As I try to teach my students how to manage Computer Security, I find it very easy to find really good really bad examples of security failures for them to analyze.

Poor security blamed after school surveillance images broadcast on Russian site

So yeah, I’d say this is pretty bad. Cassie Williams reports:

Security protocols on surveillance cameras at a Cape Breton school remain out of date, months after images of its students were unintentionally broadcast on the internet, Nova Scotia’s privacy commissioner Catherine Tully says.

Tully’s report on the matter found there were “inadequate passwords and insufficient technical controls” behind the initial breach. While passwords have been changed, Tully said the school has still not placed the streams behind a firewall or equivalent protection, and two of the cameras are no longer supported by manufacturer security updates.

Read more on CBC.ca.

Something to amuse (not inspire) my Computer Security students?

https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/10/16447264/prison-hacker-recycled-computer-fraud-ohio-marion-transkiy

Ghost in the cell

How an inmate hacker hid computers in the ceiling and turned his prison upside down

So far, none of my students thought this was a good idea either.

Amazon & Walmart’s in-home and car delivery service will let police conduct warrantless searches

Joe Cadillic writes:

Recently, Walmart shocked privacy conscious Americans by announcing they wanted customers to let Walmart employees inside their homes.

Then….

Three days ago, Amazon shocked privacy conscious Americans by announcing that they also want to deliver packages inside peoples homes and cars.

Who wouldn’t want to let two of the largest corporations in the world have access to your car and home, what could possibly go wrong?

If you want to find out what could go wrong, read Computerworld’s article that describes how letting corporations inside your home and car is one of the worst ideas ever.

Read more on MassPrivateI.

Would this hold up in court? (I think so!)

How Facebook Outs Sex Workers

Perhaps someone at Gizmodo thought this would be a great attention-getter of a headline. And maybe they’re right as far as that goes, but this is not about Facebook outing sex workers. It’s about Facebook being able to make connections – and expose connections – that perhaps you do not want made or exposed.

Kashmir Hill reports:

Leila has two identities, but Facebook is only supposed to know about one of them.

Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma, arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse).

Her “real identity”—the public one, who lives in California, uses an academic email address, and posts about politics—joined Facebook in 2011. Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all; for it, she uses a different email address, a different phone number, and a different name. Yet earlier this year, looking at Facebook’s “People You May Know” recommendations, Leila (a name I’m using using in place of either of the names she uses) was shocked to see some of her regular sex-work clients.

Despite the fact that she’d only given Facebook information from her vanilla identity, the company had somehow discerned her real-world connection to these people—and, even more horrifyingly, her account was potentially being presented to them as a friend suggestion too, outing her regular identity to them.

Read more on Gizmodo.

Something to share with my students.

https://colleenyoung.wordpress.com/2017/10/15/top-tools-for-learning-2017/

Top Tools for Learning 2017

Jane Hart, of the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies, has published her annual list of Top Tools for Learning

For the toolkit. If I can’t give my students real Intelligence, perhaps AI will do?

http://www.lightreading.com/artificial-intelligence-machine-learning/aws-and-microsoft-build-an-ai-starter-kit/d/d-id/737260?f_src=lightreading_editorspicks_rss_latest&google_editors_picks=true

AWS & Microsoft Build an AI Starter Kit

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched an artificial intelligence library, continuing the competitive AI push among the public cloud giants.

The Gluon library, created by Amazon Web Services Inc. with help from Microsoft Corp., is an AI beginner's kit. It lets developers build models by coding in Python and assembling pre-built chunks of code. The idea is to bring AI, or at least machine learning, into the hands of programmers who aren't experts in the subject, as AWS explained in a blog posting yesterday.

… Gluon is particularly interesting because it's not a research effort, but a tool for reducing AI into normal programming. It fits into Microsoft's goal of democratizing AI. And it wouldn't be surprising to see more efforts emerge along these lines, giving developers more ways to add some intelligence to their cloud applications.

Another strange day here at Centennial-Man: