Sunday, July 22, 2018

With articles like these, it is easy to keep my students interested.
If you shopped at these 15 stores in the last year, your data might have been stolen




Never rely on the word of a vendor? Several flaws are detailed.
Between You, Me, and Google: Problems With Gmail's “Confidential Mode”
With Gmail’s new design rolled out to more and more users, many have had a chance to try out its new “Confidential Mode.” While many of its features sound promising, what “Confidential Mode” provides isn’t confidentiality. At best, the new mode might create expectations that it fails to meet around security and privacy in Gmail.
… With its new Confidential Mode, Google purports to allow you to restrict how the emails you send can be viewed and shared: the recipient of your Confidential Mode email will not be able to forward or print it. You can also set an “expiration date” at which time the email will be deleted from your recipient’s inbox, and even require a text message code as an added layer of security before the email can be viewed.
Unfortunately, each of these “security” features comes with serious security problems for users.
… It’s important to note at the outset that because Confidential Mode emails are not end-to-end encrypted, Google can see the contents of your messages and has the technical capability to store them indefinitely, regardless of any “expiration date” you set. In other words, Confidential Mode provides zero confidentiality with regard to Google.




Moving forensics into the cloud.
Netflix Cloud Security SIRT releases Diffy: A Differencing Engine for Digital Forensics in the Cloud
The Netflix Security Intelligence and Response Team (SIRT) announces the release of Diffy under an Apache 2.0 license. Diffy is a triage tool to help digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) teams quickly identify compromised hosts on which to focus their response, during a security incident on cloud architectures.
… It's called "Diffy" because it helps a human investigator to identify the differences between instances




Why I had my Software Architecture students design a mobile banking app.
Banks Freed From Branches Use Mobile Apps to Go After Customers
U.S. Bancorp this week was the latest to say it will build a nationally available checking-account product as lenders introduce mobile offerings that let consumers do their full banking without a branch. The move follows similar announcements by some of the country’s largest banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and PNC Financial Services Group Inc.




The “fake news” concept seems to be catching on. Definitions seem to vary a bit.
Egypt targets social media with new law
Egypt’s parliament has passed a law giving the state powers to block social media accounts and penalize journalists held to be publishing fake news.
Under the law passed on Monday social media accounts and blogs with more than 5,000 followers on sites such as Twitter and Facebook will be treated as media outlets, which makes them subject to prosecution for publishing false news or incitement to break the law.




Perspective. Holy Mackerel! It’s not an error, it’s a message from God?
Why Is Google Translate Spitting Out Sinister Religious Prophecies?
Type the word “dog” into Google Translate 19 times, request that the nonsensical message be flipped from Maori into English, and out pops what appears to be a garbled religious prophecy.
“Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve,” it reads. “We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus' return.”




I still don’t get it.


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