How
should I interpret this? Home Depot has no record of the
transactions involved? The breach is so big that it is easier to
assume the entire population was involved that to accurately
determine who was/was not involved? Neither Home Depot nor their
lawyers have any idea how to manage a breach?
This
just in:
Hogan
Lovells, attorneys for Home Depot, sent the New Hampshire Attorney
General a notification of the breach. Their letter, dated September
9, reiterates that they first learned of a possible breach on
September 2 and confirmed it on September 9.
Home
Depot still doesn’t have exact numbers, it seems. The letter says
that “At this time we cannot determine how many residents of the
state are affected.” Home Depot therefore notified
every New Hampshire resident who used a payment card in
their stores from April on, including an offer of free credit
monitoring services.
You
can read their notification
(pdf) with the attached notice to consumers.
Local!
Someone looking for a handy dumpster? Have these already been mined
for personal information?
Jaclyn
Allen reports that a passerby discovered boxes of folders with what
appeared to be mortgage information files:
The folders have one company in common, Colorado First
Commercial Mortgage, which has been out
of business in Colorado for more than a decade.
But
wait, there’s more, it seems. When the Sheriff’s office went to
investigate, they discovered dozens of more boxes in back of the same
complex.
Read
more on The
Denver Channel.
Ignorance
is... well, ignorance.
Dian
Schaffhauser reports:
Compared to parents in Malaysia, Poland and Italy, American parents
look like babes in the woods when it comes to awareness of in-school
data mining of their children’s information, including online
behavior and email habits. Whereas 75 percent of Malaysians, 71
percent of Poles and 70 percent of Italians are aware of the
practice, only 51 percent of parents in the United States know about
it. But once they do know
about it, more than nine out of 10 are “concerned or very concerned
about the practice” and more than four out of five say
they are likely to take action against the practice.
These results come from a set of surveys conducted by SafeGov.org
among parents worldwide to understand their views on the benefits and
risks of expanding in-school access to Internet applications such as
email, document creation and group collaboration. In the United
States, 540 people were surveyed online in August 2012 for a margin
of error of ±4.16. In other countries the surveys were done in 2013
and 2014 for a margin of error that ranged from ±4.33 to ±5.67.
Read
more on THE
Journal
Riiiiiight...
Apple
Won't Decrypt Your iPhone, Even if the Government Requests It
After
the recent leak of nude
celebrity photos, possibly due to an iCloud hack, it was
reasonable to expect Apple to react at its iPhone event. Not a word
was said about the incident during the event, but Tim Cook later said
the company is taking additional steps to protect its users' security
and privacy, and now, Apple is delivering on that promise.
We've
noticed yesterday that Apple had strengthened its iCloud
security with two-factor authentication; now, the company made
public its updated Privacy Policy on an entirely new
section of its website.
…
Finally, Cook claims Apple has "never worked with any
government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our
products or services." "We have also never allowed access
to our servers. And we never will," he writes.
The
wording of that last paragraph is particularly interesting; when
asked about its participation in NSA's PRISM program back in June
2013, Apple
said it does not give any government agency "direct access"
to its servers. "Any government agency requesting customer data
must get a court order," Apple said at the time.
Now,
Cook says flat out Apple has never allowed access to its servers —
direct or not — and court orders are not mentioned.
That
position is reiterated in a special section of Apple's new Privacy
page, called "Government
Information Requests". There, Apple goes a step further,
claiming it cannot decrypt a user's phone (if it's protected by a
passcode) even if a government requests it.
…
There's a catch, though: even if Apple is unable to hand over the
data from your phone, it can (and will, if asked via a court order)
hand over the data from your iTunes or iCloud account.
Because
only real 'Mericans should have guns. Not them thar A-rab-americans,
or them Mes-i-can-americans or anyone else what ain't us.
Kelly
Riddell reports:
The Obama administration quietly has been forcing new gun buyers to
declare their race and ethnicity, a policy change that critics say
provides little law enforcement value while creating the risk of
privacy intrusions and racial profiling.
With little fanfare, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives (ATF) in 2012 amended its Form 4473 — the transactional
record the government requires gun purchasers and sellers to fill out
when buying a firearm — to identify buyers as either Hispanic,
Latino or not. Then a buyer must check his or her race: Indian,
Asian, black, Pacific Islander or white.
Read
more on Washington
Times.
Well,
this should make a lot of heads explode – and put civil
libertarians and the NRA on the same side of an issue.
“...Then
we hit them with the “Your insurance is void” laser beam!”
New
Radar Gun to Help Police Detect Texting Drivers
…
A Virginia company is working on a device that detects the radio
signals sent out from a vehicle when someone inside is using a cell
phone.
The
technology is able to differentiate text messaging from phone calls.
Virginia law allows adults to talk on a cellphone while driving, but
not send text messages.
Tools
for self-surveillance.
iOS
8 Turns Your iPhone Into A Personal Healthcare Monitor
We
offer classes to fix that...
Workers
Don’t Have the Skills They Need – and They Know It
How
do workers feel about the adequacy of their skills? Until now, few
studies have examined their views. Today, a survey
of employees is being released that provides strong confirmation of
the notion that employees need better skills to do their jobs well,
especially skills related to technology.
…
The new survey, commissioned by Udemy,
a company that provides online training courses, sharply challenges
the view that the skills gap is a corporate fiction. Polling 1,000
randomly selected Americans between the ages of 18 and 65, the survey
found that 61% of employees also feel that there is a skills gap.
Specifically, 54% report that they do not already know everything
they need to know in order to do their current jobs. Moreover, about
one third of employees report that a lack of skills held them back
from making more money; a third also report that inadequate skills
caused them to miss a promotion or to not get a job.
The
most important skills that employees are missing are computer and
technical skills. Of those reporting that they needed
skills for their current job, 33% reported lacking technical skills,
including computer skills.
For
my Data Analytics students.
IBM's
Watson May Change the Face of Business Analytics
IBM
on Tuesday announced Watson Analytics, a natural language-based
cognitive service designed to provide businesses with instant access
to powerful predictive and visual analytics tools.
It
runs on desktop PCs and mobile devices.
Some
features will be offered to beta testers within 30 days. IBM later
this year will offer a variety of Watson Analytics freemium
and premium packages.
(Related)
Need I say more?
Algorithms
Make Better Predictions — Except When They Don’t
A
warning for my Math students?
People
Are More Selfish and Dishonest After Doing Math
Research
participants who had spent 15 minutes solving math problems were 4
times more likely to lie for personal gain in an ethics game
than those who had answered randomly selected verbal questions from a
standardized test, says a team led by Long Wang of the City
University of Hong Kong. The act of calculating appears to crowd out
people’s social and moral concerns, resulting in behavior that is
more self-interested and even immoral. Stimuli such as family photos
that prompt thoughts about social values appear to diminish these
negative effects, the researchers say.
Just
because...
No comments:
Post a Comment