This is (according to Google) my 2500th
Centennial-Man blog post.
Since I do it all wrong, posting many
articles at once, I have to recalculate the details at each
milestone. 2500 posts is approximately 25000 articles, gleened from
(complete SWAG here) 350,000 articles read. Of course I've been
sending “Clippings” emails for years before that and before the
emails I actually used to cut articles from the technical journals
and mark them up with highlighters and actual ink comments (how 'old
school')
Of course, 2500 days is 6.8 years or 82
months or 357 weeks (according to WolframAlpha.com) and I estimate I
spend at least 2 hours each day reading, clipping and commenting. So
that's 5000 hours (208 days or 300,000 minutes) spent in a futile
attempt to keep my brain from turning to mush.
Just a quick question. Is an attack on
Twitter considered an attack on our (the US) infrastructure? If not,
why not? (Look at the graph!)
What
Happened to Stock Markets When the AP's Twitter Account Was Hacked
Stock markets momentarily plunged after
a tweet
sent by the Twitter account of the Associated Press, which was
apparently hacked, erroneously reported that explosions at the White
House had injured US president Barack Obama.
AP staff have confirmed that the tweet
was "bogus,"
and the @AP account has been suspended.
The Dow fell 146 points before
recovering almost immediately. The S&P 500, which was hovering
around 1576 before the mischievous tweet hit, tumbled by 0.8% in a
matter of moments, falling to nearly 1563 at 1:10 p.m. EST.
… In a knee jerk move, the CBOE
Volatility Index, or Vix -- the so-called fear gauge of the US stock
market -- shot sharply higher
In theory, I speak English.
Fortunately, I've already Googled “lakh” to translate past
articles. NOTE: You need backups as soon as you have the data
in hand! Hidden question: How will they notify the people
whose data they lost?
Data loss, but no seemingly big risk of
data misuse:
Maharashtra
government has lost data of about three lakh people collected under
the controversial Aadhaar scheme, mostly from Mumbai who enrolled
into the number scheme.
According to a
report in the Times of India, the data containing permanent
account number (PAN) and biometric information was lost while being
uploaded from Mumbai to Unique Identification Authority of India
(UIDAI) server in Bengaluru. “While the transmission was in
progress, the hard disk containing data crashed. When the data was
downloaded in Bangalore, it could not be decrypted,” the newspaper
report said quoting an official from Maharashtra information
technology (IT) department, which is overseeing the enrolment of
citizens.
Read more on MoneyLife.
Three lakh is 300,000 people. And if
you’re wondering as to whether there was a backup, the Times
of India reports that those whose data were lost will have to
re-register for their Aadhaar ID – a time-consuming a
frustrating process. Was there no backup of the drive??
A day for reminders?
April 23, 2013
Microsoft
Security Intelligence Report v14: Why antivirus software matters
"The latest volume of the Security
Intelligence Report (SIR) highlights the importance of using
antivirus
software. Antivirus software helps protect your computer from
malicious software (malware) and can be downloaded or
installed inexpensively or at no charge. Still, according
to the SIR v14 findings, 24 percent of computers worldwide were
not running up-to-date antivirus software, leaving them 5.5 times
more likely to be infected with viruses."
- SIR Volume 14: July 2012 to December 2012 - The Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIR) analyzes the threat landscape of exploits, vulnerabilities, and malware using data from Internet services and over 600 million computers worldwide. Threat awareness can help you protect your organization, software, and people."
Refining our understanding of the risk
environment...
Caroline Donnelly reports:
The Information
Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has stepped up its enforcement
activities, by issuing double the number of data breach fines in
2012-2013 as it did in the previous 12 months.
This is according
to data obtained via a Freedom of Information (FoI) request by
digital comms vendor ViaSat.
[...]
Between March 2012
and March 2013, there were 1,150 self-reported breaches made to the
ICO, despite only 730 being made between 22 March 2011 and 17
February 2012.
Read more on IT
Pro.
Oops! “...but look how quickly we
made the arrest!”
Focus
Shifts in Ricin Case as Charges Are Dropped
… One day after the F.B.I.
said it could find no evidence that the man, Paul Kevin Curtis, was
behind the plot, a federal judge released him from jail and federal
authorities shifted focus to another person of interest in the case.
… According to a senior federal law
enforcement official, the authorities were first drawn to Mr. Curtis
because the language used in the letters was strikingly similar to
language he had used before in letters to elected officials.
Prosecutors did not immediately respond
to questions about the dropped charges. A court filing released
Tuesday said the “ongoing investigation has revealed new
information.”
Backgrounder...
April 23, 2013
EFF
- How Facebook Teams Up With Data Brokers to Show You Targeted Ads
EFF: "Recently, we published a
blog
post that described how to opt out of seeing ads on Facebook
targeted to you based on your offline activities. This post
explained where these companies get their data, what information they
share with Facebook, or what this means for your privacy. So get
ready for the nitty-gritty details: who has your information, how
they get it, and what they do with it. It’s a lot of information,
so
we’ve organized it into an FAQ for convenience."
Okay, ya got me. Everything here is
repackaged, except my words of wisdom.
Is
It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here's a Tool to
Help You Find Out
… Today, the Sunlight Foundation
has unveiled a
tool that will help us all with this work. "The tool is,
essentially, an open-source plagiarism detection engine,"
web developer Kaitlin Devine explained to me. It will scan any text
(a news article, e.g.) and compare it with a corpus of press releases
and Wikipedia entries. If it finds similar language, you'll get a
notification of a detected "churn" and you'll be able to
take a look at the two sources side by side.
Tools & Techniques
LaTeX is a document markup language
that is popularly used in academia. Researchers who are writing
papers or books of their own on technical topics mostly choose LaTeX
to prepare their documents. There are various desktop text editors
that help you prepare documents using the LaTeX language. To share
these documents, you must first save them and then send the file to
your peers online. You must also make sure that they have a text
editor installed that is capable of viewing and, if necessary,
editing LaTeX files. In case the file’s recipient does not have
LaTeX ready software, it is very difficult for them to view these
files. An effective solution is offered by a site called writeLaTeX
– it lets you write and share LaTeX from an online interface.
… Creating an account is not
necessary but required in case you want to save your work and manage
different saved documents. Your documents are published under a
unique URL that can be shared with others for them to view and edit
the document. Finished documents can also be exported to PDF files
or ZIP files that include all the source files.
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