Friday, March 22, 2019

I wonder if there was someone like me who sent articles describing how incredibly stupid this was to any manager at Facebook, let alone Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years
Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees — in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Facebook says an ongoing investigation has so far found no indication that employees have abused access to this data.
Facebook is probing a series of security failures in which employees built applications that logged unencrypted password data for Facebook users and stored it in plain text on internal company servers. That’s according to a senior Facebook employee who is familiar with the investigation and who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
The Facebook source said the investigation so far indicates between 200 million and 600 million Facebook users may have had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by more than 20,000 Facebook employees. The source said Facebook is still trying to determine how many passwords were exposed and for how long, but so far the inquiry has uncovered archives with plain text user passwords dating back to 2012.




Learn from the failures of others. Even if it didn’t result in jail time.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump Use Private Accounts for Official Business, Their Lawyer Says
The chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee revealed information on Thursday that he said showed Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner used private messaging services for official White House business in a way that may have violated federal records laws.
… Mr. Kushner uses an unofficial encrypted messaging service, WhatsApp, for official White House business, including with foreign contacts.




AI isn’t perfect. Or the training of AI isn’t perfect. Relying on AI is a management failure?
Facebook says its artificial intelligence systems failed to detect New Zealand shooting video
… Facebook’s vice president of integrity, Guy Rosen, said “this particular video did not trigger our automatic detection systems.”
"AI has made massive progress over the years and in many areas, which has enabled us to proactively detect the vast majority of the content we remove," Rosen said. "But it’s not perfect."
One reason is because artificial intelligence systems are trained with large volumes of similar content, but in this case there was not enough because such attacks are rare.
Rosen said another challenge is in getting artificial intelligence to tell the difference between this and “visually similar, innocuous content,” such as live-streamed video games.




Only a lawyer would think this clears things up.
Tim Murphy reports:
MPs have revised privacy legislation to avoid a risk of ‘notification fatigue’ in which holders of data would be forced to advise the public of even minor data breaches.
Parliament’s justice select committee has raised the threshold in the Privacy Bill for when mandatory notifications to the Privacy Commissioner and affected individuals would be required from a breach causing “harm” to one of “serious harm”.
[…]
Now, the judgment of “serious harm” from a breach would be determined by a range of factors set out in the revised bill including: the actions a holder of data has taken to reduce the harm; the sensitivity of the information; the nature of the harm; those to whom the information might be disclosed; and whether the information is protected by security measures.
Read more on Newsroom. I wish they had linked to the actual language of the legislation. I’ll go look for it.
Update: Thanks to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for the link to the actual text:




For my next Computer Security class.
Enigma, Typex, and Bombe Simulators
GCHQ has put simulators for the Enigma, Typex, and Bombe on the Internet.
News article.




Silicon Island?
First details of Malta’s Artificial Intelligence policy announced
The first details of Malta’s Artificial Intelligence policy were announced on Thursday at a workshop organised by the MALTA.ai taskforce.
Silvio Schembri, Parliamentary Secretary for Financial Services and the Digital Economy, said that Malta aspires to become a jurisdiction in which local and foreign companies and entrepreneurs can develop, prototype, test and scale AI, and ultimately showcase the value from their innovations.
… The policy document will be open for public consultation until April 22. It can be accessed at:


(Related)
We want an AI-powered government’, Silvio Schembri says as AI vision launched
… The consultation document, which was formulated by the Malta.AI Taskforce which was appointed last year, is built on three major pillars and three strategic enablers. The pillars are: Innovation, start-ups and investment; public sector adoption; and private sector adoption, while the three enablers are: education and workforce; legal and ethical framework; and infrastructure.




Does everyone want to sell stuff online? A question for my Architecture students.
Pinterest hires the exec behind Walmart's tech transformation
If you're wondering how serious Pinterest is about turning itself into more of a shopping portal, here's your answer: the company has just hired former Walmart CTO Jeremy King as Head of Engineering. King headed Walmart's e-commerce team and oversaw most of the massive retailer's digital strategy, including in-store pickup of online orders and online grocery pickup. He also led the company's innovation arm called Walmart Labs. While Amazon continues to dominate the e-commerce space, Bloomberg says Walmart's online sales grew by 40 percent last year under his leadership.


(Related) Amazon wants to sell stuff.
Can Amazon Reinvent the Traditional Supermarket?
Amazon’s plans to launch physical grocery stores this year is just the latest affirmation that, ironically, bricks-and-mortar stores are crucial to the e-commerce giant’s future growth. Amazon may launch as many as 2,000 supermarkets in major U.S. cities, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal. It will be Amazon’s sixth physical retail format after Whole Foods, Amazon Books, Amazon Go, Amazon 4-Star and Amazon Pop-Up.
… Whatever retail store format Amazon uses, it “would be built upon this tremendous capacity they have to gather, analyze, understand and use what customers are saying to them every day,” said Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University who had been CEO of Sears Canada. “Amazon is proof-positive of the value of big data and the way in which you collect it and the way in which you examine it and use it.”




Perspective.
Mobile time-spent jumps up: YouTube corners ~40% of the traffic, Facebook less than 10%
Smartphones are the big gainers in media consumption year-over-year, according to the just-released Nielsen’s Q3 2018 Total Audience Report.
There’s been a significant jump in mobile time-spent among 18-34s, from 29% to 34%. The growth came at the expense of television viewing.
… With mobile media consumption coming at the expense of television viewing, it’s no wonder that a large chunk of the attention is going to the leading online video platform, YouTube.
A Sandvine study (The Mobile Internet Phenomena Report, Feb 2019) found that YouTube is now responsible for 37% of all mobile internet traffic. Interestingly, Facebook is running neck and neck with Snapchat when it comes to mobile traffic, with both having less than 9%.


(Related) “What’s a record, Grandpa?”
Streaming accounts for more than half UK record label income
Music streaming services generated more than half of the income earned by record labels in the UK last year, as CD sales continue to plummet.
Subscription streaming platforms operated by Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Music, made revenues of £468m in the UK last year, 54% of the £865.5m total income for the recorded music industry. It is the first time that subscription streaming revenues, which grew at 35% year-on-year in 2018, have accounted for more than half of total recorded music revenues for labels.


(Related) “How did anyone watch TV before the Internet, Grandpa?”
The MPAA says streaming video has surpassed cable subscriptions worldwide
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) reported today that the world’s entertainment market — encompassing both theatrical and home releases — grew to a new high in 2018: $96.8 billion, 9 percent over 2017.
… When it comes to streaming video, the MPAA reports that subscriptions surpassed cable television for the first time, with 131.2 million new subscriptions added, rising to 613.3 million worldwide, a jump of 27 percent over 2017’s numbers. The report says that cable subscriptions dropped by 2 percent to 556 million.


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