Blue Ridge Surgery Center, an affiliate of Surgical Care
Affiliates, has posted a breach notification to patients:
On March 17, 2016, BRSC learned
that an employee’s encrypted work laptop had been stolen during a break-in at
the employee’s residence that same day. The
employee reported the theft to law enforcement and we immediately began our own
investigation. Our investigation determined that the password was with the laptop at the
time of the theft, and the laptop contained email files that may
have included patients’ names, addresses, treatment information and health
insurers’ names, identification numbers and in some instances, Social Security
numbers.
We deeply regret any
inconvenience this may cause our patients. To help prevent something like this from
happening in the future, we have re-enforced training with all of our employees
regarding securing passwords.
The incident is not yet up on HHS’s public breach tool and
the total number affected has not yet been disclosed.
But how frustrating – to remember to deploy encryption and
then to leave the password with the device. Of course, we don’t know if the level of
encryption was sufficient to offer any safe harbor under state laws or HITECH
(and a risk assessment would still need to be conducted), but yeah, re-train
employees regularly….
What really happen here?
Was the teacher “hacked” or did the student find or guess her password?
AP reports:
A junior high school student
reportedly hacked into the email
system of Gilbert
Public Schools and sent inappropriate messages to other
students.
District officials said the
Highland Junior High student got access
to the teacher’s login information and emailed messages to other
students over the weekend.
Read more on The
Arizona Republic.
And the FBI was called in…… why? Well, it turns out that the student reportedly
sent x-rated images (aka porn).
[From the
Arizona Republic article:
I have reported the crime to the Mesa Police Department
and also the FBI since they are the
ones who handle all internet fraud.
Have you been using LinkedIn for four or five years?
Lorenzo Franceschai-Bicchierai reports:
A hacker is trying to sell the account information,
including emails and passwords, of 117 million LinkedIn users.
The hacker, who goes by the name “Peace,” told
Motherboard that the data was stolen during the LinkedIn breach of 2012. At the time, only around 6.5 million encrypted
passwords were posted online, and LinkedIn never clarified how many users were affected by that
breach.
Turns out it was much worse than anybody thought.
[…]
Both Peace and the one of the
people behind LeakedSource said that there are 167 million accounts in the
hacked database. Of those, around 117
million have both emails and encrypted passwords.
Read more on Motherboard.
…for targeting missiles?
MIT and Oxford researchers document availability of Twitter
user location data
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on May 17, 2016
Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office May 17, 2016: “Researchers
at MIT and Oxford University have shown that the location stamps on just a
handful of Twitter posts — as few as eight over the course of a single day —
can be enough to disclose the addresses of the poster’s home and workplace to a
relatively low-tech snooper. The tweets
themselves might be otherwise innocuous — links to funny videos, say, or
comments on the news. The location
information comes from geographic coordinates automatically associated with the
tweets. Twitter’s location-reporting
service is off by default, but many Twitter users choose to activate it. The new
study is part of a more general project at MIT’s Internet Policy Research
Initiative to help raise awareness about just how much privacy people may be
giving up when they use social media.”
·
Note – please see https://twitter.com/settings/security
to manage settings and privacy.
Speaking of targeting missiles…
When to Trust Robots with Decisions, and When Not To
Because we need more devices listening to everything we
say?
Google to Introduce Its Voice-Activated Home Device
Google will introduce its much-anticipated entry into the
voice-activated home device market on Wednesday, according to people who spoke
on the condition of anonymity.
Named Google
Home, the device is a virtual agent that answers simple questions and carries
out basic tasks. It is to be announced
at Google’s annual developers’ conference in Silicon Valley.
Thinking about IT Architecture
Smartphones Rule the Internet
… In 2014, by several measures, total
mobile Internet usage outpaced desktop Internet access. In Africa and Asia, people of all ages call
smartphones—not laptops—the most important device they use to go online,
according to a GlobalWebIndex survey last year. Worldwide, most people under age 34 say the
same thing.
A look at the web’s most popular sites is similarly
telling. More than half of Facebook’s
roughly 1.7 billion monthly users visit the site exclusively from their
smartphones—that’s 894 million mobile-only users each month, up from 581
million such users last year and 341 million mobile-only users in 2014,
according to the company’s latest earnings report.
Google confirmed last year
that more searches come from mobile devices than computers in 10 countries,
including the United States. Over the
holiday season, Amazon said more than 60
percent of shoppers used mobile. And
Wikipedia, which recently revamped the way it tracks site traffic, says it’s
getting more mobile than desktop visits to its English language site.
… Last month, the
audience-tracking firm Nielsen found that smartphones are the most-used medium
in the United States—beating out television, radio, and desktops, even though
more Americans own TVs and radios than smartphones.
“Consumers carry their phones everywhere,” said Glenn
Enoch, a vice president at Nielsen, in a statement about the
findings. “High penetration plus
portability and customized functionality have made them a staple of consumers’
media diet.”
(Related) Not “feature
phones”
Microsoft is selling its feature phone business to Foxconn
for $350 million
Microsoft is selling its feature phone business to FIH
Mobile, a subsidiary of Foxconn, for $350 million.
… Nokia is now
planning to license its brand to a newly created company called HMD global,
which will produce
and sell a range of Android smartphones and tablets.
This deal will only affect Microsoft's feature phone
business, which is currently still using the Nokia brand for basic phones. Microsoft says it will continue to develop
Windows 10 Mobile and support Lumia phones and Windows Phone devices from
partners like Acer, Alcatel, HP, Trinity and VAIO.
Telling my students where to go?
Cyberstates 2016 Report
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on May 17, 2016
“CompTIA’s 17th annual Cyberstates is the definitive source
for state-by-state analysis of the U.S. information technology industry and the
tech workforce. The report quantifies
the size and scope of the tech sector and tech occupations across multiple
vectors, while providing context with time-series trending, economic impact,
average wages, business establishment analysis, IT jobs postings, career
opportunities, gender ratios, tech patents, and more. Moreover, Cyberstates helps to connect the
dots with emerging trends. Cloud computing, big data, automation, IoT,
cybersecurity, and social technologies will continue to reshape businesses
large and small, driving innovation and digital business transformation across
the U.S. economy. As with any
sector-level report, there are varying interpretations of what constitutes the
tech sector and the tech workforce. Some
of this variance may be attributed to the objectives of the author. Is the goal to depict the broadest possible
representation of STEM and digital economy fields, or a more narrowly defined
technology subset? Is the goal to
capture all possible knowledge workers, or a more narrowly defined technology
subset? For the purposes of this report,
CompTIA focuses on the more narrowly defined technology subset. See the methodology section for details of the
specific NAICS codes and SOC codes CompTIA uses in its definitions of the tech
sector and the tech workforce.”
I suspect we could build a non-profit here that gave free
training to the survivors of the initial challenge. Would graduates of a program like that be
just what employers want?
Coding school 42 plans to educate 10,000 students in Silicon
Valley for free
… 42 welcomes all
students between 18 and 30. After filling out your online application, the real
challenge starts. The 42 team has
created a computer science version of the
Hunger Games. They call it
the swimming pool because they want to see if you can swim by throwing you into
the figurative pool. You and 1,000
others students face the same coding and logic challenges.
You only have 4 weeks, and you can code from Monday to
Sunday, day and night. After these
insanely intensive 4 weeks, the best students get to study at 42.
Not sure why I should run out and buy one.
Researchers Unveil Phone That Morphs Like a Rubix Cube
… a team made up
of researchers from Purdue and three English universities may have just
developed the world's first Rubix Cube smartphone. Dubbed "Cubimorph," the device has
OLED touchscreens on each of its six faces and uses a hinge-mounted turntable
mechanism to self-reconfigure in the user's hand.
Like a Rubix Cube, its
faces are permanently connected so you can't lose one. The reconfiguration process is automatic
thanks to the motorized turntables, which receive instructions from a computer
running algorithms to determine how best to configure the faces based on what
the user wants to do.
The idea behind the morphable prototype is to create what
its designers call "programmable
matter." The concept is similar
to 3D printing, except instead of printing what you need, you shape your
existing device into a form factor that can accomplish the task.
Perhaps an 8X10 foot poster in the library?
Learn How to Use The Confusing Apostrophe With this Quick
Guide
In English, theres no more confusing (and useful) punctuation mark than the apostrophe. It let’s us shorten words. It let’s us show ownership . It even let’s us
look stupid. Wait what?
Perhaps I should have looked at the guide below before I
wrote this post, as a matter of fact… How
many incorrect (or missing) apostrophe’s can you spot in this post?
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