Tuesday, March 06, 2018

Not a happy trend for my Computer Security students. Could victims sue the organizations who installed Mamcached without security?
World record broken again! DDoS attack exceeds 1.7 terabits per second
Just days after it was revealed that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on GitHub had been measured at a record-breaking peak of 1.35 terabits per second than another attack has raced past, claimed the record-breaking crown at a mind-blowing 1.7 Tbps.
… The attacks against GitHub, and the most recently announced world-record-breaking attack on an unnamed customer of a US-based service provider, are reflection/amplification attacks exploiting the many publicly accessible servers running memcached, an open-source distributed caching utility.
Memcached (pronounced “Mem-cache-dee”) is not supposed to be installed on servers that are exposed to the internet – because it simply doesn’t have security features to protect itself from malicious attackers in the first place.




Russia is expert at propaganda, why aren’t other states? And don’t tell me that ‘they can not tell a lie!’
Fighting fake news: Caught between a rock and a hard place
European Council on Foreign Relations: “Government regulation on fake news is unlikely to prevent malicious actors from meddling in our elections or polarising our societies. With many worried about a Russian information offensive in the West, European states are in the process of developing defence mechanisms. Unfortunately, several seem to be reacting with a legalistic approach that will likely do more harm than good. France, Germany, Italy and the UK are among those setting up measures to identify, block or remove ‘fake news’ from the internet. All these proposals suffer from the same problem: an inability to objectively and usefully define fake news without veering into political censorship. As many experts are warning, ‘fake news’ is becoming a weaponised, politicised term, applied to everything from genuine hoaxes to merely disputed opinions. To further confuse things, hate speech, propaganda, and even satire seem to be falling under this umbrella…”




Why? A question for my Data Management students.

MoviePass CEO proudly says the app tracks your location before and after movies

Everyone knew the MoviePass deal is too good to be true — and as is so often the case these days, it turns out you’re not the customer, you’re the product. And in this case they’re not even attempting to camouflage that. Mitch Lowe, the company’s CEO, told an audience at a Hollywood event that “we know all about you.”
Lowe was giving the keynote at the Entertainment Finance Forum; his talk was entitled “Data is the New Oil: How will MoviePass Monetize It?” Media Play News first reported his remarks.
“We get an enormous amount of information,” Lowe continued. “We watch how you drive from home to the movies. We watch where you go afterwards.”




For my Data Architecture class. Can you architect your customers?
Rise Science came to IDEO with a challenge. The young startup had built a robust data platform for college and professional athletes to track their sleep and adjust their behavior so that they played at peak performance. But for the players, the experience was challenging. Rise expected athletes to look at data-driven charts and graphs to determine what decisions to make next, but players struggled to find those insights. Rise was convinced they just needed easier-to-read charts and graphs.
As IDEO designers and Rise’s data scientists spent time with players and coaches, they discovered that Rise didn’t have a data visualization problem, they had a user experience problem.


(Related) As usual, Dilbert gets it!




Perspective. It’s hard to conquer the world. (Interesting video on Jeff Bezos)
After Losing China, Jeff Bezos Really Wants to Win in India
Having forfeited China to Alibaba and JD.com, Jeff Bezos is determined to win in India, a market of 1.3 billion people who at long last are discovering the pleasures of shopping.
Amazon.com Inc.’s chief has committed $5.5 billion to India and selected Amit Agarwal to spend it wisely.




“It’s where the juicy data are?”
ABA Journal – Cyberthreats 101: The biggest computer crime risks lawyers face
“Cyberattacks are on the rise, both in the number of incidents and the costs associated with the attacks. According to the ABA’s 2017 Legal Technology Survey Report, 22 percent of responding firms had been breached—an increase of 8 percentage points from the previous year’s survey. According to the ABA report, about 27 percent of firms with two to nine attorneys reported experiencing some sort of security breach, while 35 percent of firms with 10 to 49 lawyers and about one-quarter with 500 or more lawyers had suffered such an incident. In 2016, the FBI estimated that cybercrimes were on pace to be a $1 billion source of income to criminals for that year. Law firms of all sizes are attractive targets, given the type and the amount of data they collect. “Law firms are the crown jewels,” says John Reed Stark, a former chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of Internet Enforcement. “They have valuable confidential information on things like mergers and acquisitions and intellectual property,” he says. In 2016, Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Weil Gotshal & Manges were hacked by foreign nationals who used the stolen data for insider trading schemes that netted them more than $4 million. Regardless of the size of the firm or the type of data they collect, cyber hackers use the same modus operandi for gaining access to firms…”




Toward an ‘automated lawyer?’
An AI just beat top lawyers at their own game
Mashable: “The nation’s top lawyers recently battled artificial intelligence in a competition to interpret contracts — and they lost. A new study, conducted by legal AI platform LawGeex in consultation with law professors from Stanford University, Duke University School of Law, and University of Southern California, pitted twenty experienced lawyers against an AI trained to evaluate legal contracts. Competitors were given four hours to review five non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and identify 30 legal issues, including arbitration, confidentiality of relationship, and indemnification. They were scored by how accurately they identified each issue. Unfortunately for humanity, we lost the competition — badly. The human lawyers achieved, on average, an 85 percent accuracy rate, while the AI achieved 95 percent accuracy. The AI also completed the task in 26 seconds, while the human lawyers took 92 minutes on average. The AI also achieved 100 percent accuracy in one contract, on which the highest-scoring human lawyer scored only 97 percent. In short, the human lawyers were trounced. Intellectual property attorney Grant Gulovsen, one of the lawyers who competed against the AI in the study, said the task was very similar to what many lawyers do every day. “The majority of documents, whether it’s wills, operating agreements for corporations, or things like NDAs…they’re very similar,” Gulovsen told Mashable in a phone interview. So does this spell the end of humanity? Not at all. On the contrary, the use of AI can actually help lawyers expedite their work, and free them up to focus on tasks that still require a human brain. [Suggesting that contracts do not require a human brain? Bob] “Having the AI do a first review of an NDA, much like having a paralegal issue spot, would free up valuable time for lawyers to focus on client counseling and other higher-value work,” said Erika Buell, clinical professor at Duke University School of Law, who LawGeex consulted for the study….”




For the movie club.
Hulu sadly ditched its free plan back in 2016, but not all hope is lost for people wanting to watch Hulu without paying. Here’s something a lot of people don’t realize: there’s a legitimate way to watch Hulu Plus for free, month to month, and it doesn’t require much effort.


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