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.
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?”
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/21/18275670/mpaa-report-streaming-video-cable-subscription-worldwide
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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