Delta Air Lines passengers stranded after computer crash
grounds flights
Delta Air Lines' computer
systems crashed on Monday, leaving passengers of one of the world's
largest carriers stranded at airports around the globe as flights were
grounded.
The U.S. airline said the problems
were down to a power outage in
Atlanta overnight and that its information technology team was
working to resolve the problem.
… "Our systems
are down everywhere. Hopefully
it won't be much longer," the airline said on Twitter earlier on Monday.
… The
glitch follows several high-profile computer problems faced by U.S. airlines in
the past year.
They included budget
carrier Southwest Airlines Co (LUV.N),
which had to halt departures last month after a technical outage, while
American Airlines (AAL.O)
had to suspend flights from three of its hubs last September after technical
problems.
Industry consultants say
airlines face an increasing risk from computer disruptions as they automate
more of their operations, distribute boarding passes on smartphones and fit
their planes with Wifi.
An interesting group of “targets.” Who do we know that would be interested in
all of these?
New spyware detected targeting firms in Russia, China:
Symantec
A previously unknown group called "Strider" has
been conducting cyber-espionage attacks against selected targets in Russia,
China, Sweden, and Belgium, U.S.-based computer security firm Symantec Corp
said on Monday.
The group, which has been
active since at least October 2011 and could have links to a national
intelligence agency, has been using an advanced piece of hidden malware
identified by Symantec as Remsec (Backdoor.Remsec), the company said in a blog
post.
Remsec spyware lives within
an organization's network rather than being installed on individual computers,
giving attackers complete control over infected machines, researchers said. It enables keystroke logging and the theft of
files and other data.
… Remsec
shares certain unusual coding similarities with another older piece of
"nation state-grade" malware known as Flamer, or Flame, according to
Symantec.
Flamer malware has been
linked to Stuxnet, a military-grade computer virus alleged by security experts
to have been used by the United States and Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear
program late in the last decade (reut.rs/2b2FA8z).
A question for my Computer Security students. It costs a lot to actively protect your
users. Is it worth it?
Password Hacking Forces Big Tech Companies to Act
In the past few months, hackers have taken over the
social-media accounts of Facebook Inc. Chief
Executive Mark
Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter
Inc. ’s CEO, Jack Dorsey.
Behind the scenes, security teams at every major
technology company—and many smaller firms, too—are scrambling to protect others
from the same fate.
… Some of the
executives apparently reused passwords that had been stolen in earlier hacks of
LinkedIn, Myspace and other sites; others may have fallen victim to software
that uses the old passwords to guess new ones.
Nearly two billion old passwords can be viewed for as
little as $2 at a database called LeakedSource, run by anonymous operators. Investigators estimate that maybe up to 8% of
the LinkedIn usernames and passwords will work on other services, giving
hackers a way to take over accounts elsewhere.
… Hacking creates
a dilemma for operators of other popular consumer web services. They can require all users to change their
passwords, and risk losing some users. If
they don’t force password changes, users’ accounts could
be hacked.
… Twitter,
Facebook, Yahoo Inc. and
others chose a different course. Instead
of resetting all passwords, they analyzed the stolen credentials and then urged
or forced affected users to reset their passwords.
… Combing through
the data is time-consuming. Yahoo has
one billion users. Its security team
began examining the LinkedIn database on May 18. Some of the account names and
passwords were encrypted. Yahoo staffers
had to decode the names and passwords and look for matches with Yahoo’s users. Eight days later, on May 26, Yahoo emailed
notes out to an undisclosed number of affected users, telling them to reset
their passwords.
If she had not named names, would tweeting about what she
saw still be grounds for a lawsuit? If
the cleaning crew had posted pictures, would they (or the hospital) be
liable?
Law360 reports:
Allegations that a nurse at a
major Chicago hospital tweeted about a shooting victim’s death and blood-soaked
hospital room are a stunning cautionary tale that health care providers can use
to hammer home how workers may be held liable for privacy lapses, attorneys
say.
A Chicago nurse allegedly tweeted
this image of a patient’s room, prompting a lawsuit. The allegations surfaced in a new lawsuit
accusing Karrie Anne Runtz, a trauma nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital, of
“recklessly and outrageously” tweeting about the April 2015 death…
Read more on Law360
(subscription required).
Dean Wormer’s “Double Secret Probation” bleeds into Big
Brother’s world?
Paper – Coming to Terms with Secret Law
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Aug 7, 2016
Rudesill, Dakota S., Coming to Terms with Secret Law
(November 01, 2015). 7 Harvard National Security Journal 241 (2015); Ohio State
Public Law Working Paper No. 321. Available
for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2687223
“The allegation that the U.S. government is producing
secret law has become increasingly common. This article evaluates this claim, examining
the available evidence in all three federal branches. In particular, Congress’s governance of
national security programs via classified addenda to legislative reports is
here given the first focused scholarly treatment, including empirical analysis
that shows references in Public Law to these classified documents spiking in
recent years. Having determined that the secret law allegation is well founded in all
three branches, the article argues that secret law is importantly
different from secrecy generally: the constitutional norm against secret law is
stronger than the constitutional norm against secret fact. Three normative options are constructed and
compared: live with secret law as it exists, abolish it, or reform it. The article concludes by proposing rules of
the road for governing secret law, starting with the cardinal rule of public
law’s supremacy over secret law. Other
principles and proposals posited here include an Anti-Kafka Principle (no
criminal secret law), public notification of secret law’s creation, presumptive
sunset and publication dates, and plurality of review within the government
(including internal Executive Branch review, availability of all secret law to
Congress, and presumptive access by a cadre of senior non-partisan lawyers in
all three branches).”
Sounds like a poor choice to me. Why not call an Ambulance? If he had passed out, pulling to the side of
the road would not have improved his odds of survival. A new meme for this blog, “Technology helps
those who help themselves!”
A Missouri man might owe his life to his Tesla Model X's
Autopilot
… In late July, Joshua
Neally left work and began to drive home in his week-old Tesla Model X,
activating the Autopilot feature when he entered the highway. Miles down the road, he felt "the most
excruciating pain [he’s] ever had," in his chest, and after calling his
wife, decided to go to the nearest emergency room. Neally allowed the car to continue driving on
the highway for the next twenty miles, before taking over and guiding the
vehicle the remaining couple of miles to the hospital, where he checked himself
into the emergency room.
Neally
noted that he probably should have simply called an ambulance, and
potentially could have put other drivers at risk by continuing to drive.
… For his part,
Neally noted that he trusted the car to help, saying that if he had fallen
unconscious, it would have steered to the side of the road.
Perspective.
‘Pokémon Go’ has eclipsed $200 million in total revenue one
month after launching
… App analytics
platform Sensor Tower released the worldwide revenue
data on Friday, citing its latest “Store Intelligence” information. The company
also published a chart comparing Pokémon Go’s financial success to
that of other previous top earners, including Candy Crush Soda Saga
and Clash Royale.
… As seen above, Pokémon
Go was only slightly outperforming Clash Royale for the
first 18 days following its launch, but that was before Niantic Inc. released
the app in Japan, Nintendo’s home country, where the biggest Pokéfans likely reside.
Revenue exploded from there, spiking
from around $75 million to $200 million in just under 14 days.
A geezer’s perspective? I have not noticed a big difference in my
students.
Survey upends concept that older workers averse and stressed
by using technology
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Aug 7, 2016
Via CIO: “Cloud storage provider
Dropbox and Ipsos Mori, a London-based market research firm, surveyed more than
4,000 information workers in the U.S. and Europe about their use of technology
in the workplace and found that people 55 and up use 4.9 forms of technology
per week, on average — a smidge above the overall average of 4.7 per week. More importantly, the survey also revealed
that older workers are less likely than their younger colleagues to find using
technology in the workplace stressful. Just one-quarter of the respondents who are 55
or older said that they find tech in the workplace stressful. Meanwhile, 36 percent of the respondents who
are 18 to 34 years old — the ones who supposedly grew up with technology — said
they find tech in the workplace stressful.”
Historical perspective.
World's First Public Website Went Online 25 Years Ago
… Believe it or
not, the first webpage ever put online is still online, and at the exact
same address: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
Ah Hulkster, you’ve got them down. Now hit them with the chair! On the other hand, you have to try to get
something!
Gawker and Hulk Hogan Said to Be in Settlement Talks Over
Privacy Case
According to a Wall Street Journal report.
Gawker Media Group is engaged in preliminary talks with
the former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan to reach a settlement over a $140
million court judgment that led the company to file for bankruptcy protection,
the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
The settlement talks come a week ahead of a
court-administered auction that will see Gawker Chief Executive Nick Denton
lose control of the company, the Journal
said.
For my students.
Why my fellow students aren’t interested in doing data
science for you
… The statistics
(perhaps ironically) are pretty convincing. Summarized in an article
at Datanami, McKinsey says
that by 2018, the demand for data scientists will outpace supply by 60%. Accenture noted that 90% of its clients were
looking for data talent, and 40% cited a lack of it as a major problem. And to top it off, Glassdoor found
that the median starting salary for a data scientist can be almost double that
of a programmer. Everybody’s looking to
hire and pay (well) for data people, but they can’t seem to find them.
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