Tuesday, April 05, 2016

This is why I have two full sections of Computer Security.  And apparently there isn’t much competition in the government sector. 
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports:
The feds warned that “a group of malicious cyber actors,” whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, “have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks” since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard.
The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government hackers are still successfully hacking and stealing data from US government’s servers, their activities going unnoticed for years.
Read more on Motherboard.
[From the article: 
This group of “persistent cyber criminals” is especially persistent.  The group is none other than the “APT6” hacking group, according to sources within the antivirus and threat intelligence industry.  There isn’t much public literature about the group, other than a couple of old reports, but APT6, which stand for Advanced Persistent Threat 6, is a codename given to a group believed to be working for the Chinese government.  


Nothing learned from the first one?  Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. 
Trump's Hotel Chain 'Faces Credit Card System Breach' – Again
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's string of luxury hotel properties, The Trump Hotel Collection, appears to be dealing with the second breach of its credit card systems in a year, KrebsOnSecurity reported on Monday.
According to the website, sources "noticed a pattern of fraud on cards that were all used at multiple Trump hotel locations in the past two to three months


MakeUseOf is normally an App promoter.  When they say something is wrong, it might pay to listen. 
5 Reasons Your Kids Shouldn’t Use After School App
   playground gossip – moved into the 21st Century in November 2014 with the launch of the After School app on iOS and Android.
Ominously, the app’s tagline says it provides “Funny anonymous school news for confessions and compliments”.  That alone should be enough to set parents’ alarm bells ringing.


I agree, but we’re likely to get one anyway because that’s what bureaucracies do.
We Don’t Need a Whole New Regulatory Regime for Platforms Like Uber and Airbnb
   So far, the theory behind this laissez-fair regulatory approach — which many in Silicon Valley are happy to endorse — is that platform companies define new markets for which regulators were not prepared, and as such can’t be regulated in the same way as legacy companies.  We believe, however, that these businesses have not redefined industries in a fundamental way; instead they are “old wines in new bottles.”  They have more similarities than differences with traditional businesses, and should be regulated accordingly.


Will this result in more traffic accidents as people “stream and drive?” 
Twitter Said to Win NFL Deal for Thursday Streaming Rights
Twitter Inc., making a strategic push into online programming, won a deal to show Thursday night National Football League games online, a person familiar with the matter said.
The social-media company was said to be bidding against a slate of heavyweights including Verizon Communications Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.
   The NFL, aware that a growing number of households are comfortable streaming video over the Internet, is using the digital rights for Thursday night games to reach so-called cord-cutters, as former cable-TV subscribers are known.
   The league is using Thursday night games, which draw smaller audiences than the contests on Sundays and Mondays, to experiment with different kinds of media, distribution models and technologies.  By the time the NFL’s biggest broadcast contracts expire in 2021, it will be prepared to sell a broad array of digital rights -- and make more money.


Imagine the porn industry as a copyright test case.  (Any excuse to imagine porn will do)
The Hidden Economics of Porn
   Pinsker: A distinguishing feature of tube sites is that a lot of their stuff is actually taken from other places—it’s pirated content. Is that a fair generalization?
Tarrant: Yes, and it's a huge problem within the industry because it's stolen, basically, and the tube sites are aggregators of a bunch of different links and clips, and they are very often pirated or stolen.  So then the folks who made the content can go after them, and they do, but you have to have a lot of time and money and resources to stay on top of that.


Worth looking at.
Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through
For years, the federal government, states and some cities have enthusiastically made vast troves of data open to the public.  Acres of paper records on demographics, public health, traffic patterns, energy consumption, family incomes and many other topics have been digitized and posted on the web.
This abundance of data can be a gold mine for discovery and insights, but finding the nuggets can be arduous, requiring special skills.
A project coming out of the M.I.T. Media Lab on Monday seeks to ease that challenge and to make the value of government data available to a wider audience.  The project, called Data USA, bills itself as “the most comprehensive visualization of U.S. public data.”  It is free, and its software code is open source, meaning that developers can build custom applications by adding other data.


Dilbert on communications?

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