Wednesday, October 22, 2014

China acts. The FBI makes speeches.
China suspected of cyberattack on Apple
The Chinese government could be behind a hack on Apple’s cloud storage service, just as the company launches its newest phone in China.
Over the weekend, many users in the country inadvertently began giving passwords and sensitive data to hackers that may be working for the Chinese government, security analysts said.
Analysts at GreatFire, a website that monitors blocked websites in China, reported that “Chinese authorities are now staging a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack on Apple’s iCloud,” referring to a type of cyberattack in which a hacker jumps in between a person and the website they are visiting, relaying messages back and forth but also picking up their data.
Responding to the attacks on Tuesday, Apple acknowledged the intrusions and unveiled a new guide for people to verify that they are securely connected to the iCloud storage service.


“How dare they study political misinformation! Why next they'll be calling us liars!”
Science Committee Chairman: NSF shouldn't study Twitter political discussion
House Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) on Tuesday blasted a research project funded by the National Science Foundation to study political messages on Twitter.
According to reports, the project, which is led by researchers at Indiana University, has received about $1 million in federal dollars to analyze "subversive propaganda" that leads to misinformation.


Apparently I'm more naïve about strip clubs than I thought. This “business” license looks suspiciously like a “license to strip.” I don' think the state needs to know your weight and eye color to license you to run a hot dog stand... Or am I wrong?
Melissa Santos reports:
A court hearing Thursday will pit Washington state’s Public Records Act against the free speech and privacy protections laid out in the U.S. Constitution.
U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Leighton could decide whether to allow Pierce County to release the business licenses of workers at a Parkland strip club — an action the employees say would violate their privacy and threaten their ability to continue working.
Read more on The News Tribune,
[From the article:
… Leighton granted a two-week temporary restraining order preventing the county from releasing the employees’ business licenses — which contain personal information such as their stage and legal names, birth dates, photos, weight and eye color — until after a court hearing Thursday.


For my Ethical Hackers (Who should have come up with this on their own!)
– generates a random fake name, address, username, password, and (usable) email address for use with online message boards, social media, or whatever else. fakena.me lets you save the random profile generated for 30 days so you can bookmark it and return. After 30 days, the profile is deleted. The idea is that, to improve online privacy, you should change your username and email address frequently.


Does this have implications for the music and movie industries? (Or do they view their products as “low end?”) I keep referring back to Baen Publishing (baen.com) which found that every book they make available for free increases their sales. Perhaps all it takes for a site to remove itself from “low end” is to specialize (in this case, SciFi) After all, it's your customers who classify you as “low end.”
Counterfeiting as a Form of Free Advertising
In a study of a 1995 surge in counterfeiting in the Chinese shoe market, Yi Qian of the University of British Columbia found that the entry of fakes had the effect of increasing sales of high-end authentic shoes by 63%. The arrival of counterfeits on the market affirmed the value of the brands in consumers’ minds and in many cases introduced the brands to new customers. At the low end, however, counterfeits merely ate into the brands’ sales.

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