Hundreds of Thousands of Android Trojans Installed from
Unknown Sources Daily
Tens
of millions of applications are being installed on users’ smartphones daily,
but nearly one third of them come from sources that cannot be tracked, and most
of the mobile Trojans are installed via these unknown sources, researchers say.
However, some malicious apps also slip
into Google Play, while other malware might come pre-installed on mobile
devices right out of the box, Cheetah
Mobile says.
[From the
Cheetah report:
According to the statistics, about 1/3 applications are
downloaded and installed to users’ phones without setting ‘installer’, meaning
that the sources of these apps cannot be tracked.
Now that they acknowledge their crime it’s no longer a
crime?
Privacy International challenge of UK hacking operations
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Oct 17, 2016
PCWorld: “The U.K.’s spy agencies breached the European
Convention on Human Rights for years by secretly collecting almost everything
about British citizens’ communications except their content, a U.K. court has
ruled. However, now that the U.K. government has admitted what it is doing, the
collection is legal, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled Monday.
It has yet to rule on the issue of
proportionality, or whether the agencies’ actions were reasonable given the
threat they sought to counter. Responding
to a June 2015 complaint by campaign
group Privacy International, the tribunal said the secret intelligence agencies
had breached the ECHR for years because of the way they gathered bulk
communications data (BCD) and bulk personal data (BPD)…”
- Via Privacy International – Document portfolio of the case
I think I posted this before, but I have a new class of IT
Governance students who probably haven’t seen it yet.
The OPM breach report: A long time coming
… Hackers, said to
be from China, were inside the OPM system starting in 2012, but were not
detected until March 20, 2014. A second
hacker, or group, gained access to OPM through a third-party contractor in May
2014, but was not discovered until nearly a year later.
These and dozens of other depressing details are in a
timeline that is part of a 241-page report released last month by the House
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, bluntly titled, “The OPM Data Breach: How the Government Jeopardized Our
National Security for More than a Generation.”
Kinda like a “Get out of jail free” card!
FTC says it may be unable to regulate Comcast, Google, and
Verizon
The Federal Trade Commission is worried that it may no
longer be able to regulate companies such as Comcast, Google, and Verizon
unless a recent court ruling is overturned.
The FTC on Thursday petitioned the 9th US
Circuit Court of Appeals for a rehearing in a case involving AT&T’s
throttling of unlimited data plans. A
9th Circuit panel previously
ruled that the FTC cannot punish AT&T, and the decision raises
questions about the FTC’s ability to regulate any company that operates a
common carrier business such as telephone or Internet service.
While the FTC's charter from Congress prohibits
it from regulating common carriers, the agency has previously exercised
authority to regulate these companies when they offer non-common carrier
services. But the recent court ruling said that AT&T is immune from FTC
oversight entirely, even when it’s not acting as a common carrier.
Why didn’t I think of this? So simple even a cave man can do it?
Voyager and Microsoft Ventures invest $9M in business text
messaging platform Zipwhip
… Zipwhip’s
technology lets companies text their customers from the web, desktop
computers and smartphones, working across the U.S. wireless carriers. Founded in 2007, the company originally
targeted consumers and set out to be the “Facebook of text messaging.” But it pivoted around 2013, taking a different
approach by enabling hundreds of millions of landlines to receive and send text
messages for the first time. This allowed companies to text with their
customers from landline phones and toll-free numbers.
… “Businesses are
late adopters,” Zipwhip CEO John Lauer told GeekWire. “They don’t want the new thing and they don’t
want to What’s App-enable or Facebook Messenger-enable their business. They just want to text-enable because everyone
has texting.”
… Zipwhip
describes itself as a software-as-a-service company, versus a text messaging
API — “a car dealership or dentist’s
office has no idea what to do with an API,” Lauer noted. Its platform lets customers log into a
web portal to read and send text messages.
Next time I teach spreadsheets, promise!
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is the Microsoft Office
programming language that allows you to create macros and userforms, add a
message box, execute code inside a document in response to a
trigger, and much more. With VBA you can supercharge your Excel
spreadsheets. And you just have to learn a little bit about coding.
Homework.
I wonder if my niece is ready for this.
Pandora Unveils Promotional Tools for Artists, Labels
… Pandora is now
making a new tool kit available to any artist or label that could help solve
one of the biggest conundrums of releasing music in the digital age: fans tend
to prefer music they’ve heard before, and online services make it easier than
ever to skip the unfamiliar. FM radio
stations have long established familiarity by repeatedly bombarding listeners
with a small number of songs. But
digital services that allow users to choose, skip or thumb up and down their
music don’t offer the same ability to create hits.
Now, though, artists and labels who use Pandora’s
two-year-old “Amp” platform can record audio messages on their smartphones
asking their fans to give new songs a chance, while instructing the service to
play a certain song more often for a given period. The automated system also prompts artists to
take these and other actions based on how listeners are responding to their
music.
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