Nobody drags out a straightforward process like
the government.
Victims of the breach still
have not been notified. OPM will start sending postal laters
“later this month.”
The government will spend $133 million on identity
theft protection services. With options, it could go up to $330
million. ID
Experts (Identity Theft Guard Solutions LLC) got the gig to
provide the service, which will provide three years of credit
monitoring and $1 million in identity restoration insurance to
affected employees and their minor children.
CSID
got the gig to provide services to the 4.2 million employees
whose personal data was compromised in the initial reports of the
breach.
A heads-up to my lawyer friends.
Jeff Stein reports:
Marion “Spike” Bowman, a top former FBI lawyer and U.S. counterintelligence official who heads an influential organization of retired American spies, says a hacker from China penetrated his home computer, beginning with an innocent-looking email last spring.
Read more on Newsweek.
BYOA (Bring your own App) is becoming mainstream.
Enterprise
App Stores Continue to Evolve
Apps are increasingly the way we get things done,
in our personal lives and at work – and sometimes in a fuzzy space
between the two.
The app store quickly became the delivery method
of choice for purchasing personal mobile apps, thanks to Apple, which
has seen a mind-boggling number of purchases from its app store.
(Half a billion dollars for
apps and in-app purchases in
the first week of 2015 alone, according to Apple.)
In the enterprise, though, it's a bit more
complicated. While some companies are OK with employees purchasing
their own productivity apps for work, they struggle with concerns
over security, compatibility and compliance with enterprise
standards. Despite these concerns, the phenomenon of employees using
their own apps at work is so popular it has earned an acronym: BYOA,
for bring your own app.
… Concerned companies do have options. A
fairly large, and growing, number of software companies have their
own app stores where folks can purchase enterprise apps. Hootsuite,
for example, announced this week that its App Directory, introduced
in late 2011 and featuring 140-plus apps and integrations for apps
including Zendesk, Marketo and IBM SilverPop Engage, has seen
more than 2 million installs.
The
directory is focused on social media management, said
Hootsuite Director of Product Marketing Kevin Quan in an email. It
gives Hootsuite customers "the ability to use the best-of-breed
business applications and extensions that work for their unique
needs," he said. "Through the Hootsuite App Directory we
are able to extend social across all cross functional departments in
any organization."
Other software companies offering enterprise app
stores include ServiceNow, which earlier this year introduced
an app store with more than 80 applications built on its cloud
service management platform, and SugarCRM, which launched
an app store for users of its CRM software in May.
(Related) Of course, there is a downside...
Mobile
Gambling Apps Expose Enterprise Data: Report
According to Veracode, on average, multiple
gambling apps are installed in an enterprise environment, and many of
these programs are plagued by critical vulnerabilities that can
result in privacy breaches and enterprise data theft.
… Mobile gambling apps are often offered for
free, but include advertising software development kits (SDKs) that
send user information to third-party servers and can allow outsiders
to track individuals and steal corporate intellectual property.
… Earlier
this year, IBM’s Application Security Research Team conducted a
study of 41 popular dating applications for Android and determined
that more than 60 percent of them are potentially
vulnerable to cyberattacks.
“Mobile
applications can pose serious risk to enterprise data, customers and
security in general, so it is especially important for organizations
to be able to identify these apps,” Adam Ely, Founder and COO of
Bluebox, wrote
in a 2014 SecurityWeek column.
… “No
mobile app is an island,” Ely said. [Cute
Bob]
Curious?
John Wesley Hall writes:
A Phoenix officer was shot and killed on duty. “More than 300 public safety personnel, the chief of police, and the mayor quickly converged on the scene. Roughly 100 people entered the area where Sergeant Drenth’s body was discovered, including the three plaintiffs, who were assigned to canine search teams.” Male DNA was found at the scene. All but five voluntarily contributed DNA to exclude them. The five weren’t suspects, but they needed to be excluded. [If they weren't suspects, weren't they already excluded? Bob] They steadfastly refused to provide DNA, so the PPD applied for a court order to get it. After it was obtained they sued for nominal damages, a declaratory judgment, and to have it destroyed. A court order, a warrant, to obtain evidence does not require that the person from whom it is obtained be a suspect in a crime. DNA can be collected by court order to exclude people from an investigation. Bill v. Wheeler, 13-15844 (9th Cir. August 31, 2015):
Read more on FourthAmendment.com.
[From
the article:
If the killer is identified and charged, it also
has the salutary effect of removing a defense argument that DNA at
the scene wasn’t tested and could belong to another person who
could have been the actual killer.
Looks like low-hanging fruit to lawyers? Or maybe
only one lawyer.
Popcorn
Time lawsuits continue as 16 are sued for watching Survivor
The "Popcorn Time" app was launched in
2014 as a kind of "BitTorrent for dummies" with a simple
Netflix-style interface for viewing movies. But now with a second
lawsuit filed against users of the app, it looks like 16
as-yet-anonymous watchers may soon need a primer on "mass
copyright suits for dummies."
The lawsuit
(PDF), entitled Survivor Productions Inc. v. Anonymous Users
of Popcorn Time (Does 1-16), targets 16
Comcast subscribers who allegedly used the app to watch
Survivor—not the reality series, but a thriller starring
Pierce Brosnan released earlier this year.
Also useful for civilians considering the Cloud.
The US
Military Gets A Guidebook to the Cloud
DISA rolls out a collection of best practices for
a Pentagon herding its myriad information services toward their
cloud-based future.
… Released by the Defense Information Systems
Agency, the
guide is aimed at DOD “mission owners” wanting to migrate an
existing information system from a physical environment to a
virtualized cloud environment. The framework is based on real-world
cloud
pilot efforts within DOD.
… While somewhat technical, the best practices
guide is worth a read. It contains a short intro to the cloud,
impact-level
requirements, a breakdown of available cloud services and a
detailed section dedicated to understanding shared security
responsibility within the cloud – vital reading considering the
recent data
breach headlines.
(Related)
You're
hosting Uncle Sam's files in the cloud. You get hacked. This is what
happens next
The US government has posted a new set of rules
outlining how cloud providers should report IT security cockups that
involve Uncle Sam's data.
The new Department of Defense (DoD) rules
[PDF]
include requirements on how contractors who handle government
information should deal with computer network breaches and attacks,
and how to report them to government agencies.
The rules apply only to those contractors whose
cloud services host unclassified material. Classified data is
covered by a different set of reporting rules and security
requirements.
Perhaps the White House wants to be “Liked?”
White House
taps Facebook alum to be first director of product
The White House has hired a Facebook employee to
serve as its first director of product, a new position focusing on
software like the "We The People" petition site.
Josh Miller, who announced
the job move on his personal website, said that he expects to build
off the White House’s existing digital efforts.
“The White House has many digital products —
from WhiteHouse.gov to the We the People Petition site,” he said.
“It’s a dream to be able to add to and improve this portfolio.
Dragging the government into the 21st
Century?
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) is calling for the
federal government to hone its data collection efforts to gather more
information about how on-demand economy companies like Uber and
TaskRabbit are affecting the way Americans work.
“Unfortunately, our definitions, data
collection, and policies are still based on 20th century perceptions
about work and income,” he said in a statement on Tuesday
accompanying letters to the heads of several federal agencies
inquiring about their data-collection practices.
The requests are part of a larger push by Warner
to examine how policy might be changed to accommodate the rise of the
on-demand economy.
For my entrepreneurial minded students and a few
of us old faculty types.
4 of the
Hottest Markets for Professionals Who Want to Teach and Train Others
In Start
Your Own eLearning or Training Business,
you'll find information on all the steps you need to start and run a
distance learning business. In this edited excerpt, the Staff of
Entrepreneur Media, Inc. discuss the four areas of digital learning
that are seeing the more interest from those wanting to learn.
Does this signal a Polaroid come-back? Could be
the hot stocking-stuffer this year.
Polaroid
Snap camera takes instant photos without ink
… Polaroid … just announced the Polaroid
Snap, a digital camera that can immediately print out a photo, and it
doesn't even need ink to do it.
… The trick is in the Zero Ink printing
technology developed by a company called ZINK. Instead of using ink,
the camera uses special printing paper which contains cyan, yellow
and magenta dye crystals under a protective polymer coating. The
ZINK-enabled printer inside the Polaroid Snap camera then activates
those crystals to create a full-color photo.
… If you wish, you can have the photo printed
in a larger size later, as Polaroid Snap takes 10-megapixel photos
and has a microSD slot holding memory cards with up to 32GB of
capacity. The camera has several simple presets — color, black and
white and vintage — a selfie timer, and a photo booth mode, which
takes six photos in 10 seconds.
Polaroid Snap will be available in four colors —
black, white, red and blue — in the fourth quarter of 2015 for $99.
For my Website coding students.
Mozilla
Relaunches Its Thimble Online Code Editor For Teaching HTML, CSS And
JavaScript
Back in 2012, Mozilla launched
Thimble,
an online code editor for teaching the basics of HTML, CSS and
JavaScript. Over time, though, things got pretty quiet around the
project as other browser-based code editors like Brackets
and full online IDEs like Nitrous
took center stage. Today, however, Mozilla relaunched
Thimble with a major redesign and a slew of new features.
Thimble, which is based on the Adobe-supported
Brackets open
source project, is still meant to be a platform for teaching the
basics of web development. Mozilla is aiming the projects at
educators (and their students) who want to build their own learning
experiences, as well as at independent learners who want to teach
themselves.
… Thimble now also reflects the fact that even
beginners will want to target their sites at mobile, so the preview
mode now allows you to see mobile previews as well.
… The new Thimble also features a number of
new starter projects that teachers can use to teach
their students basic skills like how to edit HTML content and CSS
style sheets.
Even though this is a Mozilla project, it’s
worth noting that Thimble should work in any modern browser.
If you want to give Thimble a try, just head over
here and start coding.
For my students. At lest they're reading.
Bam! Pow! 8
of the Best Ways to Read Comics Online for Free
(Related) Tools for students who don't read.
Tired of
Reading? Make Your iPhone Read Everything to You
Too lazy to read? Why not get your iPhone
to read for you instead? With native iOS text-to-speech and a few
great apps, you can use your smartphone to take your productivity to
the next level.
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