Are they deliberately locating these
machines in places where the security cameras can't see them? That
seems a bit suspicious...
By Dissent,
November 30, 2012
Peter Hermann reports:
Fairfax County
police are investigating skimmers that were found attached to two
automated teller machines at Fairfax hospitals. The devices,
discovered this week, are designed to copy personal bank card
information and pass codes for thieves…. The devices were found
Tuesday at an ATM near the lobby gift shop of the
Inova Fairfax
Hospital Cardiac Care Center
and on Wednesday at an ATM next to the cafeteria at Inova
Fair Oaks Hospital.
Read more on The
Washington Post.
As Hermann reports, this is not
the first time the ATM at the cardiac care center was tampered with.
Another skimmer on the same ATM had been discovered in September.
As NBC
reports, the ATMs are not maintained by the hospitals, raising
the question of who is responsible for checking on them
regularly? It appears that the skimmers were discovered by either
hospital security or people walking through, but not by those who
might actually be responsible for installing and maintaining them.
Actually, I’m surprised we don’t
hear about this kind of thing more often. Other than this report,
the September report involving Fairfax, and an April report about ATM
skimmers found at 8
GTA hospitals in Toronto, Canada, I don’t recall reading other
reports of skimmers attached to an ATM in a hospital. Yet as I’ve
walked through a number of hospitals in the past year, I’ve
repeatedly thought how easy it would be to do this, and how victims
probably would have a tough time figuring out where the breach
occurred.
An interesting read for my Ethical
Hackers...
"The ACM has an article
describing the history and present of the Great Firewall of China
(GFW). 'Essentially, GFW is a government-controlled attacking
system, launching attacks that interfere with legitimate
communications and affecting many more victims than malicious actors.
Using special techniques, it successfully blocks the majority of
Chinese Internet users from accessing most of the Web sites or
information that the government doesn't like. GFW is not perfect,
however. Some
Chinese technical professionals can bypass it with a variety of
methods and/or tools. An arms race between
censorship and circumvention has been going on for years, and GFW has
caused collateral damage along the way.'"
Somehow I find this as unlikely as a
Rube Goldberg device. But the judge concluded that the result was no
4th Amendment rights...
"This is a crazy story. An FBI
agent put spyware on his kid's school-issued laptop in order to
monitor his Internet use. Before returning the laptop to the school,
he tried to wipe the program (SpectorSoft's eBlaster) by having FBI
agents scrub the computer and by taking it to a computer repair shop
to be re-imaged. It somehow survived and began
sending him reports a week later about child porn searches. He
winds up busting the school principal for child porn despite never
getting a warrant, subpoena, etc. The case was a gift-wrapped
present, thanks to spyware. A judge says the principal has no 4th
Amendment protection because 1. FBI dad originally installed spyware
as a private citizen not an officer and 2. he had no reasonable
expectation of privacy on a computer he didn't own/obtained by
fraud."
HBR Blogs! Who knew? (and why didn't
they tell me...)
Big
Data Is Not the New Oil
November 30, 2012 by Dissent
Jer Thorp writes:
Every 14 minutes,
somewhere in the world, an ad exec strides on stage with the same
breathless declaration:
“Data is the new
oil!”
It’s exciting
stuff for marketing types, and it’s an easy equation: big data
equals big oil, equals big profits. It must be a helpful metaphor to
frame something that is not very well understood; I’ve heard it
over and over and over again in the last two years.
The comparison, at
the level it’s usually made, is vapid. [...] Still, there are some
ways in which the metaphor might be useful.
Read more on Harvard
Business Review.
[From the Blog post:
First,
people need to understand and experience data ownership.
Second,
we need to have a more open conversation about data and ethics.
Finally,
we need to change the way that we collectively think about data, so
that it is not a new oil, but instead a new kind of resource
entirely.
Let the metaphors flow...
Big
Data Is Not the New Oil
November 30, 2012 by Dissent
Jer Thorp writes:
Every 14 minutes,
somewhere in the world, an ad exec strides on stage with the same
breathless declaration:
“Data is the new
oil!”
It’s exciting
stuff for marketing types, and it’s an easy equation: big data
equals big oil, equals big profits. It must be a helpful metaphor to
frame something that is not very well understood; I’ve heard it
over and over and over again in the last two years.
The comparison, at
the level it’s usually made, is vapid. [...] Still, there are some
ways in which the metaphor might be useful.
Read more on Harvard
Business Review.
Amazon has a deal with 7-11 stores.
What am I missing here?
Why
Did Google Buy BufferBox? Because The Entire Mail And Package
Delivery System Is Broken
Today, Google
bought an Ontario-based company called BufferBox. In a way, it
kind of came out of left field. Since it’s a Google Ventures
company, one can guess that those on Google’s campus were very
familiar with the service, which provides an easy alternative to
waiting around for packages at your house.
Not only is package delivery a bummer,
because things get lost, hitting up your mailbox when you get home
isn’t that much fun either. The worst is when you don’t even
have a mailbox and you come home to twenty pieces of junkmail slipped
under your door. The mail delivery system is broken and old. It’s
ripe for…disruption. How broken? The US Post
Office lost $15.9B in
2012. [and Amazon and Google can't wait to buy into that
industry? Bob]
For the “Tools & Techniques”
folder...
… The recently launched service
gives users a WYSISWYG interface, so you can put together a
professional looking newsletter, filled with images, videos and
links, in a matter of minutes.
… With the free
plan you can send out your newsletters to up to 500 subscribers,
and up to 1,000 emails.
Tools I might use, ideas I might adapt.
Open Textbooks Project: openly licensed
science textbooks, printed on demand for less than $5.
utahopentextbooks.org/about/
Open High School of Utah,
openhighschool.org/:
public charter school, completely online! charter says: use only OER
content.
Project Kaleidoscope
project-kaleidoscope.org/:
college level, gen ed courses, $0 textbooks. 10% increase for
students who succeeded.
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