Sunday, March 06, 2016

“We can, therefore we must!” Besides, who is going to stop them?
China Tries Its Hand at Pre-Crime
China’s effort to flush out threats to stability is expanding into an area that used to exist only in dystopian sci-fi: pre-crime. The Communist Party has directed one of the country’s largest state-run defense contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur.
… “We don’t call it a big data platform,” he said, “but a united information environment.” [Another name for “Total Information Awareness?” Bob]




Granted they want the precedent, but didn't the judge ask them if they could do it without Apple?
Who Needs Apple When the FBI Could Hack Terrorist iPhone Itself
… Security experts say there are many ways the FBI could hack the iPhone now at the center of a standoff between Apple and the U.S. government. They argue that doing so would be faster than waiting for the courts to decide whether Apple should be forced to create software that would let investigators try multiple passcodes without erasing the device. No one is saying a government hack would be easy, but the experts interviewed for this story have concluded the Feds aren’t even trying because they’d rather win a legal precedent that gives agents the power to access phone data with a warrant.




My Ethical Hacking students should love this.
These engineers are developing artificially intelligent hackers
Could you invent an autonomous hacking system that could find and fix vulnerabilities in computer systems before criminals could exploit them, and without any human being involved?
That’s the challenge faced by seven teams competing in Darpa’s Cyber Grand Challenge in August.
Each of the teams has already won $750,000 for qualifying and must now put their hacking systems up against six others in a game of “capture the flag”. The software must be able to attack the other team’s vulnerabilities as well as find and fix weaknesses in their own software – all while protecting its performance and functionality. The winning team will walk away with $2m.




Anyone can send you classified email, that's why you should use a secure system. You should be able to avoid sending classified data over unsecured channels if you stop and think about it. (Does the timing of DoJ releases suggest they are trying to undermine Hillary? What did she ever do to them?)
Clinton, on her private server, wrote 104 emails the government says are classified
Hillary Clinton wrote 104 emails that she sent using her private server while secretary of state that the government has since said contain classified information, according to a new Washington Post analysis of Clinton’s publicly released correspondence.
The finding is the first accounting of the Democratic presidential front-runner’s personal role in placing information now considered sensitive into insecure email during her State Department tenure. Clinton’s authorship of dozens of emails now considered classified could complicate her efforts to argue that she never put government secrets at risk.
… The analysis also showed that the practice of using non-secure email systems to send sensitive information was widespread at the department and elsewhere in government. [Perhaps some good will come of this after all. Bob]




Modern tech support?
Apple Geniuses Flock to Twitter
Apple on Thursday launched a Twitter channel to field support questions from users of its products, as well as to offer them tricks and tips.
By Friday, the @AppleSupport account had 134,000 followers and had sent more than 3,000 tweets.
… Providing support through Twitter will be a valuable service for Apple, as many companies have already discovered, noted Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.
"There are hundreds of companies by this time that maintain a watch on social media to monitor comments about their brands and their products," he told CRM Buyer.




Perspective. How did we meet people before smartphone Apps? Imagine wearing virtual reality glasses and walking down the street. Each person you see would be color coded (Possible mates in Pink, friend-worthy in Green, etc.) with numeric scores to rank them from most to least desirable.
Bumble Now Lets You Switch To BFF Mode To Find Real Friends, Not Just Friends With Benefits
Dating app Bumble from Whitney Wolfe, who was one of the Tinder co-founders, is now launching a new service designed to help users find BFFs.
Bumble became a popular dating app due to its model, which banks on women being the ones who make the first move. A new app called The Catch follows a similar model, encouraging women to pick their bachelors based on their personality, but Bumble still has its loyal fan base.
While Bumble is still primarily oriented toward dating, it now allows users to do more. In addition to finding romantic matches or friends with benefits, Bumble now enables users to find trustworthy BFFs.
Aptly called BFF, the new Bumble feature basically takes the same swiping and matching algorithms as for dating and applies them to friendship.




Is Dilbert suggesting that this guy now works for the FBI?


No comments: