I can see more students taking our Ethical Hacking
class.
Security
Researcher Predicts Creepy Scenario for Hacked Sex Robots
If people weren’t worrying about killer sex
robots before, last year’s Westworld
firmly put the idea in viewers’ heads. But the actual danger of
real-life sex robots isn’t that they might suddenly gain sentience
and look to exact vengeance against their human owners.
According to Deakin University cybersecurity
researcher Nick Patterson, the true murderous peril is that companies
will start making their robots
wifi-enabled. While robots, sexual or otherwise, blur the line
between machine and person, the danger here is a relatively
conventional extension of the danger a spyware-addled computer might
pose.
As Patterson explains in an interview with the
U.K. newspaper The Daily Star, the sentient beings to worry
about aren’t the robots but rather hackers,
who could gain control of a future, internet-enabled sex
robot and use it to attack people.
Automated law. What could possibly go wrong?
DoNotPay
bot wants to help you sue Equifax
DoNotPay
bot is now able to help people file lawsuits against Equifax.
The bot can file suits in
all 50 U.S. states, creator Joshua Browder told
VentureBeat. DoNotPay is suing Equifax at the state small claims
court level for the maximum amount allowed. In some states this can
mean being awarded up to $25,000.
The bot asks a series of simple questions about
your address, phone number, and zip code, and DoNotPay helps you fill
in a PDF. In California, it’s an SC-100 form to file a suit in
small claim’s court.
Last Friday, Equifax acknowledged that it had been
hacked
and the personal information of 143 million people exposed. Since
then, at least 23 class
action lawsuits have been filed, according to USA
Today.
“It is
particularly exciting that a lawyer is never needed in the process.
The class action lawsuit against the company will only give
successful consumers around $500 (with the rest going to greedy
lawyers in commissions),” Browder said in an email to VentureBeat.
“I hope that my product will replace those lawyers, and, with
enough success, bankrupt Equifax.”
… DoNotPay is best known for disputing parking
tickets, a service that has successfully saved residents of London
and New York hundreds
of thousands of dollars.
This
summer, DoNotPay expanded to provide more than 1,000 legal
services for U.S. and U.K. residents who typically can’t afford to
hire a lawyer for things like getting a deposit back from a landlord,
applying for maternity leave at work, or drawing up paperwork in the
event of the loss of a loved one.
Advice for the recently hacked: Don’t Panic!
Take a minute and think before you act. Your security has just been
PROVEN to be inadequate. Perhaps you should consider getting a
second opinion before you start changing (or creating new) things.
Equifax
Fixes Woefully Insecure PINs Issued To Hack Victims Attempting To
Freeze Credit Reports
… Equifax used a PIN that "protected"
each user's credit report to prevent the information from being used,
but the PINs were reportedly generated in such a way that they were
left vulnerable to brute force hacking.
Customers have found that these
PINs aren't randomly generated and were nothing more than a timestamp
of the time the user enrolled.
Tony Webster tweeted, "OMG, Equifax security
freeze PINs are worse than I thought. If you froze your credit today
2:15pm ET for example, you'd get PIN 0908171415."
(Related).
Equifax's
credit report monitoring site is also vulnerable to hacking
Allow me to repeat. Each new technology must
relearn everything older technologies have learned about Security and
Privacy, even though nothing is different.
https://www.bespacific.com/new-on-llrx-the-internet-of-things-is-sending-us-back-to-the-middle-ages/
New on LLRX
– The ‘internet of things’ is sending us back to the Middle
Ages
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Sep 11, 2017
The Internet of Things (IoT) has permeated all
facets of our lives – professional, family, social – more quickly
and expansively than many are willing to acknowledge. The
repercussions of IoT are multifaceted – and directly impact issues
that span privacy, cybersecurity, intellectual property rights, civil
liberties and the law. Law and technology scholar Joshua
A.T. Fairfield discusses the ramifications of allowing our
environment to be seeded with sensors that gather our personal data
using a plethora of devices we now consider to be essential
conveniences.
(Related). Another technology we must learn to
control.
Understanding
Crypto Regulations
In light of the recent actions
by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and People’s Bank of
China, we’re receiving a lot of questions about regulation. In
this post, we’ll provide some frameworks to understand how
governments can enforce regulations on public blockchains.
First we’ll discuss
how regulators can (or cannot) regulate the blockchain networks
directly by examining historical network regulation. Then we’ll
dive into fiat-crypto on ramps and decentralized exchanges, and
lastly touch on the SEC’s recent guidance regarding crypto ICOs.
Because if you contribute to ___A___ we love you
and want to ask you for more.
Because if you contribute to ___B___ we hate you
and want to add you to the suspected terrorist list.
Bradley Smith and Paul Gessing write about
legislation in New Mexico that regardless of where you reside, should
make you sit up and take notice. Do we really want the states
requiring residents to disclose every donation we make to every cause
and then compiling that information into a publicly searchable
database? If you live in an area where a donation to Planned
Parenthood, for example, could create backlash against you, your
family, or your business, would you rather keep your donation
private?
Read this commentary and then think about your
state and whether campaign finance reform proposals or laws may go
too far:
Doug Nickle’s recent column (“Campaign reporting proposal creates necessary, nation-leading disclosure in NM”) is an example of Orwellian doublespeak at its best.
Nickle’s purpose is to drum up support for “Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver’s proposed rules and regulations addressing campaign finance reporting,” which, Nickle notes, is based on legislation that was vetoed by Governor Martinez earlier this year due to her concerns about the invasion of privacy triggered by the legislation. So, Nickle now wants Oliver to impose the failed legislation through bureaucratic fiat.
(Editor’s note: Oliver did just that last week, after this column was submitted for publication.)
Read more on NMPolitics.net.
There’s no business like
monkey business…
In 2011, Naruto, a curious 6-year-old monkey in
Indonesia, peered into a camera lens, grinned and pressed the shutter
button on the unattended camera. Little did the endangered crested
macaque know that he may have been providing for his future.
The selfie of his bucktooth smile and wide amber
eyes made Naruto an internet celebrity. But the widely shared image
became embroiled in a
novel and lengthy lawsuit over whether the monkey owned the
rights to it. Naruto lost the first round in federal court in
California in 2016, but won a victory of sorts in a settlement on
Monday for himself and his friends.
The camera’s owner, David J. Slater, agreed to
donate 25 percent of future revenue of the images taken by the monkey
to charitable organizations that protect Naruto, who lives in the
Tangkoko Reserve on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, and other
crested macaques. Lawyers for Mr. Slater, a British photographer,
and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which sued Mr.
Slater on Naruto’s behalf, also asked the United States Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which was hearing an appeal in the
case, to drop the lawsuit and vacate a lower decision that found the
monkey could not own the image’s copyright.
Perspective. Not the breakdown I would have
guessed.
Pew – How
People Approach Facts and Information
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Sep 11, 2017
“When people consider engaging with facts and
information any number of factors come into play. How interested are
they in the subject? How much do they trust the sources of
information that relate to the subject? How eager are they to learn
something more? What other aspects of their lives might be competing
for their attention and their ability to pursue information? How
much access do they have to the information in the first place? A
new
Pew Research Center survey [PDF
Bob] explores these five broad dimensions of people’s
engagement with information and finds that a couple of elements
particularly stand out when it comes to their enthusiasm: their level
of trust in information sources and their interest in learning,
particularly about digital skills. It turns out there are times when
these factors align – that is, when people trust information
sources and they are eager to learn, or when they distrust sources
and have less interest in learning. There are other times when these
factors push in opposite directions: people are leery of information
sources but enthusiastic about learning. Combining people’s views
toward new information – and their appetites for it – allows us
to create an “information-engagement typology” that highlights
the differing ways that Americans deal with these cross pressures.
The typology has five groups that fall along a spectrum ranging from
fairly high engagement with information to wariness of it. Roughly
four-in-ten adults (38%) are in groups that have relatively strong
interest and trust in information sources and learning. About half
(49%) fall into groups that are relatively disengaged and not very
enthusiastic about information or about gaining more training,
especially when it comes to navigating digital information. Another
13% occupy a middle space: They are not particularly trusting of
information sources, but they show higher interest in learning than
those in the more information-wary groups…”
Good news for my Data Management class? Looks
like there should be a huge market for them. Can data really be this
bad?
Most managers know, anecdotally at least, that
poor
quality data is troublesome. Bad data wastes time, increases
costs, weakens decision making, angers customers, and makes it more
difficult to execute any sort of data strategy. Indeed, data
has a credibility problem.
Still, few managers have hard evidence or any real
appreciation for the impact of bad data on their teams and
departments. They are thus unable to give data quality its due. To
address this issue, in our teaching in executive programs in Ireland,
we ask participants — executives that come from a wide range of
companies and government agencies, and departments such as customer
service, product development, and human resources — to develop such
evidence using the Friday
Afternoon Measurement (FAM) method.
The method is widely applicable and relatively
simple: We instruct managers to assemble 10-15 critical data
attributes for the last 100 units of work completed by their
departments — essentially 100 data records. Managers and their
teams work through each record, marking obvious errors. They then
count up the total of error-free records. This number, which can
range from 0 to 100, represents the percent of data created correctly
— their Data Quality (DQ) Score. It can also be interpreted as the
fraction of time the work is done properly, the first time.
… Our analyses confirm that data is in far
worse shape than most managers realize — and than we feared — and
carry enormous implications for managers everywhere:
-
On average, 47% of newly-created data records have at least one critical (e.g., work-impacting) error.
-
Only 3% of the DQ scores in our study can be rated “acceptable” using the loosest-possible standard.
-
The variation in DQ scores is enormous. Individual tallies range from 0% to 99%
An interesting Marketing (anti-marketing?)
question.
What to Do
When Nazis Are Obsessed With Your Field
Nazis love Taylor Swift. She is thin, blonde,
pale, and rich. She doesn't talk politics much, which might be just
a savvy marketing decision, but it also enables wild speculation
about her views on Donald Trump, feminism, and whether black lives
matter. Nazi devotion to Swift was first reported
by Broadly over a year ago, but recent right-wing public
celebration of her new album has sparked coverage in the
Daily Beast, Dazed, and Elle UK. The latter two
articles have mysteriously gone
offline. At
the pop-culture site Kobini, writer Ella Page called Swift the
"blank space the alt-right has been craving." If
she's not going to fill the space with explicitly articulated
anti-racist views, the argument goes, Nazis can project anything they
want onto her white visage.
I'm telling you about Taylor Swift because
slightly more people care about her than the current controversies
embroiling Medieval Studies. Both the mega pop star and the esoteric
field face the same problem: Nazis love us and we're not used to
overtly signaling our disdain. I can't speak for Taylor, but
Medieval Studies must do better.
Interesting and potentially useful.
Try This:
The most useful apps, tools and sites we used during Hurricane Irma
… Watching Irma take aim at Florida,
evacuating and worrying about friends who decided to stay was a
harrowing experience. But a few tools apps and websites helped. I
hope you never have to use them, but bookmark them in case you do.
Some interesting tools for my students.
5. BriefTube
(Chrome): Auto-Generate a Table of Contents for Videos
Many of the online
lectures are hosted on YouTube. BriefTube smartly creates a Table of
Contents for the video you are watching, so you can skip to the
relevant section instantly.
The extension also
includes a simple search function for the transcript. Search for any
word in the video and you can instantly move to that time stamp. The
professor might be mid-sentence though, so remember, you can use the
Ctrl + Left arrow
YouTube
keyboard shortcut to rewind 10 seconds.
No comments:
Post a Comment