Another
nudge toward mandatory full disclosure? Perhaps with
statutory fines for incomplete information?
Remember
the Vendini
breach
last year? Jeanne Price of idRADAR.com
reports that according to attorneys representing plaintiffs in a
class action lawsuit that has reached a settlement,
over 3 million ticket purchasers were likely affected by the breach.
[From
the idRADAR article:
The
number of Americans now wondering who or what a ‘Vendini’ is now
known to run into the millions. Many
consumers had never heard of the company before this week when they
received notification of a proposed lawsuit settlement
involving a data breach that Vendini reluctantly disclosed early last
summer. It now appears that the breach was bigger than several other
recent big headliner breaches including one at Michaels Stores
nationwide.
You
may be unfamiliar with the name. It never appears when you buy
tickets online or at the box office but the odds are good that if
Ticketmaster isn’t involved, Vendini will have hands on your
transaction.
So
now everyone knows that you purchased ________. Shame on you!
From
PRNewswire:
Buyers and sellers using the online marketplace eBay may be revealing
far more than their interest in vintage furniture or video games.
Researchers at the New York University Polytechnic School of
Engineering and NYU Shanghai have discovered a privacy flaw that
allows site visitors to
view a buyer’s complete purchase history—including
sensitive items like gun accessories and at-home medical tests for
pregnancy or HIV.
[...]
The privacy flaw operates as follows: Every eBay user’s profile
includes a “Feedback as a Buyer” page, where those who have sold
items to that person can post comments. An estimated 70 percent of
sellers leave feedback for buyers, and this section is entirely
public—a user need not even sign into eBay to access this
information. Along with their comments, the seller also leaves a
record of his or her own username and the time of sale but does not
disclose the actual item purchased. By visiting the seller’s
feedback page, however, it is relatively easy to match the time stamp
of the sale and thus identify the item that was purchased.
In the event that more than one sale matches the time stamp, which
may happen with automated sales, the researchers still found it
fairly straightforward to identify purchase histories. eBay assigns
a pseudonym to each username listed in sales records, and that
pseudonym follows a formula that makes deriving the username possible
in nearly every case: In a test database of 5,580 feedback records,
the researchers matched 96 percent of buyers’ feedback records to a
single seller feedback record, complete with purchase details.
In some cases, the researchers were able to take this attack one step
further: Among a database of nearly 131,000 eBay usernames, they were
able to link 17 percent to Facebook profiles, thus revealing the
users’ real names.
[...]
This research was partially funded by grants from the National
Science Foundation. The full paper is available at
https://petsymposium.org/2014/papers/Minkus.pdf.
Read
more from PRNewswire.
Another
technology to tap. The NSA should be very interested in “off the
grid” communications.
GoTenna
The Modern Day Walkie Talkie
Off
the grid connectivity is now possible thanks to GoTenna, which gives
people the ability to communicate with no data, network or signal
connection.
GoTenna
has been designed to connect your phone over Bluetooth and use a
longer-range, low frequency radio to communicate to other GoTenna’s
up to several miles away.
…
GoTenna is specifically designed to be used when your phone is
offline and out of cellular range and as
long as the person you need to communicate with also has a GoTenna,
you will be able to get through.
Currently,
the GoTenna only supports text based chat however, unlike other
off-the grid communication devices it does not use satellites or
require a monthly fee to remain activated.
GoTenna
is completely free to use
and each network is self contained.
…
GoTenna can currently be pre-ordered for $150 for two devices.
Yesterday
I noted that Facebook and Twitter were making it easier for users to
buy stuff without leaving their systems. Could they be next?
EU
Tells Apple, Google: Limit In-App Purchasing
As
U.S. regulators continue
to press mobile platform providers for failing to prevent
children from making unauthorized purchases in apps, European
regulators are doing the same.
…
EU Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) authorities have decided
that games advertised as "free" should not misrepresent the
cost to consumers. In response, Google has removed the term "free"
from Google Play store listings that describe games containing its
In-app Billing API, even if that API is not actually used.
In
so doing, Google has gone above and beyond regulatory requirements.
The CPC rules require only that "an online game cannot be
marketed as 'free' where the consumer cannot, without making in-app
purchases, play the game in a way that he/she would reasonably
expect." In many "free" games, in-app purchases are
not required; they generally improve the player's situation without
being critical to in-game advancement.
For
my Ethical Hackers: “Hey kids! There's a McDonalds ahead! Mom &
Dad can buy you a Happy Meal!”
New
Toyota Minivan Helps Parents Yell at Their Kids
…
Toyota Sienna minivan has a so-called “Driver Easy Speak”
feature. It has a mounted microphone to amplify a parent’s voice
through the speakers in the back seats.
For
my students who read. Mortimer Adler wrote “How to read a
book.” Perhaps now we need “How to read a Kindle.”
Being
a Better Online Reader – The New Yorker
by
Sabrina I.
Pacifici on Jul 19, 2014
“Certainly,
as we turn to online reading, the
physiology of the reading process itself shifts; we don’t read the
same way online as we do on paper.
Anne Mangen, a professor at the National Centre for Reading Education
and Research at the University of Stavanger, in Norway, points out
that reading is always an interaction between a person and a
technology, be it a computer or an e-reader or even a bound book.
Reading “involves factors not usually acknowledged,” she told me.
“The ergonomics, the haptics of the device itself. The
tangibility of paper versus the intangibility of something digital.”
The contrast of pixels, the layout of the words, the concept of
scrolling versus turning a page, the physicality of a book versus the
ephemerality of a screen, the ability to hyperlink and move from
source to source within seconds online—all these variables
translate into a different reading experience.”
[From
the article:
…
the more reading moved online, the less students seemed to
understand.
…
Was the digital format to blame for their superficial approaches, or
was something else at work?
(Related)
Now find something to read and write about.
Discovery
Hub
by
Sabrina I.
Pacifici on Jul 19, 2014
“Exploratory
search - Discovery
Hub is an
exploratory search engine built on top of the famous encyclopedia on
the web, Wikipedia.
The exploratory search is a
new way to search the web,
not to find what you are searching, but to
find what you are not searching,
and might be interesting for you! It allows performing queries in an
innovative way and helps you to navigate rich results. As a hub, it
proposes redirections to others platforms
to make you benefit from your discoveries (Youtube, Deezer and
more).”
- “The DBpedia data set uses a large multi-domain ontology which has been derived from Wikipedia. The English version of the DBpedia 3.9 data set currently describes 4.0 million “things” with 470 million “facts”. In addition, we provide localized versions of DBpedia in 119 languages. All these versions together describe 24.9 million things, out of which 16.8 million overlap (are interlinked) with concepts from the English DBpedia. The full DBpedia data set features labels and abstracts for 12.6 million unique things in up to 120 different languages; 24.6 million links to images and 27.6 million HTML links to external web pages; 45.0 million data links into external RDF data sets, 67.0 million links to Wikipedia categories, and 41.2 million YAGO categories. The dataset consists of 2.46 billion pieces of information (RDF triples) out of which 470 million were extracted from the English edition of Wikipedia, 1.98 billion were extracted from other language editions, and about 45 million are data links to external RDF data sets.”
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