Two swing states decline DHS security for voting machines
In August, DHS offered to help states thwart potential hacking amid
cybersecurity concerns about just how easily a U.S. election could be
manipulated.
Georgia and Pennsylvania, however, have opted out. Instead, the two states will rely on their own
systems to monitor potential election hacking, reports NextGov.
Mobile is more popular to hackers as well as advertisers.
Mobile Bank Heist: Hackers Target Your Phone
… Cyberthieves are
using such so-called malware to steal banking credentials from unsuspecting
consumers when they log on to their bank accounts via their mobile phones,
according to law-enforcement officials and cybersecurity specialists.
It is difficult to quantify how much money has been stolen
as a result of the mobile-phone malware, mostly because the thieves can access
an account through any normal channel after they steal credentials through a
phone. Still, the prevalence of the
malware is significant enough that it has caught the attention of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and U.S. banking regulators.
… The malware
typically gets onto a phone when a user clicks on a text message from an
unknown source or taps an advertisement on a website. Once installed, it often lies dormant until
the user opens a banking app.
… The Federal
Reserve said earlier this year that 53% of smartphone users with bank accounts
had used mobile banking in the previous 12 months, up from 43% in 2011.
… A recent study
conducted by SAS and Javelin Strategy & Research found that fewer than
one-third of smartphone owners use mobile antivirus or anti-malware software on
their phones.
Another of those articles that impact all my students.
58 Percent of Small Businesses Already Have International
Customers, Survey Finds
Small businesses are breaking barriers and going
international, a new study by foreign exchange company USForex has found.
The survey shows 58 percent of small businesses already
have international customers, while 72 percent plan to grow their international
customer base by 2017. About 96 percent
of these small businesses, in fact, are confident about conducting business
abroad.
“Going global is no longer an option for successful small-
and medium-sized businesses — it’s a strategic imperative,” said Karin Visnick,
head of North America, USForex.
Would they do this to Uber drivers? Will Taxi driver defect to Uber?
From the Rutherford Institute:
A federal appeals court has
upheld New York City’s program of warrantless and continuous GPS surveillance
of taxi drivers, ruling that drivers are not
protected by the Fourth Amendment’s bar on unreasonable searches and
seizures when on the job. The Rutherford Institute appealed to the
Second Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of taxi drivers who were being forced
by government officials to attach GPS tracking devices to their taxis.
In a 2-1 decision, the Second
Circuit held that taxi drivers do not have a protected privacy interest in the
vehicles they drive. The dissenting
opinion, issued by Circuit Judge Rosemary S. Pooler, takes issue with the lower
court’s premise that taxi drivers should be stripped of all Fourth Amendment
protections. Rebutting the view that the
government’s surveillance is conspicuous, that taxis are not truly private
property, and that the tracking system was installed pursuant to regulations,
Pooler declared, “The physical invasion of a constitutionally protected area is
no less actionable under the Fourth Amendment merely because it is conspicuous.
To hold
otherwise would allow the government to conduct unreasonable searches merely by
announcing them.”
Read more on the Rutherford
Institute.
Is this the “best possible” solution? What makes a single word ‘newsworthy?’
Facebook is trying to get rid of bias in Trending news by
getting rid of humans
Facebook will no longer employ humans to write
descriptions for items in its Trending section, which attracted controversy
over allegations of political bias in May. Topics appearing in the Trending section will
now appear solely as a short phrase or single word, with an indication of the
number of people discussing it on the social network.
Quartz confirmed from multiple sources that Facebook has
laid off the entire editorial staff on the Trending team—15-18 workers
contracted through a third party. The Trending team will now be staffed entirely by
engineers, who will work to check that topics and articles surfaced
by the algorithms are newsworthy.
Will this change when Google starts sending users to news sites
outside the EU?
Internet Companies May Have to Pay Publishers for News Under
New EU Rules
News aggregators like Alphabet Inc. ’s
Google news search may have to pay publishers to list snippets of articles on
their websites under plans by the European Union’s executive body to update the
bloc’s copyright rules.
Beware of falling peperoni!
Domino’s Gets Approval For Fresh Pizza Deliveries By Drone In
New Zealand
Believe it or not, I do have discerning nerds in my
classes.
The discerning nerd's guide to Raspberry Pi hardware (2016
mid-year edition)
In my "Ultimate Guide to Raspberry Pi Operating
Systems" (Part
1, Part
2, and Part
3) I listed pretty much every noteworthy operating system and OS variant
available for the Raspberry Pi family of single board computers. But what of the hardware all this OS goodness
runs on? It's not like there's just one
Raspberry Pi board. So, if you don't
know your Model A from your Zero from your generation 3 Model B, this is the
guide for you.
Also make sure you check out my 7
ways to make your IoT-connected Raspberry Pi smarter and 9
Raspberry Pi programming tools bundled with Raspbian, both of which are
full of Raspberry Pi and Internet of Things goodness.
Saturday already?
Hack Education Weekly News
… “Members of
Congress are in an unusual position as they demand an explanation for Mylan
NV's 400 percent price hike for the EpiPen and focus attention
squarely on its CEO: Heather Bresch,” Bloomberg
reports. Bresch, whose father is a
senator from West Virginia, had successfully lobbied to have
Epipens, which contain life-saving anti-allergy medication, be purchased by
public schools. Bresch had previously
been involved
in another education-related scandal when, in 2007, it was revealed she had
been awarded an MBA by West Virginia University even though
she’d only completed half of the required credits.
… “The University
of Chicago is attacking academic freedom,” says
New Republic’s Jeet Heer. The
school’s dean of students, has sent a letter
to the freshman class saying that,
Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do
not support so called “trigger warnings,” we do not cancel
invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not
condone the creation of intellectual “safe spaces” where
individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.
… I can’t think of
anything I loathe more about back-to-school each year than the release of the Beloit
College Mindset list. Here’s the latest one for the Class
of 2020.
… Bored with Pokemon
Go? Try this exciting new app
to “catch ’em all” and participate in a mainstreaming of surveillance
culture: a
mobile app for finding bank robbers, built by the FBI.
… Via the BBC: “University
hit 21 times in one year by ransomware.” The university: Bournemouth,
which apparently has a cybersecurity centre.
