“It’s for your own good!” Perhaps my Ethical Hacking students
could do the same?
Catalin Cimpanu reports:
The Japanese government approveda law amendment on Friday that will allow government workers to hack into people’s Internet of Things devices as part of an unprecedented survey of insecure IoT devices.
The survey will be carried out by employees of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) under the supervision of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.
Read more on ZDNet.
[From
the article:
NICT employees will be allowed to use default
passwords and password dictionaries to attempt to log into Japanese
consumers' IoT devices.
The plan is to compile a list of insecure devices
that use default and easy-to-guess passwords and pass it on to
authorities and the relevant internet service providers, so they can
take measures to alert consumers and secure the devices.
Great for my Computer Security students, but I’ll
share this with everyone.
Be safe on
the internet.
An open source
checklist of resources designed to improve your online privacy and
security.
Is it easy to fix this?
Misinformation
Woes Could Multiply With 'Deepfake' Videos
If you see a video of a politician speaking words
he never would utter, or a Hollywood star improbably appearing in a
cheap adult movie, don't adjust your television set -- you may just
be witnessing the future of "fake news."
"Deepfake" videos that manipulate
reality are becoming more sophisticated due to advances in artificial
intelligence, creating the potential for new kinds of misinformation
with devastating consequences.
… "A
well-timed and thoughtfully scripted deepfake or series of deepfakes
could tip an election, spark violence in a city primed for civil
unrest, bolster insurgent narratives about an enemy's supposed
atrocities, or exacerbate political divisions in a society,"
Chesney and University of Maryland professor Danielle Citron said in
a blog post for the Council on Foreign Relations.
Paul
Scharre, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a
think tank specializing in AI and security issues, said it was almost
inevitable that deepfakes would be used in upcoming elections.
… With
believable fake videos in circulation, he added, "people can
choose to believe whatever version or narrative that they want, and
that's a real concern."
Interesting to think through.
The
internet of human things: Implants for everybody and how we get there
Over the past several years, the Government of
Sweden has been moving toward becoming a completely cashless society.
By
2025, most Swedish citizens will perform all their financial
transactions using debit and credit cards, mobile devices, PCs, or
wearables.
But a small, growing number have gone even further
than using conventional technology to make payments. They
are using implants -- tiny, rice grain-sized microchips that use
Near-Field Communications (NFC) technology -- to communicate
wirelessly with reader terminals installed in stores and other public
places.
… Wallets Must Die
… And So Should Your Keys
There is no reason for any of these companies to
store their data in an easily-read-by-humans format. Perhaps there
is a business opportunity to “translate” for reporters?
GDPR makes
it easier to get your data, but that doesn’t mean you’ll
understand it
If the numerous tech scandals
of recent years have taught us anything, it’s that tech companies
hold a truly terrifying amount of data about us all. Along with
feeling invasive, this data can be outright dangerous when it falls
into the wrong hands.
Europe’s response to that
risk, put in place as part of the General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR), is the “Right of Access.” The right says that, when
requested, any company should be prepared to provide you with your
personal data. They should provide it in a way that’s easy for you
to read, in a timely manner, and with enough background information
for you to understand how they got it and how they use it. The
thinking is that once you know what data a company holds about you,
you can use it to make informed decisions about whether you want to
provide it, as well as holding them accountable when they gather data
without your consent.
… All of my location data
from Google was contained within a single 61MB JSON file, and opening
it with Chrome revealed a bewildering array of fields labeled
“timestampMs,” “latitudeE7,” “logitudeE7,” and
estimations about whether I was sitting still or in some kind of
transport (I assume).
I don’t doubt that this is
all the location history information that Google has associated with
my account, but without
context, this data is meaningless. It’s a series of
numbers that I’d have to make a serious effort to even begin to
understand and import into another piece of software to properly
parse.
How to handle e-assets?
Court rules
man must be given access to husband's iCloud photos
Apple must provide a man access to the iCloud
account of his late husband so he can retrieve family photos shot
with an iPhone and a dedicated camera, a New York judge has ruled.
Nicholas Scandalios has so far been locked out of
the Apple ID belonging to his husband, Ric Swezey, who was killed in
an accident two years ago, according to MarketWatch. Apple
hasn't been outright fighting the request, but did insist
that Scandalios obtain a court order. [Sounds
like ‘fighting’ to me. Bob]
"Apple shall afford the opportunity to reset
the password to [Swezey's] Apple ID," Surrogate Judge Rita Mella
wrote in her ruling.
Complicating the situation is that Swezey's will
didn't contain language authorizing access. Mella's
opinion stated that the photos weren't a form of "electronic
communication" requiring proof of consent or even a court order,
which could help build precedent against Apple's position.
This is a fun way to look at AI.
Google –
Talk to Books
“In Talk
to Books (Beta), when you type in a question or a statement, the
model looks at every sentence in over 100,000 books to find the
responses that would most likely come next in a conversation. The
response sentence is shown in bold, along with some of the
text that appeared next to the sentence for context.. Mastering Talk
to Books may take some experimentation. Although it has a search
box, its objectives and underlying technology are fundamentally
different than those of a more traditional search experience. It’s
simply a demonstration of research that enables an AI to find
statements that look like probable responses to your input rather
than a finely polished tool that would take into account the wide
range of standard quality signals. You may need to play
around with it to get the most out of it..
- Not a traditional search – Use this demo as a creativity tool to explore ideas and discover books by getting quotes that respond to your queries.
- Use natural language – Speaking to it in sentences will often get better results than keywords. That’s because the AI is trained on human conversations.
- Play with it – Try our sample queries then try your own. Experiment with different wording to see how it changes the results…”
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