If you can’t get them at the source, intercept them on the way to
the bank.
Breach at
PoS Firm Hits Hundreds of U.S. Restaurants, Hotels
Point-of-sale
(PoS) solutions provider North Country Business Products, whose
products are used at over 6,500 locations across the United States,
recently disclosed a data breach that resulted in the exposure of
payment card data.
The
company said it learned on January 4 of suspicious activity in
certain client networks. An investigation assisted by a third-party
cyber forensics firm revealed that malicious actors had deployed a
piece of malware to some of its customers between January 3 and
January 24, 2019.
The
malware was designed to harvest data belonging to individuals who
used their payment cards at one of the impacted North Country
customers. Exposed data includes cardholder names, card numbers,
expiration dates, and CVV codes.
North
Country has set up a dedicated website where it has provided a list
of the
restaurants and hotels impacted by the incident. The list
includes 137 locations, mostly in Arizona and Minnesota, but also in
Louisiana, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas,
Wisconsin, Tennessee, Oregon, and Ohio.
Inevitable?
Bank
robbers are fleeing the scene on shared electric scooters
… In September 2018, a burglar in
Indianapolis, Indiana, used a Bird electric scooter to
make off with a man’s wallet, laptop, and backpack. In
December, a man in Baltimore, Maryland, stole a cellphone at gunpoint
and fled
on a Bird scooter. Also in December, a 19-year-old robbed a bank
in downtown Austin, Texas, and hopped on one of Uber’s Jump
e-scooters to
make his getaway. Earlier this month, a bank robber in a suburb
of Chicago, Illinois, took a Lyft to the bank, had it wait outside
while he committed the robbery, and then took
the same car to O’Hare airport.
Improving background checks?
Bree Burkitt reports:
Arizona
could soon be one of the first states to maintain a massive statewide
DNA database.
And
if the proposed legislation passes, many people — from parent
school volunteers and teachers to real estate agents and foster
parents — will have no choice but to give up their DNA.
Under
Senate Bill 1475, which Rep. David Livingston, R-Peoria, introduced,
DNA must be collected from anyone who has to be fingerprinted
by the state for a job, to volunteer in certain positions or for
a myriad of other reasons.
Read more on AZcentral.
Perspective.
Amazon
Alexa and the Search for the One Perfect Answer
This article is
adapted
from Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way
We Live, Work, and Think, by James Vlahos, to be published in
March by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
… Two decades later, with the rise of voice
computing platforms such as Amazon
Alexa and Google
Assistant, the world’s biggest tech companies are suddenly,
precipitously moving in Tunstall-Pedoe’s direction. Voice-enabled
smart speakers have become some of the industry’s best-selling
products; in 2018 alone, according to a report by NPR and Edison
Research, their prevalence in American households grew
by 78 percent. According to one market survey, people ask their
smart speakers to answer questions more often than they do anything
else with them. Tunstall-Pedoe’s
vision of computers responding to our queries in a single
pass—providing one-shot answers, as they are known in the search
community—has gone mainstream. The internet and the
multibillion-dollar business ecosystems it supports are changing
irrevocably. So, too, is the creation, distribution, and control of
information—the very nature of how we know what we know.
(Related)
Strategy
Analytics: Amazon beat Google in Q4 2018 smart speaker shipments
Smart speakers continue to sell like hotcakes.
That’s according to Strategy
Analytics, which today reported that in the fourth quarter of
2018, shipments of AI-imbued speakers grew 95 percent from 22.6
million units in Q3 to 38.5 million units — more than the entire
2017 total. It brought the year-end tally to 86.2 million units.
Perspective.
AI Is Not
Just Getting Better; It’s Becoming More Pervasive
… Deloitte predicts there will be more than
half a billion mobile chips running machine learning on smartphones,
tablets, and other devices in 2019. And continued innovation in AI
hardware and software will lead to a growing number of devices and
machines with built-in AI capabilities.
… And autonomous vehicles, perhaps the most
prominent example of machines with embedded intelligence, are
expected to reshape the transportation sector by offering a cheaper
alternative to traditional car ownership through on-demand ride
services. They could also make parking lots, traffic jams, and gas
stations disappear, while upending traditional business models for
auto insurers, logistics providers, and other companies.
Probable futures.
From
Machine Learning to Blockchain, Gartner identifies Top 10 Data and
Analytics Technology Trends for 2019
1: Augmented Analytics
2: Augmented Data
Management
3: Continuous Intelligence
4: Explainable AI
5: Graph
6: Data Fabric
7: NLP/ Conversational
Analytics
8: Commercial AI and
Machine Learning
9: Blockchain
10: Persistent Memory
Servers
Learn the difference
between “Veblen goods” and “Giffen goods.”
Welcome to
the Financial Times Lexicon
ft.com
Lexicon – “Browse thousands of words and phrases selected by
Financial Times editors and suggest new terms for the glossary.”
How to make your PowerPoints really boring?
Can
PowerPoint speak aloud & read the text in my slideshows?
PCWorld: “Can
PowerPoint speak aloud and read the text in my slideshows? Yes, it
can. Using the Speak command, also known as the Text to Speech
(TTS) feature, PowerPoint can read the text in your slideshows and in
your notes out loud. Be advised, however, that there is not
a pause and continue feature with Speak. This is available only with
the Read Aloud command, which is available in Word and Outlook, but
not yet in PowerPoint or Excel…”
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