What would have made this legal? Is there anything illegal about re-publishing data that has been publicly available for months? Isn’t that simply “data aggregation?”

http://www.securityweek.com/canadian-man-charged-over-leak-three-billion-hacked-accounts

Canadian Man Charged Over Leak of Three Billion Hacked Accounts

An Ontario man made his first court appearance Monday to answer charges of running a website that collected personal and password data from some three billion accounts, and sold them for profit.

Jordan Evan Bloom, 27, of Thornhill earned some Can$247,000 ($198,800 US) by selling the data for a "small fee" via leakedsource.com, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a statement.

The information was stolen during massive hacks of websites including LinkedIn and the Ashley Madison online dating service.

… Authorities have shut down Bloom's website, but another with the same domain name hosted by servers in Russia is still operating.

Something for my Computer Security students to consider. Why I start so many descriptions of technology with the phrase, “It’s like...”

https://www.bespacific.com/law-metaphor-and-the-encrypted-machine/

Law, Metaphor and the Encrypted Machine

Gill, Lex, Law, Metaphor and the Encrypted Machine (2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2933269 – “The metaphors we use to imagine, describe and regulate new technologies have profound legal implications. This paper offers a critical examination of the metaphors we choose to describe encryption technology in particular, and aims to uncover some of the normative and legal implications of those choices. Part I provides a basic description of encryption as a mathematical and technical process. At the heart of this paper is a question about what encryption is to the law. It is therefore fundamental that readers have a shared understanding of the basic scientific concepts at stake. This technical description will then serve to illustrate the host of legal and political problems arising from encryption technology, the most important of which are addressed in Part II. That section also provides a brief history of various legislative and judicial responses to the encryption “problem,” mapping out some of the major challenges still faced by jurists, policymakers and activists. While this paper draws largely upon common law sources from the United States and Canada, metaphor provides a core form of cognitive scaffolding across legal traditions. Part III explores the relationship between metaphor and the law, demonstrating the ways in which it may shape, distort or transform the structure of legal reasoning. Part IV demonstrates that the function served by legal metaphor is particularly determinative wherever the law seeks to integrate novel technologies into old legal frameworks. Strong, ubiquitous commercial encryption has created a range of legal problems for which the appropriate metaphors remain unfixed. Part V establishes a loose framework for thinking about how encryption has been described by courts and lawmakers—and how it could be. What does it mean to describe the encrypted machine as a locked container or building? As a combination safe? As a form of speech? As an untranslatable library or an unsolvable puzzle? What is captured by each of these cognitive models, and what is lost? This section explores both the technological accuracy and the legal implications of each choice. Finally, the paper offers a few concluding thoughts about the utility and risk of metaphor in the law, reaffirming the need for a critical, transparent and lucid appreciation of language and the power it wields.”

Possible insights from a war fighting strategy?

https://www.bespacific.com/u-s-army-concept-for-cyberspace-and-electronic-warfare-operations-2025-2040/

U.S. Army Concept for Cyberspace and Electronic Warfare Operations 2025-2040

The U.S. Army Concept for Cyberspace and Electronic Warfare Operations 2025-2040, CRS report via FAS. “TRADOC Pamphlet 525-8- 6, The U.S. Army Concept for Cyberspace and Electronic Warfare Operations expands on the ideas presented in TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3- 1, The U.S. Army Operating Concept: Win in a Complex World (AOC). This document describes how the Army will operate in and through cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum and will fully integrate cyberspace, electronic warfare (EW), and electromagnetic spectrum operations as part of joint combined arms operations to meet future operational environment challenges. Cyberspace and EW operations provide commanders the ability to conduct simultaneous, linked maneuver in and through multiple domains, and to engage adversaries and populations where they live and operate. Cyberspace and EW operations provide commanders a full range of physical and virtual, as well as kinetic and non-kinetic, capabilities tailored into combinations that enhance the combat power of maneuver elements conducting joint combined operations. This concept serves as a foundation for developing future cyberspace and electronic warfare capabilities and helps Army leaders think clearly about future armed conflict, learn about the future through the Army’s campaign of learning, analyze future capability gaps and identify opportunities, and implement interim solutions to improve current and future force combat effectiveness..”

(Related)

https://warontherocks.com/2018/01/trust-war-dangerous-trends-cyber-conflict/

Trust War: Dangerous Trends in Cyber Conflict

Perspective. Big Data requires big infrastructure.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-computing-now-google-adds-more-data-centers-and-plans-its-own-undersea-cable/

Cloud computing: Now Google adds more data centers, plans its own undersea cable

… The advertising-to-cloud-computing giant said its new Netherlands and Montreal cloud computing regions will open in the first quarter of 2018, followed by Los Angeles, Finland, and Hong Kong.

Like other cloud infrastructure companies, Google orders its cloud computing resources into regions which are then subdivided into zones, which include one or more data centers from which customers can run their services. It currently has 15 regions made up of 44 zones.

… It's the second announcement of big cloud computing infrastructure spending of the day: Google's big rival Amazon Web Services has already announced it has opened its 50th data center availability zone, in London. AWS has plans for 12 more AZs and four more regions.

Student toolkit.

https://www.labnol.org/internet/gmail-image-recognition/31062/

Search your Handwritten Notes with Gmail OCR

One of the most useful features of Evernote and OneNote is Image OCR. When you clip an image – be it a screenshot, a scanned business card, or a picture of the whiteboard – these tools automatically detect the text inside the image and make the image searchable.

Gmail text search has always been very capable but some might not know that Gmail, like Evernote, also performs OCR on images contained in email messages. When you perform searches inside Gmail or Google Inbox, the results always contain matching images that contain the search keywords.

… Text recognition in Gmail works for both image attachments as well as inline embedded images.

… Google Drive and Google Keep are other Google products that offer you the ability to search for text within stored images. In the case of Google Keep, you also have the option to extract the text detected inside in an image and store it within the note itself.

(Ditto)

How to Install PIP for Python on Windows, Mac, and Linux