Wednesday, February 17, 2016

How long can they go on operating like it's 1965?
A Hospital Paralyzed by Hackers
A hospital in Los Angeles has been operating without access to email or electronic health records for more than a week, after hackers took over its computer systems and demanded millions of dollars in ransom to return it.
The hackers that broke into the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center’s servers are asking for $3.6 million in Bitcoin, a local Fox News affiliate reported.
… Medical records that show patients’ treatment history are inaccessible, and the results of X-rays, CT scans, and other medical tests can’t easily be shared. New records and patient-registration information are being recorded on paper, and some patients have been transferred to other hospitals.




Is this about the encryption or the feature that erases the data after too many failed passwords? If the latter, can't they copy the file? (I bet they can) What does the FBI think is in the encrypted text? A list of co-conspirators? Correspondence with a lawyer? An Imam?
Apple vs. the FBI
… At issue is a court order issued Tuesday by Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the Federal District Court for the District of Central California ordering Apple to, in the words of The Associated Press, “supply highly specialized software the FBI can load onto the phone to cripple a security encryption feature that erases data after too many unsuccessful unlocking attempts.Wired adds that Apple’s compliance would allow the FBI to attempt to unlock the phone using multiple password attempts—a method known as bruteforcing. But Apple declined, calling for a public discussion, so its customers and citizens “understand what is at stake.”
Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.
… Apple points out that the FBI—rather than seeking congressional legislation—is seeking a new interpretation of the All Writs Act of 1789, which allows judges to “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.”


(Related)
Apple can comply with the FBI court order
… I believe all of the FBI’s requests are technically feasible.


(Related)
Why Have Americans Given Up On Privacy?
… a recent study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication concluded that:
“[A] majority of Americans are resigned to giving up their data.”
Is this true? Is it a wider issue affecting more than just Americans? And why?




Believe whatever makes you happy. What would you do if the email said, “see the attachment for detailed attack plans?”
N.S.A. Gets Less Web Data Than Believed, Report Suggests
A newly declassified report by the National Security Agency’s inspector general suggests that the government is receiving far less data from Americans’ international Internet communications than privacy advocates have long suspected.
The report indicates that when the N.S.A. conducts Internet surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act, companies that operate the Internet are probably turning over just emails to, from or about the N.S.A.’s foreign targets — not all the data crossing their switches, as the critics had presumed.




How good should your software be if you will kill the people it identifies as terrorist? Let's apply it to people in Colorado and see what we get.
The NSA’s SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people
In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that "we kill people based on metadata." Now, a new examination of previously published Snowden documents suggests that many of those people may have been innocent.
Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA's SKYNET programme. According to the documents, SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan's mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person's likelihood of being a terrorist.
Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA's methods as "ridiculously optimistic" and "completely bullshit." A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET's machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.




For my Data Management students. I'm teaching like the answer is “yes!”
Does your company need a chief data officer?
It's a rare business today that doesn't depend on data in some significant way, but does that mean most companies need a chief data officer?
That's a question on more than a few executive minds in this big-data era, particularly as analyst firms wax increasingly enthusiastic about the role. Gartner, for instance, recently said it expects 90 percent of large organizations to have a chief data officer by 2019. Last August, Forrester found that 45 percent of global firms already have one, while another 16 percent said they planned to do so within the next year. Experian points to a similar trend.


(Related) Data, data everywhere, nor anyone who thinks.
The Internet Of Medicine Is Just What The Doctor Ordered
… IoT is just what the doctor ordered. It holds the key to lowering medical costs, improving quality and making healthcare more personalized, accessible and affordable for average patients.
Call it the Internet of Medicine (IoM). From a financial standpoint, the annual impact from IoM could soon exceed a trillion dollars a year — revenue, by the way, that will increasingly rely on recurring revenue arrangements.




Yesterday Wharton, today Harvard. Maybe this is important.
Lessons from Facebook’s Fumble in India
… As I’ve written previously, there are good reasons to like Facebook’s Free Basics initiative; I have argued that it is better for a society to provide even limited access to more people, than the status quo where close to 80% of the population has no internet access at all – as is the case in India.




Try those Data Analysis skills.
CIA Releases Declassified Documents to National Archives
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on Feb 16, 2016
“Today [February 16, 2016], CIA released about 750,000 pages of declassified intelligence papers, records, research files and other content which are now accessible through CIA’s Records Search Tool (CREST) at the National Archives in College Park, MD. This release will include nearly 100,000 pages of analytic intelligence publication files, and about 20,000 pages of research and development files from CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, among others. The newly available documents are being released in partnership with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) and are available by accessing CREST at the National Archives. This release continues CIA’s efforts to systematically review and release documents under Executive Order 13526. With this release, the CIA collection of records on the CREST system increases to nearly 13 million declassified pages.”




I'm adding this to my “must see” movie list. Interesting read.
U.S. Hacked Into Iran’s Critical Civilian Infrastructure For Massive Cyberattack, New Film Claims
A new documentary on “Stuxnet”, the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program, reveals it was just a small part of a much bigger cyber operation against the nation’s military and civilian infrastructure under the code name “NITRO ZEUS”.




For my geeks
Windows 95 architect launches open-source, media-rich document creation platform for mobile devices
PowerPoint is fine for your business presentation, but getting your message across with a few pictures and text alone may not fit when you’re trying to give a product demo on a website or present your findings via email. That’s where a new project from Satoshi Nakajima comes in.
With Swipe, announced today, users can build media-rich documents with animations, video, vector graphics and audio via any touch-enabled device
… Swipe has a free demo app for iPhone in the app store now, and users can access the open-source code over on Github now to try the project before it is officially unveiled next month.


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