Election hacking. Where did those horrible Russian hackers
strike?
A Glitch Caused Donald Trump's Site to Say Whatever The Internet
Wanted It to Say
Until recently, Republican presidential candidate Donald
Trump’s official campaign
website featured an amusing glitch that allowed Internet users to modify
its headline text however they so pleased.
The campaign website’s home page auto-generated a default
message that encouraged visitors to vote for the Trump ticket. But by editing the text in the page’s
URL—replacing words between its “%20” notation dividers, typical URL encoding
that denotes spacing—anyone could replace those words with their own message.
(Related) See? The election must have been hacked!
(Related)
Hackers tried to take down pro-Clinton phone banks the day
before the election, but inadvertently hit Republican calls too
Hackers tried to knock out political call centers on
Monday in an effort to "harm Clinton's chances of winning," but they
may have done equal damage to Republican phone lines, according to the company
that was targeted.
TCN, a company
that provides political phone banking services, has a number of
conservative clients in addition to pro-Clinton ones, the firm's chief
technology officer Jesse Bird told
Wired.
"The ironic thing is that they were probably
impacting Republican calls just as much as Democrat calls," Bird said.
Could this be where Russian hackers concentrated their
efforts?
Elections Usher In New Crop of Political-Tech Startups
… Hustle, a
venture-backed startup that was founded in 2014, caught on early with Bernie
Sanders’s grass roots organizers.
… Starting in
mid-2015 Sanders field personnel started using the app, which allows users to
aim texts at a long list of recipients, sending each one individually in
rapid-fire, then giving the user a platform to manage their text conversations
with voters. This approach allows the campaigns to get around regulations
that prevent robo-dialing mobile phone numbers.
So, who is liable? What was promised?
Zack Whittaker reports:
If you bought a car in the last
few years, there’s a good chance your personal information may have found its
way to the open internet.
Names, addresses, phone numbers
and social security numbers for both customers and employees for over a hundred
car dealerships have leaked online, all thanks to a centralized records system
coupled with shoddy security.
The system, built and operated by
DealerBuilt, an Iowa-based database software company, sells
management systems for car dealerships across the US, offering a central system
for sales, customer relations, and employee payroll needs.
Last week, MacKeeper security researchers found 128 dealership systems,
known as LightYear machines, were backing up to DealerBuilt’s central systems
without any encryption or security, allowing anyone to see what was being
backed up.
Read more on ZDNet.
Are we doing the same thing here?
Matt Burgess reports:
At least 1,000 schools across the
UK are using forms of ‘surveillance’ technology to monitor the activity of
pupils, a new report has claimed.
Privacy advocates Big Brother
Watch has published
research claiming 72 per cent of secondary schools use ‘Classroom
Management Software’ to keep an eye on pupils. The system, which can check use of computers,
including internet history, is installed on 819,970 school-owned devices and
1,416 private devices, the group says.
Read more on Wired
(UK).
Might be fun to fiddle with…
Google to Offer SDK for Assistant in December
… Where the new
Assistant is concerned, Google is soon to offer up keys to the city, so to
speak, starting next month with the launch of developer tools to make it even
easier for people to add their own functionality to the wider platform.
Starting in December, Google will open up the Assistant in
three distinct ways, one of which will be allowing users to embed the Assistant
itself inside of third-party hardware, a la Amazon’s Alexa. Direct Actions will
allow services and products to offer simple, recognizable commands for the
Assistant to connect other devices and services together and finally,
Conversation Actions, will allow developers to add in more sophisticated features,
like offering access to a bank account, going back-and-forth with the user to
complete the task at hand.
For when you cut the cable?
With Kodi being a free, open source media center, it’s no
surprise there are plenty of options to customize your experience when using
it. These range from changing the
overall appearance of Kodi, to setting up profiles for different family
members.
Perhaps if my neighbors do this I won’t need to pay the
Internet!
In high school, I worked summers at a summer stock theater
that hosted music on Mondays. I got to
see both Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald (not together). Since I played trumpet (poorly) in those
days, Armstrong was already a hero. Ella
is still the best jazz voice I have ever heard.
Follow this link and listen for yourself.
The Story of ‘Ella and Louis,’ 60 Years Later
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Nov 8, 2016
Two of America’s greatest musicians- listen and fall in
love with music that will stay with you a lifetime: A century-defining album’s improbable genesis
“…The first of three successful collaborations between Ella Fitzgerald and
Louis Armstrong, “Ella and Louis” is nearly perfect. It is one of those works of art — and they
don’t come along often — that seems to have always existed. It features two of the greatest artists the
century produced: Armstrong, the innovator and ambassador of jazz, and
Fitzgerald, its most gifted singer. The
album was produced by a man almost solely responsible for bringing jazz into
the realm of respectability and desegregating its audience, who founded the
label which released it, and assembled the all-star team of musicians who made
it so marvelous. “Ella and Louis” helped
rekindle interest in what would become known as The Great American Songbook. Though it is something only American culture
could produce, “Ella and Louis” was also something a large part of American
society worked hard to prevent…”
Anything to get rid of find jobs for my students.
Facebook threatens LinkedIn with job opening features
… A Facebook
spokesperson tells me, “Based on behavior we’ve seen on Facebook, where many
small businesses post about their job openings on their Page, we’re running a
test for Page admins to create job postings and receive applications from
candidates.”
The new features could compete with LinkedIn, as well as
developers like Work4, Workable and Jobscore that build “Jobs” tab applications
that businesses can embed in their Facebook Pages. Perhaps Facebook was prepping for these new
features when it tested Profile Tags last year that mimic LinkedIn’s endorsements
feature.
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