Are
they crying, “Wolf?” A serious attack would not be so easily
detected...
"Iranian officials on Tuesday
said a
'Stuxnet-like' cyberattack hit some industrial units in a
southern province. 'A virus had penetrated some manufacturing
industries in Hormuzgan province, but its
progress was halted,' Ali Akbar Akhavan said, quoted by the ISNA
news agency. Akhavan said the malware was 'Stuxnet-like' but did not
elaborate, and that the attack had occurred over the 'past few
months.' One of the targets of the latest attack was the Bandar
Abbas Tavanir Co, which oversees electricity production and
distribution in Hormuzgan and adjacent provinces. He also accused
'enemies' of constantly seeking to disrupt operations at Iran's
industrial units through cyberattacks, without specifying how much
damage had been caused. Iran has blamed the U.S. and Israel for
cyberattacks in the past. In April, it said a voracious
malware attack had hit computers running key parts of its oil
sector and succeeded in wiping data off official servers."
Key
management...
Glitch
imperils swath of encrypted records
December 25, 2012 by admin
Shaun Waterman reports:
A widely used
method of computer encryption has a little-noticed problem that could
allow confidential data stored by almost all Fortune 500 companies
and everything stored on U.S. Government classified computers to be
“fairly easily” stolen or destroyed.
The warning comes
from the inventor of the encryption method, known as Secure Shell or
SSH.
“In the
worst-case scenario, most of the data on the servers of every company
in the developed world gets wiped out,” Tatu Ylonen, chief
executive officer of SSH Communications Security Corp., told The
Washington Times.
Mr. Ylonen said a
computer programmer could create a virus that would exploit SSH’s
weaknesses and spread throughout servers to steal, distort or destroy
confidential data.
Read more on Washington
Times.
[From the article:
About “90 percent of U.S. companies
are out of compliance with regulations governing
financial institutions because of this issue,” Mr.
Ylonen said.
…
SSH
is used “deep inside the back-end systems” Mr.
Ylonen said, referring to programs that run in the background on
large computer systems, unnoticed by the average user.
Without careful monitoring and
management, SSH
goes on creating keys and storing them in easily identifiable
directories where hackers can find and use them to access secure
computers.
For example, one major bank that Mr.
Ylonen’s company audited had used SSH
in more than 5,000 applications on as many as 100,000 servers.
He said the auditors found in “a
fraction of the bank’s environment” more than 1
million unaccounted-for keys — 10 percent of which granted root
access, or control of the server at the most basic level.
Fighting
dirty in the gun control debate? (Think of all the other “public
information” maps we could produce.)
New
York newspaper faces backlash after publishing map of gun permit
holders
December 25, 2012 by Dissent
Fox News reports:
A local New York
newspaper is drawing the ire of its readers after publishing an
interactive map that shows the names and addresses of thousands of
residents who have handgun permits.
The online map was
published by The Journal News along with an article under the
headline: “The gun owner next door: What you don’t know about
the weapons in your neighborhood.”
The newspaper
obtained, and then published, the names and addresses of pistol
permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties through a Freedom
of Information Act request.
Read more on Fox
News.
[The
map:
Lots
of interesting questions here, like: If I buy a company, do I need to
repurchase all the software licenses?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
recaps two court cases pending in the U.S. which will decide
whether you're allowed to re-sell the things you purchase. The
first case deals with items bought in other countries for resale in
the U.S., such
as textbooks. An unfavorable decision there would mean "anything
that is made in a foreign country and contains copies of copyrighted
material – from the textbooks at issue in the Kirtsaeng case to
shampoo bottles with copyrighted labels – could be blocked from
resale, lending, or gifting without the permission of the copyright
owner. That would create a nightmare for consumers and businesses,
upending used goods markets and undermining what it really means to
'buy' and 'own' physical goods. The ruling also
creates a perverse incentive for U.S. businesses to move their
manufacturing operations abroad. It is difficult for us
to imagine this is the outcome Congress intended." The second
case is about whether music purchased on services like iTunes can be
resold to other people. "Not only does big content deny that
first sale doctrine applies
to digital goods, but they are also trying to undermine the first
sale rights we do have by forcing users to license items they would
rather buy. The copyright industry wants you to "license"
all your music, your movies, your games — and lose your rights to
sell them or modify them as you see fit."
Isn't this inevitable? As companies
grow to dominate one industry, growth requires them to branch out.
Since each company develops backroom tools to support their
businesses, why not sell those?
Amazon and Google, both giants in the
online business world, started out as separate entities with two very
different agendas. As each has grown into an empire, the overlapping
areas of business between the two companies has grown as well. But
with both companies moving strongly into the electronic device
market, cloud services, and Amazon
now building out its advertising network, they find themselves
increasingly at odds, and 2013
may bring more direct battles. "Amazon wants to be the one
place where you buy everything. Google wants to be the one place
where you find everything, of which buying things is a subset. So
when you marry those facts I think you're going to see a natural
collision," said VC partner Chi-hua Chien. Adds Reuters, "Not
long after Bezos learned of Google's catalog plans, Amazon began
scanning books and providing searchable digital excerpts. Its Kindle
e-reader, launched a few years later, owes much of its inspiration to
the catalog news, the executive said. Now, Amazon is pushing its
online ad efforts, threatening to siphon revenue and users from
Google's main search website."
(Related) Maybe journalists are just
starting to notice? Once upon a time, IBM helped circulate the meme:
“No one ever got fired for recommending IBM.”
SternisheFan
tips a report at the NY Times about the progress Google is making in
its
quest to unseat Microsoft's position atop the business software
industry. From the article:
It has taken
years, but Google seems to be cutting into Microsoft's stronghold —
businesses. ... In the last year Google has scored an impressive
string of wins, including at the Swiss drug maker Hoffmann-La Roche,
where over 80,000 employees use the package, and at the Interior
Department, where 90,000 use it. One big
reason is price. Google charges $50 a year for
each person using its product, a price that has not changed since it
made its commercial debut, even though Google has added features. In
2012, for example, Google added the ability to work on a computer not
connected to the Internet, as well as security and data management
that comply with more stringent European standards. That made it
much easier to sell the product to multinationals and companies in
Europe. ... Microsoft says it does not yet see a threat. Google 'has
not yet shown they are truly serious,' said Julia White, a general
manager in Microsoft’s business division. 'From the outside, they
are an advertising company.'"
Social
replaces email? Definately worth a read...
December 25, 2012
Commentary
- the evolving workplace extends to home and beyond
Brett
Caine writing in Forbes:
"We have become a society that communicates and shares just
about everything we do, with one notable exception – work. Work is
the place where social firewalls go up when they really should come
down. After all, our teams are about teamwork. Social is the
perfect tool to get our teams to work more collaboratively. And as
it catches on, productivity is improving – people can work and play
from anywhere and (finally) debunking the notion that workers need to
be in an office to produce. The number of work-at-home employees is
increasing dramatically and not just day-extenders. For
the first time we are seeing companies implement work-at-home
policies and practices that make it possible to work from home as a
full member of the team. Everyone wants flexibility, more
and more ask for it and the millennials will demand it. What does
this changing workforce (and workplace) mean for leaders and managers
in the workplace?"
Something for my Statistics class.
Does Climate Change equal Rate Increase?
A recent paper in Science
(abstract)
examines the insurance industry's reaction to climate change. The
industry rakes in trillions of dollars in revenues every year, and a
shifting climate would have the potential to drastically cut into the
profits left over after settlements have been paid. Hurricane
Sandy alone did about $80 billion worth of damage to New York and New
Jersey. With incredible amounts of money at stake, the industry is
taking climate projections quite seriously. From the article:
"Many
insurers are using climate science to better quantify and diversify
their exposure, more accurately price and communicate risk, and
target adaptation and loss-prevention efforts. They also analyze
their extensive databases of historical weather- and climate-related
losses, for both large- and small-scale events. But insurance
modeling is a distinct discipline. Unlike climate models, insurers’
models extrapolate historical data rather than simulate the climate
system, and they require outputs at finer scales and shorter time
frames than climate models."
Like
Khan Academy but with broader coverage?
We’ve been tracking Knowmia
since it got underway over the summer. Co-founded by the creator of
the Flip video camera, Knowmia has seen tremendous growth and you
should start checking it out. Boasting more than 8,000 videos, the
site offers video lessons by teachers to anyone.
… If you’re a teacher or want to
at least help educate the young minds of the world, you can create a
video lesson on Knowmia and then upload it.
They also have an iPad app called
Knowmia Teach that lets you easily create your own lessons and add
them to Knowmia. Check
that out here.
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