Harvard’s Berkman Center had an online class on cybersecurity and internet privacy some years ago, and the resources of the class are still online. It was about how to enhance privacy in an online world, speaking of quaint, with titles of articles like, “Is Big Brother Listening?”
And how.
You’ll find all the laws in the US related to privacy and surveillance there. Not that anyone seems to follow any laws that get in their way these days. Or if they find they need a law to make conduct lawful, they just write a new law or reinterpret an old one and keep on going. That’s not the rule of law as I understood the term.
The last days of Unix
Errol Rasit, research director at Gartner, concurs that the primary cause of Unix weakness over the past decade is migration from the RISC platform to x86-processor based alternatives, which can run many Unix workloads, usually at attractive price/performance ratios. Today, x86 technology attracts most new deployments and innovation, such as cloud computing and fabric-based computing, which further validates the technology as a preferred platform.
ZMap · The Internet Scanner
ZMap is an open-source network scanner that enables researchers to easily perform Internet-wide network studies. With a single machine and a well provisioned network uplink, ZMap is capable of performing a complete scan of the IPv4 address space in under 45 minutes, approaching the theoretical limit of gigabit Ethernet.
ZMap can be used to study protocol adoption over time, monitor service availability, and help us better understand large systems distributed across the Internet.
Instagram “likes” worth more than stolen credit cards
In the latest twist, a computer virus widely used to steal credit card data, known as Zeus, has been modified to create bogus Instagram “likes” that can be used to generate buzz for a company or individual, according to cyber experts at RSA, the security division of EMC.
These fake “likes” are sold in batches of 1,000 on hacker forums, where cybercriminals also flog credit card numbers and other information stolen from PCs. According to RSA, 1,000 Instagram “followers” can be bought for $15 and 1,000 Instagram “likes” go for $30, whereas 1,000 credit card numbers cost as little as $6.
via Instagram “likes” worth more than stolen credit cards | News | PC Pro.
The Increasing Failure Of Malware Sandboxing
The sandboxing appliances popularly deployed today are performing well against your average”0-day” malware threat, but capabilities decline dramatically the more targeted an adversary becomes. As such, organizations are much better at stopping the generic non-targeted “Internet threats”, but becoming more vulnerable to marginally tuned malware. For example, any piece of malware that requires the user to perform an action at a specific time (before it acts maliciously) is sufficient to evade detection in most cases.
via The Increasing Failure Of Malware Sandboxing — Dark Reading.
How Do You Hijack a Popular Streaming Movie Site? With Ease, Apparently
“You don’t have to have access to any emails, passwords, or any other credentials. You simply grab the information from the WHOIS, write a letter with an attached photo-shopped ID with the same name, send it from a random email address, and the domain will be handed to you fairly quickly.”
via How Do You Hijack a Popular Streaming Movie Site? With Ease, Apparently | TorrentFreak.
What Does It Really Matter If Companies Are Tracking Us Online?
Sometimes, that will mean exploiting people who are not of a particular class, say upcharging men for flowers if a computer recognizes that that he’s looking for flowers the day after his anniversary. But other times there could be troubling equity concerns. For example, Calo points to the work of NYU professor Oren Bar-Gill who has shown how companies can use complexity in credit-card contracts, mortgages, and cell-phone contracts to “hinder or distort competition and impose outsized burden on the least sophisticated consumers.” Calo says such price-discrimination tactics, applied en masse online, could “lead to regressive distribution effects,” also known as preying on the vulnerable.
via What Does It Really Matter If Companies Are Tracking Us Online? – Rebecca J. Rosen – The Atlantic.
From the paper, Digital Market Manipulation
A new theory of digital market manipulation reveals the limits of consumer protection law and exposes concrete economic and privacy harms that regulators will be hard-pressed to ignore. This Article thus both meaningfully advances the behavioral law and economics literature and harnesses that literature to explore and address an impending sea change in the way firms use data to persuade.
Linux-based autopilots target commercial UAVs
The computers offer pre-installed flight control and mission software built upon the Linux-based AirwareOS platform. The software is provided under a royalty-free license that enables modification, extension third party software, and inclusion in proprietary products, says the company. The Linux-based software is written in C++, and provides a single hardware-independent Unified Autopilot Interface (UAI) API to the INS/GPS solution, system status, sensor data, actuators, datalink radio, and payloads.
via Linux-based autopilots target commercial UAVs · LinuxGizmos.com.
“Bloodsucking leech” puts 100,000 servers at risk of potent attacks
The threat stems from baseboard management controllers that are embedded onto the motherboards of most servers. Widely known as BMCs, the microcontrollers allow administrators to monitor the physical status of large fleets of servers, including their temperatures, disk and memory performance, and fan speeds. But serious design flaws in the underlying intelligent platform management interface, or IPMI, make BMCs highly susceptible to hacks that can cascade throughout a network, according to a paper presented at this week’s Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies.
via “Bloodsucking leech” puts 100,000 servers at risk of potent attacks | Ars Technica.
Grading Essays at College Level
EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.
via New Test for Computers – Grading Essays at College Level – NYTimes.com.
Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanford faculty members to create “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, are also committed to automated assessment systems because of the value of instant feedback.