Lesson
to learn: If you are going to rely on your Security procedures, make
certain they are reliable. (How would anyone gain access to your
offsite backups without your knowledge? They write blank “backups”
and over time older backups are deleted.)
Victim
Company Refuses to Pay DDoS Extortion Fee and Is Permanently Forced
Out of Business
…
Code Spaces experienced a DDoS attack accompanied by a ransom
demand. Code Spaces assumed it could handle the attack on its
systems, which were hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). When the
attackers didn’t get their payoff to end the DDoS attack, it is
presumed they directed their vengeance toward gaining access to Code
Spaces’s Amazon EC2 control panel and then deleting most of the
company’s data, backups, machine configurations and
offsite backups.
That's
100,000 won more than US breach victims typically get. I wonder how
they did it?
Yonhap
News reports:
South Korea’s No. 2 mobile carrier KT Corp. was ordered by a local
district court Friday to pay 100,000 won (US$97) in compensation to
each customer who had personal data leaked in 2012.
The Seoul Central District Court’s ruling came after some 28,000 KT
users filed a lawsuit against the mobile carrier for the leak of
sensitive personal information, demanding compensation of 500,000 won
per person.
Read
more on Global
Post.
I
expect nothing less. Why would the NSA have all that data and no way
to search for the specific bits they need? (The “Intercept” link
has some great images for your next presentation, specifically the
one illustrating “billions and billions of records”)
NSA
built 'Google-like' search engine for metadata
The National Security Agency built a "Google-like" search
engine to give domestic and international government agencies access
to details of billions of calls, texts and instant messages sent by
millions of people, according
to The Intercept.
The
search engine, called ICReach, had behind it roughly 850 billion
pieces of metadata in 2007 on calls made largely but not exclusively
by foreign nationals, the report said.
Metadata
is the data the surrounds a communication but not the contents of the
message or telephone call itself. In the case of ICReach, the
program includes the date, time and duration of calls, the number of
the caller and destination, and, in the case of a mobile telephone,
the unique IMEI number of the handset being used, according to a
document
published earlier this year by the American Civil Liberties
Union.
Do
you suppose everyone knew they could be monitored at this level?
Jawbone
Looks At UP Data To See How Many Were Woken Up By The Napa Earthquake
Jawbone
has shown one of the more interesting ways data gathered on its
platform might be used for large-scale population studies: The
fitness tracker company looked at its cumulative UP data to find out
where
wearers of its fitness bands were woken up by the South Napa
earthquake that happened yesterday morning, and where people
slept through the ground shaking.
Jawbone
found that, unsurprisingly, those living closest to the epicenter of
the quake were the ones who woke up most reliably, at around 3:20 AM
when it originally struck. 93 percent of UP wearers in Napa, Sonoma,
Vallejo and Fairfield woke up almost instantly, while just over half
of UP wearers in San Francisco and Oakland were awoken.
At
some point, failure to check your facts with Google (or similar
repositories of the accumulated wisdom of mankind) will be considered
an indication that the speaker/writer is either certifiably crazy or
a politician.
Google’s
fact-checking bots build vast knowledge bank – New Scientist
by
Sabrina I.
Pacifici on Aug 25, 2014
Hal
Hodson, 20 August 2014, New Scientist - The
search giant is automatically building Knowledge Vault, a massive
database that could give us unprecedented access to the world’s
facts..
“GOOGLE
is building the largest store of knowledge in human history – and
it’s doing so without any human help. Instead, Knowledge Vault
autonomously gathers and merges information from across the web into
a single base of facts about the world, and the people and objects in
it. The breadth and accuracy of this gathered knowledge is already
becoming the foundation of systems that allow robots and smartphones
to understand what people ask them. It
promises to let Google answer questions like an oracle rather than a
search engine, [With
vague language, subject to multiple interpretations? Bob]
and even to turn a new lens on human history. Knowledge Vault is a
type of “knowledge base” – a system that stores information so
that machines as well as people can read it. Where a database deals
with numbers, a knowledge base deals with facts. When you type
“Where was Madonna born” into Google, for example, the place
given is pulled from Google’s existing knowledge base. This
existing base, called Knowledge Graph, relies on crowdsourcing to
expand its information. But the firm noticed that growth was
stalling; humans could only
take it so far. So Google decided it needed to automate
the process. It started building the Vault by using an algorithm to
automatically pull in information from all over the web, using
machine learning to turn the raw data into usable pieces of
knowledge. Knowledge Vault has pulled in 1.6 billion facts to date.
Of these, 271 million are rated as “confident facts”, to which
Google’s model ascribes a more than 90 per cent chance of being
true. It does this by cross-referencing new facts with what it
already knows… Google’s Knowledge Graph is currently bigger than
the Knowledge Vault, but it only includes manually integrated sources
such as the CIA Factbook. Knowledge Vault offers Google fast,
automatic expansion of its knowledge – and it’s only going to get
bigger. As well as the ability to analyse text on a webpage for
facts to feed its knowledge base, Google can also peer under the
surface of the web, hunting for hidden sources of data such as the
figures that feed Amazon product pages, for example. Tom Austin, a
technology analyst at Gartner in Boston, says that the
world’s biggest technology companies are racing to build similar
vaults. “Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and IBM
are all building them, and they’re tackling these enormous problems
that we would never even have thought of trying 10 years ago,” he
says.”
Perspective
For
The First Time, More People Will Watch MLB.tv Streams On Devices Than
Desktops
On
August 26, 2002, Major League Baseball streamed its first live MLB.tv
video of a game to the web — a tiny, grainy little player that
looks laughable in comparison to today’s HD streams you hold in
your palm.
This
month, 12 years later, the MLB says that it projects that over 51
percent of its monthly live streams will be watched on ‘connected’
and mobile devices in August. It says that this is a first for any
live sports video product on the Internet.
The
future looks bright for my Computer Security students.
Global
Cybersecurity Spending to Reach $76.9 Billion in 2015: Gartner
As
organizations worldwide become more and more aware of the risks posed
by the lack of protection against cyber threats, information security
spending will continue to increase, Gartner forecasts.
According
to the IT research and advisory firm, global IT security spending
will reach $71.1 billion this year, which represents an increase of
7.9% compared to 2013. Next year, spending will grow even more,
reaching $76.9 billion.
The
use of security solutions will be driven in the next couple of years
by the rapid adoption of mobile, cloud, social and information
technologies, which often interact with each other, Gartner
said.
(Related)
The same for my Data Analysis students. Perhaps our students could
volunteer at some of these nonprofits as interns?
Recruiting
Data Scientists to Do Social Good
We
know that data scientists are a
hot commodity. Businesses
can’t get enough of them. That’s great for tech
companies that attract talent with stock and benefits, but less so
for social initiatives and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who
could use their talent too. Short of asking nonprofits to drain
their coffers to make expensive hires, can we find a way to staff
their projects? I think so, if we can create a better mechanism to
connect people to opportunities.
The
going rate for data scientists has obviously soared.
It's
not that strange. For years I have been explaining fractions using
pizza.
Proper
Punctuation Explained With Bacon
…
So how can you learn to use punctuation marks properly without
making dumb
grammar mistakes? Simple. Bacon is the answer.
Always
interesting to see how they plan to “solve” education.
How
Computer Technology Will Transform Schools Of The Future
In
the 1800′s, students sat in a classroom, listened to a teacher and
took tests. In 2014, students do exactly the same thing, with maybe
the addition of a pocket calculator and some slides.
Nearly
every other industry has been changed beyond recognition by the
invention of computers. Why not education, arguably one of the
industries with the most to gain?
…
Today, we’re going to be talking about the five biggest ideas that
are going to change education more than you’d believe.
(Related)
Clever, but very tricky.
Digital
textbooks adapt to your level as you learn
…
"We want to be able to create the perfect book for every
person," says Richard
Baraniuk, director of the OpenStax project at Houston's Rice
University, which is behind the books. "Ultimately, we want a
system that turns reading the book into an exploration of knowledge."
OpenStax
already offers an array of online and printed textbooks on subjects
including economics, biology and history. For the past three years,
researchers have tracked how students in 12 US schools use the books
in their studies, including information on how they scored on
questions.
That
work is now being used to train machine-learning algorithms that give
OpenStax's biology and physics textbooks the ability to adapt to
individuals. If a reader seems to be struggling with a particular
topic – acceleration, say – the book will slot in additional
explanations and practice questions, and increase emphasis on related
subjects, such as centripetal force, that could otherwise trip that
person up.
…
Salt
Lake Community College, which has more than 60,000 students and
is the largest higher-education institution in Utah, wants to pilot
OpenStax's algorithm-enhanced textbooks next year in political
science, business and mathematics classes. Jason Pickavance,
director of educational initiatives at the college, says he is
curious to see whether the books improve student performance.
…
Whether the books are successful will depend on teachers, says Ben
du Boulay, who works on artificial intelligence at the University
of Sussex, UK. They are the ones who will ensure that students make
the most of their books – for instance, by working out what to do
when the books identify a common problem area among their students.
I
post this for my female students with absolutely no comment.
Women
Surpass Men as Kickstarter Fundraisers
Women
may be heavily underrepresented in the start-up world, but they’re
doing well on Kickstarter. In one study, two-thirds
of technology ventures led by women reached their fundraising goals
on the crowdfunding site, compared with 30% of those
led by men, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Female-founded start-ups attract support from women who are activists
and want to help other women, the researchers say.
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