Thursday, September 17, 2015

If I was insuring them, I certainly have some questions about this.
BitPay Sues Insurer After Losing $1.8 Million in Phishing Attack
BitPay has filed suit against a Massachusetts insurance company after losing $1.8m during a phishing attack last December.
According to documents obtained by the Atlanta Business Chronicle, the bitcoin payment processor was defrauded in mid-December by an unknown individual posing as BTC Media CEO David Bailey, whose computer was infiltrated prior to the attack.
The attacker subsequently obtained email credentials for BitPay CFO Bryan Krohn, which were then used to prompt CEO Stephen Pair and executive chairman Tony Gallippi to authorize three payments totalling 5,000 BTC on 11th and 12th December, including one transaction from a wallet on the bitcoin exchange Bitstamp.


(Related) I think Dilbert is commenting on this story.




Encryption is inevitable. Deal with it!
Google forges ahead with data encryption despite FBI warnings
Google on Wednesday vowed to charge ahead with more encryption of user data even as law enforcement officials warn the technology could hamper their investigations.
The tech giant's director of law enforcement and information security, Richard Salgado, on Wednesday told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the security techniques are a net positive for law enforcement, because they can many times prevent online crime in the first place. [So what is the strategy here? Catch crooks or prevent crime in the first place? Bob]
"There are lots of different ways to secure data besides encryption, but there is pretty much a consensus inside the security community that encryption is a fundamental and critical way to protect users data from the very thieves, identity theft cases, [and] privacy intrusions that law enforcement is interested in investigating," Salgado told Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).
… Echoing law enforcement concerns, Grassley said officials have warned "this technology made court authorized warrants not worth the paper that they are printed on." However, recent reports note that the Obama administration might be softening its tone on the issue.


(Related) China wants the same things the FBI is asking for. Does that make the issues clearer?
China Tries to Extract Pledge of Compliance From U.S. Tech Firms
HONG KONG — The Chinese government, which has long used its country’s vast market as leverage over American technology companies, is now asking some of those firms to directly pledge their commitment to contentious policies that could require them to turn user data and intellectual property over to the government.
The government distributed a document to some American tech companies earlier this summer, in which it asked the companies to promise they would not harm China’s national security and would store Chinese user data within the country, according to three people with knowledge of the letter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The letter also asks the American companies to ensure their products are “secure and controllable,” a catchphrase that industry groups said could be used to force companies to build so-called back doors — which allow third-party access to systems — provide encryption keys or even hand over source code.


(Related) Correcting an error. Library users want TOR.
From the good-for-them dept., Nora Doyle-Burr reports:
The Kilton Public Library will reactivate its piece of the anonymous Internet browsing network Tor, despite law enforcement’s concerns that the network might be used for criminal activities.
The Lebanon Library Board of Trustees let stand its unanimous June decision to devote some of the library’s excess bandwidth to a node, or “relay,” for Tor, after a full room of about 50 residents and other interested members of the public expressed their support for Lebanon’s participation in the system at a meeting Tuesday night.
Read more on Valley News.




Do we have a common understanding of appropriate policing to serve as a basis for appropriate drone use?
Veronique Dupont reports:
Drones are increasingly making their mark in the arsenal of US police forces, operating in a legal gray area and sparking concerns of constant surveillance of civilians.
The specter of armed drones surfaced with a law passed in North Dakota last month that allows police to equip the aircraft with teargas.
“It’s still a bit of a Wild West,” said American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) policy analyst Jay Stanley.
Read more on Yahoo.




Should I categorize this as a marketing tool or a security warning?
I created a fake business and bought it an amazing online reputation
If you live in the Bay Area and have looked for something special to spice up a birthday party, you might have discovered the Freakin’ Awesome Karaoke Express, a truck that promises to deliver an unbelievable selection of songs to your doorstep. You might have seen a review on Yelp that said it’s perfect for a girl’s night out or a Facebook review that mentioned it being a crowd-pleaser at a neighborhood block party. You may have been impressed by its 19,000 Twitter followers, and considered hiring this mobile song-slinging truck to drive up to your next outdoor shindig.
What you probably didn’t realize was that there is no such thing as the Freakin’ Awesome Karaoke Express (or F.A.K.E., for short). I made it up and paid strangers to pump up its online footprint to make it seem real. I didn’t do it to scam anyone or even for the LULZ. I wanted to see firsthand how the fake reputation economy operates. The investigation led me to an online marketplace where a good reputation comes cheap.




Perspective. Yet another definition of “unlimited.” Why are they still allowed to use that word? If the network is “particularly busy” speeds are already “throttled.”
AT&T changes data rules for 'unlimited' plans
AT&T is increasing the amount of data that customers on “unlimited” plans can consume before their speeds are slowed, three months after the Federal Communications Commission proposed fining the company $100 million for allegedly not being forthright with customers about its policies.
Under the new policy, users' data speeds will only be slowed — or throttled — if they use more than 22 gigabytes in a billing period and are in an area where the network is particularly busy. The previous threshold was five gigabytes.




So should Jeff buy more content producers?
Amazon converting Prime members into Washington Post digital subscribers with new promotion
Amazon launched a new promotion with The Washington Post this morning, offering its tens of millions of Amazon Prime members the opportunity to sign up for a free digital subscription to the newspaper — converting automatically to a discounted paid subscription after six months.
It’s the latest collaboration between the e-commerce giant and the newspaper, which was acquired by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos two years ago. Amazon is touting the promotion as a benefit to Prime members, but it also promises to be a boon for the Washington Post — giving the newspaper a deep connection to some of Amazon’s most loyal customers.




A record of those who open their mouth before engaging their brain. (But, will they continue to gather these Tweets?)
Open State preserves Politwoops’ history on the net
In a move to preserve the public record for everyone, Open State has uploaded its complete Politwoops archive of deleted tweets by politicians to the Internet Archive. The archive consists of 1,106187 deleted tweets by 10,404 politicians collected in 35 countries and parliaments over a period of five years.
In August, Twitter blocked Politwoops in more than 30 countries that enabled the public to see what legislators and other elected officials, once had tweeted but then decided to delete.
… Earlier this month, 17 rights groups including Human Rights Watch, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access, Sunlight Foundation and others joined in opposition to Twitter’s crackdown on Politwoops and called on the social network to restore Politwoops’ API access.
In less than a week, the open letter published by the group, was endorsed by 50 organizations across five continents, including World Wide Web Foundation, European Federation of Journalists, Derechos Digitales and EDRi.




A resource for my students.
ScienceOpen Hits the 10 Million Article Mark
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on Sep 16, 2015
PR Newswire: “ScienceOpen, the research + open access publishing network, has added article records from more than 10 million scientific publications. Researchers can now filter published content by the number of citations and monitor the relevance and impact of recent scientific results by tracking social media mentions. Over 20,000 scholarly journals are currently published worldwide. At this volume, researchers need a reliable overview of trends in their discipline. ScienceOpen has exponentially grown its database to allow scientists to more easily navigate, search and comment on scientific articles. To enhance discoverability, each research article page provides recommendations for related articles regardless of publisher. This function has long been common to consumer platforms but ScienceOpen is one of the first to bring this feature to the research community. The new ScienceOpen release is the next step in creating an independent, open database which contains references and citation information for current global research in all disciplines. The citation count of an article helps to quantify the influence of research and those who performed it. To support search and discovery, ScienceOpen has begun building the first openly and freely available citation index. This was achieved by tracking the references of the nearly 2 million Open Access articles on the site. The new release of the ScienceOpen platform displays the relative citation count, all the citing articles, and their own citations. Researchers can now filter all content based on a wide range of options including citations, journal, publisher, date and other bibliometric data. Moreover, scientists can track in real time the social media coverage of articles in Twitter, Google+, Mendeley and other social networks.”
“ScienceOpen is a freely accessible research network to share and evaluate scientific information. We aggregate Open Access articles from a variety of sources – opening them up to commenting and discussion. Manuscripts submitted to ScienceOpen will be published Open Access and evaluated in a fully transparent Post-Publication Peer Review process.”




A “suggestion” for my Data Management students.
The Hottest Live-Streaming Social Apps You Need To Try


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