Tuesday, June 05, 2018

Eventually the details come out.
Hacker Stole 26 Million Email And Home Addresses Of Ticketfly Users
Ticketfly’s parent company Eventbrite said it's still investigating the incident, and hasn’t revealed the extent of the data breach, nor how much or what kind of data was stolen. Motherboard downloaded a series of CSV database files posted on a public server by the hacker last week and shared it with Troy Hunt, the founder of the “Have I Been Pwned,” a website dedicated of informing users of data breaches.
Hunt analyzed the databases and found 26,151,608 unique email addresses. The databases did not include passwords nor credit card details. But for most users, they did include their home and billing address and phone numbers.
The hacker told Motherboard that they reached out to Ticketfly before the breach, alerting the company of a vulnerability, and demanding a ransom of 1 bitcoin to help them fix the flaw. After the company did not respond to their emails, the hacker defaced the site.
… As of Monday, the service is still offline. It’s now been offline for five days.




Not the right Washington? Is this the start of a flood?
Washington state sues Facebook, Google over election ad disclosure
The state of Washington said on Monday it had sued Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google for allegedly violating state campaign finance law by failing to maintain information about who buys election ads.
The state's attorney general, Bob Ferguson, who posted copies of the lawsuits here and here on his website, said he was seeking penalties against the companies and an injunction for failing to disclose ad spending in state elections since 2013.
… Unlike most U.S. jurisdictions, both Washington state and the city of Seattle have laws dating to the 1970s that require companies that sell advertising, such as radio stations, to disclose who buys political ads. Other states put the burden of disclosure on the buyers themselves.




Are we protecting “methods and capabilities?”
What If Police Use ‘Rekognition’ Without Telling Defendants?
At least two US law enforcement departments — and Motorola, which sells equipment to the government — have already purchased access to Amazon’s “Rekognition” system. This technology combines facial recognition and artificial intelligence to identify people and track their movements, including in crowds.
Among the many civil-liberties implications of programs like these is the real possibility that people in the United States facing imprisonment or deportation will never learn about law enforcement’s use of such systems during investigations, thanks to the U.S. government practice known as “parallel construction.” This means the constitutionality of such activities could go unchallenged by defendants and unexamined by judges, who are essential to providing checks on police powers.
… For courts to play their vital role in ensuring that any government investigative measures—including sophisticated emerging technologies—are lawful, both judges and the defense need to know what law enforcement is doing. Congress should require the government to disclose complete information about the methods used to obtain evidence—and in the meantime, judges should strongly consider doing the same. The digital age, with its unprecedented capabilities to catalogue intimate details about our lives, is no time to relax our vigilance in defending rights.




When can I video my students? When are they not students?
William J. Zee of Barley Snyder writes, in part:
…. Prior to the recent issuance of the “FAQs on Photos and Videos under FERPA,” the issue of surveillance video as an education record was addressed in the December 7 “Letter to Wachter.” The new guidance does not deviate substantially from the information provided in the letter, but it does offer a more detailed and comprehensive analysis applicable to determining when a photo or video of a student is deemed an education record under FERPA. It also address what steps schools need to take in handling requests for such information.
Determining when a visual representation of a student is directly, rather than incidentally, related to a particular student is a very context-specific analysis.
Read more on Barley Snyder.




Conway is not exactly on the boarder with Canada. Is there something special about that area?
Planning a vacation with Joe Cadillic is probably not a typical planning experience. 🙂
Joe writes:
Since last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) have been conducting immigration checkpoints in Hew Hampshire’s White Mountains.
NH’s motto ‘Live Free or Die’ is fast becoming a joke to all who visit.
Why would I say that?
Because this past Memorial Day weekend, State Police with DHS funding, conducted a DWI ‘saturation patrol’ in Conway from 9 PM-3 AM stopping ninety motorists. Anyone familiar with North Conway knows that most bars and restaurants close at 1AM and stopping ninety Conway residents would have caused a public outcry.
So who were the police targeting?
Read more on MassPrivateI.




It’s not just robots that “take” jobs.
How a Genetically Modified Soybean Helped Modernize an Economy
As Brazil’s farms became more efficient, workers shifted to manufacturing.




My students are watching this market.
Waymo, the self-driving car spinoff of Google, made a big splash last week by announcing it struck a deal with Fiat Chrysler to add 62,000 Chrysler Pacficia hybrid minivans to its upcoming fleet of autonomous taxis. Turns out, the move could have a big impact not only on Waymo’s bottom line but also potential buyers of electric cars in years to come, too. It appears that nothing’s stopping the company from seeking as much as $465 million in federal tax credits as a result of the order, according to experts who spoke to Jalopnik.
Even if Waymo decides against claiming the electric vehicle tax credit—worth up to $7,500 per car—on its annual returns, the Pacifica order will impact the ability of future car buyers to purchase a FCA electric or hybrid model at a more affordable price, experts said. The Pacifica order represents more than 30 percent of the 200,000 vehicle cap set under federal regulators for the tax credit; once a manufacturer hits that ceiling, the credit begins to phase out.




Perspective. Some programmers actively hate Microsoft. Not sure that’s a valid strategy.
13,000 Projects Ditched GitHub for GitLab Monday Morning
On Monday morning, Microsoft announced that it had acquired the popular collaborative software development platform Github for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. The announcement was met with mixed reactions from the developer community. Some looked at the acquisition as inevitable and the only way to sustain a free platform that had grown as large as Github. Others saw it as the death knell for a neutral, community-driven platform that was the de facto home of open source software development.
Rumors of the acquisition first began circulating over the weekend, which led to a mass migration of Github projects to its competitor’s platform, GitLab. A real-time tracker on GitLab shows a massive spike in imported Github projects early on Monday morning, with over 13,000 projects being imported within a single hour. Yet GitLab’s CEO and co-founder Sid Sijbrandij said the mass migration has been going on for nearly a week.
“Within the past seven days, we have imported nearly 50,000 projects,” Sijbrandij told me in an email. “We’ve scaled up the servers for GitLab.com three times already.”
… Although 50,000 projects being transferred to GitLab is nothing to bat an eye at, it’s still a relatively small portion of the roughly 80 million projects hosted on GitHub.




You can’t make this stuff up. At least, I can’t.
… The fourth generation (Series 3) of the Apple Watch was the first to get built-in cellular connectivity, letting you leave your iPhone at home. To make it easier to reach out to other Apple Watch users, a new Walkie-Talkie app is being introduced with watchOS 5.0 that lets users send quick voice memos back and forth over a cellular connection, or Wi-Fi. It looks like it’s a faster alternative to placing a call, and may be considerably lighter on data usage.




Useful tools?
New on LLRX – Popular Face-to-Face Conferencing Software
Via LLRXPopular Face-to-Face Conferencing SoftwareBrandon Wright Adler reviews free and fee based meeting/conferencing software that meets the requirements to support effective communications with team and/or group members in disparate locations.


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