You say, “large
collection of data,” I say, “target!”
Hackers
use Amazon cloud to scrape mass number of LinkedIn member profiles
LinkedIn is suing a
gang of hackers who used Amazon's cloud computing service to
circumvent security measures and copy data from hundreds of thousands
of member profiles each day.
"Since May 2013,
unknown persons and/or entities employing various automated software
programs (often referred to as 'bots') have registered thousands of
fake LinkedIn member accounts and have extracted and copied data from
many member profile pages," company attorneys alleged in a
complaint filed this week in US District Court in Northern
California.
… With more than
259 million members—many who are highly paid professionals in
technology, finance, and medical industries—LinkedIn holds a wealth
of personal data that can prove highly valuable to people conducting
phishing attacks, identity theft, and similar scams.
The allegations in the
lawsuit highlight the unending tug-of-war between hackers who work to
obtain that data and the defenders who use technical measures to
prevent the data from falling into the wrong hands.
… The unnamed "Doe"
hackers employed a raft of techniques designed to bypass
anti-scraping measures built in to the business network. Chief among
them was the creation of huge numbers of fake accounts. That made it
possible to circumvent restrictions dubbed FUSE, which limit the
activity any single account can perform.
… The hackers also
circumvented a separate security measure that is supposed to require
end users to complete bot-defeating
CAPTCHA dialogues when potentially abusive
activities are detected. They also managed to bypass restrictions
that LinkedIn intended to impose through a robots.txt
file, which websites use to make clear which
content may be indexed by automated Web crawling programs employed by
Google and other sites.
Interesting map.
MassPrivateI has a
roundup of links on the topic that you may want to read. The article
begins:
Law
enforcement agencies throughout the nation are increasingly adopting
automated license plate recognition (ALPR) technologies, which
function to automatically capture an image of the vehicle’s license
plate, transform that image into alphanumeric characters, compare the
plate number acquired to one or more databases of vehicles of
interest, and alert the officer when a vehicle of interest has been
observed, all within a matter of seconds.(spying on citizens &
tracking our every movement)
Read more here.
Statutory fines do not
have a built in “cost of living” adjustment.
Emmanuelle Trecolle
reports:
France’s
data protection watchdog on Wednesday fined Google 150,000 euros
($205,000) — the maximum possible — for failing to comply with
its privacy guidelines for personal data.
The
fine, though tiny for a group that made $15 billion in one quarter
last year, is the regulator’s biggest ever and follows in the wake
of other European nations cracking down on Google’s increasingly
controversial privacy polices.
Read more on Yahoo.
Okay, so they fined
them. But how does that bring them into compliance with French law?
What’s next if Google doesn’t comply with the changes CNIL
requested?
Perspective How do I
censor thee, let me count the ways...
Trends
in transition from classical censorship to Intenet censorship:
selected country overviews
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on January 8, 2014
“Censorship is no
longer limited to printed media and videos. Its impact is felt much
more strongly with regard to Internet related resources of
information and communication such as access to websites,
email and social networking tools which is further enhanced by
ubiquitous access through mobile phones and tablets. Some
countries are marked by severe restrictions and enforcement, a
variety of initiatives in enforcing censorship (pervasive as well as
implied), as well as initiatives to counter censorship.
The article reflects on
trends in Internet censorship in selected countries, namely
Australia, Chile, China, Finland, Lybia, Myanmar, Singapore, Turkey,
and the United Kingdom (UK).
These trends are
discussed under two broad categories of negative and positive trends.
Negative trends include: trends in issues of Internet related
privacy; ubiquitous society and control; trends in Internet related
media being censored; trends in filtering and blocking Internet
content and blocking software; trends in technologies to monitor and
identify citizens using the Internet to express their opinion and
applying “freedom of speech”; criminalization of legitimate
expression on the Internet; trends in acts, regulations and
legislation regarding the use of the Internet and trends in
government models regarding Internet censorship; trends in new forms
of Internet censorship; trends in support of Internet censorship;
trends in enforcing regulations and Internet censorship; trends in
Internet related communication surveillance. Positive trends
include: trends in reactions to Internet censorship; attempts and
means to side-step Internet censorship; trends in cyber actions
against Internet censorship; trends in innovative ways of showing
opposition to Internet censorship.
Detailed reports for
each country are included as appendixes. A
summary of how the trends manifest in the countries in which data
were mined, as well as the trends per se is included in the article.”
Also Perspective. I
think most of my students are in group three... Curious, but I may
be wrong.
Gallup
– Three in 10 in U.S. Own an Array of Consumer Electronics
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on January 8, 2014
“As electronics
enthusiasts gather in Las Vegas for the International Consumer
Electronics Show this week, a new
Gallup analysis finds Americans falling into four groups
according to their ownership levels of the electronic devices already
available. At one end of the spectrum, 31% are “Super Tech
Adopters,” who report broad ownership of the major computing and
entertainment devices on the market. At the other extreme, 28% are
“Tech-Averse Olders,” who own little more than a basic cellphone
and DVD player. Between the extremes, 19% of Americans could be
considered “Smartphone Reliants.” These Americans are highly
likely to have a smartphone, but far less likely than Super Tech
Adopters to own other electronics, particularly other portable
devices. Additionally, “Mature Technophiles” — 22% of the
public — report broad ownership of a variety of home electronics,
but less than half have smartphones.”
One of the (many)
surprises at the start of the new quarter were the new touch screen
HP Envy Windows 8 computers in the labs. Here's yet another tip for
my students.
5
Security Tips To Consider When Using a Microsoft Account
Microsoft wants Windows
8 users to log into their computers with a
Microsoft account, not a standard old local user account. You
can’t use much of the new user interface without a Microsoft
account — you can’t even upgrade
to Windows 8.1 without one. Along with this new focus on
Microsoft accounts comes new security concerns. The account you use
to log into your computer is now an online account and you need to
worry about securing it.
There are advantages to
using a Microsoft account, as it allows you to sync
your settings, files, apps, and other data between your
computers. You log into Macs and iPads with an Apple ID, Android
devices and Chromebooks with a Google account, and now Windows with a
Microsoft account.
As a corollary to “We
can, therefore we must!” I give you, “We can, and some fool will
pay us to do it!”
For my students...
2014–15
Occupational Outlook Handbook
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on January 8, 2014
“The 2014–15
Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) was released today by the
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The OOH reflects BLS
employment projections for the 2012–22 decade. The OOH is one of
the nation’s most widely used sources of career information. It
provides details on hundreds of occupations and is used by career
counselors, students, parents, teachers, jobseekers, career changers,
education and training officials, and researchers…. The 2014–15
OOH includes 334 occupational profiles covering 580 detailed
occupations, or about 84 percent of total employment in 2012. Each
occupational profile describes:
- What workers do
- Where they work
- Typical education and training requirements
- Wages
- Job outlook.”
For my ESL students in
particular.. Looks trivial, but it is not.
– is a site that
gives you the ability to enter any English word, and then be told
anything about that word, such as an equivalent noun, adjective,
adverb or verb. You can also look up the tenses, pronunciation,
rhyming words, words that mean the same, and of course the meaning of
the word. It’s a great site to bookmark if you are working with
the English language on a regular basis.
The future is “proof
of skill by exam.”
… Higher education,
however, is in the midst of dramatic, disruptive change. It is, to
use the language of innovation theorists and practitioners, being
unbundled.
(Some more of my thoughts on higher-ed unbundling can be found
here.)
And with that unbundling, the traditional credential is rapidly
losing relevance. The value of paper degrees lies in a common
agreement to accept them as a proxy for competence and status, and
that agreement is less rock solid than the higher education
establishment would like to believe.
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