For
my Ethical Hackers. Think there would be a market here?
Want
to Hire a Hacker? Find One on Hacker's List
…
The new site Hacker's List has only been operating for less than
three months yet has been flooded with over 500 hacking jobs that are
waiting for a successful bidder.
…
compared to popular freelancing sites such as Odesk and Elance where
both the bidder and buyer need to build a credible profile, the
identities of those involved in a project at Hacker's List are kept
anonymous.
…
The site, which is registered in New Zealand, contains a 10-page
terms and conditions section. The most important message it conveys
is that users are not allowed to "use the service for any
illegal purposes."
…
Hacking jobs that are offered on the site have prices that range
from $100 to $5,000. The hackers' hourly rates would go between $28
and $300. One woman who hails from California is offering $500 to
anyone who can successfully hack into the Gmail and Facebook accounts
of her boyfriend under the suspicion that he's cheating on her. A
man from Sweden is willing to pay as much as $2,000 to anyone who can
gain access to his landlord's website.
NOT
in Denver! Note the very typical “we had no clue” language.
Maura
Lerner reports:
Metro State University is investigating a computer security breach
that may have exposed personal information about students, faculty
and staff.
In a campuswide e-mail Friday, interim president Devinder Malhotra
wrote that a computer hacker apparently got “unauthorized access”
to the university database in
mid-December, and that investigators are still trying to
determine the scope of the data breach.
“We do not believe this
server contained any financial data or credit card information,”
he wrote, but he said some of the databases included employee Social
Security numbers.
Officials say they learned
about the problem Jan. 2, when a cybersecurity service notified them
about a blog posting “by a computer hacker” who claimed to have
hacked into 75 websites. “We were just one of those,” said Anne
Sonnee, the interim vice president for communications.
Read
more on Star
Tribune.
A
statement
on the university’s web site states:
… To date, we have established the validity of the claimed
attack, disabled the vulnerability that we believe permitted this
breach, isolated the risk from other servers, and notified law
enforcement. The
university is also taking additional measures to minimize future
security risks.
… While our
investigation may take several weeks to establish the nature and
scope of the possible breach, out of an abundance of
caution and with the goal of full transparency, we are communicating
what we do know about this situation as soon as possible.
… While we are not yet
able to determine who the affected individuals are, in the
interim it may be prudent to take precautions
There
is a related
Q & A about the breach on the university’s web site.
A
search of Pastebin discloses a post on December 31st by “Abdilo”
(@abdilo_ on Twitter), a self-described teenage hacker from
Australia. The paste references having allegedly hacked Metro State
in December:
MetroState.edu(I broke into you cause i like 22 jump street, thanks
for the 22k ssns)
If
that claim is true, at least 22,000 people may have had their Social
Security numbers stolen.
Computer
Security managers: How will you deal with this when it happens to
you? Note that headlines like these are easily disproved because of
the easy access to news.
Twitter
hackers declare World War III
HACKERS
took over Twitter accounts of the New York Post and United Press
International, writing bogus messages, including about hostilities
breaking out between the US and China.
One
tweet posted under the UPI account on Friday quoted Pope Francis as
saying, “World War III has begun”. Another message delivered on
the Post account said the USS George Washington, an aircraft carrier,
was “engaged in active combat” against Chinese warships in the
South China Sea.
Interesting
new law.
Canada
Prohibits Installation of Software, Updates Without Consent
A
new provision in Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) prohibiting
the installation of software without consent from the device’s
owner came into effect on Thursday.
According
to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission,
the new
rule applies when someone installs or causes the installation of
software on another individual’s device in
the course of commercial activity.
I
try not to post about “potential” legislation or “proposed”
rules because the change so much before becoming reality. But this
is just dumb!
President
Obama wants a backdoor to track people’s social media messages.
…
“Social media and the Internet is the primary way in which these
terrorist organizations are communicating,” Obama said during a
press conference with Cameron on Friday.
“That’s
not different from anybody else, but they’re good at it and when we
have the ability to track that in a way that is legal, conforms with
due process, rule of law and presents oversight, then that’s a
capability that we have to preserve,” he said. [“Preserve”
all you want. Change technology at your peril! Bob]
Interesting.
Sort of the opposite of Elon Musk's concern that AI will take over
the world?
Facebook
open-sources new AI smarts
Facebook has released as open source some software modules that can
speed image recognition, language modeling and other machine learning
tasks, in a move to advance computer artificial intelligence for
itself and others.
Such
modules could be used by startups or other companies that want to
build AI-based products and services, but may not have the "deep
engineering" expertise on hand to develop such capabilities
in-house, said Soumith Chintala, a Facebook research engineer who
works for the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) lab.
Facebook
does not yet incorporate AI technologies into its social networking
service, Chintala said, though the techniques being developed at FAIR
may one day be used to improve customer experience.
…
The new
modules run on Facebook's Torch, an
open source development framework for building
deep learning applications. Google, Twitter, Nvidia, Intel, and
Nvidia have used this framework for their projects.
Something
to add to our programming language catalog?
Apple's
Swift is on fire
To
make the lives of iOS developers easier — and to discourage them
from bolting to Google’s Android — Apple in June introduced
Swift, describing it grandly as “the first industrial-quality
systems programming language that is as expressive and enjoyable as a
scripting language.”
Half
a year later, how’s Swift doing?
Pretty
well, judging from the latest rankings from Red
Monk’s Stephen O’Grady, who predicted last
summer that Swift was going to be “a lot more popular, and very
soon.”
Even so,” O’Grady wrote Thursday, “the growth that Swift
experienced is essentially unprecedented in the history of these
rankings.
Red
Monk’s full chart
https://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/swift-full-chart.png
Uber
was able to shake up this quasi-monopolistic industry. Now taxis are
being forced to do what they could have done on their own several
years ago.
For
my Business Intelligence class: This is equally “substitutes” and
“new entrants”
Riders
May Soon Be Able To ‘E-Hail’ A Regular Taxi Using A Smartphone
Los
Angeles wants taxi drivers to get on board with a mobile app that
will allow customers to hail a taxi from their smartphones.
If
and when implemented, taxi drivers who don’t use the app “e-hail”
could face fines of up to $200 a day, starting in August.
Is
this now accurate or still too high?
Here
Is AT&T's Epic $8 Billion Friday-Night News Dump
The
running joke in news is that companies dump news when people aren't
looking, like before holidays or on Friday nights before long
weekends.
AT&T
met the latter criteria this week.
On
Friday night, AT&T
disclosed that in the fourth quarter, it will
take a $7.9 billion noncash, pretax loss related to an adjustment in
assumptions made for its pension plan.
The
company announced that on Dec. 31, it adjusted its assumed discount
rate for its pension obligation to 4.3%. Previously, the company had
used a 5% discount rate, according
to its most recent 10-K filed with the SEC.
…
The company also said that contributing to the loss were "updated
mortality assumptions," which means that people covered under
AT&T's pension plan are now living longer.
For
my researching students?
Google
– Still in the Search
by
Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jan 16, 2015
In-depth
reporting and writing about the continuing evolution of Google search
from both a tactical and strategic perspective. For consumers,
researchers, librarians, lawyers and educators, this is a must read.
It takes time, focus and mindfulness to read long articles in this
increasingly rapid fire burst of bits of information that shoot at us
every waking moment. The concept of information overload has
seemingly long ago given way to the deluge as the new normal. This
article is a reminder why we need to stay engaged in all facets of
future developments in the realm of search,
discovery and knowledge sharing. Enjoy and keep being “the best.”
Interesting.
A
Glimpse of the Future: The ‘Oscars of Innovation in Higher
Education’
When
it comes to modern higher education, a few things are universally
clear. First, there is no one right answer for every student.
Second, everyone involved is still learning what methods will work
best in the 21st century. But some clear winners do stand
out for their effective, outside-the-box approaches, and a few of
them were honored at the recent inaugural Reimagine Education
Conference.
…
The Overall Winner award, which carried a grand prize of $50,000,
was split between two teams: PaGamO from National Taiwan University,
and PhET Interactive Simulations from the University of Colorado,
Boulder. (See a complete
list of the winners in different categories here.)
Every
week, amusement!
Hack
Education Weekly News
…
The Obama Administration announced
$25,000,000 in grants to 13 HBCUs
to develop cybersecurity
programs.
…
Indonesia
plans to replace textbooks with tablets, reports
Edukwest.
…
Via
the AP: “Arizona
became the first state in the nation on Thursday to enact a law
requiring high school students to pass
the U.S. citizenship test
on civics before graduation.”
…
Ed-tech
is in its infancy, according
to The New York Times. Despite the role of universities in its
development, education
has not been “touched by Internet technology.”
