Digit_al Society

"The deluge of claims trying to exercise the "right to be forgotten" follows a decision by Europe's highest court, which said that in some cases the right to privacy of individuals outweighs the freedom of search engines to link to information about them although the information itself can remain on web pages."

"There were staggering gaps in procedural and operational security, and the architecture of the system leaves it open to cyberattacks from foreign powers, such as Russia. "

"Poland has become the first country in Europe to introduce a network of "finger vein ID" cash machines, with 2,000 of the new ATMs opening in bank branches and supermarkets across the country this year, backed by a marketing campaign that promises "cash within your finger"."

"Understanding how our driving data will be used is important, but we should be scrutinising other companies and products too"

"That is, when you are continuously surveilled, when your every word - even your private conversations, even your personal journals - are subject to continuous monitoring, you never have the space in which to think things through. If you doubt a piece of popular wisdom and want to hash it out, your ability to carry on that discussion is limited the knowledge that your testing of the day's received ideas is on the record forever and may be held against you."

"Dye told the Wall Street Journal that hackers increasingly use novel methods and bugs in the software of computers to perform attacks, resulting in about 55% cyberattacks going unnoticed by commercial antivirus software."

"Scanner for ebook cannot tell its 'arms' from its 'anus' A technical problem with optical character recognition software creates some awkward moments in romantic novels"

"This effectively ensured that all South Koreans are forced to use Internet Explorer. To this day, OS X and Linux hasn't seen the same degree of adoption in Korea as it has in Europe, China and the United States. It also means that 75% of South Korean netizens use some variety of IE because… Well? They have to. It also means that many South Korean websites are fundamentally less advanced, less user friendly and much less secure than their Western counterparts. The cruel irony is that this government intervention effectively hamstrung an entire industry"

""I'd like to ask you," NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden asked Russian leader Vladimir Putin on a televised call-in show, "does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals?" Putin, a former KGB agent and head of Russia's intelligence service, spoke about what they had in common: spycraft. "

"In Eric S. Raymond's seminal essay on open source, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, he defines Linus's Law (named for the father of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds), which states that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." In other words. If enough users are looking at the code, bugs and problems will be found."

"Naturally, you should do this - but be aware that this situation presents an ideal opportunity to phishers to start sending fake emails, complete with embedded links to the "change password" page - in reality, a website designed to harvest your details."

The US National Security Agency (NSA) knew of the Heartbleed flaw in the widely used OpenSSL security tool and exploited it for year - instead of blowing the whistle so that the patch could be flawed."

"But Lodge admits that the BYOD trend does have a number of flaws. His biggest concern? It encourages students to use technology during teaching time: "The major downside of BYOD is the potential for distraction. Students' own devices are likely to include all the applications they use on a regular basis. This cannot be controlled like it can be with computers provided by the institution.""

"While capable of mimicking others, the SociBot's slightly sinister side comes from the fact that it is also watching you. Equipped with two cameras in its head and a depth sensor in its chest, it can detect gestures and movements, as well as judge your emotions by mapping the position of your features over a series of internal templates."

"n many jobs, work email doesn't stop when the employee leaves the office. And now France has decided to act. It has introduced rules to protect about a million people working in the digital and consultancy sectors from work email outside office hours. Those are taken to be before 9am and after 6pm. The deal signed between employers federations and unions says that employees will have to switch off work phones and avoid looking at work email, while firms cannot pressure staff to check messages. "

"This stuff is far more complicated than calibrating safe following distances or even braking for a loose soccer ball. Goodall writes: "There is no obvious way to effectively encode complex human morals in software.""

"The dataset that we analyzed in this report spanned hundreds of users over several months. Phone records held by the NSA and telecoms span millions of Americans over multiple years. Reasonable minds can disagree about the policy and legal constraints that should be imposed on those databases. The science, however, is clear: phone metadata is highly sensitive."

"Just a few days after Turkey's scandal-rocked government banned Twitter by tweaking national DNS settings, the state has doubled down by ordering ISPs to block Twitter's IP addresses, in response to the widespread dissemination of alternative DNS servers, especially Google's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (these numbers were even graffitied on walls). "

"Software is writing news stories with increasing frequency. In a recent example, an LA Times writer-bot wrote and posted a snippet about an earthquake three minutes after the event. The LA Times claims they were first to publish anything on the quake, and outside the USGS, they probably were."

""The fake page is actually hosted on Google's servers and is served over SSL, making the page even more convincing," Symantec security expert Nick Johnston explained in a blog post. "The scammers have simply created a folder inside a Google Drive account, marked it as public, uploaded a file there, and then used Google Drive's preview feature to get a publicly accessible URL to include in their messages.""