Any publicity is good publicity? Can you trust
any of this?
Ashley
Madison Claims 'Hundreds of Thousands' of New Users Have Created
Accounts in the Last Week
Extramarital affair dating site Ashley Madison's
identity was based on its ability to facilitate private, discreet
affairs.
Considering recent events – in which hackers
exposed the personal information and account details of more than 33
million of its members – you'd think it may be time for the company
to throw in the towel.
Instead, Ashley Madison just came out swinging.
In a new blog
post, the company suggests that in contrast to reports that the
hack attack has crushed its business, things are actually going
swimmingly.
"Despite having our business and customers
attacked, we are growing," the post reads. "This past week
alone, hundreds of thousands of new users signed up for the Ashley
Madison platform – including 87,596 women."
The company also refuted reports that the leaked
data revealed Ashley Madison's user base contained almost no real
women
Perspective.
Data
Breaches by the Numbers
… The
Privacy
Rights Clearinghouse has maintained an easily searchable database
of breaches from 2005 to the present, allowing us to easily track the
rise and fall of data breaches.
… The
data is clear and powerful. First, based on the number of records
compromised, breaches are on the rise. In security circles, 2014 was
known colloquially as “the year of the breach.” However, 2015
almost doubled the 2014 tally of breached records, and has done so in
the first eight months.
Digging
deeper, we can see the source of these breaches. The first thing
that stands out is that external hacking is far and away the leading
source of breaches, and the percentage is growing. In 2013, external
hacking accounted for 83.77 percent of the total records that were
compromised. In 2014, that percentage jumped to 98.73 percent. So
far in 2015, the percentage continued its rise to 99.99 percent.
Grounding
the pendulum of rulings?
EFF amicus
brief in SCOTUS case on seizure of historical cell site records from
a cell phone provider
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Aug 31, 2015
EFF
– “Americans have the right to expect that digital records of
their daily travels—when they left home, where they went, and how
long they stayed—is private information, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation (EFF) said in an amicus
brief filed with the Supreme Court of the United States.
Weighing in on one of the most important digital privacy rights cases
of the year, EFF is asking the court to hear arguments in Davis
v. U.S., a federal criminal case from Florida that examines
whether police need a search warrant to obtain historical cell site
location information (CSLI). These records show law enforcement
which cell phone towers your phone has connected to in the past. In
this case, police obtained 67 days of records about defendant
Quartavious Davis without a warrant and used them to implicate him in
various robberies. In the brief filed Monday, EFF and other advocacy
groups argue that the
ubiquity of cell phone use in this country—along with a clear
increase in law enforcement demands for cell site records and
conflicting court rulings about the need for search warrants—means
the U.S. Supreme Court should grant review in Davis’s case.”
(Related) You mean it's not a series of pipes?
… For example, it is well-established
— and generally understood — that the contents of any sealed
letters or packages we send through the Postal Service are considered
private, and they “can only be opened and examined under [a]
warrant, issued upon [] oath or affirmation, particularly describing
the thing to be seized, as is required when papers are subjected to
search in one’s own household.” The only exceptions to this rule
are the observations of the letter’s properties one can observe
without opening it, such as its size, its weight, and the address
information written on it. Can the same be said about our email?
One can’t touch or otherwise physically manipulate an email message
like one written on paper, but we still tend to think of email
messages as a contemporary analogue to “letters.” Does
it therefore follow that we have the same expectation of privacy in
our email messages as we do our letters and packages?
Research tool or stalking tool?
How to get
Social and Professional Info From Email Addresses with Pipl
The Pipl
Search API allows you to perform people lookups using a variety
of search inputs. In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to use the
API to enrich the data you have of your newsletter subscribers.
Lawsuits? You know there's an App for
that!
Law firm
targets Google foes for private damages claims
U.S. law firm and class
action specialist Hausfeld launched a platform on Tuesday to help
pursue claims against Google,
posing a potential headache for the world's No. 1 Internet search
engine amid its regulatory troubles in Europe.
… The law firm said
the Google Redress & Integrity Platform (GRIP) is aimed at those
affected by alleged anti-competitive behavior by Google in Europe.
It said the platform
would build on the European Commission's April charge sheet, which
accuses Google of unfairly promoting its own shopping service to the
disadvantage of rivals.
"GRIP offers
corporations, consumers and other entities harmed by Google's
anti-competitive business practices in Europe a mechanism to evaluate
their potential claims," Michael Hausfeld, chairman of Hausfeld,
said in a statement.
Perspective. Interesting, but I doubt it's
predictive.
Which
Presidential Candidate Is Winning the Tech Money Race?
It is becoming clear that the road to the White
House in 2016 leads straight through Silicon Valley.
Once a bit-player in the political money game, the
technology industry came
in second behind the oil and gas industry among the top sources
for political contributions in the 2012 presidential and
congressional elections. The candidates have noticed and are
courting
the Valley’s wealthy tech elite.
With 435 days to go until Election Day 2016,
several of the major party candidates — including Hillary Rodham
Clinton, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio — have already made early
pilgrimages to Silicon Valley, looking to drum up support and to
build their campaign war chests.
Political courtesy? I have to agree with my
military students – if they sent classified information over
personal email they'd face a court-martial.
Hillary
Clinton email scandal: Legal experts see no criminal activity thus
far
Experts
in government secrecy law see almost no possibility of criminal
action against Hillary Clinton [That
is quite different from the headline. Bob] or her top
aides in connection with now-classified information sent over
unsecure email while she was secretary of state, based on the public
evidence thus far.
Perspective. We've gone from corporate,
room-sized mainframe computers to employee owned, pocket sized
computers. How do we control them?
Apple,
Cisco Unveil Business Partnership
Apple
Inc. and Cisco
Systems Inc. are teaming
up to help bring more iPhones and iPads to business users.
The partnership, announced Monday, is aimed at
helping Apple’s mobile devices communicate more effectively on
corporate networks where Cisco gear is widely used, the companies
said. They also plan to jointly work on technology to help workers
with iPhones and iPads better exploit Cisco’s collaboration
products, including its video- and Web-conferencing services.
It matters to me.
Good to
hear that “Why blogging still matters”
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Aug 31, 2015
opinion
| David Weinberger |Boston Globe: “…blogging went mainstream.
Most media outlets now feature less formal, more personal columns
either by their official columnists or by a cadre of writers who
can’t be fitted into the limited space of a print newspaper or
magazine. Even so, when the media refer to “bloggers,” they
often mean unschooled amateurs unaffiliated with respectable
publications — people who are obsessed with the trivial, full of
hate, and unfamiliar with spellcheck. Yet delve into almost any
field of research and you’ll find webs of bloggers joined by their
common interests, whether it’s cooking, policy, or contemporary
philosophy. We bloggers are still there, connecting, learning from
one another, and speaking in our own flawed human voices. The
leading blogging site, WordPress.com,
hosts 37 million of them, although not all are personal or
still active. Tumblr
claims 252 million blogs and 99 billion posts, mainly
short form. We’re not noticed as much outside of our webs, and we
are no longer considered a “phenomenon,” but we’re there. In
fact, blogs now often are where the most interesting ideas are
surfaced, argued, and appropriated into a discipline’s discourse.
Unlike the output in scholarly journals and magazines, in these webs
of blogs we get to see ideas emerging from conversation among people
sharing what in the old days we’d take as early drafts. These webs
allow participation by people regardless of credentials, enabling
voices to rise to their own level of credibility…” [thanks to Bob
Ambrogi – grateful to hear this message and share it via my Word
Press blog – and also celebrate 13 years of blogging on
beSpacific.]
For my (you had better be) researching students.
NISO
Launches New Primer Series with the Publication of Primer on Research
Data Management
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Aug 31, 2015
“The National Information Standards Organization
(NISO) has launched a new Primer Series on information management
technology issues with the publication of the first primer on the
topic of Research Data Management. Two more primers on the topics of
Understanding Metadata and Linked Data for Cultural Institutions,
respectively, will be released in coming months, with additional
Primers to be published periodically. The primer on Research Data
Management provides an overview of how data management has changed in
recent years, and outlines
best practices for the collection, documentation, and preservation of
research data. The importance of creating a data
management plan (DMP) before beginning a research data project is
emphasized. Crucial questions regarding how the data will be managed
are answered ahead of time in a DMP, thus making it easier for the
researcher to collect and document the data properly for future use
and reuse. Creating research data that is easily reproducible and
transparent is the ultimate goal, and following the guidelines in
this primer can help educate researchers to ensure their data is
available for others. The differences between publishing papers and
publishing datasets and the citation challenges the data community
are working on solving are also discussed. “Research in all
domains is seeing an increasing prevalence of data-driven research
and an influx of diverse data sources and analysis methods,” says
Carly Strasser, author of this primer. “Data management is
therefore an emerging concern for researchers. This primer provides
a high-level overview of research data management, and is intended to
be useful across domains.” This primer on Research Data Management
and the forthcoming primers on Understanding Metadata and Linked Data
for Cultural Institutions are introductory documents on these
important topics relating to information management for those new to
our community, or for those who just need a summary understanding of
these issues. The NISO Primer series will be freely available and
licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons-BY-NC 4.0 license.
“Meant to provide insight and instruction to researchers collecting
data, these primers discuss the latest developments in research data
and the new tools, best practices, and resources now available,”
says Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director. “Providing basic
information to the wider community about NISO’s activities is a
critical component of our work as an organization. We seek to serve
not only those who are deeply versed with technology in our
community, but those who are starting out as well.” The NISO
Primer on Research Data Management is available as a free download
from the NISO website at:
http://www.niso.org/publications/press/researchdata/”
Dilbert suggests a downside to “smart” robots.
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