What defines a
"cyber-Pearl Harbor?"
Would everyone immediately recognize an act of cyberwar?
"American intelligence
officials are increasingly convinced that Iran
was the origin of a serious wave of network attacks that crippled
computers across the Saudi oil industry and breached financial
institutions in the United States, episodes that contributed to a
warning last week from Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta that the
United States was at risk of a "cyber-Pearl Harbor." After
Mr. Panetta's remarks on Thursday night, American officials described
an emerging shadow war of attacks and counterattacks already under
way between the United States and Iran in cyberspace. Among American
officials, suspicion has focused on the "cybercorps" that
Iran's military created in 2011 -partly in response to American and
Israeli cyberattacks on the Iranian nuclear enrichment plant at
Natanz -though there is no hard evidence that the attacks were
sanctioned by the Iranian government. The attacks emanating from
Iran have inflicted only modest damage. Iran's cyberwarfare
capabilities are considerably weaker than those in China and Russia,
which intelligence officials believe are the sources of a significant
number of probes, thefts of intellectual property and attacks on
American companies and government agencies."
(Related)
State-Sponsored
Malware ‘Flame’ Has Smaller, More Devious Cousin
Researchers have uncovered new
nation-state espionage malware that has ties to two previous
espionage tools known as Flame and Gauss, and that appears to be a
“high-precision, surgical attack tool” targeting victims in
Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere.
Researchers at Kaspersky Lab, who
discovered the malware, are calling the new malware miniFlame,
although the attackers who designed it called it by two other names –
“SPE” and “John.” MiniFlame seems to be used to gain control
of and obtain increased spying capability over select computers
originally infected by the Flame and Gauss spyware.
It is the fourth piece of nation-state
malware discovered in the last year that appears to have been created
by the same group behind Stuxnet, the groundbreaking cyberweapon that
sabotaged Iran’s nuclear program and is believed to have been
created by the U.S. and Israeli governments. The others – all
designed for espionage rather than destruction – are DuQu,
Flame,
and Gauss.
The new malware adds to
the arsenal of cyber tools that are quickly becoming the
mark of nation-state intelligence gathering and
warfare methods and provides new clues into how such
operations are conducted.
This was relatively
harmless before the Internet. Why should it be more harmful now?
"An interesting case touching
on privacy in the Internet age has erupted in Kennebunk, Maine, the
coastal town where the Bush family has a vacation home. When a
fitness
instructor who maintained a private studio was arrested for
prostitution, she turned out to have maintained meticulous
billing records on some 150 clients, and had secretly recorded the
proceedings on video files stored in her computer. Local police have
begun issuing summons to her alleged johns, and have announced
intentions to publish
the list, as is customary in such cases. Police believe such
publication has a deterrent effect on future incidents of the kind.
However, the notoriety of the case has some, including newspaper
editors, wondering whether the lives
of the accused johns may be disproportionately scarred (obtaining
or keeping a job, treatment of members of their families within the
community) for a the mere accusation of having committed a
misdemeanor. Also, the list of names will be permanently archived
and indexed by search engines essentially forever."
(Related) We better find
and answer quickly... (Do you think they would go so far as to
suggest “Vote for us or we'll call back when your spouse is
home...”)
Campaigns
chew on cookies to see if you watch porn
Is he one of us?
That's the question both the Romney and
Obama campaigns will be asking as election time rolls near.
Every last vote will count. Every last
nuance will matter in determining which candidate will steer America
through the next four joyous years.
So how are the campaigns trying to
identify those who might be on their side? Why, cookies.
According
to the New York Times, many, many voters can look forward to
calls from campaign workers who will, for once, be armed with very
personal details about their targets' predilections.
The Times boldly declares that these
callers will know...
...details like
whether voters may have visited pornography Web sites, have homes in
foreclosure, are more prone to drink Michelob Ultra than Corona or
have gay friends or enjoy expensive vacations.
Is reliance on education
sufficient? How often does Facebook change policy and therefore
require re-education?
"The Wall Street Journal is
reporting that Facebook revealed
the sexual preferences of users despite those users have chosen
'privacy lock-down' settings on Facebook. The article describes two
students who were casualties of a privacy loophole on Facebook—the
fact that anyone can be added to a group by a friend without their
approval. As a result, the two lost control over their secrets, even
though both students were sophisticated users who had attempted to
use Facebook's privacy settings to shield some of their activities
from their parents. Facebook
spokesman Andrew Noyes responded with a
statement blaming the users: 'Our hearts go out to
these young people. Their unfortunate experience reminds us that we
must continue our work to empower and educate users about our robust
privacy controls.'"
What should we call this?
Mini-surveillance? The electronic equivalent of a “house arrest
ankle thingie?”
Truth
In Geolocation
Lying’s a lot harder than it used to
be. Examples —
Boss:
“Where are you?”
Employee: “On my way to the office.”
Boss:
“Show me.”
Mom: “Where
are you?”
Son: “At
Jimmy’s house”
Mom: “Show
me.”
With geo-coded messages, you have to be
where you say you are. Whether it’s a parent, employer, or spouse,
anyone with a little power over you can demand you
verify your location.
… Now, someone could request a
screenshot of your blue dot on your mobile map. Or that you send a
geo-coded
Facebook message that shows your current location. Hell, they
could force you into a video call and request you to show the traffic
you’re supposedly stuck in, or the house you’re supposed to be
at.
Censorship is a response
to fear (of inconvient facts) so this should be no surprise...
"Internet censorship is common
in conservative majority-Muslim countries, but it may have more
to do with politics and technology than with religion. I.e.,
Iran is not so different from Cuba and China. From the article: 'n
an attempt to uncover the various reasons -- and ways -- that
countries clamp down on Internet freedoms, the U.S.-based watchdog
Freedom House investigated the issue in 47 nations and released a
study of its findings this year. Employing a number of factors
ranging from blogger arrests to politically motivated website
blockades, the study ranked each country according to its degree of
online freedom. And, as it happens, Islamic countries do not stand
out for their degree of censorship.'"
[The report:
Geeky stuff... Search in
the age of big data...
October 14, 2012
Dremel:
Interactive Analysis of WebScale Datasets
Dremel:
Interactive Analysis of WebScale Datasets - Sergey Melnik, Andrey
Gubarev, Jing Jing Long, Geoffrey Romer, Shiva Shivakumar, Matt
Tolton, Theo Vassilakis - Google, Inc.
- "Dremel is a scalable, interactive ad-hoc query system for analysis of read-only nested data. By combining multi-level execution trees and columnar data layout, it is capable of running aggregation queries over trillion-row tables in seconds. The system scales to thousands of CPUs and petabytes of data, and has thousands of users at Google. In this paper, we describe the architecture and implementation of Dremel, and explain how it complements MapReduce-based computing. We present a novel columnar storage representation for nested records and discuss experiments on few-thousand node instances of the system."
Perspective Well, we did go from 16th
to 15th
October 14, 2012
2012
edition of Measuring the Information Society
Measuring
the Information Society 2012: "New figures released
today by International Telecommunications Union (ITU) show that
information and communication technology (ICT) uptake continues to
grow worldwide, spurred by a steady fall in the price of telephone
and broadband Internet services. The new data, released in ITU’s
flagship annual report Measuring the Information Society 2012, rank
the Republic of Korea as the world’s most advanced ICT economy,
followed by Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Finland. Of the ten
top-ranked countries, eight are from Europe. The two remaining
countries both come from the Asia-Pacific region, with the Republic
of Korea in first place, and Japan ranked 8th. The top five
countries have not changed their rank between 2010 and 2011. The
only new entrant in the top ten is the UK, which moved up from 14th
place last year to 9th place in 2012. ITU’s ICT Development Index
(IDI) ranks 155 countries according to their level of ICT access, use
and skills, and compares 2010 and 2011 scores. All countries in the
IDI top 30 are high-income countries, underlining the strong link
between income and ICT progress. There are large differences between
developed and developing countries, with IDI values on average twice
as high in the developed world compared with developing countries.
The report identifies the group of countries with the lowest IDI
levels – so-called ‘Least Connected Countries’ – and
highlights the need for policy makers to pay keen attention to this
group."
...and I thought they
would buy WalMart to improve their delivery. Still, driving down
your costs (of the Kindle) isn't a bad idea either...
Report:
Amazon In Advanced Talks To Buy Texas Instruments’ Mobile Chip
Business In Deal Worth Billions
Fine tuning my teaching
methods...
October 14, 2012
How
College Graduates Solve Information Problems Once They Join the
Workplace
How
College Graduates Solve Information Problems Once They Join the
Workplace. October 16, 2012 | Alison J. Head
- "Qualitative findings about the information-seeking behavior of today’s college graduates as they transition from the campus to the workplace. Included are findings from interviews with 23 US employers and focus groups with 33 recent graduates from four US colleges and universities, conducted as an exploratory study for Project Information Literacy’s (PIL’s) Passage Studies. Most graduates in our focus groups said they found it difficult to solve information problems in the workplace, where unlike college, a sense of urgency pervaded and where personal contacts often reaped more useful results than online searches. Graduates said they leveraged essential information competencies from college for extracting content and also developed adaptive information-seeking strategies for reaching out to trusted colleagues in order to compensate for what they lacked. At the same time, employers said they recruited graduates, in part, for their online searching skills but still expected and needed more traditional research competencies, such as thumbing through bound reports, picking up the telephone, and interpreting research results with team members. They found that their college hires rarely demonstrated these competencies. Overall, our findings suggest there is a distinct difference between today’s graduates who demonstrated how quickly they found answers online and seasoned employers who needed college hires to use a combination of online and traditional methods to conduct comprehensive research."
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