If so, they must have failed to
implement many “Best Practices” that could have detected and
prevented this. Note that they did not need an Internet connection
to be infected.
"Two U.S. power companies have
reported infections of malware during the past three months, with
the bad software apparently brought in through tainted USB drives,
according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Industrial
Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT). The
publication (PDF) did not name the malware discovered. The
tainted USB drive came in contact with a 'handful of machines' at the
power generation facility and investigators found sophisticated
malware on two engineering workstations critical to the operation of
the control environment, ICS-CERT said."
It might be interesting to have a
random group of law school students look back at their high school
websites to see how they are handling student privacy.
Here’s something you likely won’t
see here in the U.S. – partly because we don’t have a Privacy
Commissioner and partly because the U.S. Department of Education
remains disturbingly placid about all the breaches in the education
sector – the government of Hong Kong issued the following
statement:
The Office of the
Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data has discovered that sensitive
personal information of students has inadvertently been exposed
online, potentially affecting as many as 8,505 students from 11 local
schools, including tertiary institutions.
[...]
It’s not clear to me what enforcement
action the government might take should educational institutions not
improve their data protection and security, but I suspect that they
will be more likely to take action there than we are here.
The next big thing in Mobile Apps?
The
Future of Commerce Starts With a Tap
Over 100 million phones will ship with
NFC this year. Google has built NFC into the Android operating
system. Nintendo uses NFC
in the new Wii U gaming console. At the recent Consumer
Electronics Show, Samsung, LG, and Sony unveiled NFC-enabled
smartphones, televisions, and appliances.
So what's NFC? It technically stands
for Near Field Communications, and it enables mobile devices like
smartphones to communicate with nearby devices and objects with a
simple tap. It works like this: A chip in your phone sends out a
radio wave that is picked up by another NFC device or any object with
an RFID
tag. The tag is small, about the size of a dime, and can be
embedded in or attached with a sticker to a product or advertisement.
When tapped by a device, the tag tells
the device what to do, such as open a web site, transmit a file,
download an app, or make a payment.
Now you too can hold several jobs (why
stop at one?) and still have time to party! (Sort of an outsourcing
sub-lease?)
"The security blog of Verizon
has the story of an investigation into unauthorized VPN access from
China which led to unexpected findings. Investigators found invoices
from a
Chinese contractor who had actually done the work of the employee,
who spent the day watching cat videos and visiting eBay and Facebook.
The man had Fedexed his RSA token to the contractor and paid only
about 1/5th of his income for the contracting service. Because he
provided clean code on time, he was noted in his performance reviews
to be the best programmer in the building. According
to the article, the man had similar scams running with other
companies."
Okay, this guy has suffered enough.
Now let's send everyone to my crabby backyard neighbor! [It's wrong,
but it's on the Internet so it must be true!]
"A mysterious GPS-tracking
glitch has brought a parade of lost-phone seekers — and police
officers — to
the front door of a single beleaguered homeowner in Las Vegas.
Each of the unexpected visitors – Sprint customers all — has
arrived absolutely convinced that the man has their phone. Not so,
police confirm. The same thing happened in New Orleans in 2011 and
Sprint got sued. Says the Las Vegas man: 'It's very difficult to
say, 'I don't have your phone,' in any other way other than, 'I don't
have your phone.''"
“Leader of opposition party killed in
tragic accident. A spy drone fell on him” Why not just share our
take (allow them limited tasking) just to ensure they play by the
rules?
Pentagon
Swears It Won’t Sell Killer Drones to Afghanistan, Just Spy Ones
Yesterday, when Afghan president Hamid
Karzai boasted that the U.S. was about to give him his own fleet of
drones, you may have been tempted to see the mercurial leader with
his hand on the joystick of an armed Predator. Please disabuse
yourself of that notion. The Pentagon confirmed on Tuesday that it’s
in talks to sell the Afghans drones. But the drones will be tiny,
low-flying, and unarmed.
(Related) See “tragic accident,”
above...
Senator
Asks CIA Nominee When Drones Can Kill Americans
… Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a
letter on Monday to John Brennan, the White House’s
counterterrorism adviser and nominee to be head of the CIA, asking
for an outline of the legal and practical rules that underpin the
U.S. government’s targeted killing of American citizens suspected
of working with al-Qaida. The Obama administration has repeatedly
resisted disclosing any such information about its so-called
“disposition matrix” targeting terrorists, especially where it
concerns possible American targets. Brennan reportedly oversees
that matrix from his White House perch, and would be responsible for
its execution at CIA director.
Interesting ruling!
"Reuters reports that a
Manhattan District Judge has ruled that AFP and the Washington Post
infringed
a photographer's copyright by re-using photos he posted on his
Twitter account. The judge rejected AFP's
claim that a Twitter post was equivalent to making the images
available for anyone to use (drawing a distinction
between allowing users to re-tweet within the social network and the
commercial use of content). The judge also
ruled against the photographer's request that he be
compensated for each person that viewed the photos, ruling instead
that damages would be granted once per
infringing image only. This last point might have
interesting implications in file-sharing cases — can
it set a precedent against massive judgments against peer-to-peer
file-sharers?" [I'm betting no
Bob]
Hooray!
Right?
How
California’s Online Education Pilot Will End College As We Know It
Today, the
largest university system in the world, the California State
University system, announced
a pilot for $150 lower-division online courses at one of its campuses
— a move that spells the end of higher education as we know it.
[Note: at the end of this article,
I offer a timeline for how this all comes crumbling down]
(Related) Is it already too late?
Non-Profit
Innovation: How Minerva Plans To Make Its Affordable, Next-Gen
University A Reality
The
Minerva Project burst onto the scene last year with an ambitious
goal: To create the next elite American university, online, and, in
so doing, help rethink the role of higher education in the Digital
Era. Not only that, but the startup wants to establish rigorous, Ivy
League-caliber standards, admitting only the best and the brightest,
with a faculty to match, while offering tuition that’s
“substantially less than half” the price of today’s elite
universities, according to founder Ben Nelson.
I
have several tons of old negatives. Perhaps there is a faster way to
do this?
Odds are many people out there have old
developed film from the old days of 35 mm photography lying around.
If you ever wished that you could take those old photos from physical
film and transfer them to digital, you will want to check out the
Lomography Smartphone Film Scanner. The scanner works with a
smartphone and an app that allows you to make digital versions with
ease.
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