For
my Ethical Hackers.
Kashmir
Hill reports:
A few years back, Thomas ‘T.K.’ Kinsey was
having a late, inebriated night in downtown Redlands, a far-flung
suburb of Los Angeles. He started climbing a fountain, making the
kind of bad decision a late-night carouser makes. Suddenly, he heard
a voice coming from above telling him to stop. It wasn’t a good
angel on his shoulder; it was a member of the police department
speaking to him through a speaker in a city surveillance camera.
Redlands has over 140 surveillance cameras around the 70,000-person
town that have helped the police spot and stop drunk drivers,
brawlers, vandals, and people illegally smoking in parks, according
to a
case study on the site of Leverage
Information Systems, the company that provided the camera system.
After his encounter being watched by the cameras, Kinsey, a security
engineer, decided to gaze back at the system.
He and Dustin Hoffman, his boss at IT firm Exigent Systems,
discovered that the police were not the only ones who could peer
through the eyes of the city’s cameras.
Read
more on Forbes.
I
suspect this is more common than you might think. I used to send a
report each month to managers, listing their employees who had login
credentials (and the systems they were authorized to access).
Today’s
reminder is from a breach I came across in reviewing records obtained
in response to a Freedom of Information Act request I filed.
American
Medical Response is a billing/collections agency. In the
course of business, they routinely access a database maintained by
Acxiom Insight.
Apparently,
login credentials of an inactive employee were never properly
terminated as there was access to the database between April 2009 and
March 2010. AMR did not know about it, however, until Acxiom Insight
first contacted them on August 31, 2011 to alert them. All told, 944
people had their files accessed. The files contained their names,
addresses, phone numbers, and Social Security numbers.
Affected
consumers were notified on January 12, 2012, but were not offered any
free credit monitoring services. It’s not clear why Acxiom first
detected the problem more than one year after it stopped occurring.
The
breach was reported to NYS in January 2012, but doesn’t seem to
have appeared in the media at the time.
This
will become a highly competitive and highly (hacker) targeted area.
Exclusive:
Apple prepares Healthkit rollout amid tangled regulatory web
Apple
Inc has been discussing how its "HealthKit" service
will work with health providers at Mount Sinai, the Cleveland Clinic
and Johns Hopkins as well as with Allscripts,
a competitor to electronic health records provider Epic Systems,
people familiar with the discussions said.
While
the talks may not amount to anything concrete, they underscore how
Apple is intent on making health data, such as blood pressure, pulse
and weight, available for consumers and health providers to view in
one place.
Currently, this data is being collected by thousands of third-party
health care software
applications and medical devices, but it isn't centrally stored.
Apple also hopes physicians will use this data to better monitor
patients between visits – with the patient's consent — so the
doctors can make better diagnostic and treatment decisions.
(Related)
For my Statistics students.
Own
your body's data
The
new breed of high-tech self-monitors (measuring heartrate, sleep,
steps per day) might seem targeted at competitive athletes. But
Talithia Williams, a statistician, makes a compelling case that all
of us should be measuring and recording simple data about our bodies
every day — because our own data can reveal much more than even our
doctors may know.
Another
interesting area for Privacy.
The
Promises and Dangers of Ambient Intelligence in Your Life
…
Ambient Intelligence (stylized as AmI) is a
new way of thinking about human-computer interactions,
characterized by embedded devices, wearables, and passive adaptation
of technology to your needs. The goal of AmI is for technology to
maximize its usefulness while minimizing its footprint on your
attention. In other words, AmI tries to be invisible, pulling data
from the environment to make intelligent, helpful decisions for you,
without you ever having to ask.
This
new paradigm is obviously powerful, but it also comes with its own
risks and challenges. As the devices in your world come to know your
life in more detail, they also come to know your life in more
detail.
What
Ambient Intelligence Can Do
AmI
is the intersection of two important trends. The first is the
so-called “Internet of
things” – networked devices like Wifi-enabled
lightbulbs, Internet radios, smart
homes, smart appliances, and wearable technology that make it
easy to present data to the user in a variety of ways.
The
second is big data analytics and increasingly powerful artificial
intelligence tools, which can absorb the flood of data from all of
those sensors and devices and turn it into useful insight that can be
used to drive helpful behavior without human intervention.
Perspective.
Meanwhile, back in the “end user” world, we're lucky to see
speeds in the double digit megabyte range... 60,000 times slower.
Google
helps build 'Faster' cable under Pacific Ocean
The
cable, dubbed Faster, will connect the US with Japan and cost about
$300m (£179m; 225m euros), the consortium
said.
The
trans-Pacific fibre cable would deliver speeds of 60 terabytes per
second - enough to send more than 2,000 uncompressed HD films a
second.
For
my researching students.
Guide
to International Research Resources
by
Sabrina I.
Pacifici on Aug 11, 2014
“This
guide is intended as a repository of resources specifically for
research using materials produced and collected in other countries.
The main resources included here are links to national
libraries, national bibliographies and union catalogs.
Additional regional resources have been included where appropriate.
Navigation can be done through the tabs at the top or the table of
contents to the left. Resources are divided geographically. On each
continental main page there are maps indicating what countries are
included in the regional subsections. If there are additional
resources that you think should be added or if you find a broken link
please send a comment on the feedback tab.” [Jennifer
Dinalo]
For
my Computer Science students (who probably already know this stuff).
11
Shortcuts For Learning Linux In Record Time
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