Yet another convenience product that compromises consumers privacy.
You can’t just pick up the phone and call?
I can relate.
Amazon Web Services big outage was caused by human error.
“Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.”
Whoops, indeed, but been there, done that.
Good News
For those of us who want a phone and not a vulnerability ridden, intrusive, open doorway into our data.
The Sound of Settled Science
Fukushima residents exposed to far less radiation than thought:
Citizen science usually isn’t this personal. In 2011, roughly 65,000 Japanese citizens living near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant started measuring their own radiation exposure in the wake of the TÅhoku earthquake and tsunami. That’s because no one, not even experts, knew how accurate the traditional method of estimating dosage–taking readings from aircraft hundreds of meters above the ground–really was…
The scientists concluded that actual radiation doses were roughly 15% of what the helicopters were measuring, scaled to ground level, they reported last month in the Journal of Radiological Protection. That’s four times less radiation than what the Japanese government was previously assuming.
Anti-nuclear activists are reportedly devastated at the results.
But it’s on the App Store….
I have a great idea! How about I let China know everything about me so that I can look googly-eyed on my selfie.
Security of your person and privacy is and always has been your job. It’s a silly request, but I’d ask that people start taking that job seriously. Especially if you’re one of the special ones who demand access to the company network on your own device.
Things you should think about before installing anything:
1. Do I really need this application?
2. What do I know about the people who wrote this app?
3. If I install this app, do I know what it is really doing?
4. Is there anything past, present or future that I wouldn’t want Russia, China, the kid down the block or the mafia to know about me on this device?
5. If it requires a network connection, where and who in the physical world am I giving that information?
YMMV based on your level of paranoia, but those are my guidelines.
A Thousand Words
#CreditCardSafety – Always tug on the credit card reader at the gas pumps, you never know when someone has slipped a reader on there. pic.twitter.com/gwiXEJ5NQa
— NorthportPoliceDept. (@Northport_AL_PD) January 14, 2017
Goodbye FM radio?
Not really an FM listener, but this may interest.
Your Own Lyin’ Eyes
h/t B Deplorable
4\/\/Kw4Rd!
Georgia’s secretary of state: “DHS tried to breach our firewall”
(link fixed, sorry!)
The Best Internet Thing Of The Day
Everyone’s a hacker.
Examining the DDOS attacks from the Internet of Things (IoT).
Patching machines is a tough enough challenge for busy IT Departments the chances of the home consumer doing it are nearly nil, we already know this because of the millions of home routers that have never been patched. On top of that the profit margins on these products are so small the companies that manufacture them will have almost no incentive to create patches for identified security holes.
This is going to be a disaster.
This will be problematic
AT&T stops selling Samsung Galaxy Note 7.
As anyone concerned about safety will tell you, don’t cheap out on batteries. They are dangerous.
And only twenty years late.
Patent trolls may find the future unwelcoming.
About bloody time, these scum have been the bane of developers since they discovered that describing something incorrectly allowed them to profit from license.
What do the Liberals want?
Electronic Voting!
When do we want it? Never!
Experts told CBS News that the ultimate goal of these hackers is not to necessarily change the outcome of the election; their main objective is to de-legitimize the outcome by sowing doubt, uncertainty and suspicion through a series of cyberattacks.
Successful operation, I’d say.
Are you sure you want better WiFi?
Radio is radar.
Foreign Actors compromise voters
Old-school cracks exploited the Arizona and Illinois State Board of Elections.
The story is weak on specifics regarding the Arizona crack, this statement is ambiguous.
While the hackers did not compromise the state network, they stole the username and password of an election official in Gila County, located in central Arizona.
That doesn’t tell us if the stolen username was the origin of the crack attempt or the result. If the origin, then it was either an infected machine the user used or s/he used the same username/password combination on other websites.
From the McLean County Clerk’s Facebook page regarding the Illinois crack:
The pathway into IVRS was NOT through our firewalls but through a vulnerability on our public web page that an applicant may use to check the status of their online voter registration application.
The method used was SQL injection. The offenders were able to inject SQL database queries into the IVRS database in order to access information. This was a highly sophisticated attack most likely from a foreign (international) entity.
As a side note, headlines aside, no story that I’ve found actually says it was the Russians.
The Sound of Settled Science
Most Scientific Findings are Wrong or Useless:
Why it is a lie? Because it makes “it easy to believe that scientific imagination gives birth to technological progress, when in reality technology sets the agenda for science, guiding it in its most productive directions and providing continual tests of its validity, progress, and value.” He adds, “Technology keeps science honest.” Basically, research detached from trying to solve well-defined problems spins off self-validating, career-enhancing publications like those breast cancer studies that actually were using skin cancer cells. Yet no patients were cured of breast cancer. The “truth test” of technology is the most certain way to tell if the knowledge allegedly being generated by research is valid. “The scientific phenomena must be real or the technologies would not work,” Sarewitz explains.
Modern Spy Story
John Batchelor interviews Patrick Tucker, of Defense One, about how Wikileaks has purportedly been weaponized. Here is Tucker’s original article.
Pen and Paper
What do the Liberals want? Electronic Voting!
When do we want it? NEVER!
That’s not how they work
When this is the goal: Officials predicted earlier this year that the newer model would find average overpayments of $1,739, up from the $1,047 identified during the first generation of the program.
And this is the result: The average overpayment identified under the newer model was $861 between May and August 2015, a drop from the $957 average during the same period in 2014.
This is not the correct conclusion: The department said it’s too early to say if the recalibrated system is meeting expectations.