Another example of encryption poorly implemented?
Forever 21
reveals potential data breach
Forever 21 is investigating a potential data
breach which may have compromised customer information and payment
cards.
On Tuesday, the US
clothing retailer said that the company recently received a tip
from a third-party that there "may have been unauthorized access
to data from payment cards" at a number of Forever 21 outlets.
… However, the company did reveal that as
encryption and token-based authentication systems were implemented
back in 2015, "only certain point of sale (PoS) devices in some
Forever 21 stores were affected."
According to the firm, a potential compromise may
have taken place when encryption "was not in operation" on
certain PoS devices, which may suggest older systems or locations
where the 2015 rollout did not occur may be at the heart of the
security incident.
Overreach?
Michael Geist explains:
The Canada Revenue Agency has obtained a federal court order requiring PayPal to hand over years of transactional information from all business accounts in Canada. The scope of the order is incredibly broad, covering any business account holder who sent or received a payment over a nearly four year period from January 1, 2014 to November 10, 2017.
Read more on MichaelGeist.ca.
Dilbert points out a downside to health monitors.
This was never going to be easy.
'Way too
little, way too late': Facebook's factcheckers say effort is failing
Journalists working for Facebook
say the social media site’s fact-checking tools have largely failed
and that the company has exploited their labor for a PR campaign.
Several fact checkers who work for independent
news organizations and partner with Facebook told the Guardian that
they feared their relationships with the technology corporation, some
of which are paid, have created a conflict of interest, making it
harder for the news outlets to scrutinize and criticize Facebook’s
role in spreading misinformation.
The reporters also lamented that Facebook had
refused to disclose data on its efforts to stop the dissemination of
fake news.
Elections and social media. (and some excellent
graphics)
Report –
Manipulating Social Media to Undermine Democracy
Freedom
House – Freedom of the Net 2017: “Governments
around the world have dramatically increased their efforts to
manipulate information on social media over the past year.
The Chinese and Russian
regimes pioneered the use of surreptitious methods to distort online
discussions and suppress dissent more than a decade ago, but the
practice has since gone global. Such state-led interventions present
a major threat to the notion of the internet as a liberating
technology. Online content manipulation contributed to a seventh
consecutive year of overall decline in internet freedom,
along with a rise in disruptions to mobile internet service and
increases in physical and technical attacks on human rights defenders
and independent media. Nearly half of the 65 countries assessed in
Freedom on the Net 2017 experienced declines during the
coverage period, while just 13 made gains, most of them minor. Less
than one-quarter of users reside in countries where the internet is
designated Free, meaning there are no major obstacles to access,
onerous restrictions on content, or serious violations of user rights
in the form of unchecked surveillance or unjust repercussions for
legitimate speech. The use of “fake news,” automated “bot”
accounts, and other manipulation methods gained particular attention
in the United States. While the country’s online environment
remained generally free, it was troubled by a proliferation of
fabricated news articles, divisive partisan vitriol, and aggressive
harassment of many journalists, both during and after the
presidential election campaign. Russia’s
online efforts to influence the American election have been well
documented, but the United States was hardly alone in this respect.
Manipulation and disinformation tactics played an important role in
elections in at least 17 other countries over the past year,
damaging citizens’ ability to choose their leaders based on factual
news and authentic debate. Although some governments sought to
support their interests and expand their influence abroad—as with
Russia’s disinformation campaigns in the United States and
Europe—in most cases they used these methods inside their own
borders to maintain their hold on power…”
Perspective. If the professional writers can’t
get it right, what hope for my students?
American
Press Institute – Time to reinvent social media in newsrooms
“…But as
this report will detail, social media teams, on the front lines
of both issues, still are largely doing what they’ve done for a
decade. A new API survey of 59 U.S. newsrooms conducted for this
report shows that posting links to their own content, mostly on
Twitter and Facebook, is still by far the top activity of the average
social media team. While organizations like Hearken, GroundSource
and the Coral Project are working to help newsrooms use social media
for audience engagement rather than just for clicks, there is still
much progress to be made — in using social platforms as tools to
understand communities and to bring audiences into news creation.
What’s more, the majority of newsrooms only “sometimes” or
“very rarely” address misinformation on social media and comment
platforms, our survey shows. And long-term strategies and planning
are rare…”
Reading is as hard as writing?
Lateral
Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital
Information
Wineburg, Sam and McGrew, Sarah, Lateral Reading:
Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information
(October 6, 2017). Stanford History Education Group Working Paper
No. 2017-A1. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3048994
“The Internet has democratized access to
information but in so doing has opened the floodgates to
misinformation, fake news, and rank propaganda masquerading as
dispassionate analysis. To investigate how people determine the
credibility of digital information, we sampled 45 individuals: 10
Ph.D. historians, 10 professional fact checkers, and 25 Stanford
University undergraduates. We observed them as they evaluated live
websites and searched for information on social and political issues.
Historians and students
often fell victim to easily manipulated features of websites, such as
official-looking logos and domain names. They read
vertically, staying within a website to evaluate its
reliability. In contrast, fact
checkers read laterally, leaving a site after a quick scan
and opening up new browser tabs in order to judge the credibility of
the original site. Compared to the other groups, fact checkers
arrived at more warranted conclusions in a fraction of the time. We
contrast insights gleaned from the fact checkers’ practices with
common approaches to teaching web credibility.”
Maybe I could Tweet instead of Blog?
Those new to Twitter are probably left with tons
of questions. What is this site all about? How do I use it? And
how can I make the most of it with advanced tips and tricks?
We’ll answer all these questions and more in our
complete guide to Twitter. Let’s get started!
Not much on the evening news.
Zimbabwe's
Mugabe 'under house arrest' after army takeover
Zimbabwe's military has placed President Robert
Mugabe under house arrest in the capital Harare, South African
President Jacob Zuma says.
Troops are patrolling the capital, Harare, after
they seized state TV and said they were targeting "criminals".
The move may be a bid to replace Mr Mugabe with
his sacked deputy, Emmerson Mnangagwa, BBC correspondents say.
Mr Mnangagwa's dismissal last week left Mr
Mugabe's wife Grace as the president's likely successor.
Some of my students might be interested.
Free course
targets candidates for network engineering jobs
NexGenT is new to the IT boot camp field, so it's
promoting itself, offering up a course that helps people prepare for
IT careers. The fee? A $5 charity donation.
… The monthlong course, which has a list price
of $997, gets help desk technicians, network admins or other IT
apprentices ready for CompTIA's Network+
certification, a useful, but not mandatory, credential for getting
network engineering jobs.
Extreme, but then it probably has to be.
'Slaughterbots'
film shows potential horrors of killer drones
Perhaps the most nightmarish, dystopian film of
2017 didn't come from Hollywood. Autonomous weapons critics, led by
a college professor, put together a horror show.
It's a seven-minute
video, a collaboration between University of California-Berkeley
professor Stuart Russell and the Future of Life Institute that shows
a future in which palm-sized, autonomous drones use facial
recognition technology and on-board explosives to commit untraceable
massacres.
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