Again? Sony doesn't know what is going on?
PSN is down
for gamers around the world (update: it’s back up)
… PlayStation Network is down, according to
Sony Computer Entertainment America. The company has updated
its status page to confirm the outage. This is preventing gamers
on both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 from loading up online
multiplayer sessions in blockbusters like Destiny: The Taken King and
Call of Duty: Black Ops III. It’s even causing issues with some
players trying to log into primarily single-player experiences like
Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom
Pain. On top of that, PlayStation owners are running into problems
launching video apps, such as Hulu and Netflix.
… It’s also worth noting that while both PSN
and Xbox
Live.have gone offline a number of times over the last 12 months,
cyberattackers had nothing to do with most of those incidents.
Unfortunate, unless you're a hacker.
Users Lax
on Mobile Security: Survey
… According
to the study
(PDF), which had nearly 12,000 respondents from 27 countries,
users are increasingly concerned about online threats, and many are
looking install security software on their devices. Furthermore, the
report reveals that consumers use more connected devices than before,
with an average of 8 connected devices per household.
Them Dutch guys, they be pretty smart, you betcha.
Dutch
Government Opposes Encryption Backdoors
… The
government in the Netherlands believes authorities should seek new
solutions to address the issues posed by the use of encryption during
their investigations, but weakening encryption is not the answer.
Dutch officials have pointed out that introducing a backdoor that
would allow authorities to access encrypted data could also be abused
by criminals, terrorists and foreign intelligence services, and it
could have undesirable consequences.
For
my Computer Security students.
Data
Security and Breach Notification Legislation: Selected Legal Issues
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jan 4, 2016
CRS – Data
Security and Breach Notification Legislation: Selected Legal Issues,
Alissa M. Dolan, Legislative Attorney. December 28, 2015. “Recent
data breaches at major U.S. retailers have placed a spotlight on
concerns about the security of personal information stored in
electronic form by corporations and other private entities. A data
breach occurs when data containing sensitive personal information is
lost, stolen, or accessed in an unauthorized manner, thereby causing
a potential compromise of the confidentiality of the data. Existing
federal laws, such as the Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Health Information Technology for
Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act), and the
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, impose security and breach notification
requirements on specific industries or types of data. Additionally,
47 states, the District of Columbia (D.C.), and three territories
have enacted laws requiring breach notification, while at least 12
states have enacted data security laws, designed to reduce the
likelihood of a data breach. Alabama, New Mexico, and South Dakota
have not enacted breach notification laws.”
Some
articles start me giggling before I read beyond the headline.
Can Robots
Be Lawyers? Computers, Lawyers, and the Practice of Law
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jan 4, 2016
Remus, Dana and Levy, Frank S., Can Robots Be
Lawyers? Computers, Lawyers, and the Practice of Law (December 30,
2015). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2701092
or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2701092
“We assess frequently-advanced arguments that
automation will soon replace much of the work currently performed by
lawyers. Our assessment addresses three core weaknesses in the
existing literature: (i) a failure to engage with technical details
to appreciate the capacities and limits of existing and emerging
software; (ii) an absence of data on how lawyers divide their time
among various tasks, only some of which can be automated; and (iii)
inadequate consideration of whether algorithmic performance of a task
conforms to the values, ideals and challenges of the legal
profession. Combining a detailed technical analysis with a unique
data set on time allocation in large law firms, we estimate that
automation has an impact on the demand for lawyers’ time that while
measureable, is far less significant than popular accounts suggest.
We then argue that the existing literature’s narrow focus on
employment effects should be broadened to include the many ways in
which computers are changing (as opposed to replacing) the work of
lawyers. We show that the relevant evaluative and normative
inquiries must begin with the ways in which computers perform various
lawyering tasks differently than humans. These differences inform
the desirability of automating various aspects of legal practice,
while also shedding light on the core values of legal
professionalism.”
The pendulum swings back. ...and I don't
understand the logic.
In August, 2014, I noted a report involving a
transcription
contractor of Boston Medical Center exposing patient information on
the Internet. BMC notified approximately 15,000 patients and
fired MDF Transcription Services because of the incident. Of note,
BMC told patients in a notification letter that it had no reason to
believe their information had been misused – or even accessed. The
incident, which had been reported to HHS in April 2014, appears on
HHS’s breach tool under MDF’s name as the Business Associate.
There is no indication in the breach tool that OCR has closed its
investigation into that incident as of today’s date.
Unbeknownst to me, there was a lawsuit that
followed the incident: Walker et al v. Boston Medical Center
Corp. Not surprisingly, the defendants moved to dismiss for
lack of standing. After all, there was no evidence the data had even
been accessed, much less misused, and because… Clapper.
BMC must have gotten a real shock when the opinion
was issued. Kevin M. McGinty of Mintz Levin explains:
A Massachusetts Superior Court judge held that a plaintiff has standing to sue for money damages based on the mere exposure of plaintiff’s private information in an alleged data breach. The court concluded that the plaintiff had pleaded a “real and immediate risk” of injury despite failing to allege that any unauthorized persons had even seen or accessed that information.
Read more on Mintz
Levin.
[From
the article:
Although the Walker plaintiffs did not
allege that their medical records had been accessed, or their
personal information used, by any unauthorized person, the court’s
holding indicates that the
mere exposure
of patient
data to the potential
to be
accessed by unauthorized persons may still adequately plead an
injury. In this case, the plaintiffs alleged facts that,
if true “suggest[ed] a real risk of harm from the data breach at
BMC” (internal quotations omitted) because BMC’s letter notifying
the plaintiffs of the data breach supported an inference that
“plaintiffs’ medical records were available to the public on the
internet for some period of time and that there is a serious risk of
disclosure.” Based on
this inference, the court found it was reasonable to draw the further
inference that the records “either were accessed or likely to be
accessed by an unauthorized person.” This “general
allegation of injury from the data breach” was sufficient to
demonstrate standing.
Play with this a bit. Could be very interesting.
How The
Internet* Talks
*Well, the mostly young and mostly male users of
Reddit, anyway.
… To get a sense of the language used on
Reddit, we parsed every comment from late 2007 through August 2015
and built the tool above, which enables you to search for a word or
phrase to see how its popularity has changed over time.
Perspective.
The Rise of
Visual Content Online
While the explosion of data and information has
been a topic of considerable interest in recent years, another
phenomenon has received comparably less attention: The explosion of
visual content. To put this growth in perspective, it is estimated
that 3.8 trillion photos were taken in all of human history until
mid-2011, but 1
trillion photos were taken in 2015 alone. And that’s without
counting the number of people making, viewing, or sharing videos
[YouTube alone boasts over a billion
users worldwide], Vines [40
million users], and gifs.
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