Sunday, March 10, 2019

A possible Final Exam question: What procedures would you implement to make this less likely to occur?
Today’s reminder that some “human error” breaches can put lives at risk. Alex Horton reports:
Army officials inadvertently disclosed sensitive information about hundreds of immigrant recruits from nations such as China and Russia, in a breach that could aid hostile governments in persecuting them or their families, a lawmaker and former U.S. officials said.
A spreadsheet intended for internal coordination among recruiters was accidentally emailed to recruits and contained names, Social Security numbers and enlistment dates. The list was sent out inadvertently at least three times between July 2017 and January 2018.
Read more on Washington Post.
And yes, the Army made a statement that included the all-too-predictable claim that they take privacy seriously, etc. etc.




Something makes this sound like a CyberWar proof of concept exercise.
Partial service restored to San Francisco’s BART transit system after massive shutdown
  • San Francisco Bay Area’s BART system was shut down Saturday morning for several hours due to a power malfunction, [Not a power outage? Bob] forcing riders to look for other options to get around the region.
  • Bay Area Rapid Transit said Saturday that crews working overnight on BART’s uninterruptible power supply ran into problems that impacted the power supply system and train control routing system.
San Francisco’s public transit service, BART, stopped running early Saturday, halting all train traffic for several hours before “limited service” was restored.
Bay Area Rapid Transit said Saturday that crews working overnight on BART’s uninterruptible power supply ran into problems that impacted the power supply system and train control routing system. Without these systems, a BART statement said, it is unable to safely dispatch its trains for service.




Security theater. I’ll bet each box was clearly marked “Glocks: Help Yourself!”
2 boxes of guns stolen at Atlanta airport
Atlanta Police say two men wearing bright yellow vests walked through an unsecured door at a United Airlines cargo area around 4:30 p.m. March 1 and took the boxes that were waiting to be loaded onto a plane.
Each box, police said, contained 10 9mm Glock handguns.




The school of privacy?
Sarah Rasheed writes:
The data privacy landscape looks a lot different than it did even a few years ago. New federal and state laws—and a greater focus on the issue by districts—are giving edtech companies a lot to consider.
Specifically, companies may run into roadblocks with legal or data privacy officers if they don’t meet key criteria regarding legal terms, data privacy and security that districts and schools need to see based on local, state and federal legislation.
FERPA, COPPA and GDPR—the new privacy legislation out of Europe—are among some of the hot-button issues for local education agencies in considering vendor selection.
Read more on EdSurge.




I’m not seeing many articles like this one.
Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, and CIO of Everipedia, has an OpEd on Podium. He writes, in part, that both political parties have not served us well in terms of protecting us from the serious risks we face:
Remember when everybody left social media in droves and started locking down their Internet use, because otherwise the NSA would have easy access to their every move?
No, I don’t remember that either, because it didn’t happen. Nor, sadly, was there a popular revolt to get these programs repealed. I think many of us couldn’t really believe it was happening; it just didn’t seem real, it seemed to be about terrorists and spies and criminals, without any impact on us.
One thing that bothers me quite a bit is that pretty much the whole Democratic Party thinks Donald Trump is a crypto-Nazi and is one step from instituting fascism—but still, puzzlingly, nobody thinks to observe worriedly that he’s in control of the NSA and can find trumped-up excuses to spy on us if he wishes. In other words, if Trump were a fascist and he did turn out to want to start the Fourth Reich here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., it doesn’t seem to bother many Democrats that Trump holds handy tools to do just that.
Meanwhile, Republicans often think the Democratic Party is beholden to social justice warriors that want to institute socialism, thought policing, censorship, and general totalitarianism. You know–fascism. But they, too, seem strangely uninterested to dismantle government programs that systematically monitor everyone.
Read more of his OpEd on TNW Podium.




For my Indian students. Is there a US equivalent? (Would this one work here?)
Google releases Bolo, a speech recognition app that helps Indian kids learn to read
Google, which already dominates India’s smartphone, search, and online video market, today launched a learning app for primary school children in the country as part of an effort to cement its grip on the world’s fastest-growing internet market.
The Android app, called Bolo, aims to help young kids improve their reading comprehension and vocabulary skills in Hindi and English. Bolo (the Hindi word for “speak”), features a range of games and tasks, and it rewards kids as they progress.
Bolo, which is powered by Google’s speech recognition and text-to-speech technology, first asks kids to read sentences. The app then listens to the efforts and reviews them, and an animated voice assistant — called Diya — suggests pronunciation and vocabulary corrections wherever applicable.




Is Dilbert suggesting that the government would never know the difference?


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