Tuesday, December 11, 2018

A very very small portion of Google’s users.
Google says Google+ bug affected 52.5 million people
Google will shut down its Google+ social network much sooner than planned after discovering a second bug that revealed millions of customers' private information to software developers.
In a blog post, the company said 52.5 million people were affected by a bug in a November software update. The latest bug allowed app developers to access profile information not marked public. App developers inadvertently had access to this data for six days.




You might want to send this article to “your leaders.” Or at least your Accounts Payable department.
How Internet Savvy are Your Leaders?
Back in April 2015, I tweeted about receiving a letter via snail mail suggesting the search engine rankings for a domain registered in my name would suffer if I didn’t pay a bill for some kind of dubious-looking service I’d never heard of. But it wasn’t until the past week that it become clear how many organizations — including towns, cities and political campaigns — actually have fallen for this brazen scam.
… According to a statement filed with the Federal Election Commission, one of the earliest public records involving a payment to Web Listings dates back to 2008 and comes from none other than the the 2008 Hillary Clinton for President fund.
… Guilmette said most of the public references he found regarding payments to Web Services Inc. are from political campaigns and small towns.
“Which naturally raises the question: Should we really be trusting these people with our money?” Guilmette said. “What kind of people or organizations are most likely to pay a bill that is utterly phony baloney, and that actually isn’t due and payable? The answer is people and organizations that are not spending their own money.”




I doubt this will be the basis for a US version of the GDPR. And why no Democrats? Cherchez la political contribution?
House Cmte Investigation Issues Scathing Report on Equifax Breach
The Hill: “The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, following a 14-month probe, released a scathing report Monday saying the consumer credit reporting agency aggressively collected data on millions of consumers and businesses while failing to take key steps to secure such information. The breach is estimated to have harmed 148 million consumers.
“In 2005, former Equifax Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Richard Smith embarked on an aggressive growth strategy, leading to the acquisition of multiple companies, information technology (IT) systems, and data,” according to the 96-page report authored by Republicans. “Equifax, however, failed to implement an adequate security program to protect this sensitive data. As a result, Equifax allowed one of the largest data breaches in U.S. history. Such a breach was entirely preventable.”…




How do we know this article was not written by an AI?
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humans
Pew: “Experts say the rise of artificial intelligence will make most people better off over the next decade, but many have concerns about how advances in AI will affect what it means to be human, to be productive and to exercise free will. Digital life is augmenting human capacities and disrupting eons-old human activities. Code-driven systems have spread to more than half of the world’s inhabitants in ambient information and connectivity, offering previously unimagined opportunities and unprecedented threats. As emerging algorithm-driven artificial intelligence (AI) continues to spread, will people be better off than they are today? Some 979 technology pioneers, innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists answered this question in a canvassing of experts conducted in the summer of 2018. The experts predicted networked artificial intelligence will amplify human effectiveness but also threaten human autonomy, agency and capabilities. They spoke of the wide-ranging possibilities; that computers might match or even exceed human intelligence and capabilities on tasks such as complex decision-making, reasoning and learning, sophisticated analytics and pattern recognition, visual acuity, speech recognition and language translation. They said “smart” systems in communities, in vehicles, in buildings and utilities, on farms and in business processes will save time, money and lives and offer opportunities for individuals to enjoy a more-customized future…”




I don’t think they like Article 13.
Latest EU Copyright Proposal: Block Everything, Never Make Mistakes, But Don't Use Upload Filters
As we've been discussing the "Trilogue" negotiations between the EU Commission, EU Council and EU Parliament over the EU's Copyright Directive have continued, and a summary has been released on the latest plans for Article 13, which is the provision that will make upload filters mandatory, while (and this is the fun part) insisting that it doesn't make upload filters mandatory. Then, to make things even more fun, another document on the actual text suggests the way to deal with this is to create a better euphemism for filters.




Perspective. No breakdown of the results of these searches. What were they looking for? How often did they find anything?
Colleen Long of AP reports:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers are searching the electronic devices of travelers more often, and did not always follow proper protocol, a new watchdog report has found.
The report made public Monday found there were 29,000 devices searched at a port of entry out of 397 million travelers to the U.S. in budget year 2017, up from 18,400 the year before from 390 million travelers.
Customs and Border Protection officials note it is less than 1 percent of all travelers.
Read more on AP.




Perspective.
Social media outpaces print newspapers in the U.S. as a news source
Social media sites have surpassed print newspapers as a news source for Americans: One-in-five U.S. adults say they often get news via social media, slightly higher than the share who often do so from print newspapers (16%) for the first time since Pew Research Center began asking these questions.
… Overall, television is still the most popular platform for news consumption – even though its use has declined since 2016. News websites are the next most common source, followed by radio, and finally social media sites and print newspapers.




Perspective. This should have been done 30 or 40 years ago!
UK just banned the NHS from buying any more fax machines
BBC News: “The National Health Service will be banned from buying fax machines from next month – and has been told by the government to phase out the machines entirely by 31 March 2020. In July, the Royal College of Surgeons revealed nearly 9,000 fax machines were in use across the NHS in England. The Department of Health said a change to more modern communication methods was needed to improve patient safety and cyber security. An RCS spokesman said they supported the government’s decision. In place of fax machines, the Department of Health said secure email should be used. Richard Kerr, who is the chair of the RCS’s commission on the future of surgery, said the continued use of the outdated technology by the NHS was “absurd”. He added it was “crucial” that the health service invested in “better ways of communicating the vast amount of patient information that is going to be generated” in the future. The group’s report from earlier this year found the use of fax machines was most common at the Newcastle upon Tyne NHS Trust, which still relied on 603 machines. Three-quarters of the trusts in England replied to the survey – 95 in total. Ten trusts said that they did not own any fax machines, but four in ten reported more than 100 in use…”


No comments: