The New Indian Express reported this in July:
In a case of corporate espionage,
a computer engineer’s bid to sell his employer’s data to a company, which he
thought was a competitor, fell flat when the recipient discovered the two firms
are in fact partners, and the data sought to be sold was their own. Shreesha Rao (23), a resident of Vinayaka
Nagar in K R Puram, has been arrested and is now cooling his heels in judicial
custody. He is a computer-aided design
and drafting (CADD) professional who designs radius maps for a company called
New Generation.
In a bid to make quick money,
Shreesha Rao contacted another company, SBT Associates, offering to sell his
employer’s data. After SBT Associates
agreed, he sent the data as an attachment to his personal email, and then
forwarded it to the buyer. However,
Shreesha didn’t know that SBT Associates was a vendor for his employer, and
that the data in question was in fact sourced from them.
Read more on New
Indian Express.
This raises many questions for me. What would they have done if there was a “fake
news” story that might have changed a lot of votes? Did they have any criteria for identifying such
a story? What attack on voting machine was
possible that might change even 1% of the vote?
Exclusive: FBI tracked 'fake news' believed to be from Russia
on Election Day
The FBI monitored social media on Election Day last year
in an effort to track a suspected Russian disinformation campaign utilizing
"fake news," CNN has learned.
… On Election Day,
dozens of agents and analysts huddled at a command center arrayed with large
monitoring screens at the FBI headquarters in Washington watching for security
threats, according to multiple sources.
… FBI analysts had
identified social media user accounts behind stories, some based overseas, and
the suspicion was that at least some were part of a Russian disinformation
campaign, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.
The FBI declined to comment for this story.
For the FBI, this was uncomfortable territory, given the
First Amendment's free speech protections even for fake news stories.
"We were right on the edge of Constitutional
legality," a person briefed on the investigation said. "We were
monitoring news."
… At the end of
day, top officials exchanged congratulations for an election day that was
completed without disruptions of the vote.
(Related). Gosh,
maybe everyone does it! Perhaps I should
add this to the Ethical Hacking course?
South Korea Spy Agency Admits Attempting to Rig Election
South Korea's spy agency has
admitted that it had engaged in a far-reaching attempt to manipulate voters as
it sought to help conservatives win parliamentary and presidential elections.
In-house investigators from the National Intelligence
Service (NIS) confirmed that the agency's cyber warfare unit organised and
operated up to 30 teams for more than two years in the run-up to the 2012
elections, the agency said in a statement late Thursday.
They hired internet-savvy civilians and sought to sway
voter opinions through postings on portals and Twitter.
… The internal
probe also found Won ordered the agency to muzzle the press, provide support
for pro-government conservative civic groups and put some major opposition
politicians under secret surveillance.
…and the ‘proof of insurance?’
The march of technology is
eliminating another favorite tool police use to search vehicles. The Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals last
week said police
cannot rummage through an automobile’s glovebox without permission or
warrant to “find the registration” when a simple computer search can look up
the same information from the VIN, the vehicle identification number visible
from outside the car.
Read more on The Newspaper.
Win some, lose some.
Wait for the reversals.
Brett Max Kaufman of the ACLU writes:
When you fill a prescription at
your local drug store, you would surely bristle at someone behind you peeking
over your shoulder — but in a decision
issued last week, a federal court in Utah said that you have no Fourth
Amendment right to object when the peeker is the United States government.
You read that correctly: In a case
challenging the Drug Enforcement Administration’s warrantless access to patient
prescription records stored in a secure state database, the court relied in
part on an outdated legal doctrine to rule that a “patient in Utah decides to
trust a prescribing physician with health information to facilitate a
diagnosis,” and thereby “takes the risk . . . that his or her information will
be conveyed to the government.”
Read more on ACLU.
Complete speculation.
(Fun, isn’t it?)
Snapchat would let Google finally conquer the $72 billion TV
ad market and stop Facebook in its tracks
As Business Insider's Alex Health reported on Thursday, Google
has looked into buying Snapchat for as much as $30 billion.
Who knows whether this deal would ever happen? But in the meantime, it's worth examining what
such an acquisition would do for Google (besides
keeping Snapchat away from Facebook).
At top of the list: a marriage of Snapchat and
Google's mega global video platform YouTube could help Google make a serious
bid for the biggest prize in advertising — the $72 billion TV market.
… Snapchat boasts
of average
daily users sessions of 30 minutes. YouTube users now average 60
minutes a day on its mobile app. Facebook, by contrast, is doing everything it
can simply to convince users to spend 3 second watching a video in its
Newsfeed.
The combination of YouTube - which reaches
1.5 billion users a month - and Snapchat could give Google an
unmatchable daily "reach machine"; a direct pathway to youngsters who
log their screen time hours in front of phones and tablets. It's easy to imagine a specialized Google
ad buy that connects brands with the majority of teens and 20-somethings every
day, giving Google a legitimate rival to the reach marketers currently get
through TV.
Simple enough to be useful?
Flip Anim - Quickly Create Animated GIFs
Flip Anim
provides possibly the easiest way draw and create an animated GIF. Within minutes of learning about Flip Anim on Larry Ferlazzo's blog I had created a couple of animated
GIFs illustrating basic addition problems. One of those is included below.
To create an animation on Flip Anim simply go to the site and start drawing on the
notepad in the center of your screen. You
can draw as much or as little as you like on each page of your notepad. You're essentially drawing a piece of each
animation on each page of your notepad much like the way that old cartoons were
created. When you're done drawing on all
of your pages you can preview the animation by pressing the play button. To save your work you do have to upload it to
Flip Anim (registration is not required) then you can download it as an
animated GIF.
