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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