It might be interesting to explore some of the
reasons the FBI can't get to these guys before the deadline. Not in
the US shouldn't be a major stumbling block. Are they being
protected?
… More than 100 companies, including targets
from big banks to brokerages in the financial sector, have received
distributed denial of service threats since about April, says Richard
Jacobs, assistant special agency in charge of the cyber branch at the
FBI’s New York office. With these types of attacks, known as DDoS,
criminals jam websites by flooding them with useless traffic.
The ransom requests typically run in the tens of
thousands of dollars and in some cases, the companies have paid up,
Jacobs said. If firms have already traced the ultimatums to identify
likely culprits, they can determine whether those criminals have
historically followed through with threats or backed off if a target
doesn’t pay up. In some cases, when companies fork over cash, they
end up facing further attacks because they proved they’re willing
to engage.
… A distributed denial of service outage could
mean losses of more than $100,000 an hour for financial companies,
according to Neustar, a Sterling, Va.-based information services and
analytics company.
Banks faced an onslaught of DDoS attacks in 2012
and 2013. Last year, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination
Council, which includes five U.S. banking regulators, issued
a six-step requirement that institutions must follow to fight
these cyberattacks, including monitoring Internet traffic to detect
assaults and building incident-response plans to communicate with the
sector, Internet providers and customers.
Why is it taking so long?
United
Airlines Hack Highlights Need for Improved Information Sharing
The
same cyber-attackers who breached the Office of Personnel Management
and healthcare giant Anthem
appear to have also stolen flight manifests containing passenger
information from United Airlines earlier this year, according to
reports.
Sharing
details of the breach would help other organizations identify if they
have also been targeted by this group, security experts said.
"It
would be naive to think that we have found the only three
compromised," Paul Kurtz, former cybersecurity advisor to the
White House and current CEO of TruSTAR Technology, told SecurityWeek.
The
airline detected the attack in May or early June, but there are signs
the attackers were in the networks as far back as April 2014,
Bloomberg reported
Wednesday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the investigation.
The system outages which grounded flights for two hours in early July
were not related to this attack, according to the report.
United
Airlines has yet to confirm the breach, and says the report is based
on speculation.
This will be a blast to hack! Change “No
Parking Any Time” to “Free Parking Today,” then change it back.
He He He.
In some respects, E Ink displays are a bit of a
marvel, with their low power consumption, easy readability, and
minimal glare making them both sustainable and practical. No wonder,
then, that the Australian Road and Maritime Services (RMS) has
decided to try out the technology in a new domain: the world
of signage.
Perspective. Not what I would have thought.
Google and Facebook are the only two major social
media, retail or casino companies that the Government Accountability
Office could identify as using facial recognition technology in a new
report.
… Both companies, which were not explicitly
named in the report
released Thursday, told GAO investigators that neither had any plans
to share their facial recognition data with a third-party without
user consent.
… Six other unnamed social media companies
said they do not employ the technology. The five largest retail
stores and the four largest casinos did not mention facial
recognition in their privacy policies either. But the GAO said that
does not necessarily mean the companies do not employ the technology.
The National Retail Federation told investigators that its members'
privacy policies are "written broadly enough" to address
the technology.
No federal laws explicitly govern the use of
facial recognition technology, but the GAO found that the Federal
Trade Commission might have some limited power if the technology
violated a privacy policy or caused consumers substantial injury.
The report also highlighted some laws that could cover the sharing
and distribution of data collected.
Good news and bad news for Microsoft?
(Related) Is there no one at Microsoft to whom
this sounds familiar?
Firefox
cubs HATE Microsoft and Windows 10 -- déjà vu!
Firefox
head honcho castigates Microsoft chief:
Chris Beard, the Mozilla CEO is lambasting his opposite number at
Microsoft for Windows 10's inability to remember browser choice
settings.
His complaint centers
around the user experience upgrading to the new OS. It appears that
Satya's crew decided -- in their infinite wisdom -- that all users
should have the new Edge browser as their default.
I would not have been surprised if the US had paid
France for these carriers. Will China still buy them if their
economy is in the tank?
Russia says
it's getting a refund for the warships France won't hand over to them
Russia's order of two Mistral helicopter carrier
ships has been a constant headache for the French government.
The sale of the ships was agreed in 2010, then put
on hold in 2014 when Russian military forces annexed Crimea, which
had until then been a part of Ukraine.
… Now Vladimir Kozhin, one of Putin's aides,
says that Russia and France have agreed a refund for the ships,
according
to AP.
Nothing's yet come from the French side to suggest
that a refund is coming yet, and no figure has been released.
Hollande
confirmed in April that if the ships weren't supplied, there
would be some sort of refund.
A month later a report suggested that France
could sell the warships to China instead.
At last! Someone needs to tell the French they
are not a global power.
Google to
defy French 'right to be forgotten' ruling
Last month, the French privacy watchdog, CNIL,
ordered the firm to extend people's right to have posts removed from
its websites worldwide, including Google.com.
Google
said it "respectfully" disagreed with
CNIL's authority to make such an order.
... Google is believed to have processed more
than one million requests to remove data since the ruling came into
effect. It reviews all requests and refuses those it judges have no
merit.
However, those that are deleted are removed on its
European websites such as Google.de or Google.fr. They are not
removed from Google.com.
The company points out that more than 95% of
searches in Europe are made on the firm's local websites.
Google is launching balloons in Sri Lanka,
Facebook will have drones. Big ones, from the pictures.
Behind the
scenes with Facebook's new solar-powered Internet drone and laser
technology
Interesting article. If it works in emerging
nations, why is it ignored here?
How
Innovation Is Helping Emerging Multinationals to Race Ahead
… Increasingly, companies from developing
countries such as Brazil, India, China and Mexico are becoming global
leaders and eclipsing familiar brands in the developed world. Take
Alibaba, the e-commerce giant from China. It has a market value
greater than Yahoo, Netflix, eBay, Yelp, LinkedIn, Twitter and
Groupon put together. Alibaba’s cloud service Aliyun is
giving Amazon Web Services a run for its money. South Korea’s
Samsung is the world’s largest consumer electronics firm,
outselling Sony, Panasonic and Philips. Bimbo of Mexico is
the largest bakery company; in 2010, Bimbo purchased Sara Lee’s
North American bakery business. And on this year’s Forbes
Global 2000 list, although the U.S. still claims the maximum spots,
the top four are occupied by Chinese banking firms.
Perspective. The “gig economy” seems to pay
off.
Uber to
plough $1bn into India investment drive
Uber is set to plough $1bn into a major expansion
in India, placing its investment in the country on a par with China
and signalling an escalation of its rivalry with domestic
ride-sharing Ola.
… In June, it was revealed that Uber
planned to spend $1bn in China in 2015 to catch up with Didi
Kuaidi, the market leader backed by internet groups Alibaba and
Tencent. At the time, Uber's Chinese drivers were making close to 1m
daily trips, a far higher level than most analysts expected.
Tools for my student researchers.
The
Powerful Benefits of Web Annotations for Research & Recall
… Taking
notes has long been a widely embraced way of improving your
retention of information — it’s one of the reasons why we take
notes during class and meetings. Not only does the act of taking
notes better embed the information in your brain, but reviewing those
annotations later can be helpful in a number of ways.
Find something useful here...
Best of the
Web - Summer 2015 Update
On Wednesday morning in Mooresville, North
Carolina I presented an updated version of my popular best of the web
slides. Those slides are embedded below. I try to provide something
for everyone in the slides.
I can use this one right now.
Vibby -
Break YouTube Videos Into Segments With Commentary
Vibby
is a new service for breaking YouTube videos into segments and
inserting comments into those segments. To segment a YouTube video
on Vibby simply grab the URL for the video and paste into the Vibby
editor. Once inserted into Vibby you can highlight a segment on the
video timeline. Vibby then play only the sections you've
highlighted. Click on a highlighted section to add a comment to it.
Videos edited through Vibby can be shared via email, social media, or
embedded into a blog or website.
Vibby
could be a good tool to use when you want to share with your students
just a few pieces of a larger video. Using the comments in
highlighted sections could be a good way to call attention to
important parts of a video or to add further explanation to a
section.
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