Monday, August 13, 2018

NOW will you listen to the experts and do something about security? (Probably not.)
An 11-year-old changed election results on a replica Florida state website in under 10 minutes
An 11-year-old boy on Friday was able to hack into a replica of the Florida state election website and change voting results found there in under 10 minutes during the world’s largest yearly hacking convention, DEFCON 26, organizers of the event said.
… Nico Sell, the co-founder of the the non-profit r00tz Asylum, which teaches children how to become hackers and helped organize the event, said an 11-year-old girl also managed to make changes to the same Florida replica website in about 15 minutes, tripling the number of votes found there.
Sell said more than 30 children hacked a variety of other similar state replica websites in under a half hour.
“These are very accurate replicas of all of the sites,” Sell told the PBS NewsHour on Sunday. “These things should not be easy enough for an 8-year-old kid to hack within 30 minutes, it’s negligent for us as a society.”
Sell said the idea for the event began last year, after adult hackers were able to access similar voting sites in less than five minutes.
“So this year we decided to bring the voting village to the kids as well,” she said.




Of course they can be hacked.
Police Bodycams Can Be Hacked to Doctor Footage
As they proliferate, police body cameras have courted controversy because of the contentious nature of the footage they capture and questions about how accessible those recordings should be.
But when it comes to the devices themselves, the most crucial function they need to perform—beyond recording footage in the first place—is protecting the integrity of that footage so it can be trusted as a record of events. At the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas on Saturday, though, one researcher will present findings that many body cameras on the market today are vulnerable to remote digital attacks, including some that could result in the manipulation of footage.
… In all but the Digital Ally device, the vulnerabilities would allow an attacker to download footage off a camera, edit things out or potentially make more intricate modifications, and then re-upload it, leaving no indication of the change. Or an attacker could simply delete footage they don't want law enforcement to have.




Think of a technology that allows you to print out some data you have in your computer, send it electronically then require the recipient to re-enter it into their computer. Gosh I hate Fax machines. Technology invented before the Civil War is probably not the optimal technology to use today.
Hackers could use fax machines to take over entire networks, researchers warn
Researchers at Nasdaq-listed Check Point Software Technologies said that fax machines — which still reside in many offices — have serious security flaws. Those vulnerabilities could potentially allow an attacker to steal sensitive files through a company's network using just a phone line and a fax number.
In a report released on Sunday, Check Point researchers showed how they were able to exploit security flaws present in a Hewlett Packard all-in-one printer. Standalone fax machines are a rarity in companies today, but the fax function is still present in commonplace all-in-one printers.




American parents would panic. Is it possible the French can’t figure out how to use Smartphones in the classroom? Mon Dieu!
French school students to be banned from using mobile phones
French school students will be banned from using mobile phones anywhere on school grounds from September, after the lower house of parliament passed what it called a “detox” law for a younger generation increasingly addicted to screens.
The centrist president Emmanuel Macron had promised during his election campaign that he would outlaw children’s phones in nursery, primary and middle-schools, until around the age of 15.
The new law bans phone-use by children in school playgrounds, at breaktimes and anywhere on school premises. Legislation passed in 2010 already states children should not use phones in class.




Perspective. An interesting article.
AI is bringing a new set of rules to knowledge work
The rules of the physical world are either not applicable or are severely diminished. Things move from sparsity to abundance, where consumption does not lead to depletion. To the contrary, the more an object is consumed, the more valuable it becomes. Cost of production and distribution is no longer critical, and the concept of inventory is no longer applicable.
When things go digital, they also move from linear to exponential – a world in which new technologies and new players can enter and dominate an industry in just a few years.
Consider that each year more people take online courses offered by Harvard than the number of students who attended Harvard in its 380-year history. Each year, three times more people use online dispute resolutions to resolve disputes on eBay® than lawsuits filed in the United States. Each day, five billion videos are watched on YouTube®. For context, the first YouTube video was uploaded in 2005. I was talking to a gentleman at Facebook® recently who said, “I joined Facebook three years ago and 70 percent of the company started after me.” Talk about hyper-growth businesses!


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