Wednesday, April 24, 2019


Security does depend on the resources you can deploy.
Wow. As far as a physical security FAIL goes, this is a contender.
The Ahmedabad Mirror reports:
Officials of the Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI) in Gujarat on Sunday lodged a complaint of theft of record files from their storage unit in Ahmedabad.
The DGGI storage unit is housed in an old and decrepit government quarters building in Pragatinagar area of the city. It neither has any security measures to prevent incursions nor CCTV to monitor activities there.
Read more on Ahmedabad Mirror. You seriously need to take a look at that storage unit pictured in the story.




A look a the threats to international money transfers.
New SWIFT Report Details Cyber Threats to International Payment Flows
According to a new SWIFT report (“Three Years On From Bangladesh: Tackling the Adversaries”), international cyber criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the ways that they evade detection when carrying out fraudulent payment transactions. The report, based on 15 months of investigation after the much-heralded cyber attack on the Bank of Bangladesh in 2016, found a constantly evolving landscape of cyber threats to international payment flows.




A really good suggestion and a completely unrelated survey?
UK's NCSC Suggests Automatic Blocking of Common Passwords
A recent survey from the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC, part of GCHQ), conducted by Ipsos Mori, suggests that 52% consider their most prevalent online security consideration to be protecting their privacy, while 51% consider it to be the loss of their money.
The survey ( PDF ), conducted between November 2018 and January 2019, involved 1,350 telephone interviews with the general public aged 16+ and was weighted to represent the UK population.
Absent from this survey is any analysis of passwords specifically. This is covered in a separate survey that analyzes the most commonly used passwords as found in Troy Hunt's Have I been Pwned database.
The NCSC believes that if defenders automatically block the most common passwords, then hacking will be made more difficult. To make this practical, it has -- in conjunction with Troy Hunt – published a list of the 100,000 most common passwords found in the Have I Been Pwned database. These range from the most common '123456' to the 100,000th most common 'crossroad'.




What happens after I cry, “Fake news?” How will they stop Russia from flagging the truth as fake?
Strengthening our approach to deliberate attempts to mislead voters
Today, we are further expanding our enforcement capabilities in this area by creating a dedicated reporting feature within the product to allow users to more easily report this content to us.
We will start with 2019 Lok Sabha in India and the EU elections and then roll out to other elections globally throughout the rest of the year.
For more on the specifics of the policy, the types of content we will be taking action on, and our enforcement approach, visit the Twitter Help Center here.




How to ‘private up.’ Using the GDPR in the US?
It used to be that listings websites would make it very difficult for you to remove your data. Often they would request annoying things like printing and posting a paper form, or even requiring you to send a fax.
But now, thanks in part to new EU data control laws, the sites must give you a reasonable way to remove your details. Even if you live outside the EU, if the site operates within Europe then it must allow you to remove your information. [Really? Bob]
Unfortunately there is no way to opt out of all these sites at once. You will have to submit a request for your data to be removed from each site individually. But it shouldn’t take too long. Usually you just need to fill out an online form and the site will take down your details within a few days.
Here is a list of some of the most common data collection websites with links to their respective opt out pages:
You can find a longer list of personal data websites with instructions on how to remove your details from each at wiki.onerep.com.




Perspective. Is Mark Zuckerberg hiring mentors or attack dogs?
Facebook Hires Another Privacy Advocate and Critic
Kevin Bankston, currently director of the privacy-focused Open Technology Institute in Washington, will be joining Facebook as a director of privacy policy, he announced Tuesday. Bankston joins a number of privacy advocates at the beleaguered tech giant, as The Information previously reported. All have said they hope to change the company from within and help improve its privacy practices.




I want to buy the T-shirt! (Will the FBI consider it a munition?)
This colorful printed patch makes you pretty much invisible to AI
The rise of AI-powered surveillance is extremely worrying. The ability of governments to track and identify citizens en masse could spell an end to public anonymity. But as researchers have shown time and time again, there are ways to trick such systems.
The latest example comes from a group of engineers from the university of KU Leuven in Belgium. In a paper shared last week on the preprint server arXiv, these students show how simple printed patterns can fool an AI system that’s designed to recognize people in images.
As the researchers write: “We believe that, if we combine this technique with a sophisticated clothing simulation, we can design a T-shirt print that can make a person virtually invisible for automatic surveillance cameras.”




I don’t believe this is true. “Better performance” means they make more money.
Stock traders not ready for AI revolution, Greenwich survey finds
Traders are hesitant about using machine-learning tools to help them gain an edge in the stock markets, despite these being lauded by some of the financial services industry’s biggest investors.
Three-quarters of respondents to Greenwich Associates’ latest survey on the trends in global electronic equity execution said they did not yet use artificial intelligence when trading stocks. Of those that did, 37% said algorithms powered by such tech led to better performance.




Perspective. Hope for old businesses willing to leap into technology?
Disney: New Streaming Service Could Transform Its Valuation
Summary
  • On Apr. 11, Disney announced its new streaming service, Disney+.
  • Disney+ is priced at $6.99 per month; Disney clearly aims to undercut Netflix, the current market leader, and make a play for the streaming crown.
  • Disney is attempting to forge a new narrative, positioning itself as a growth stock story akin to Netflix or even Amazon.
… Despite the long lead time and general lack of surprises regarding Disney+, Disney shares leapt higher in the wake of the official unveiling. The stock is now trading 12% higher than it was the day before the advent of Disney+. That means the market has added more than $20 billion to the company’s valuation virtually overnight.




Perspective. Donald Trump is the opposite of the average Twitter user?
Twitter Is Not America
Hard as that is for the Twitter-addicted to believe, it is true, and a new Pew Research study presents new evidence about the way that the platform leans.
In the United States, Twitter users are statistically younger, wealthier, and more politically liberal than the general population.
They were far more likely (60%) to be Democrats or lean Democratic than to be Republicans or lean Republican (35%).




Perspective. “It’s a bird! It’s a plane. It’s a drone!” Watch the video to see how this drone lowers your package on a cable.
Google Spinoff’s Drone Delivery Business First to Get FAA Approval



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