Wednesday, November 07, 2018

HSBC has been awfully quiet on this. Are they still counting victims?
HSBC bank confirms US data breach
HSBC has said some of its US customers' bank accounts were hacked in October.
The lender said that the perpetrators may have accessed information including account numbers and balances, statement and transaction histories and payee details, as well as users' names, addresses and dates of birth.
… The bank said the online accounts were breached between 4 and 14 October.
It is not clear whether the attackers have tried to make use of the data to steal savings.
A template of the alert sent to customers has been posted online by the California Attorney General's Office, although the hack was not limited to that state.
One expert said it appeared that the technique involved was a "credential stuffing" in which personal details harvested from elsewhere had been used to gain unauthorised access to the accounts. [Password reuse should be the customer’s problem, not the bank’s. Bob]




I suspect more will follow. (Yes, I have a very negative view of the election process.)
Don’t Be Fooled: There Was Election Interference in 2018
With Election Day 2018 behind us, many are breathing a sigh of relief. Those following closely the prospect of widespread election interference are indicating that, despite fears of everything from the changing of votes to the spread of disinformation, the 2018 midterms saw relatively little by way of such interference, or at least less than occurred in 2016. It’s true that there have been no credible reports of actual vote changing of the type that could call into question the Election Day results, and that’s reassuring. But, all told, it’s unfortunately misguided to suggest that this campaign season and ultimately this election were free from election interference. That’s for at least three reasons.


(Related) “Discovered” on Monday?
Facebook connects Russia to 100+ accounts it removed ahead of mid-terms




How did they identify the criminals in the mix? By looking at everyone? (Won’t the FBI be jealous?)
Police crack encrypted chat service IronChat and read 258,000 messages from suspected criminals
Dutch police have revealed that they were able to spy on the communications of more than 100 suspected criminals, watching live as over a quarter of a million chat messages were exchanged.
The encrypted messages were sent using IronChat, a supposedly secure encrypted messaging service available on BlackBox IronPhones.
Criminals were amongst those who purchased the IronPhones, and used the IronChat app to communicate openly about their activities, believing that they were safe as they paid up US $1500 for a six month subscription to the service. What they did not realise was that the app had been compromised by police.
… In a statement, police in the Netherlands explained that as a result of their surveillance, law enforcement agencies have seized automatic weapons, large quantities of hard drugs (MDMA and cocaine), 90,000 Euros in cash, and dismantled a drugs lab.
… “This operation has given us a unique insight into the criminal world in which people communicated openly about crimes,” said Aart Garssen, Head of the Regional Crime investigation Unit in the east of the Netherlands.




Will the FBI ask Facebook to retain the deleted messages? After all, they might contain evidence of a crime that will be unavailable to investigators. (Like encrypted messages)
Facebook’s unsend feature will give you 10 minutes to delete a message
Facebook Messenger will soon allow you to delete sent messages up to 10 minutes after you’ve originally sent them. The feature is listed as “coming soon” in the release notes for version 191.0 of Messenger’s iOS client. Compared to the hour Facebook gives you to delete an erroneous WhatsApp message, 10 minutes doesn’t give you too much time to correct yourself. But it’s a lot better than having your mistakes preserved eternally.




Start planning.
The Starter Pistol Has Been Fired for Artificial Intelligence Regulation in Europe
Paul Nemitz is principal advisor in the Directorate-General Justice and Consumers of the European Commission. It was Nemitz who transposed the underlying principles of data privacy into the legal text that ultimately became the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Now Nemitz has fired the starting gun for what may eventually become a European Regulation providing consumer safeguards against abuse from artificial intelligence (AI). In a new paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, he warns that democracy itself is threatened by unbridled use of AI.




A case for my Architecture students.
Why Doctors Hate Their Computers
… A 2016 study found that physicians spent about two hours doing computer work for every hour spent face to face with a patient—whatever the brand of medical software. In the examination room, physicians devoted half of their patient time facing the screen to do electronic tasks. And these tasks were spilling over after hours. The University of Wisconsin found that the average workday for its family physicians had grown to eleven and a half hours. The result has been epidemic levels of burnout among clinicians. Forty per cent screen positive for depression, and seven per cent report suicidal thinking—almost double the rate of the general working population.
Something’s gone terribly wrong. Doctors are among the most technology-avid people in society; computerization has simplified tasks in many industries. Yet somehow we’ve reached a point where people in the medical profession actively, viscerally, volubly hate their computers…”




Perspective. I liked the quote, “My kids are trying to order by tapping on the images.”
Amazon looks to the past by sending out holiday toy catalogs
… Amazon has again taken a leaf from the brick-and-mortar world by launching its own catalog for the very first time, reports CNBC.
… The difference, however, is that Amazon's catalog has no prices listed on any of its pages, making parents use the Amazon app to scan product images to add it to their cart.




Something to learn and teach?
Facebook’s GraphQL gets its own open-source foundation
GraphQL, the Facebook -incubated data query language, is moving into its own open-source foundation. Like so many other similar open-source foundations, the aptly named GraphQL Foundation will be hosted by the Linux Foundation.
… At its core, GraphQL is basically a language for querying databases from client-side applications and a set of specifications for how the API on the backend should present this data to the client. It presents an alternative to REST-based APIs and promises to offer developers more flexibility and the ability to write faster and more secure applications. Virtually every major programming language now supports it through a variety of libraries.




So that’s what my students are calling me!
Green’s Dictionary of Slang to Go Free
“GDoS Online [Green’s Dictionary of Slang] was launched two years ago, in October 2016.
… Two years into the project, and having no intention to abandon my researches, I have decided that the dictionary in its entirety – headwords, etymologies, definitions and citations – will henceforth be made available for free…”




For my student vets…
Veterans Day discounts: Your comprehensive guide to free pizza, farm supplies, desserts, hotel stays and more




It’s not the same as reading, but it might lead to it.




This is not what we teach our students.


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