This
reads like the DHS knew about the Cyberattack in December 2013
(Target) but no one figured out that it was software based until late
July 2014. I doubt that very much. What is really going on here?
Most
U.S. Businesses Don’t Know They Were Caught Up In Massive
Cyberattack
Is
your payment information safe? It’s hard to know, considering many
companies hit by the same cyberattack that
hit Target don’t even know it.
According
to a New York Times report published Friday, more than 1,000
businesses, including Supervalu
and United Postal
Service (UPS), were caught up in a breach affecting in-store cash
register systems. The Department of Homeland Security issued an
advisory that said millions of American payment cards have been
affected by the hack.
At
the end of July, the report says government agencies instructed
companies to check for “Backoff” malware, a type of infection
that occurs at the Point Of Sale. Since then seven companies have
told the government their systems were hacked, but the Times says the
Secret Service estimates more than 1,000 have not checked or stepped
forward. Government agencies have instructed companies to search for
the “Backoff” malware on their systems or enlist the help of
antivirus companies.
[From
the DHA notice:
…
One particular family of malware, which was detected in October 2013
and was not recognized by antivirus software solutions until August
2014, has likely infected many victims who are unaware that they have
been compromised.
Are
hackers getting better or is it just better reporting?
Wow.
At first I thought WantChinaTimes was just rehashing older
news, but they’re not. They
report:
South Korean authorities have unveiled a massive leak of personal
information related to more
than 70% of the population aged between 15 and 65 in the
country. A hacker from China is one of the perpetrators, reports
Duowei News, a news website operated by overseas Chinese.
The main perpetrator, last name Kim, was arrested along with over a
dozen others for stealing and selling over 220 million items of
personal information from 27 million South Koreans aged between 15
and 65, which accounts for about 72% of that demographic range,
according to the South Jeolla Provincial Police Agency on Aug. 21.
The information had been stolen through hacking registrations on
websites for online games, movie ticketing and ring tone downloads.
A registration on any one of the websites can be used to trace
registrations for the same person from other online service
providers, the police said.
Read
more on WantChinaTimes.com.
Kim
Bong-Moon of Korea JoongAng Daily reports
that 16 were arrested, and adds some details:
According to police, Kim reportedly received 220 million personal
information items, including the names, resident registration
numbers, account names and passwords, of the 27 million people from a
Chinese hacker he met in an online game in 2011.
The police suspect he used the personal information to steal online
game currency by using a hacking tool known as an “extractor,”
which automatically logs on to a user’s accounts once the login and
password are entered. He is also thought to have sold those cyber
items for profit.
When passwords he received were wrong, he allegedly bought the
personal information on the identification cards and their issue
dates from a cellphone retailer in Daegu to change the passwords
himself.
Fuel
for debate? (No answers in this video)
Is
Technology Shifting Our Moral Compass?
At
this year's Aspen
Ideas Festival, we asked a group of experts what new technologies
like self-driving cars and drones might mean for our collective
conscience. "When a technology first comes into the
marketplace, there are always unintended consequences," says
Ping Fu, chief strategy
officer for 3D Systems.
I
suspect the same things apply here.
OTTAWA,
August 21, 2014 –
Understanding a website’s privacy practices should not require a
law degree or time-consuming search for relevant information, says
Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien. Online privacy
transparency has emerged as a significant concern and is among the
key issues highlighted in the Commissioner’s 2013
Annual Report to Parliament on the Personal
Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act,
Canada’s federal private sector privacy law.
Big Brother fights terrorists!
Paul
Ciocoiu reports:
The Romanian parliament passed a new law in June that makes it
obligatory for all users of pre-paid SIM cards to register them, but
the move designed to thwart terrorists has sparked an ongoing debate
about whether the measure encroaches on the citizens’ right to
privacy.
Read
more on Southeast
European Times
Russia
demonstrates that they can cross the boarder whenever they want and
do whatever they want in the Ukraine. Next week they may send in
40,000 AK47 carrying “vacationers” and Europe and the US will do
nothing.
Truck
Convoy Returns to Russia From Ukraine
The huge convoy of Russian trucks that entered war-torn eastern
Ukraine on Friday, sharply escalating tensions, returned to Russian
on Saturday after unloading food and medicine in the city of Luhansk,
and the Russian government quickly declared its satisfaction with the
operation.
Russia’s
decision to send the convoy across the border without an escort by
the International Red Cross or final clearance from the Ukrainian
government in Kiev, had
drawn harsh criticism. President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine
called it a “flagrant violation of international law.” Another
senior Ukrainian official denounced it as a “direct invasion.”
And NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasumussen in a statement
condemning the convoy’s entry, said it coincided with a “major
escalation in Russian military involvement in eastern Ukraine.”
This
could be very dangerous in the hands of anyone who dies not have a
limitless budget.
Is
the Future of Shopping No Shopping at All?
In a
survey on what he terms "predictive shopping," Harvard Law
professor Cass Sustein found that 41% of people would "enroll in
a program in which the seller sent you books that it knew you would
purchase, and billed your credit card." That number went down
to 29% if the company didn't ask for your consent first.
But
what if the products and services were different, like a sensor that
knew you were almost out of dish detergent? Without consent, were
people willing to have a company charge their account and send them
more detergent? Most people (61%) weren't. But the results were a
bit more interesting when Sustein did a similar survey among
university students. While most still weren't into being charged
automatically for books they might like, "69% approved of
automatic purchases by the home monitor, even without consent."
The professor posits that "among younger people, enthusiasm is
growing for predictive shopping, especially for routine goods where
shopping is an annoyance and a distraction."
We
called them model airplanes and built them of balsa wood when I was a
kid (shortly after the Wright brothers showed us how).
Drone-Rule
Uproar Shows Hurdles to U.S. Commercial Rules
Hobbyists
who’ve been flying unmanned airplanes and helicopters for decades
asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
(1002L:US)
yesterday to block what they see as new restrictions imposed in June
on the recreational flights.
Separate
appeals were filed in the court by a drone investment group,
Washington-based UAS America Fund LLC, and universities seeking
broader access to unmanned aircraft for research.
Is
there no justice? Where is the lawyer for the monkey?
Monkey
selfie can’t be copyrighted: US regulator
WASHINGTON:
US regulators have ruled in effect that the now infamous 'selfie'
taken by a monkey that swiped a photographer's camera cannot be
copyrighted — because it wasn't taken through a creative,
self-aware process. In other words, it was more on account of an
accident than smart thinking by the monkey or the photographer.
Does
this suggest some business model that reviews/suggests Apps for
specific groups of people? Like “Apps for Lawyers” or “Apps
for students?”
Most
U.S. smartphone owners don't give a fig about downloading new apps:
ComScore
When
it comes to apps, it seems people are as adventurous as 80-year old
grandmas.
There
are billions of apps out there (1.2 billion in the App Store and 1.3
billion in the Play Store), however, users have mostly shunned new
apps and have stuck with ones they've already downloaded.
According
to data from research firm ComScore, 65.5 percent of American
smartphone users neglected to download a single app in a typical
month. In its latest mobile app report,
the company said that most of the remaining users that committed to a
download only took in one or two apps. Only a small fraction of
smartphone owners in the United States downloaded more than four apps
per month.
Every
week I find amusement.
…
The US
Department of Education
has given states a “reprieve”
on using standardized
tests to evaluate
teachers’
performance.
['cause we were
never serious about that. Bob]
…
The ACLU
has filed
a complaint over the Mendon-Upton School District’s iPad
policies. The district allows low income students (those who are
eligible for free or reduced lunches) to take their school-issued
iPads home; others cannot.
…
Coursera
and the Carlos Slim
Foundation have
partnered to launch Acceso
Latino: “a free website created to provide U.S. Latinos easy
access to tools and content about education, healthcare, job
training, culture and more. This site will serve as a valuable
resource to help
Latinos succeed in the
United States.”
…
Online preschool,
I kid you not.
…
Compton Unified District
school police are now authorized
to carry semi-automatic
AR–15 assault rifles.
…
Students
in Dubuque
Community School District
will have to wear heart
monitors
in gym class.
“The results will be transferred to an iPad and projected onto a
big screen in the gym.” The data will be used to as part of a
student’s grade. WTF. Who owns that data?
…
Northern Illinois
University will
restrict
access to "political content,"
Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and
Foursquare via dorm WiFi.
…
68%
of Americans think it should be a crime for children under age 9
to play in a park
unsupervised.
Cheap
and free Apps
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/save-double-dragon-r-type-retro-classics-plus-free-star-trek-ios-sales/
Save
On Double Dragon, R.Type & More Retro Classics, Plus Free Star
Trek [iOS Sales]
For the student Book Club. (SciFI is good!)
The Hugo Awards
For
my students. How would you use Watson? Teacher/tutor?
Remember
when IBM’s “Watson” computer competed on the TV game show
“Jeopardy”
and won?
…
IBM, a company with a long and successful tradition of
internally-focused R&D activities, is adapting to this new world
of creating platforms
and enabling open
innovation. Case in point, rather than keep Watson locked up in
their research labs, they decided to release it to the world as a
platform, to run experiments with a variety of organizations to
accelerate development of natural language applications and services.
In January 2014 IBM announced they were spending $1 billion to
launch the Watson
Group, including a $100 million venture fund to support start-ups
and businesses that are building Watson-powered apps using the
“Watson
Developers Cloud.” More than 2,500 developers and start-ups
have reached out to the IBM Watson Group since the Watson Developers
Cloud was launched in November 2013.
So
we should stop teaching and start training? How about if we teach
the trainers?
It's
Not a Skills Gap: U.S. Workers Are Overqualified, Undertrained
…
Something is clearly broken in the labor market. The problem may
not be the skills workers ostensibly lack. It may be that employers’
expectations are out of whack. That’s the premise of a paper
by Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the Wharton School. For
much of the twentieth century, it was up to industry to pluck smart,
capable college graduates and turn them into quality workers. In
recent decades, on-the-job training has declined. Companies want new
hires to be able to “hit the ground running.”
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