Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Would any corporate Board of Directors tolerate this? I wonder what will happen during the shutdown?
Defense Department Continuously Challenged on Cybersecurity
A recently published report from the United States Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General shows that, while the Department has improved its security posture, it still faces challenges in managing cybersecurity.
The report (PDF) reveals that DoD Components implemented some corrective actions to improve system weaknesses identified by reports summarized in the cybersecurity summary report issued at the end of 2017, but also points out that DoD still faces cybersecurity challenges.
Of the 159 recommendations made in the summarized unclassified reports, the DoD has taken action to address only 19. Of the 175 recommendations the DoD oversight community and the GAO made between July 1, 2017, and June 30, 2018, 151 remained open as of September 30, 2018.




The pendulum swings again.
Feds forcing mass fingerprint unlocks is an “abuse of power,” judge rules
"Citizens do not contemplate waiving their civil rights when using new technology." [Now that’s a quote I can use! Bob]
According to a new ruling issued last week by a federal magistrate in Oakland, California, the government can't get a warrant granting permission to turn up at a local house allegedly connected to a criminal suspect, seize all digital devices, and force anyone found at the house to use biometrics to try to unlock those devices.
… US Magistrate Judge Kandis Westmore found that the government request here "runs afoul of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments," which protect against unreasonable searches and self-incrimination, respectively.
She continued, noting that the government request was "overbroad."
"The Government cannot be permitted to search and seize a mobile phone or other device that is on a non-suspect's person simply because they are present during an otherwise lawful search," the judge wrote.
Blake Reid, a law professor at the University of Colorado, told Ars that it was a positive step that another judge was understanding the possible ramifications of allowing the government to rifle through someone's phone.
"Accessing people's phones is, in my opinion, much more like accessing the contents of their brains than it is the contents of their file cabinets," he emailed.
Multiple times, Judge Westmore cited a 2018 Supreme Court decision known as Carpenter, which found that law enforcement needs a warrant to obtain more than 120 days of cell-site location information.
"Citizens do not contemplate waiving their civil rights when using new technology, and the Supreme Court has concluded that, to find otherwise, would leave individuals 'at the mercy of advancing technology,'" she wrote, citing the Carpenter opinion.




Your phone as their spy device. See Perspective below.
Location data is ground zero in privacy wars
Axios: “Our phones’ GPS and location capabilities are a key part of what make them magical — enabling them to speed our commutes, hail rides and find the devices when we lose them. These capabilities are also ground zero for the looming fight over defining the boundaries of privacy and acceptable uses of our personal information. The big picture: Three recent stories show just how common problems with location data can be — and how thorny they’ve become.
  1. Cell providers resell location info…
  2. Tweet locations reveal where you live…
  3. Slack monitors your itinerary…
  4. What’s next: Members of the new Congress plan to float a wide range of new privacy legislation this year, with location data at the heart of the debate. New laws will need to thread the needle between protecting personal information and enabling useful innovation.
  5. The bottom line: Your phone is also a surveillance device. Use it with care unless you want your life to be an open book — or map….”




Something to amuse all my students. (A quick way to profit from your Ethical Hacking class)
Pwn2Own contest will pay $900,000 for hacks that exploit this Tesla
Pwn2Own has been the foremost hacking contest for more than a decade, with cash prizes paid for exploits that compromise the security of all manner of devices and software. Browsers, virtual machines, computers, and phones have all been fair game. Now in its 13th year, the competition is adding a new category—a Tesla Model 3, with more than $900,000 worth of prizes available for attacks that subvert a variety of its onboard systems.
The biggest prize will be $250,000 for hacks that execute code on the car’s gateway, autopilot, or VCSEC.
… Pwn2Own will pay $100,000 for hacks that attack the Tesla’s key fob or Phone-as-Key either by achieving code execution, unlocking the vehicle, or starting the engine without using the key.




A backgrounder for my Software Architecture students. Look where the money is going! The graphic summaries are interesting.
Billionaire Masayoshi Son–not Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg–has the most audacious vision for an AI-powered utopia where machines control how we live. And he’s spending hundreds of billions of dollars to realize it. Are you ready to live in Masa World?




A heads-up. Flash was just a flash in the pan.
Firefox 69 to Disable Adobe Flash by Default
… “We are now scheduled to completely disable Flash in Firefox 69 which moves to the Stable release on August 3rd,” Mozilla notes on the browser’s roadmap page.
In July 2017, Adobe announced plans to completely kill Flash and stop providing security updates for it by the end of 2020.
While Flash continues to be used in numerous applications and websites, developers and content creators are encouraged to migrate from Flash to open standards such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly, which are already supported by all major web browsers.




Perspective. This theme needs more development. Many devices vs. one device?
Once-revolutionary smartphone is losing its power to amaze and maybe its singular hold on our lives
WSJ [paywall] The Big Hangup: Why the Future Is Not Just Your Phone The once-revolutionary smartphone is losing its power to amaze—and maybe its singular hold on our live: “Steve Jobs took to a stage a dozen years ago this week to introduce a revolutionary new product to the world: the first Apple iPhone. That groundbreaking device, and the competitors that followed, changed the way people communicated, ordered dinner and hailed a taxi. The technology world reoriented around the smartphone, supplanting [??? Bob] the personal computer, MP3 players, the digital camera and maps. And the mobile economy was born. Today, it looks like the era of smartphone supremacy is starting to wane. The devices aren’t going away any time soon, but their grip on the consumer is weakening. A global sales slump and a lack of hit new advancements has underlined a painful reality for the matured industry: smartphones don’t look so singularly smart anymore. While once smartphones were like a centripetal force sucking up tools from dozens of devices, from flashlights to calculators to game consoles, functions are now flying out of phones and onto other products with their own embedded smart connections. Wristwatches can now text emojis. Televisions can talk and listen. Voice-activated speakers can order diapers. The number of “connected” devices in use that can stream music, clock mileage or download apps has more than doubled to 14.2 billion in the past three years, according to market researcher Gartner Inc. The total excludes smartphones.
What’s shifted most is the smartphone’s monolithic status as the device that software companies and businesses needed to reach mobile users—and for consumers to access their services. Now the universe has expanded to voice apps, car infotainment centers and wearable devices… Twelve years after the iPhone’s debut, more than half of the world’s population owns a smartphone. While that leaves billions of potential first-time buyers in countries from Indonesia to Brazil, they reside in poorer areas, offering lower profits. Meanwhile, the market in wealthier countries such as the U.S. has become saturated, as the improvements in the devices become more incremental and many consumers have decided they don’t need to get each new upgrade.
  • As recently as 2015, annual smartphone shipments grew at a double-digit clip. Those days are over: The industry saw its first declines at the end of 2017 and remained negative all last year. A major driver was China, the world’s largest smartphone market, where annual shipments sank 16%, according to government data…”




I said much the same things yesterday.
Investing in AI will determine future world superpowers
The world is witnessing a "cold technological war" between major powers that want to control the globe "digitally". International powers are trying to use their Artificial Intelligence (AI) capability to profit and accumulate wealth at the expense of other countries in economic, military and information fields.




For the reading shelf?
How the Blockchain Ushers in a New Form of Trust

Listen to the podcast: Wharton's Kevin Werbach provides an in-depth explanation of the blockchain, as presented in his new book.



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