Is the escalation from theft to industrial espionage to military
espionage and no higher? Apparently, this is not a path to cyberwar,
so feel free to hack all you like? With minimal downside, anything
hackers can steal is virtually pure profit.
Surge in
China Theft of Australia Company Secrets: Report
China
has sharply escalated cyberattacks on Australian companies this year
in a "constant, significant effort" to steal intellectual
property, according to a report published Tuesday.
The
investigation by Fairfax Media and commercial broadcaster Channel
Nine comes just days after US Vice President Mike Pence accused
Beijing at the APEC summit of widespread "intellectual property
theft".
The
report said China's Ministry of State Security was responsible for
"Operation
Cloud Hopper", a wave of attacks it said were detected by
Canberra and its partners in the "Five Eyes" intelligence
alliance -- the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.
An
unnamed senior Australian government official told Fairfax the
activity was "a constant, significant effort to steal our
intellectual property", while other officials
expressed frustration that firms and universities were not tightening
their security.
I have students from India, Africa, all over the
middle east and even Canada, but no one from the EU, as far as I
know.
Luke Irwin reports:
…. A major concern is the GDPR’s requirement that organisations report certain types of data breach to their supervisory authority within 72 hours of becoming aware of the incident. It’s one of the toughest rules to meet, but this blog provides you with all the details you need.
Read more on IT
Governance Blog.
“Those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana
Ivanka
Trump used personal account for government business, posing security
risk to White House
During the 2016 presidential election, US
President Donald Trump aggressively went after Hilary Clinton for
using her personal email account and server for official
conversations during her time as US Secretary of State. Two years
later, it is now Ivanka Trump’s turn to take the heat. Or not.
White House ethics officials confirmed she used a
private email account to send official government-related emails last
year, writes
the Washington Post. Ivanka Trump exchanged hundreds of official
emails with assistants, Cabinet officials and White House aides
through a domain shared with her husband, Jared Kushner. The domain
was created in December 2016, before she moved Washington. Because
the domain was created through a Microsoft system, the emails are
stored by the tech company.
Her actions could be in violation of the
Presidential Records Act, which specifies that White House
Communication must be secured and all data kept in a secure archive
to prevent hacking and mishandling of data. Although her emails were
mostly about personal travel dates and logistical data, some may
still be in violation of federal records legislation, as they
discussed official business and government policies.
Worth watching?
Operation
Infektion: Russian Disinformation: From The Cold War To Kanye
Opinion Video Series | Operation Infektion By Adam
B. Ellick and Adam Westbrook The New York Times, November 12, 2018
WATCH: This is a three-part film series.
Scroll down at
this link and click to play any episode…
“Russia’s meddling in the United States’
elections is not a hoax. It’s the culmination of Moscow’s
decades-long campaign to tear the West apart. “Operation
InfeKtion” reveals the ways in which one of the Soviets’ central
tactics — the promulgation of lies about America — continues
today, from Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies. Meet the KGB
spies who conceived this virus and the American truth squads who
tried — and are still trying — to fight it. Countries from
Pakistan to Brazil are now debating reality, and in Vladimir Putin’s
greatest triumph, Americans are using Russia’s playbook against one
another without the faintest clue…”
(Related) He may not have time to do anything
else!
Now eight
parliaments are demanding Zuckerberg answers for Facebook scandals
Facebook’s
founder is facing pressure to accept an invite from eight
international parliaments, with lawmakers wanting to question him
about negative impacts his social network is having on democratic
processes globally.
Last week Facebook declined
an invitation from five of these parliaments.
The elected representatives of Facebook users want
Mark
Zuckerberg to answer questions in the wake of a string of data
misuse and security scandals attached to his platform. The
international parliaments have joined forces — forming a grand
committee — to amp up the pressure on Facebook.
Amid talk of Google as a monopoly, does this
suggest they might have the power to revise the law? Could news
sites expect a 51% or greater reduction in user visits?
Google News
may shut over EU plans to charge tax for links
The Guardian – Search
engine is lobbying hard to stop proposed tax, aimed at compensating
news publishers – “Google’s top news executive has refused
to rule out shutting down Google
News in EU countries, as the search engine faces a battle with
Brussels over plans to
charge a “link tax” for using news stories. Richard
Gingras, the search engine’s vice-president of news, said while
“it’s not desirable to shut down services” the company was
deeply concerned about the current proposals, which are designed to
compensate struggling news publishers if snippets of their articles
appear in search results. He told the Guardian that the future of
Google News could depend on whether the EU was willing to alter the
phrasing of the legislation. “We can’t make a decision until we
see the final language,” he said. He pointed out the last time a
government attempted to charge Google for links, in 2014 in Spain,
the company responded by shutting down Google News in the country.
Spain passed a law requiring aggregation sites to pay for news links,
in a bid to prop up struggling print news outlets. Google responded
by closing the service for Spanish consumers, which he said
prompted a fall in traffic to Spanish news websites…”
(Related) The Spanish experience has been
ignored.
New study
shows Spain’s “Google tax” has been a disaster for publishers
… In the short-term, the study found, the law
will cost publishers €10 million, or about $10.9 million, which
would fall disproportionately on smaller publishers. Consumers would
experience a smaller variety of content, and the law "impedes
the ability of innovation to enter the market."
The study concludes that there's no "theoretical
or empirical justification" for the fee. The full
study (PDF) is available for download; it's in Spanish with an
English-language executive summary.
… Whatever loss of traffic occurs due to
readers who may read a news aggregator and then choose not to read an
entire story, is more than made up for by the "market expansion"
effect, the study found. In other words, given access to a news
aggregator like Google, people read much more news.
The NERA analysis found a 6 percent overall drop
in traffic from the Spanish Google News closure and a 14 percent drop
for smaller publications.
Looks like you need computer geeks to succeed.
Throughout the global economy, big
companies are getting bigger. They’re
more productive, more
profitable, more
innovative, and they
pay better. The people lucky enough to work at these companies
are doing relatively well. Those who work for the competition
aren’t.
… Research
by one of us (James) links this trend to software. Even outside of
the tech sector, the employment of more software developers is
associated with a greater increase in industry concentration, and
this relationship appears to be causal. Similarly, researchers at
the OECD have found
that markups — a measure of companies’ profits and market power —
have increased more in digitally-intensive industries. And academic
research has found
that rising industry concentration correlates with the
patent-intensity of an industry, suggesting “that the industries
becoming more concentrated are those with faster technological
progress.” For example, productivity has grown dramatically in the
retail sector since 1990; inflation-adjusted sales per employee have
grown by roughly 50%. Economic analysis
finds that most of this productivity growth is accounted for by a few
companies such as Walmart who used information technology to become
much more productive. Greater productivity meant lower prices and
faster growth, leading to increased industry dominance. Walmart went
from a 3% share of the general merchandise retail market in 1982 to
over 50% today.
Perspective. Is Microsoft positioning itself to
replace phone companies?
Skype
calling now available on Alexa
Microsoft is bringing its
Skype calling service to Amazon’s Alexa-enabled devices this week.
Amazon’s Echo range will be able to access Skype’s basic calling,
and hardware like the Echo Show will also include video calling
support for Skype. This integration also lets Skype users call
mobile and landlines using SkypeOut, and simply call contacts by
saying “Alexa, call Tom on Skype” to activate a call.
Perspective. Probably inevitable.
Forget the old American campaign slogan of a
chicken in every pot, or the Indian politician’s common pledge to
put rice in every bowl.
Here in the state of Chhattisgarh, the chief
minister, Raman Singh, has promised a smartphone in every home —
and he is using the government-issued devices to reach voters as he
campaigns in legislative elections that conclude on Tuesday.
… The phones are the latest twist in digital
campaigning by the B.J.P., which controls the national and state
government and is deft
at using tools like WhatsApp groups and Facebook posts to
influence voters. The B.J.P. government in Rajasthan, which holds
state elections next month, is also
subsidizing phones and data plans for residents, and party
leaders are considering extending the model to other states.
… The phones themselves also actively promote
Mr. Singh, who has run the state for 15 years and is seeking a fourth
term.
His smiling face is set as the background image on
the home screen, prompting some to nickname it the “Raman mobile.”
An interesting precedent?
A court
ruled that judges can be Facebook friends with lawyers because those
are not real friendships
Quartz:
“Florida’s Supreme Court has ruled on something that most social
media users already know: Facebook friendships are not real.
Specifically, the court said in
a Nov. 15 opinion that a Facebook friendship between a judge and
an attorney does not mean the judge is too biased to preside over
that attorney’s case. Ruling on an appeal in a case where one side
argued a trial court judge should be disqualified because of a
Facebook friendship, the court added that even traditional, IRL
friendship wouldn’t necessarily be disqualifying, because the
nature of friendship is “indeterminate.”
The ruling includes some philosophical musings on the meaning of friendship. For chief justice Charles Canady, who writes for the majority, a real friend, “is a person attached to another person by feelings of affection or esteem.” Meanwhile, a Facebook friend is a “person digitally connected to another person by virtue of their Facebook ‘friendship.’” And a Facebook friendship, he says, “does not objectively signal the existence of the affection and esteem involved in a traditional ‘friendship.’”…
It’s a “kill or die” game. Probably need a
bit more subtlety. You can help.
MIT Moral
Machine – building human opinions on machine action
Moral
Machine – “From self-driving cars on public roads to
self-piloting reusable rockets landing on self-sailing ships, machine
intelligence is supporting or entirely taking over ever more complex
human activities at an ever increasing pace. The greater autonomy
given machine intelligence in these roles can result in situations
where they have to make autonomous choices involving human life and
limb. This calls for not just a clearer understanding of how humans
make such choices, but also a clearer understanding of how humans
perceive machine intelligence making such choices. Recent scientific
studies on machine ethics have raised awareness about the topic in
the media and public discourse.
This website aims to take the discussion further, by providing a platform for 1) building a crowd-sourced picture of human opinion on how machines should make decisions when faced with moral dilemmas, and 2) crowd-sourcing assembly and discussion of potential scenarios of moral consequence…”
I’ll have to give it a try.
For my new Security class.
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