Saturday, July 27, 2019


If there was a CDC for malware, ransomware would be an epidemic.
Puerto Rico: Two hospitals report ransomware incident potentially affecting more than 520,000 patients
Add Bayamón Medical Center and its affiliated Puerto Rico Women And Children’s Hospital to the list of ransomware victims.
On July 19, the hospitals notified HHS and the public of a “recent” security incident that resulted in files being encrypted. No details were provided as to when this occurred, whether the hospitals paid any ransom, and whether they have fully recovered all patient records. Nor do they reveal how the ransomware was inserted into the system.




Signs that state governments are getting serious?
Governor signs bills to help prevent data breaches
Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Thursday signed legislation that expands the law to cover any company holding personal data belonging to a New Yorker, and not just companies doing business in the state.
The SHIELD (Stop Hacks and Improve Electronic Data Security) Act, which takes effect in 240 days, will also add email addresses and passwords and biometric data to the list of information covered by the law. The measure aims to ensure consumers know if personal data, such as Social Security numbers, are obtained by hackers.
Cuomo also signed a bill Thursday that requires credit reporting agencies to provide identify theft prevention services to consumers when their data is exposed during a breach.




Leaders like this explain at lot about CBP.
Top CBP Officer Testifies He’s Unsure if 3-Year-Old Is “a Criminal or a National Security Threat”
One of the country’s top border officers cannot say whether a 3-year-old child might pose a “criminal or national security threat.”




Worth reading.
The Internet of Things Needs a Business Model. Here It Is
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been near the top of the technology-hype lists for years. In 2018, Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies ranked IoT platforms as cresting the “peak of inflated expectations” stage and ready to tumble into the dreaded “trough of disillusionment,” like a barrel careening over Niagara Falls.




Modern English writing.
Is the Internet Making Writing Better?
A new book argues that our richest, most eloquent language is found online.
A common refrain from writers on Twitter is that writing is hard. Often, this insight is accompanied by the rueful observation that tweeting is easy. This is, of course, the difference between informal and formal expression, between language that serves as a loose and intuitive vehicle for thought and language into which one must wrestle one’s thought like a parent forcing his squirming kid into a car seat. We’ve long had both formal and informal modes of speech. The first pours from political orators; the second winds around friends at a bar. But, as the linguist Gretchen McCulloch reveals in “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language,” her effervescent study of how the digital world is transfiguring English, informal writing is relatively new. Most writing used to be regulated (or self-regulated); there were postcards and diary entries, but even those had standards. It’s only with the rise of the Internet that a truly casual, willfully ephemeral prose has ascended—and become central to daily life.




I’m an “opinionated old guy,” just not this one.



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