What information would you provide in order to
enter a lottery? Name, address, email or phone. Probably not credit
card or bank data. 23 billion won is about $20 million so roughly a
buck a record.
South Korea has had some major breaches involving
consumer information that I’ve reported on over the past years.
Here’s a report from Yonhap News that
mentions a breach I seem to have missed, though:
In February, Homeplus Co., the South Korean unit of British retail giant Tesco PLC, was also indicted on charges of illegally selling the personal data of 24 million customers to insurance firms for a total of 23 billion won.
Most of the information was collected under the guise of conducting a lottery for free gifts.
Homeplus chief Do Sung-hwan, five other former and current company executives and employees as well as two officials from the insurance companies have also been indicted over their involvement in the case.
This may actually fall more under privacy breach
than data breach, but I thought I would mention it here.
These are not my hackers. Perhaps they mean
teenagers caught hacking into the school computer to change grades.
Real hackers can afford better lawyers.
Ed Pilkington reports:
The underground world of computer hackers has been so thoroughly infiltrated in the US by the FBI and secret service that it is now riddled with paranoia and mistrust, with an estimated one in four hackers secretly informing on their peers, a Guardian investigation has established.
Cyber policing units have had such success in forcing online criminals to co-operate with their investigations through the threat of long prison sentences that they have managed to create an army of informants deep inside the hacking community.
[…]
Lulz Security shares qualities with the hacktivist group Anonymous that has launched attacks against companies including Visa and MasterCard as a protest against their decision to block donations to WikiLeaks. While Lulz Security is so recent a phenomenon that the FBI has yet to get a handle on it, Anonymous is already under pressure from the agency. There were raids on 40 addresses in the US and five in the UK in January, and a grand jury has been hearing evidence against the group in California at the start of a possible federal prosecution.
Read more on The
Guardian.
As you might suppose, there are significant
differences. We're not getting the word out people! Worth reading
the paper.
White Paper
– Comparing Expert and Non-Expert Security Practices
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jul 23, 2015
Google
Online Security Blog: “Today, you can find more online
security tips in a few seconds than you could use in a lifetime.
While this collection of best practices is rich, it’s not always
useful; it can be difficult to know which ones to prioritize, and
why. Questions like ‘Why do people make some security choices (and
not others)?’ and ‘How effectively does the security community
communicate its best practices?’ are at the heart of a new paper
called, “…no
one can hack my mind”: Comparing Expert and Non-Expert Security
Practices” that we’ll present this week at the
Symposium
on Usable Privacy and Security. This paper outlines the results
of two surveys—one with 231 security experts, and another with 294
web-users who aren’t security experts—in which we asked both
groups what they do to stay safe online. We wanted to compare and
contrast responses from the two groups, and better understand
differences and why they may exist.”
Mining Big Data for the “old people” gene? I
assume they will find correlations in the geography, probable diet,
mobility (healthy people migrate, the unhealthy do not) and who knows
what else.
Google bio
tech firm will mine Ancestry.com data for longevity gene
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jul 23, 2015
Via Calico:
” AncestryDNA,
an industry leader in consumer genetics, and Calico, a company
focused on longevity research and therapeutics, today announced an
effort to investigate human heredity of lifespan. Together, they
will evaluate anonymized data from millions of public family trees
and a growing database of over one million genetic samples.
Financial terms have not been disclose AncestryDNA and Calico will
work together to analyze and investigate the role of genetics and its
influences in families experiencing unusual longevity using
Ancestry’s proprietary databases, tools and algorithms. Calico
will then focus its efforts to develop and commercialize any
potential therapeutics that emerge from the analysis. “On the
heels of our AncestryHealth launch and our one million genotyped
customers milestone for AncestryDNA, we’re excited to announce this
collaboration with Calico to research and develop life changing
solutions,” said Ken Chahine, Executive Vice President and Head of
DNA and Health. “We have laid the groundwork for this effort
through the combination of an unmatched family history database, one
of the fastest growing genetic databases, and a strong and talented
team of computer scientists and professional genealogists.”
AncestryDNA can provide access to a unique combination of resources
that will enable Calico to develop potentially groundbreaking
therapeutic solutions. The extensive research period will identify
common patterns in longevity and human heredity through pedigree
data.”
Perspective. The Intelligence game is changing.
Nothing new there. Consider too that as information leaks,
disinformation can be pushed along the same channels.
The following post is a preview of a new
paper from New America’s Cybersecurity
Initiative, where the author is a fellow.
The nature of secrets is changing. The “half-life
of secrets” is declining sharply for many intelligence activities
as secrets that in the past may have been kept successfully for 25
years or more, are now exposed well before.
(Related) Flush out them thar secrets!
Ten
standards for oversight and transparency of national intelligence
services: custodiet ipsos custodes
On July 23rd 2015, legal scholars from the
Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam —
Sarah Eskens, Ot van Daalen and Nico van Eijk — published a report
(.pdf, in English) entitled “Ten standards for oversight and
transparency of national intelligence services”. The proposed
standards are substantiated by, among others, analysis of CJEU
jurisprudence.
For my entrepreneurial students with “Big Data”
aspirations. (1000 gigabytes to the terabyte, 1 million gigabytes to
the petabyte, so at $0.01 per gigabyte 100 petabytes of storage would
cost: $0.01 times 100 million = $1,000,000 per month)
Google's
Cloud Storage Nearline is now available to the general public. The
company has announced that the service, which offers low-cost premium
archiving and backing up of data, has moved out of beta. In order to
entice users, Google is offering storage of 100PB of space for free.
Released as a beta in March, Cloud Storage
Nearline is aimed at data-heavy businesses that need fast retrieval
of data. The service competes with Dropbox, Amazon's Glacier, Box,
and OneDrive among others. Unlike its competitors that take hours
for handling such voluminous data, Google says that Nearline could do
it in seconds and minutes.
Discussing Nearline's other features, Google
promises 99 percent uptime, on demand I/O operations, and lifecycle
management - consisting of features such as automated archival and
scheduled deletions. And, of course, there is the 100PB
free of storage for up to six months. Afterwards, users
will have to pay $0.01 per GB every month.
… To help users jump the boat, Nearline's
Cloud Storage Transfer feature allows one to import large amount of
data from HTTP/HTTPS services such as Amazon S3. Speaking of Amazon,
Google is also offering a total cost of ownership calculator to let
users know how much they will be saving by switching from Amazon Web
Services.
Something to motivate my students. (Remember to
cut your old professor in for 1%)
Amazon Has
Surpassed Walmart in Market Cap After Stock Rally
Amazon (AMZN) just surpassed Walmart in market
capitalization. Wall Street loved Amazon's surprise profit so much
that they bought up the stock after hours, sending it to an a gain of
18%. The stock rally puts Amazon's value at $262 billion, more than
the $233 billion of Walmart. Amazon
CEO Jeff Bezos became $7 billion dollars richer in less than an hour
of extended trading. While Amazon has surpassed Walmart
in terms of the value of the company in the eyes of investors, its
annual sales still fall far short of those of Walmart. Amazon
revenue in the past 12 months is $95.8 billion, which is a 5th of
Walmart's $485 billion. But the 21 year old Amazon is growing and
that is what what investors are buying and paying up for. One
big contributor to Amazon's profit was web services, the cloud
computing division whose numbers were broken out for the
first time. Amazon stock is up 25% in the past 3 months.
Perspective.
YouTube
just launched a redesigned app and shared even more growth stats
YouTube just released a
big update to its mobile app that adds video editing tools and
makes it easier to keep track of channels you subscribe to.
…
YouTube was the star of Google's
blockbuster earnings last week too. The company cited YouTube
revenue growth as a factor behind the strong quarter and revealed
that the
average YouTube viewing session on mobile now lasts a stunning 40
minutes.
We're going to make a series of short videos on a
variety of IT topics. This could be interesting.
Frequently
Overlooked Useful YouTube Features - A PDF Handout
One of the webinars that I did yesterday for
Simple K12 was about useful YouTube features for teachers and
students. If you couldn't attend the webinar you can still get the
handout that I shared during the webinar. 8
Overlooked Useful YouTube Tools is embedded below as a PDF. You
can also click
here to grab it from Box.com.
Towards a Star Trek tricorder.
A Search
Engine, but Not on the Internet
An Israeli company wants to build molecular
spectroscopy into a smartphone so people can count calories, identify
pills, and find out more about objects than can be seen by the human
eye.
… The SCIO, the handheld spectrometer that
Consumer Physics has produced,
first showed up in a Kickstarter video last year, where its
creators promised a machine that could tell you “which watermelon
is sweeter, when is that avocado going to ripen, how many calories,
carbs or proteins are in that shake, how your plants are doing” and
more. “Imagine if there was a way to know the chemical makeup of
everything you come in contact with,” the narrator says. “The
applications are endless.”
The public apparently agreed. The company reached
its $200,000 goal within 24 hours. By the end of the month, the
campaign raised more than $2.75 million.
Teaching tools
Collect
Names on Image-based Riddle Quizzes
Riddle
is a nice quiz creation service that launched back in May of this
year. Since its launch the developers have steadily added new
features. The latest update introduced the option to collect the
names and email addresses of people who complete one of your Riddle
quizzes.
Riddle
quizzes and surveys can be image-based or simply text-based. You can
add links to your Riddle quizzes and surveys. Those links could be
to sources of information, to videos, or to an online audio recording
like those you can find on SoundCloud. In the video embedded below I
provide a demonstration of how to use Riddle to create a quiz.
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