Group items tagged

"iTunes phishing scams Compromised phones or computers Celebrity passwords/emails as part of a larger password dump (such as the Adobe hack) Mobile-phone or computer-repair individuals abusing access Password reset questions guess Brute force"

"If reelected, British Prime Minister David Cameron would consider banning messaging apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp, if they don't make their data available to intelligence agencies, he said Monday."

"With news that the 15 million Twitter users in the UK can now be targeted at individual postcode levels, the micro-blogging platform is selling its advertising opportunities as ultra-geographically precise, and therefore ultra-cost effective. "The key benefit of geo-targeting is that it enables advertisers, or in this case political parties, the ability to reach users in specific regions, metropolitan areas and now postcodes," Twitter said in a blog post. "

"Rutgers University's new program also uses a "behavior observation tool," which monitors student browser activity throughout an active session. While this feature is intended to prevent students from using the Internet to cheat on exams, the power that this grants instructors is extremely invasive. If a student accidentally leaves a personal or embarrassing website in their browser during an online course, a ProctorTrack instructor might stumble upon their activity."

"Halifax's system, which is currently at the proof-of-concept stage, uses a piece of wearable technology known as the Nymi band; it monitors and stores a user's heartbeat via an electrocardiogram (ECG). Users must wear the Nymi on one wrist, and touch its top sensor with the opposite hand for it to work. The Nymi pairs with a smartphone via Bluetooth, using a companion app for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. Removal of the wristband invalidates biometric authentication."

"Selling data is as yet a small part of Twitter's overall income - $70m out of a total of $1.3bn last year, with the lion's share of cash coming from advertising, but the social network has big plans to increase that. Its acquisition of Chris Moody's analytics company Gnip for $130m last April is a sign of that intent. Google and Facebook have built their businesses around sharing data, but their control of our private and public information has become a source of huge controversy. "

"Luckily for the kid, it was only a single tweet. Had several students gotten together to form a study group, they might have been prosecuted for felony interference with a business model and gotten the death penalty. Do you suppose Pearson has hidden microphones set up around the schools so they can also listen in and see if students discuss the tests during lunch? I ask because that is basically the offline version of the student's infraction."

"Pearson is apparently monitoring social media, to detect signs of cheating during exams. That's insanely creepy, and a horrible violation. "And for those who think "Well, its Twitter, its public", remember this: So is walking down the street. But is it OK for the government to monitor us with street surveillance cameras and send us fines for not crossing with the crosswalk?" via Pearson Caught Spying On Students. Big Brother Is Here. "

"America's National Security Agency gathers unfathomable mountains of Internet communications from fiber optic taps and other means, but it says it only retains and searches the communications of "targeted" individuals who've done something suspicious. Guess what? If you read Boing Boing, you've been targeted."

"The NSA uses laughably sloppy tools for deciding whether a target is a "US person" (a person in the USA, or an American citizen abroad). For example, people whose address books contain foreign persons are presumed by some analysts to be foreign. Likewise, people who post in "foreign" languages (the US has no official state language) are presumed by some analysts to be non-US persons."

"A new algorithm, however, is attempting to identify specific syndromes much sooner by screening photos for characteristic facial features associated with specific genetic conditions, such as Down's syndrome, Progeria, and Fragile X syndrome."

"Jimmy Wales said it was dangerous to have companies decide what should and should not be allowed to appear on the internet. His comments came after the bosses of the leading search engines met the heads of European data watchdogs on Thursday."

Scary but if we are not careful - could be true in the future - "Existing properties will be required to install them over a four-year period. These would supply real-time images of terrorists, criminals and paedophiles at any time of day and night. Any disconnection of a camera would immediately alert the police as prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. I have held talks with the industry on whether the cameras should be in bathrooms and bedrooms. It would clearly be nonsensical to exclude them, as terrorists and paedophiles often make use of these rooms."

"A story on the site of the Japanese broadcaster NHK shows how this is playing out in the world of social networks. Online criticism of the behavior of the President of South Korea following the sinking of the ferry MV Sewol prompted the government to set up a team to monitor online activity. That, in its turn, has led people to seek what the NHK article calls "cyber-asylum" -- online safety through the use of foreign mobile messaging services, which aren't spied on so easily by the South Korean authorities. According to the NHK article: Many users have switched [from the hugely-popular home-grown product KakaoTalk] to a German chat app called Telegram. It had 50,000 users in early September. Now 2 million people have signed up."

"But the bigger problem with things like public tweets is that no-one knows what information can be derived from them, either now or in the future. I write as a data analyst who's done a fair bit of work with this kind of material. What follows are a few techniques that aren't at all obvious to the average Twitter user. They go far beyond reading the surface text (or metadata) of an individual tweet. And these are just some of the techniques currently used to mine this data, ethically or unethically, legally or illegally."

"Marlinspike's Textsecure has an impeccable reputation as a secure platform, and Whatsapp founder Jan Koum attributes his desire to add security to his users' conversations to his experiences with the surveillance state while growing up in Soviet Ukraine. However, without any independent security audit or (even better) source-code publication, we have to take the company's word that it has done the right thing and that it's done it correctly."

"Major Wall Street institutions were cracked wide open by a phishing scam from FIN4, a hacker group that, unlike its competition, can write convincingly and employs some basic smarts about why people open attachments."

"Graduated top of your class in Ghana and managed to land a place on an MBA at Oxford? Then you're heading for a salary high enough to make repaying your student loan a cinch - especially if half your Facebook followers are from McKinsey. At least, this is the kind of calculation being made by private funders stepping into the increasingly complex and competitive student loans market."

""Many predicted at the outset that Google would simply agree to most requests for removal to save time and money," said Barron. "That hasn't happened - 60% of removal requests have been rejected. Every single request is considered by our teams and there is no automation. If their judgment is challenged by the publisher we will reconsider and, if a mistake has been made, we will reinstate." "