Graham Cluley writes:
Southern Oregon University has
announced that it is the latest organization to fall victim to a business email
compromise (BEC) attack after fraudsters tricked the educational establishment
into transferring money into a bank account under their control.
According to media reports, the
university fell for the scam in late April when it wired $1.9 million into a
bank account. They believed they were
paying Andersen Construction, a contractor responsible for constructing a
pavilion and student recreation center.
Read more on TripWire.
I’m not sure we will ever be satisfied with the answers we
find. However there have been
suggestions that I think would make vote tampering easily detectable.
Questions increase over determining extent of Russia election
hacking
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jun 14, 2017
NPR – If Voting Machines Were Hacked, Would
Anyone Know? – “As new reports emerge about Russian-backed attempts to hack
state and local election systems [Link], U.S. officials are increasingly worried
about how vulnerable American elections really are. While the officials say they see no evidence
that any votes were tampered with, no one knows for sure. Voters were assured repeatedly last year that
foreign hackers couldn’t manipulate votes because, with few exceptions, voting
machines are not connected to the Internet. “So how do you hack something in cyberspace,
when it’s not in cyberspace?” Louisiana
Secretary of State Tom Schedler said shortly before the 2016 election. But even if most voting machines aren’t
connected to the Internet, says cybersecurity expert Jeremy Epstein, “they are
connected to something that’s connected to something that’s connected to the
Internet…”
Nextgov – “Congressional concern is
climbing—not for the first time—about government agencies using an anti-virus
tool made by the respected but Russia-based security firm Kaspersky Lab. The dustup is a case study in why securing
government systems is devilishly complicated…”
So, what can we do about it?
The Internet, a historically unparalleled source of
information and expression, has also become a playground for censorship,
punishment and propaganda. Not a day goes by where an individual is not
arrested, prosecuted or threatened for the content of a tweet or a post. States are ordering internet shutdowns in
times of public protest, elections, and even school exams. Governments enjoy surveillance capabilities
that drill deep into the lives of journalists, activists, political opposition,
and regular citizens.
1. Network
shutdowns devastate individuals and their communities … and are spreading:
2. Surveillance
is more secretive and invasive than ever:
3. States
must back up their commitments with action:
4. Companies
are on the front line of the fight for users’ rights:
5. Transparency
needed across the board:
Read the full report, which also discusses the erosion of
net neutrality, and the human rights impact of standards developing
organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force, and its supplementary
materials, here.
Perspective.
IoT spending to surpass $800 billion in 2017, led by
hardware: IDC
Research firm IDC has released updated spending estimates for the Internet of Things.
Overall, IDC expects IoT spending to grow 16.7 percent year-over-year in 2017,
reaching just over $800 billion.
By 2021, global IoT spending is expected to total nearly
$1.4 trillion, led by enterprise investments IoT hardware, software, services,
and connectivity.
Is this bad? Should
we stop the little earthquakes and just wait for the big one?
https://www.bespacific.com/gigantic-increase-in-fracking-related-earthquakes-spikes-insurance-costs/
Gigantic increase in fracking related earthquakes spikes
insurance costs
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jun 14, 2017
GOOD: “…According to the U.S.
Geological Survey, prior to 2009, when oil and gas fracking in Oklahoma and
neighboring states really started to boom, Oklahoma experienced roughly two earthquakes a year. Now, the state sees as many as two or three
earthquakes each day, leaping from an annual average of 99 between
2009-2013 to 585 in 2014. By 2015,
the state endured 887 earthquakes, including 30 that topped 4.0 on the
Richter scale…”
Because writing out a grocery list is so “last year!”
Amazon’s New Dash Wand Will Now Take Your Grocery Order
Amazon's new Dash Wand is the company's latest
connected device aims to make buying groceries from AmazonFresh delivery service or other items from
Amazon.com even easier.
About the size of a remote control, Dash
Wand incorporates Alexa, the virtual personal assistant persona that drives
Amazon's Echo devices. That means users
can tell it what to order or they can scan in product codes. It can search for
recipes but, unlike Echo, it will not
play music. [Sounds like a project for my Ethical Hacking students! Bob]
Research tools? My
students are not encouraged to use “old” articles, which I define as more than
12 months old. Perhaps I should make an
exception here?
Google releases collection of highly cited subject matter
papers
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jun 14, 2017
Google Scholar Blog: “Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood The Test of
Time – “Scholarly research is often about the latest findings – the newest
knowledge that our colleagues have gleaned from nature. Some articles buck this pattern and have
impact long after their publication. Today,
we are releasing Classic Papers, a collection of
highly-cited papers in their area of research that have stood the test of time. For each area, we list the ten most-cited
articles that were published ten years earlier. This release of classic papers consists of
articles that were published in 2006 and is based on our index as it was in May
2017. To browse classic papers, select
one of the broad areas and then select the
specific research field of your interest…
The list of classic papers includes articles that presented new
research. It specifically excludes
review articles, introductory articles, editorials, guidelines, commentaries,
etc. It also excludes articles with
fewer than 20 citations and, for now, is limited to articles written in
English.”
Looks like I need to develop another class.
Science and Technology Resources on the Internet – Text
Mining
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jun 14, 2017
Science and Technology Resources on the Internet – Text Mining,
by Kristen Cooper, Plant Sciences Librarian, University of Minnesota Libraries,
University of Minnesota. Issues in
Science and Technology Librarianship, Spring 2017. DOI:10.5062/F4K0729W.
“As defined by Bernard Reilly (2012), president of the
Center for Research Libraries, text mining is “the automated processing of
large amounts of digital data or textual content for the purpose of information
retrieval, extraction, interpretation, and analysis.” The first step is to find or build a corpus,
or the collection of text that a researcher wishes to work with. Most often researchers will need to download
this corpus to either their computers or an alternative storage platform. Once this has been done, different tools can
be used to find patterns, biases, and other trends that are present in the text
(Reilly 2012). Within higher education, text mining is most often found among the
digital humanities and linguistics studies. However it is growing in popularity in the
science and technology fields…”
(Related).
VC firm Andreessen Horowitz explains why it led a $23 million
round in a social network for data
Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley's most
prominent venture capital firms, has placed a bet on a start-up called Instabase
that's quietly building a web service where data scientists and less technical
users can work with data, CNBC has learned.
… So in 2014,
Anant Bhardwaj and his colleagues at MIT's renowned Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), along with other academic
researchers, detailed a new system for data called DataHub in a paper.
DataHub, now available on GitHub under an
open-source license, forms
the basis of Instabase.
But the start-up's web service is billed as being in
preview and only lets a small number of people start using it every few days.
Once on the website, users can post data sets, which other
users can explore, query, chart and contribute to them. The service keeps track of changes to data
just as GitHub stores updates to code files.
Perspective. IBM
wins at Chess and Go – this is the best Microsoft can do?
Microsoft AI plays a perfect game of Ms Pac-Man
Now that’s an attention-grabbing promotion!
Baseball Team Will Give Fans Pregnancy Tests at 'You Might Be
the Father's Day' Game
When the marketing team of AA
baseball team the Jacksonville
Jumbo Shrimp steps up to the plate, they swing for the fences.
The theme of this coming Thirsty Thursday is “You Might Be
the Father’s Day,” and the team will be distributing pregnancy tests to fans so
that, according to the promotion, “you'll know if you need to return for
Sunday's Father's Day game.”
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