Thursday, September 04, 2014


“I double dog dare you to do anything about it!” Vladimir Putin. Russia sends in the army and we send politicians to play golf and talk about it?
NATO chief, at summit, says Russia attacking Ukraine
NATO's top official accused Moscow outright on Thursday of attacking Ukraine as allied leaders gathered for a summit to buttress support for Kiev and bolster defenses against a Russia they now see as hostile for the first time since the Cold War.
U.S. President Barack Obama and his 27 allies meeting at a golf resort in Wales will also discuss how to tackle the Islamic State straddling parts of Iraq and Syria, which has emerged as a new threat on the alliance's southern flank, and how to stabilize Afghanistan when NATO forces leave at year's end.


How big is this breach? Stay tuned.
Brian Krebs reports:
New data gathered from the cybercrime underground suggests that the apparent credit and debit card breach at Home Depot involves nearly all of the company’s stores across the nation.
Read more on KrebsOnSecurity.com.


Apparently my (mostly male) Ethical Hackers are carefully studying these photos too.
Analysis Of Kate Upton Photos Shows Hackers May Have A Backup Of Her Entire iPhone
It just got even worse for the 101 celebrities whose naked photos were hacked from their iCloud accounts: An analysis of the metadata on Kate Upton's photos showed that her account was hacked using a piece of software intended for law-enforcement agencies that downloads an entire backup copy of all the files on a target's iPhone.
The software is called EPPB, or Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker. [Available to anyone at http://www.elcomsoft.com/eppb.html Bob] It is intended for police departments and government agencies that want to "rip" entire copies of iPhones for evidence. We first saw the story on 9to5Mac, but the full account is on Wired. Here's the key section:
If a hacker can obtain a user’s iCloud username and password with iBrute, he or she can log in to the victim’s iCloud.com account to steal photos. But if attackers instead impersonate the user’s device with Elcomsoft’s tool, the desktop application allows them to download the entire iPhone or iPad backup as a single folder, says Jonathan Zdziarski, a forensics consult and security researcher. That gives the intruders access to far more data, he says, including videos, application data, contacts, and text messages.

(Related) Just in case...
How To Delete Your Own Nude Photos From Apple's iCloud: A Step-By-Step Guide


For my Computer Security students.
Hack Your API First – learn how to identify vulnerabilities in today’s internet connected devices with Pluralsight
A few years ago I was taking a look at the inner workings of some mobile apps on my phone. I wanted to see what sort of data they were sending around and as it turned out, some of it was just not the sort of data that should ever be traversing the interwebs in the way it was. In particular, the Westfield iPhone app to find your car caught my eye. A matter of minutes later I had thousands of numberplates for the vehicles in the shopping centre simply by watching how this app talked over the internet:

(Related) Things for your Internet. (Is this really the best we can do?)
5 Smart Home Appliances You Should Be Buying


Just knowing you communicated with a doctor tells me a lot.
Nadia Kayyali writes:
Turns out, the DEA and FBI may know what medical conditions you have, whether you are having an affair, where you were last night, and more—all without any knowing that you have ever broken a law.
That’s because the DEA and FBI, as part of over 1000 analysts at 23 U.S. intelligence agencies, have the ability to peer over the NSA’s shoulder and see much of the NSA’s metadata with ICREACH. Metadata is transactional data about communications, such as numbers dialed, email addresses sent to, and duration of phone calls, and it can be incredibly revealing. ICREACH, exposed by a release of Snowden documents in The Intercept, is a system that enables sharing of metadata by “provid[ing] analysts with the ability to perform a one-stop search of information from a wide variety of separate databases.” It’s the latest in a string of documents that demonstrate how little the intelligence community distinguishes between counter-terrorism and ordinary crime—and just how close to home surveillance may really be.
Read more on EFF.


Perspective.
NFL exec: 70% of fans use a second screen while watching football
… Twitter CEO Dick Costolo … noted how the NFL is “hugely important” for Twitter. “You can literally see the spikes in tweet traffic that are perfectly coordinated with interesting moments in the game,” he said.
… Much of Wednesday’s event focused on NFL Now, a new app from the league that is largely a video hub for all things NFL. Available as a free or paid app, NFL Now features instant highlights, behind-the-scenes content, historic NFL Films footage, and much more.
… Whether it’s NFL Now, the use of Microsoft Surface tablets on the sidelines, or RFID tags that will be embedded in player shoulder pads this season, it’s clear that the NFL trying to keep up with the times.


Perspective. Portables are getting cheap.
A Windows 8.1 Tablet For Just $119
If you desperately want a Windows 8.1 tablet but cannot afford the pricey Surface Pro 3, then the Encore Mini from Toshiba may fulfil your needs. This is a 7-inch Windows 8.1 tablet priced at just $119. A price which buys you a quad-core Intel Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage.
The Toshiba Encore Mini is set to start shipping on Sept. 17, and we can see these things flying off the shelves. Windows 8.1 may suck as a desktop operating system but it’s surprisingly good on tablets.

(Related) But this one is even cheaper!
Ikea Mocks Apple With BookBook Commercial
And finally, Ikea has mercilessly mocked Apple and its hyperbolic, hipsterish style of ads with a video introducing the 2015 catalog. This isn’t a book, it’s a bookbook. With eternal battery life, and no need for any cables, this is a mesmerizing product. Just don’t try playing Angry Birds on it, or you’ll be bitterly disappointed.


For my Data Analytics students. If at first you don't succeed...
Learn from Your Analytics Failures
By far, the safest prediction about the business future of predictive analytics is that more thought and effort will go into prediction than analytics. That’s bad news and worse management. Grasping the analytic “hows” and “whys” matters more than the promise of prediction.
In the good old days, of course, predictions were called forecasts and stodgy statisticians would torture their time series and/or molest multivariate analyses to get them. Today, brave new data scientists discipline k-means clusters and random graphs to proffer their predictions. Did I mention they have petabytes more data to play with and process?


For my website students?
Lifetime Membership To OSTraining For $79, Be An Expert Web Developer
… If you’re ever thinking of becoming a web developer (or if you already are), this is an essential skill. It’s really not that difficult to learn, especially with the right guidance. OSTraining provides just that, and lifetime access to their entire library of 1,800 tutorials is currently available at a whopping 96% discount.


Something for my upcoming spreadsheet class.
Turn a Set of Spreadsheet Cells Into Easy to Read Documents
Save As Doc is a free Google Spreadsheets Add-on that enables you to select a series of adjacent cells and turn them into an easy to read Google Document. The Save As Doc Add-on takes just a minute to install. Once installed select the Add-on from your "Add-on's" drop-down menu and click "start." After clicking "start" you can choose a set of cells or all cells to be converted into a Google Document. The document will appear in your Google Drive dashboard (it might take a minute or two to appear if you have selected a large set of cells) where you can then view it, edit it, or download it as a PDF.

No comments: