Once again I managed to stay off this list! Several of these threats are worth discussing in my Computer Security class. I list a few.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/these-are-top-26-national-security-threats-facing-america-40412

These Are the Top 26 National Security Threats Facing America

The Government Accountability Office polled four government agencies on what they saw as the biggest threats to American security. The result was 26 threats identified by the Department of Defense, Department of State, Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

New adversaries and private corporations. New states could arise that threaten the U.S. Interestingly, the GAO report worries about “private corporations obtaining resources that could grant them more influence than states.”

Information operations. Adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran will take advantage of social media, artificial intelligence and data crunching to wage information warfare.

Cyber weapons. In addition to Russia and China, Iran and North Korea are developing cyberattack capabilities that could target a variety of systems, such as air traffic control or health care.

If you had control of all of your personal data and all data about your activities, would that identify GDPR violations? As raw data, that might be overwhelming. A system to manage the data is going to be very complex. Might be fun for my Software Architects to consider.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-privately-testing-bali-a-way-to-give-users-control-of-data-collected-about-them/

Microsoft is privately testing 'Bali,' a way to give users control of data collected about them

… The "About" page for Bali describes it as a "new personal data bank which puts users in control of all data collected about them.... The bank will enable users to store all data (raw and inferred) generated by them. It will allow the user to visualize, manage, control, share and monetize the data."

According to the About page, Bali is based on the concept of "Inverse Privacy," the subject of a paper authored in 2014 by Yuri Gurevich, Efim Hudis and Jeannette Wing, who all worked for Microsoft Research at that time. An item of personal information is inversely private if some party has access to it, but the creator/user of it does not. Health providers, police, toll-road operators, grocery chains and employers all create inversely private data, which, in many cases, users could benefit from owning, the authors noted.

Opinions vary.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/01/stop-scaremongering-about-kids-spending-time-their-phones

Stop scaremongering about kids spending time on their phones

How much should we worry about our children using screens? It’s hard, as a parent, not to worry. Not least because we’re constantly surrounded by doom-laden warnings about how smartphones have “destroyed a generation”.

… With all that in mind, it’s an enormous relief that the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) has issued new screen time guidelines that are entirely sensible and acknowledge the weakness of the evidence. It says there is “essentially no evidence” to support the idea that screen time is directly toxic to health, despite wild claims in the media. It says there is some evidence that it can displace other activities such as exercise. But its main recommendations are simply to ask yourselves, as a family, whether your screen time is controlled, or whether it gets in the way of things you want to do – family time, eating together – and to try to control your use if it does.

Those who do not study history… (and a graphic worth framing?)

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/20-internet-giants-rule-web/

The 20 Internet Giants That Rule the Web

With each passing year, an increasingly large segment of the population no longer remembers images loading a single pixel row at a time, the earsplitting sound of a 56k modem, or the domination of web portals.

Many of the top websites in 1998 were basically news aggregators or search portals, which are easy concepts to understand. Today, brand touch-points are often spread out between devices (e.g. mobile apps vs. desktop site) and a myriad of services and sub-brands (e.g. Facebook’s constellation of apps). As a result, the world’s biggest websites are complex, interconnected web properties.

Today’s visualization, inspired by an earlier work published by WaPo, looks at which of the internet giants have evolved to stay on top, and which have faded into internet lore.