An
Ethical Hackers scorecard... An infographic for my Computer Security
class. (Rankings are subject to debate.)
The
8 Biggest Security Breaches In History
In
this digital age, almost all of your personal information stored
electronically — credit cards, usernames, passwords, bank details,
even photos and videos. Compare that with the past, when we used to
only trust certain organisations — banks, for example. Are we now
so carefree with our trust to allow almost anyone to store our
private details for us?
Here’s
a look at the worst security breaches in history, just to remind you
that nothing
is ever safe online.
Security
theater.
Retired
US airport body scanners fail to spot guns, knives
A
type of body scanner in wide use across U.S. airports through last
year fails to spot well-concealed weapons including guns and knives,
computer security researchers contend.
The
Rapiscan Secure 1000 full body scanner provides only "weak
protection against adaptive adversaries," according to their
paper, which will be
presented on Thursday at the Usenix Security Symposium in San Diego.
The researchers also set up a website with their findings.
"It
is possible to conceal knives, guns and explosives from detection by
exploiting properties of the device's backscatter X-ray technology,"
the paper said.
Although
the Rapiscan Secure 1000 was retired from U.S. airport use last year,
it is still used at court houses and prisons. Airports currently use
millimeter-wave scanning technology, which the researchers have not
tested.
…
Part of the problem is that the manufacturers and the government
have not allowed independent tests on such scanners for fear
the disclosure of weakness could tip-off attackers to effective
countermeasures, they wrote.
That
strategy might be effective for some time, but it depends on
maintaining tight purchase controls, they wrote.
"The
root cause of many of the issues we describe seems to be failure of
the system engineers to think adversarially," the paper said.
Intro
to IT. The user as a test subject.
How
Much Should You Know About How Facebook Works?
Every
semester, Cornell professor Jeff Hancock asks his students to
complete an experiment. First, he has them all Google the same
search term. Then, he asks each student to turn to the right or left
and compare the results on their screens.
What
his students inevitably find, and what stuns many of them, he says,
is how feeding Google an identical phrase can yield wildly different
results. "They think
your Google search is an objective window into the world,"
Hancock told me. "And they don't have a sense that they're
algorithmically curated."
…
Hancock co-authored a now infamous study about a secret Facebook
experiment he and other researchers constructed to study emotional
contagion. The work involved changing what users saw in their News
Feeds as a way to manipulate their emotional states.
…
One of Hancock's main areas of research has to do with "deception
and its detection," according to his
university website, a detail that people have asked him about, he
says.
…
Last month, Kate Crawford—a principal researcher at
Microsoft—argued
in these pages that users should be able to opt in to
experimental groups. "It is a failure of imagination and
methodology to claim that it is necessary to experiment on millions
of people without their consent in order to produce good data
science," Crawford wrote.
It's
called, “being a victim of your own success.”
Google
Hits Piracy Milestone
Google
has a huge piracy problem, and it’s growing on a daily basis.
According to TorrentFreak,
Google is now asked to
remove 1 million links every day, with copyright holders
swamping the tech giant with DMCA
takedown notices.
In
2008, Google received one request every six days, and now, in 2014,
it receives one request
every
8 milliseconds. The new record is 7.8 million in a single
week, and the numbers are only set to increase from here on in.
Not
all of these requests are honored, but the numbers are so vast that
it must be getting more difficult for Google to determine which
takedown requests are valid and which are bogus.
Remember,
there are no weapons of mass destruction in the middle east.
Key
Parts Of The Declassified US Report On The Chemical Weapons Attack In
Syria
Below
is the declassified U.S. intelligence assessment on the chemical
weapons attack that took place in the suburbs of Damascus, Syria on
August 21.
The
administration considers it clear evidence that the regime of Bashar
al-Assad carried out the attack with a nerve agent.
…
Here's the full document: 08.30.2013++USG+Assessment+on+Syria
(1)
Amusing
and possibly useful.
Interactive
Map of Breach-Notification Status
European member states are in the process
of adopting laws and regulations that require businesses operating in
their countries to notify government agencies and affected
individuals when they experience breaches of personal data. Even as
the EU Directive on Data Protection is being reviewed and might be
replaced by a regulation, data breach notification laws, when
adopted, will already apply in each Member State, mostly to
telecommunications companies and Internet service providers. They
are also expected to continue to evolve in how they are practically
implemented before any Data Protection Regulation comes into force,
which could ultimately mean that any entity processing personal data
would be bound to data breach notification obligations. For many
European companies, this will be a new experience fraught with
challenges. American companies, in spite of their long experience
with breach notification, will face new constraints and trigger
points that will create a need for updating operational procedures
and training EMEA staff.
See
the map on Data
Breaches Map. Rolling your cursor over a country’s name
reveals the status of its laws.
For
us winos...
Wine
Stocks Directory Updated; New Research Shows US spent $21.2 Billion
on Wine in 2013
New
research from Canadean (http://www.canadean.com/) finds that in the
US, women drink wine in order to relax and unwind, seeking good value
options, whereas men are more likely to be wine buffs, searching for
high quality and new drink experiences. In 2013 the US spent a total
of $21.2 billion on wine. Women are the biggest drinkers accounting
for 59% of consumption by volume compared to 41% for men.
According
to Canadean’s new research, women desire products that will help
them relax and unwind, with this need motivating over $6.7 billion in
wine sales in 2013. Finding good value wine is also highly important
to women: 15% of what they buy is driven by the search for products
which give the best value for money. According to Catherine
O’Connor, senior analyst at Canadean, this is partly due to women’s
high wine consumption: Being more regular drinkers of wine than men,
women look to find affordable offerings that allow them to enjoy the
drink frequently without feeling guilt over their spending. This
makes communicating value an essential part of how marketers should
target women.”
Although
they drink less wine than women, men spend more in the search for
quality. Male wine consumers in the US are driven by the search for
quality products and new drink experiences. Although they drink less
wine than women, they spend considerably more money in their search
for high quality products. Men spent $1.8 billion to meet this need
in 2013, whereas women only spent $1.0 billion in their search for
quality. Men are also driven to find products that offer new
experiences, with this need fuelling $2.4 billion of their wine
consumption compared to $2.2 billion of female consumption.”
Makes
buying a used car safer.
DOT
Launches Free, Online Search Tool for Recalls Using Vehicle
Identification Number
by
Sabrina I.
Pacifici on Aug 20, 2014
“Every
year, millions of vehicles are recalled in the United States due to
safety defects or noncompliance with federal safety standards. To
help car buyers, owners and renters know that their vehicles are safe
and their safety defects have been address, the U.S. Department of
Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
(NHTSA) today unveiled a new, free,
online search tool consumers
can use to find out if a vehicle is directly impacted by a recall.
The new tool is available on www.safercar.gov/vinlookup
and provides consumers with a
quick and easy way to identify uncompleted recalls by entering their
Vehicle Identification Number
(VIN). All major light vehicle and motorcycle brands can be
searched… Also effective today, under the new NHTSA mandate, all
major light vehicle and motorcycle manufacturers are required to
provide VIN search capability for uncompleted recalls on their own
websites. This data must be
updated at least weekly. NHTSA’s new VIN look-up tool directly
relies on information from all major automakers, and regularly
updated information from the automakers is critical to the efficacy
of the search tool. Consumers can find their vehicle identification
number by looking at the dashboard on the driver’s side of the
vehicle, or on the driver’s side door on the door post where the
door latches when it is closed. Determining whether there is a
recall that consumers need to take action on is easy. After entering
the VIN number into the field, results will appear if the consumer
has an open recall on their vehicle, and if there are none, owners
will see “No Open Recalls…” Today’s announcement builds on
NHTSA’s current efforts to provide consumers with information to
help them make informed decisions, including the New Car Assessment
Program (NCAP) 5-Star Ratings System, Recall
envelope and Safercar mobile apps
which provide on-the-spot information on crash protection features,
advanced safety features, and recalls on new vehicles and many older
models. In addition, NHTSA is working with the National Automobile
Dealers Association (NADA) to help ensure that franchise dealerships
across the United States become aware of and understand how to use
the new VIN search tool.”
For
students everywhere...
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For
my students who try that “TL;DR” stuff, a warning: These don't
work all that well.
Too
Lazy to Skim? Get The Gist With These Top 3 Summarization Tools
Ever
looked at a long piece of writing and thought how convenient a quick
summary would be? Felt too lazy to bother even skimming? Curious
what the key points of your own writing are?
I
tested a number of different free online summarization tools so you
don’t have to. Just pick your favourite and off you go, ready to
be lazier more efficient than ever at the click of a
button.
For
my App writing students.
Mobile
App Development: Pressure on IT Will Increase
Forget
about the frenzy surrounding mobile applications development abating
or stabilizing anytime soon. Instead, it is going to increase over
the next few years.
And
all of those enterprise software vendor efforts to sell prepackaged
mobile versions of their apps won’t make a big dent in your
workload – internal development will continue to rule. Those and
other surprises came out of a global survey and qualitative research
report I was involved with over the past several months.
…
The average number of mobile applications developed by the
respondents’ organizations in the past year was nine. In addition,
they purchased another nine from consultants, their enterprise
software providers and other vendors. Most of the respondents’
organizations release a new version of a mobile app at least on a
quarterly basis; 20% release a new app every month! And updates are
even more frequent: 35% of
the respondents update apps every month.
…
Additional insights about the how and where of mobile applications
development are included in the report. It is available here.
Free
is good, copyright free is gooder.
The
Public Domain Review - A Good Place to Find Public Domain Media
The
Public Domain Review is a website that features collections of
images, books, essays, audio recordings, and films that are in the
public domain. Choose any of the collections to search for materials
according to date, style, genre, and rights. Directions for
downloading and saving media is included along with each collection
of media.
As
you might guess, nearly all of what I found in the collections on The
Public Domain Review is content of a historical nature. The
collections include short descriptions that explain the significance
of the media you're accessing.
The
Public Domain Review could be a great place to find historical
media to use in history lessons, literature lessons, and art history
lessons. If you're looking for colorful imagery to use as filler or
backgrounds in slide presentations, the collections on The Public
Domain Review are probably not your best bet. In that case, I would
look to Pixabay for images that are in the public domain.
For
my students, because we're a “Technical” university.
How
do you Make Money on the Internet
Dilbert
explains that even though working for Google is heaven, there's a
catch.
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