Vermont Utility Refutes Reports of Russia Hacking U.S.
Electric Grid
… The Washington
Post has rewritten
its story, clarifying that authorities had not actually found any evidence that
the grid had been breached. However,
experts say even the new headline, “Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility,
showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security,” is FUD.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. My Computer Security students will likely
agree. Why all the pushback?
New York State Imposes New Cybersecurity Regulation for
Financial Services
New York State Department of
Financial Services (DFS) has published its revised proposal for what it calls a
'first-in-the-nation cybersecurity regulation' for New York regulated financial
services. Publication was delayed by
approximately one week following significant pushback from affected
organizations on Dec. 22 2016.
"This updated proposal (PDF),"
announced Financial Services Superintendent Maria T. Vullo, Dec. 28, "allows
an appropriate period of time for regulated entities to review the rule before
it becomes final and make certain that their systems can effectively and
efficiently meet the risks associated with cyber threats."
… The new 14-page
DFS regulation is effectively a very detailed high level security policy
document. It states what is required
from financial services rather than how the requirements should be implemented.
As such it is yet another set of
compliance regulations that relevant companies need to meet.
… In this
instance, two of the main new requirements for New York financial institutions
would be the need to employ a CISO;
and the need for annual reports,
effectively signed-off by the board with a certification document to be sent to
the DFS.
Not sure my students are ready for this. Interesting paper but I can’t find a link to
the web App, so it may not be available yet.
Paper – The legal macroscope: Experimenting with visual legal
analytics
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jan 1, 2017
The legal macroscope: Experimenting with visual legal analytics,
Nicola Lettieri, Antonio Altamura, Delfina Malandrino First Published December
28, 2016.
“This work presents Knowlex, a web application designed
for visualization, exploration, and analysis of legal documents coming from
different sources. Understanding the
legal framework relating to a given issue often requires the analysis of
complex legal corpora. When a legal
professional or a citizen tries to understand how a given phenomenon is
disciplined, his attention cannot be limited to a single source of law but has
to be directed on the bigger picture resulting from all the legal sources
related to the theme under investigation. Knowlex exploits data visualization to support
this activity by means of interactive maps making sense out of heterogeneous
documents (norms, case law, legal literature, etc.). Starting from a legislative measure (what we
define as Root) given as input by the user, the application implements two
visual analytics functionalities aiming to offer new insights on the legal corpus
under investigation. The first one is an
interactive node graph depicting relations and properties of the documents. The second one is a zoomable treemap showing
the topics, the evolution, and the dimension of the legal literature settled
over the years around the norm of interest. The article gives an overview of the research
so far conducted presenting the results of a preliminary evaluation study
aiming at evaluating the effectiveness of visualization in supporting legal
activities as well as the effectiveness of Knowlex, the usability of the
proposed system, and the overall user satisfaction when interacting with its
applications.”
My students do this, weather they mean to or not.
Think Like a Futurist to Be Prepared for the Totally
Unexpected
… Predicting the
future, it turns out, isn’t what futurists do. And in a funny way, that’s what makes their
work so vital. Many futurists are
convinced that, now more than ever, everyone needs to start thinking the way
they do.
What futurists actually do is facilitate as groups of
people work through a highly structured, sometimes months-long process of
coming up with as many hypothetical futures as they can, in order to prepare
for more or less anything.
… In the current
moment, with political and economic uncertainty combining with rapid
technological change, “it’s clear we’re not going to make it through this as
passengers,” says Scott Smith, a futurist for 20 years and creator of the
educational resource How
To Future.
Perspective. Clear
charts if you want to grab them.
Facebook & Google dominate the list of 2016’s top apps
… Not
surprisingly, Facebook again grabbed the number one spot on the list, with more
than 146 million average unique users per month, and 14 percent growth over
last year. In fact, Facebook scored
several spots on the top 10 chart, thanks to Messenger (#2) and Instagram (#8)
– the latter which also showed some of the highest year-over-year growth, up 36
percent from 2015.
Messenger came in second place this year, with over 129
million average unique monthly users, followed by YouTube with over 113 monthly
uniques.
However, it was Google, not Facebook, that grabbed the
most spots on the year-end chart.
According to Nielsen, Google’s apps YouTube (#3), Google
Maps (#4), Google Search (#5), Google Play (#6) and Gmail (#7) were among those
people used the most throughout the year.
… Nielsen also
took a brief glimpse into the state of smartphone penetration in the U.S.,
noting that 88 percent of mobile subscribers now use a smartphone, up from 86
percent at the beginning of the year.
Over half (53%) are on Android, with 45 percent on iOS,
and just 2 percent on Windows Phone. Blackberry
is somehow still on the charts with a 1 percent share.
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