Saturday, October 20, 2018

If the front door is locked, try the back door. (Hacking 101)
Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reports:
A government computer system that interacts with HealthCare.gov was hacked earlier this month, compromising the sensitive personal data of some 75,000 people, officials said Friday.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services made the announcement late in the afternoon ahead of a weekend, a time slot agencies often use to release unfavorable developments.
Read more of this AP report on ABC.
[From the article:
The system that was hacked is used by insurance agents and brokers to directly enroll customers. All other sign-up systems are working.
CMS spokesman Johnathan Monroe said "nothing happened" to the HealthCare.gov website used by the general public. "This concerns the agent and broker portal, which is not accessible to the general public," he said. [Oh. And a few hackers… Bob]




For my Computer Security students. (The Ethical Hacking students get a much longer list of sites.)




This happens when you play wack-a-mole. Time for Twitter (and others) to get serious.
Alex Jones and InfoWars Are Still on Twitter, Despite ‘Ban’
… Now, with his Twitter accounts shuttered, Jones had no way to communicate with the hundreds and thousands of followers.
Except those accounts weren’t shuttered.
In fact, two months after Jones and InfoWars were supposedly shunned, a number of accounts remain live and tweeting.
… All three Twitter accounts are listed on the InfoWars site as official InfoWars social media, meaning they wouldn’t be hard for Twitter to find. But the InfoWars social media page notes it’s only “a small list of our main profiles,” suggesting InfoWars is using other social media accounts to evade the ban.




For my Architecture students.
How Companies Can Leverage Technology to Deliver Hyper-Personalized Services
… There are two options. One is to completely take those old core systems and modernize. Some of them are taking that approach. But the problem with that approach is that it’s not easy. It takes two, three, four years to completely modernize all of your systems. And by the time these modernization projects are done, the industry has moved on. Newer products have come along.
So what do we do? There is an approach that we call “end transformation.” It is all about starting with your end stakeholder in mind, looking at what are the specific use cases that make sense for that customer, and how can we add value to the customer and start working from there. You do that by building an intelligent middle layer, which then talks to your core systems and pulls out the data and services, and provide them using your engagement layer back to the customer.




Worth a mention.
TED-Ed Explains Why Students Should Read Classics
A few weeks ago TED-Ed published a lesson titled Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe? It now appears that lesson was the first in a series of lessons designed to explain and encourage students to read some classics. Since the Poe lesson was published TED-Ed has published similar lessons about Don Quixote, Waiting for Godot, and The Canterbury Tales. All of those video lessons plus the Poe lesson are embedded below.




Get ahead of the ‘rent-a-bike’ crowd.




I want to make a note of this because someday I’ll buy a phone. Maybe.


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