral reef history by driving pipes into reefs to pull
out core samples.
… The team found the same gap in
earlier studies by other researchers as far away as Australia and
Japan, and tied the collapse to an intensification of the natural
climate cycle that produces El Nino and La Nina weather events.
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