Why not? My Ethical Hackers will tell me.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports:
This story is part of When Spies Come Home, a Motherboard series about powerful surveillance software ordinary people use to spy on their loved ones.
A company that sells consumer-grade software that lets customers spy on other people’s calls, messages, and anything they do on their cell phones left more than 95,000 images and more than 25,000 audio recordings on a database exposed and publicly accessible to anyone on the internet. The exposed server contains two folders with everything from intimate pictures to recordings of phone calls, given that the app markets itself mostly to parents.
Read more on Motherboard.
“Hello, we’re from the government. We’re
here to help.” I guess they hire others to do harm.
Caroline Linton reports:
FEMA mistakenly exposed personal information, including addresses and bank account information, of 2.3 million disaster victims, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General said in a report released Friday. The breach occurred because FEMA did not ensure a private contractor only received information it required to perform its official duties, the report said.
The victims affected include survivors of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria and the 2017 California wildfires.
The report found FEMA’s failure to protect their data put them at risk of identity theft and fraud.
Read more on CBS
A near perfect headline!
Olivia Rizzo reports:
Several
high school students are in hot water after they were able to log
into their schools’ computer systems to change grades and
attendance records.
A
letter was sent out Wednesday to parents of high school students in
the Elizabeth Public School
system informing them of the data breach.
“Unfortunately,
a number of our students have made some poor choices by
participating, to varying degrees, in compromising our student
information system to manipulate attendance and classroom grades,”
a letter from the district’s Superintendent Olga Hugelmeyer read.
Read more on NJ.com.
Where were you on the night of the murder? Don’t
bother to answer, your App has already ratted you out.
Matt Swayne writes:
Fitness apps and other smart devices embedded with GPS satellite chips and other sensors may use satellite data to help users stay fit and healthy, but, according to Penn State and Penn State Dickinson Law researchers, they unwittingly open a gateway to privacy-related legal and ethical headaches and are a repeated source of national security threats.
In a session at the Penn State Law Review annual symposium held today (March 22), the researchers and Dickinson Law professors said that immediate focus is needed on how vast quantities of data, collected from sensors embedded in smart devices combined with both government-owned and privately owned satellite mapping technologies, is aggregated, used, disseminated, and bought and sold. Government-owned satellite mapping technologies, including global positioning satellites provide free, worldwide access for use in GPS chip-embedded devices.
Read more on Penn
State News.
A series on Privacy.
Michael Grothaus writes:
This story is part of The Privacy Divide, a series that explores the fault lines and disparities–economic, cultural, philosophical–that have developed around digital privacy and its impact on society.
Increasingly, the most important issue for everyday internet users is privacy—and rightly so. In today’s connected world, we’re being tracked and surveilled more than ever by everyone from search giants and social media companies to ISPs and advertising firms. These organizations don’t just record what we click on or share, but analyze our online activity to compile complex demographic and psychographic profiles about us—so they can manipulate us into doing their bidding, whether that’s clicking on ads they serve us based on the data they hold about us or getting us to interact with their sites more and share even more information about ourselves.
Read more on Fast
Company.
An automated bias reinforcing App. Could be
political ad with no specific political orientation. Some elements
of “six degrees of separation” thinking.
How
Twitter's algorithm is amplifying extreme political rhetoric
magine opening up the Twitter app on your phone
and scrolling through your feed. Suddenly, you come across a
hyper-partisan tweet calling Hillary Clinton the "godmother of
ISIS." It's from a user you do not follow, and it's not in your
feed by virtue of a retweet from a user you do follow. So how did it
get there?
Over the last several
months, Twitter has begun inserting what it believes to be relevant
and popular tweets into the feeds of people who do not subscribe to
the accounts that posted them. In other words, Twitter
has started showing users tweets from accounts that are followed by
those they follow. This practice is different from the
promoted content paid for by advertisers, as Twitter is putting these
posts into the feeds of users without being paid and without consent
from users.
Twitter said its goal with the practice is to
expose users to new accounts and content that they might be
interested in. In some situations, the practice is innocuous and
perhaps even beneficial. For instance, if someone is watching the
Super Bowl, but doesn't follow Tom Brady, it might be useful for them
to see his post-game tweet.
… In effect, the practice means Twitter may at
times end up amplifying inflammatory political rhetoric,
misinformation, conspiracy theories, and flat out lies to its users.
… The feature affects different users in
different ways because it relies on the accounts followed by the user
to determine which tweets to insert into the timeline. It does not
appear to be biased toward a particular ideology, but only biased
toward what content users might engage with. If a user primarily
follows accounts on the political left, it's likely that person will
see inserted content from other accounts on the left. The same goes
for people who follow accounts on the political right.
Something every citizen should have? (Free)
All the
Crime, All the Time: How Citizen Works
Open Citizen
and you will see a familiar blue location dot — that’s you! —
surrounded by other, often larger dots, in red and yellow. Each
represents an incident, either of the “Recent” or
“Trending” variety, that has recently been reported in your
proximity, and that may even be unfolding at the very moment.
… Particularly notable reports might have
video, sometimes live, as well as a timeline of new developments, and
a chat-scroll full of users discussing what they’re seeing. (“This
is the second time this has happened in a month,” noted one citizen
in TAXI ENGULFED IN FLAMES. “Is it gonna blow up,” wondered
another, watching the live video broadcast of firefighters putting
down the fire.)
Free is good. In this case, free is good for
Microsoft. (
The Windows
10 calculator will soon be able to graph math equations
Microsoft is adding a
graphing mode to the Windows 10 calculator. The company made the
calculator open-sourced
on GitHub earlier this month and has received over thirty
suggestions from contributors so far, as spotted
by ZDNet.
… As of now, the feature’s still under
development but GitHub notes indicate users would be able to graph
linear, quadratic, and exponential equations.
[Until
it’s ready, try: https://www.desmos.com/calculator
For my programmers. Always steal
study and create your own version of the best!
Same for Artificial Intelligence?
