Friday, October 05, 2018

When will this add up to “too much?”
West Accuses Russian Spy Agency of Scores of Attacks
The West unleashed an onslaught of new evidence and indictments Thursday accusing Russian military spies of hacking so widespread that it seemed to target anyone, anywhere who investigates Moscow's involvement in an array of criminal activities — including doping, poisoning and the downing of a plane.
Russia defiantly denied the charges, neither humbled nor embarrassed by the exceptional revelations on one of the most high-tension days in East-West relations in years. Moscow lashed back with allegations that the Pentagon runs a clandestine U.S. biological weapons program involving toxic mosquitoes, ticks and more.
The nucleus of Thursday's drama was Russia's military intelligence agency known as the GRU, increasingly the embodiment of Russian meddling abroad.
In the last 24 hours: U.S. authorities charged seven officers from the GRU with hacking international agencies; British and Australian authorities accused the GRU of a devastating 2017 cyberattack on Ukraine, the email leaks that rocked the U.S. 2016 election and other damaging hacks; And Dutch officials alleged that GRU agents tried and failed to hack into the world's chemical weapons watchdog, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.


(Related)
Canada Says it Was Targeted by Russian Cyber Attacks
Canada said Thursday it too was targeted by Russian cyber attacks, citing breaches at its center for ethics in sports and at the Montreal-based World Anti-Doping Agency, after allies blamed Moscow for some of the biggest hacking plots of recent years.
"The government of Canada assesses with high confidence that the Russian military's intelligence arm, the GRU, was responsible" for these cyber attacks, the foreign ministry said in a statement.




Will this solve everything?
Introducing the Internet Bill of Rights
Should American citizens get a new Bill of Rights for the internet?
… Six months ago, Ms. Pelosi charged Ro Khanna — the Democratic representative whose California district is home to Apple, Intel and Yahoo — with the creation of that list.
… Mr. Khanna’s List:

Set of Principles for an Internet Bill of Rights

The internet age and digital revolution have changed Americans’ way of life. As our lives and the U.S. economy are more tied to the internet, it is essential to provide Americans with basic protections online.
You should have the right:
(1) to have access to and knowledge of all collection and uses of personal data by companies;
(2) to opt-in consent to the collection of personal data by any party and to the sharing of personal data with a third party;
(3) where context appropriate and with a fair process, to obtain, correct or delete personal data controlled by any company and to have those requests honored by third parties;
(4) to have personal data secured and to be notified in a timely manner when a security breach or unauthorized access of personal data is discovered;
(5) to move all personal data from one network to the next;
(6) to access and use the internet without internet service providers blocking, throttling, engaging in paid prioritization or otherwise unfairly favoring content, applications, services or devices;
(7) to internet service without the collection of data that is unnecessary for providing the requested service absent opt-in consent;
(8) to have access to multiple viable, affordable internet platforms, services and providers with clear and transparent pricing;
(9) not to be unfairly discriminated against or exploited based on your personal data; and
(10) to have an entity that collects your personal data have reasonable business practices and accountability to protect your privacy.




Salesmen can talk school administrators into anything? Detection is not prevention.
Is School Surveillance Technology Worth It?
After Parkland, schools are installing gunshot-detection systems typically used in cities like Oakland and Chicago. But are they worth the expense?
… In the wake of the Parkland shooting, and Sandy Hook before that, school districts across the nation are spending hundreds of thousands to outfit campuses with high-tech surveillance, crisis response, and police technologies. Playgrounds are cordoned off by biometric locks requiring face and iris scans, parking lots are scanned and license plates are recorded, gunshot-detection devices are embedded in cafeterias, human police wear body cameras, and autonomous robots patrol hallways to detect weapons.




Inevitable? Do you need this? Is it likely to come down to “my body cam vs your body cam?”
iPhone Shortcut Automatically Records Police
iPhone users have created shortcuts that allow Apple’s flagship product to automatically record video, text a location to an emergency contact, and even stop police from entering the phone—just in case the iPhone owner has an interaction with a law enforcement officer.
Apple recently introduced “Shortcuts” to iOS 12, an app that allows iPhone owners to design their own automated commands for their phone.
According to Mic, Reddit user Robert Peterson created a trick using the virtual assistant, Siri, that lowers the phone’s brightness, turns on Do Not Disturb, texts the iPhone owner’s location to an emergency contact and lets them know you have been pulled over by police. The shortcut will also automatically start recording video and, when finished, the phone will send the video to the contact or save it to a cloud service.
The shortcut is available here, while another user created a workflow that automatically reboots the phone, rendering the fingerprint or face ID feature useless until a person enters a passcode.




Will they use Stinger or Javelin missiles?
Senate passes bill that lets the government destroy private drones
The wording comes from another bill, the Preventing Emerging Threats Act of 2018, which was strongly supported by the Department of Homeland Security and absorbed into the FAA Reauthorization Act. In June, as part of its argument as to why it needed more leeway when it comes to drones, the agency said that terrorist groups overseas "use commercially available [unmanned aircraft systems] to drop explosive payloads, deliver harmful substances and conduct illicit surveillance," and added that the devices are also used to transport drugs, interfere with law enforcement and expolit unsecured networks.
… The bill says that when a "credible threat" is posed by a drone to a "covered facility or asset," the federal government can "disrupt control" of that device, "seize or exercise control" of it, confiscate it or "use reasonable force, if necessary, to disable, damage or destroy the unmanned aircraft system." In the bill, "credible threat" is left undefined.




Because we don’t actually talk any longer? Instead of “Hello there!” now it’s “Scan my phone!”
Instagram’s Nametag feature makes it easier to follow people you meet IRL
Instagram is rolling out a new way to quickly follow people you’ve met in real life. Called Nametag, the feature works by showing your username on your phone in a format that allows it to be scanned by your soon-to-be follower. This tag can also be customized with additional designs, colors, and stickers.
Similar functionality is already available across other social media networks. Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat users can generate QR codes for others to scan and quickly find accounts, while Spotify offers the same for music tracks.
… Alongside Nametag, Instagram is also testing a new bio field at some US universities, which will allow you to add your school, class year, and society memberships. Searching for this information will then show you a directory of everyone at that institution, making it easier to find and add classmates… and for Facebook to gather more information about you.




Perspective. The evolution of the scooter industry.
Bird unveils custom electric scooters and delivery
… Dubbed Bird Zero, the scooters have 60 percent more battery life, and better ride stability and durability than the original model. There’s also an integrated digital screen to display your speed.
… The name of the game, VanderZanden said, is to be as customer-obsessed as possible. That’s where Bird Delivery, launching soon, comes in. With Bird Delivery, riders can request a Bird be delivered to their home or office by 8 a.m. From there, the rider can use it throughout the day.


(Related) Easier to replace your car.
Google Assistant now helps you compare ride-hailing prices and summon a car
After announcing some updates to the Google Assistant user experience yesterday, today Google is rolling out a new way of booking rides with your voice — or at least getting most of the way there. Starting this week, you’ll be able to say “Hey Google, book a ride to” or “Hey Google, get me a taxi to” your destination.
Assistant will then respond by listing off price estimates and current wait times for Uber, Lyft, Ola, Grab, GO-JEK, “and many more” ride-hailing apps, according to Google.
… This works on Android, iPhone, Google Home, and all other smart speakers that have Assistant built in.




A tool for collecting the “Wit and Wisdom of Donald Trump?” Probably not.
Christian Howard · October 1, 2018 – Mining Twitter Data
“Hello again, everybody! I’m back this semester as a DH Prototyping Fellow, and together, Alyssa Collins and I are working on a project titled “Twitterature: Methods and Metadata.” Specifically, we’re hoping to develop a simple way of using Twitter data for literary research. The project is still in its early stages, but we’ve been collecting a lot of data and are now beginning to visualize it (I’m particularly interested in the geolocation of tweets, so I’m trying out a few mapping options). In this post, I want to layout our methods for collecting Twitter data.
Okay, Alyssa and I have been using a python based Twitter scraping script, which we modified to search Twitter without any time limitations (the official Twitter search function is limited to tweets of the past two weeks). So, to run the Twitter scraping script, I entered the following in my command line: python3 TwitterScraper.py. This command then prompted for the search term and the dates within which I wanted to run my search. For this post, I ran the search term #twitterature (and no, the python scraper has no problem handling hashtags as part of the search query!). After entering the necessary information, the command would create both a txt and a csv file with the results of my search…”
[From the article:
You can download the python scraper (TwitterScraper.py) from our GitHub page: github.com/CHoward345/Twitterature-Methods-and-Metadata. For the DocNow tools, visit: github.com/DocNow/twarc.




Maybe it’s just me and this has nothing to do with the White House.


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