Group items tagged

"Sequencing cancer to find the breaks has become easy and cheap. But information on which drugs might or might not work on particular mutations remains buried in PDF files and scattered across medical journals."

Woweee - look at these and you realise the economics and problems with security of data...

How shocking is this?

"A newly released set of slides from the Snowden leaks reveals that the NSA is harvesting millions of facial images from the Web for use in facial recognition algorithms through a program called "Identity Intelligence." James Risen and Laura Poitras's NYT piece shows that the NSA is linking these facial images with other biometrics, identity data, and "behavioral" data including "travel, financial, behaviors, social network." "

"China's internet censors have cracked down on searches about the Panama Papers, a massive leak of documents that reportedly tie the relatives of current and retired Chinese politicians, including President Xi Jinping, to offshore companies used for tax evasion. The reports by an international coalition of media outlets working with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ, are based on documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world's biggest creators of shell companies."

"After a successful phishing attack that captured over 50 accounts, hackers stole 500,000 records from the San Diego Unified School District, for staff, current students, and past students going all the way back to 2008; including SSNs, home addresses and phone numbers, disciplinary files, health information, emergency contact details, health benefits and payroll info, pay information, financial data for direct deposits."

"Clearview, the shady facial-recognition firm with links to law-enforcement and alt-right internet trolls, reports that its entire client list has been stolen."

"The company, Unacast, went live with its Social Distancing Scoreboard Tuesday. The dashboard, billed as a public health utility, includes a county-by-county breakdown of people's movement patterns. It assigns each county a grade, which Unacast based (at least in part) on how much people are traveling. "

"Fear-mongering Citizen app apparently stepped up from crime pronouncement to vigilantism this weekend when they offered a $30k reward for information about a gentleman they believed to be an arsonist responsible for starting a large fire. It is pretty clear local law enforcement didn't ask for this assistance and that sharing of the photo could easily have endangered the "suspect," or in this case victim, especially as requested in the quote below."

"More than 400,000 crime records could have been affected by a data blunder, with records for serious offences supposed to be kept forever accidentally deleted and police fearing criminals may not be caught, a letter from a senior officer reveals. The records were accidentally deleted due to a coding error on 10 January, and the incident affects fingerprints, DNA, and arrest records on the police national computer (PNC)."

"The case was finally cracked when new legislation in January 2019 allowed police to search for matches to suspects' DNA on commercial genealogy websites, which are popular among Swedes seeking long-lost relatives."

"Information collected includes dates of birth, addresses, marital status, along with photographs, political associations, relatives and social media IDs. It collates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and even TikTok accounts, as well as news stories, criminal records and corporate misdemeanours. While much of the information has been "scraped" from open-source material, some profiles have information which appears to have been sourced from confidential bank records, job applications and psychological profiles."