A
global tragedy?
Facebook
global 30-minute outage leaves users frustrated
Facebook
today experienced a global outage that left its over 1.2 billion
users, including those in India, unable to access the world's largest
social networking portal.
For
about 30 minutes, users logging into the website saw the message:
"Sorry something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed
as soon as we can."
…
With Facebook down, netizens took to microblogging site Twitter to
vent their frustration.
While
many compared the outage to an "apocalypse",
others mocked the situation saying "people may now have to talk
to each other face to face".
Attention
Ethical Hackers. Imagine the fun you could have if your favorite law
professor was on sabbatical in (for example) New Zealand. By the
time he returned, you could have emptied his office, his house, and
his garage! What (hypothetical) fun!
eBay
Launches iOS App Called “eBay Valet” Which Will Sell Your Stuff
For You
Have
you ever wanted to sell stuff on eBay but found you were too lazy to
actually do it? Well eBay has filled that niche by introducing an
app for iPhone which will do the actual selling for you, in exchange
for a 30% cut. It’s called eBay
Valet, and seems to be confined to eBay
USA for now.
Think
of Valet as one of those consignment stores which were really popular
some years back. But being eBay, the scale is obviously much bigger,
and the organization is much more efficient. The mobile app is an
expansion on the web-based version of the service called Sell
For Me, and it seems to be designed to make everything as simple
as possible.
Don't
think of it as a phone, think of it as a sales tool.
Amazon’s
Fire Phone might be the biggest privacy invasion ever (and no one’s
noticed)
…
There’s a lot of gee-whiz
gadgetry in the new Fire Phone: a 3-D screen, head sensors,
dynamic perspective shifts as you move, and real-time identification
of over 100 million objects. That last part, the real-time
identification, is the new Firefly function.
Firefly
is a seriously impressive combination of hardware, software, and
massive cloud chops that delivers an Apple-like simplicity to
identify objects like books, movies, games, and more, just by
pointing your Fire Phone’s camera at them and tapping the Firefly
button.
Lest
you noticed a common denominator to those items and get the crazy
idea that Firefly is only for stuff you can buy at Amazon, it also
recognizes songs (oh, you can buy those on Amazon too) and TV shows
(ditto) as well as phone numbers, printed information, and QR codes.
Wait.
How
do you think it recognizes those things, including text on images,
for which Amazon says it will offer language translation features
later this year?
Well,
the Firefly
button and the camera button are one and the same. Meaning that
whenever you’re using
Firefly, you’re using the camera. Plus, of course, you’re
turning on audio sensors that capture ambient sound.
…
By storing all the photos you’ll ever take with Firefly,
along with GPS location data, ambient audio, and more metadata than
you can shake a stick at in Amazon Web Services, Amazon will get
unprecedented insight into who you are, what you own, where you go,
what you do, who’s important in your life, what you like, and,
probably, what you might be most likely to buy.
Babies
in your pictures? Sell that dame diapers. Lots of old-school hot
rods? See if you can sell Billy Bob some NASCAR shwag, or maybe beef
jerky. Outdoorsy, are you, with your pictures of remote mountaintops
and idyllic forest meadows? Clearly you need hiking boots and
granola. Looking at a business card? Perhaps things she likes will
be things you’ll like, too.
There
are “information systems” and there are “collections of data”
– this sounds like the latter. If you can't access your own data
what are you paying IT for?
I
meant to post this last week, but hey, I’m old, I forget.
Benjamin
Herold reports:
Nevada state education officials recently told a parent it would cost
him more than $10,000 to access the data the department has collected
on his four children, raising a tangled web of questions about
everything from the structure of state educational databases to the
interpretation of federal student-privacy laws to the implementation
of new Common Core State Standards.
Parents
have a right to inspect their children’s educational records at no
cost to them under FERPA. But those requests are typically made to
the Local Educational Agency (LEA), i.e., the child’s school
district. In this case, the parent was querying information the
state educational agency held in their databases.
The
$10k tag would be for the state to develop
a system to produce records responsive to his request as they
currently have no means to do so. But should they have
the means? What if data in a state database became corrupted after
it was correctly transmitted by the LEA? Could that eventually cause
difficulty for the student? And even if there was no potential for
harm to the student, shouldn’t parents have the right to see what
information the state has compiled about their children, which often
includes parental and family information?
Read
more on Education
Week.
This
is a settlement, but it looks like the bank was not adequately
secured.
Oil
Co. Wins $350,000 Cyberheist Settlement
A
California oil company that sued its bank after being robbed of
$350,000 in a 2011 cyberheist has won a settlement that effectively
reimbursed the firm for the stolen funds.
TRC
Operating Co. Inc., an oil production firm based in
Taft, Calif., had its online accounts hijacked after an account
takeover that started late in the day on Friday, November 10, 2011.
In the ensuing five days, the thieves would send a dozen fraudulent
wires out of the company’s operating accounts, siphoning nearly
$3.5 million to accounts in Ukraine.
The
oil firm’s financial institution, Fresno-based United
Security Bank, successfully blocked or recalled all
but one of the wires – for $299,000. Nevertheless, TRC later sued
its bank to recover the remaining wire amount, arguing that USB
failed to offer a commercially reasonable security procedure because
the bank offered little
more than a user name and password to help secure the account.
…
As we seen time
and again,
a single virus infection can ruin your company. And I wouldn’t
count on the lawyers to save your firm from the very real cost of a
cyberheist: These court challenges can just as easily end up costing
the victim business well more than their original loss (see Ruling
Raises Stakes for Cyberheist Victims).
Businesses
do not enjoy the same protections against cyberfraud that are
afforded to consumer banking customers. If this is news to you, or
if you’d just like some tips how to reduce your exposure to online
banking fraud, please take a moment to read my recommendations here:
Online
Banking Best Practices for Businesses.
(Related)
Interesting question.
Are
Organizations Ready for PCI DSS 3.0?
Businesses
that handle payment card data have to become compliant with the
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard 3.0 (PCI
DSS 3.0) by December 31, 2014, yet many appear to be unprepared
for the challenge.
According
to a recent study conducted by NTT Com Security, only 30% of
organizations have created a plan for compliance
after reviewing requirements, with 70%
of those surveyed being unaware of the December 31 deadline.
Additionally, 41% of the respondents said they have heard of PCI DSS
3.0, but haven’t laid out a plan for compliance.
I
see a market among the right wing anti-government types. No one else
would put up with 65 “detection alarms” per minute.
Test
a Personal Drone Detection System for $500
If
they can't blame “The Internet” who will they blame?
New
study finds Internet not responsible for dying newspapers
by
Sabrina I.
Pacifici on June 19, 2014
“[A]
recently published study finds that we may be all wrong about the
role of the Internet in the decline of newspapers. According to
research by University
of Chicago Booth School of Business Professor Matthew
Gentzkow, assumptions about journalism are based on three
false premises. In his new paper, Trading
Dollars for Dollars: The Price of Attention Online and Offline,
which was published in the May issue of the American
Economic Review, Gentzkow notes that the
first fallacy is that online advertising revenues are naturally lower
than print revenues, so traditional media must adopt a less
profitable business model that cannot support paying real reporters.
The second is that the web has made the
advertising market more competitive, which has driven down rates and,
in turn, revenues.
The third misconception is that the Internet is responsible for the
demise of the newspaper industry…
Several
different studies already have shown that people spend an order of
magnitude more time reading than the average monthly visitor online,
which makes looking at these rates as analogous incorrect… By
comparing the amount of time people actually see an ad, Gentzkow
finds that the price of attention for similar consumers is actually
higher online. In 2008, he calculates, newspapers earned $2.78 per
hour of attention in print, and $3.79 per hour of attention online.
By 2012, the price of attention in print had fallen to $1.57, while
the price for attention online had increased to $4.24. Gentzkow also
points out that the popularity of newspapers had already
significantly diminished between 1980 and 1995, well before the
Internet age, and has dropped at roughly the same rate ever since.
“People have not stopped reading newspapers because of the
Internet,” Gentzkow notes.”
Perspective
If they wanted to look better they should have included more family
and friends than a mere 7%.
Congress
hits new low: Only 7% have confidence in the institution
Perspective.
Not what I expected. (mostly graphics, I'd like to see the raw
data)
The
Most Popular Social Network for Young People? Texting
Apparently,
I've been going about this all wrong! I need to dumb down my Apps!
App Raises $1M In Funding For
Simply Sending The Message 'Yo' Back And Forth
…
Allow me to introduce you to new chat app, Yo.
You
may have heard of it recently, it has been dominating headlines over
the last 24 hours for two reasons. Firstly, its simplicity. The app
allows you to message friends with the word “Yo” and that’s it.
Nothing else can be said other than sending this innocuous greeting.
Secondly,
it has just raised $1m in seed funding from CEO of Mobli, Moshe
Hogeg’s angel fund.
…
The founder Or Abel told the Financial
Times that he coded the app in eight hours, after being asked by
his then boss Moshe Hogeg, to make a notification app that could
summon his secretary.
For
my students. Think outside the box.
Distracted
By Google Search? 4 “Search Engines” You Should Not Ignore
…
Alternative
search engines look at search in different ways. Some tout
privacy… while some go for specialization.
The
four below have a common factor – they are all user-curated
platforms. They may not be search engines by the strictest
definition, but they are huge reserves of data.
For
my students. Start telling your elected officials what you
want/need/demand/wish for... And most importantly, where they
screwed up!
Sunlight
Foundation Announcement – We finally gave Congress email addresses
by
Sabrina I.
Pacifici on June 19, 2014
Via
Tom
Lee: “On OpenCongress,
you can now email your representatives and senators just as easily as
you would a friend or colleague. We’ve added a new feature to
OpenCongress.
It’s not flashy. It doesn’t use D3 or integrate with social
media. But we still think it’s pretty cool. You might’ve
already heard of it. Email. This may not sound like a big deal, but
it’s been a long time coming. A
lot of people are surprised to learn that Congress doesn’t have
publicly available email addresses. It’s the number one
feature request that we hear from users of our
APIs. Until recently, we didn’t have a good response.
That’s because members of Congress typically put their feedback
mechanisms behind captchas and zip code requirements. Sometimes
these forms break; sometimes their requirements improperly lock out
actual constituents. And they always make it harder to email your
congressional delegation than it should be. This is a real problem.
According
to the Congressional Management Foundation, 88% of Capitol Hill
staffers agree that electronic messages from constituents influence
their bosses’ decisions. We think that it’s
inappropriate to erect technical barriers around such an essential
democratic mechanism. Congress
itself is addressing the problem. That effort has just entered its
second decade, and people are feeling optimistic that a
launch to a closed set of partners might be coming soon. But we
weren’t content to wait. So when the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF) approached us about this
problem, we were excited to really make some progress. Building on
groundwork first done by the Participatory
Politics Foundation and more recent work within Sunlight,
a
network of 150 volunteers collected the data we needed from
congressional websites in just two days. That
information is now on Github, available to all who want to
build the next generation of constituent communication tools. The
EFF is already working on some exciting things to that end. But we
just wanted to be able to email our representatives like normal
people. So now, if you visit a legislator’s page on OpenCongress,
you’ll see an email address in the right-hand sidebar that looks
like Sen.Reid@opencongress.org
or Rep.Boehner@opencongress.org.
You
can also email myreps@opencongress.org
to email both of your senators and your House representatives at
once. The first time we get an email from you, we’ll send one back
asking for some additional details. This is necessary because our
code submits your message by navigating those aforementioned
congressional webforms, and we don’t want to enter incorrect
information. But for emails after the first one, all you’ll have
to do is click a link that says, “Yes, I meant to send that email.”
One more thing: For now, our system will only let you email your
own representatives. A lot of people dislike this. We do, too. In
an age of increasing polarization, party discipline means that
congressional leaders must be accountable to citizens outside their
districts. But the unfortunate truth is that Congress typically
won’t bother reading messages from non-constituents — that’s
why those zip code requirements exist in the first place. Until that
changes, we don’t want our users to waste their time. So that’s
it. If it seems simple, it’s because it is. But we think that
unbreaking how Congress connects to the Internet is important. You
should be able to send a call to action in a tweet, easily forward a
listserv message to your representative and interact with your
government using the tools you use to interact with everyone else.”
(Related)
Here's something Congress could address.
Study:
People Harassed Online Have Few Legal Protections
…
No doubt there are police out there who have used social media.
Still, according to a
recent paper from the Center
on Law and Information Policy at Fordham Law School, Hess’s
experience is not unusual. "Although online harassment and
hateful speech is a significant problem, there are few legal remedies
for victims," authors Alice Marwick and Ross Miller wrote.
Victims who go to the police often find what Hess found; most law
enforcement agencies have neither the resources nor the expertise to
deal with harassment, and are ill-equipped to even understand the
problem, much less take it seriously.
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