Thursday, August 03, 2017

Cyber Threats - Historical D Day Memories


Hackers claim to have infiltrated Mandiant - SecurityLeak analyst's creds.

WHAT WE GET INSTEAD OF FLYING CARS AND MOONBASES: Facebook Messenger and Other Apps are Listening to You Through Your Phone. Here’s How to Turn the Microphone Off


Commonwealth Bank accused of money laundering and terrorism-financing...

Bitcoin divides to rule - The Economist


Utopia: Nation Shapers.

A skewering satire of myGov and other digital public service matters  


The Benefits of Saying Nice Things About Jozef IMRICH

Facial Recognition Software Eliminates Anonymity. Now The Battles For Privacy Regulations


"Facial recognition’s use is increasing. Retailers employ it to identify shoplifters, and bankers want to use it to secure bank accounts at ATMs. The Internet of things—connecting thousands of everyday personal objects from light bulbs to cars—may use an individual’s face to allow access to household devices. Churches already use facial recognition to track attendance at services." … [Read More]

Laurie Oakes greatest moments

Big Brother can watch me work any day - Financial Times

Government surveillance gets most of activists’ scrutiny, but many of today’s privacy abuses are happening in the workplace...When your boss turns into Big Brother, surveillance has grave latitudional consequences 


The case against Big Brother at work - The Globe and Mail


 2018  Spy technology can cause more problems than it solves, experts say.


New Unwritten Chapter in Our Lives: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom strictly prohibit ongoing monitoring of employee communications and permit electronic monitoring only in very limited circumstances (e.g., where an employer already has concrete suspicions of wrong-doing against particular employees), subject to significant restrictions with respect to the duration, mode, and subjects of the monitoring activities.


FTC news release: “Every day American consumers report tens of thousands of illegal robocalls to the Federal Trade Commission, and now the FTC is helping put that information to work boosting industry efforts to stop unwanted calls before they reach consumers. Under a new initiative announced by the FTC, when consumers report Do Not Call or robocall violations to the agency, the robocaller phone numbers consumers provide will be released each day to telecommunications carriers and other industry partners that are implementing call-blocking solutions 

Customs to pass on passports for ID



Why the ATO is hardening its API environment

Service provider relationships under review





Accountants' reputations suffering as they “wear the pain” of outages




With Technology Comes Power. But It Might Make Us Less Happy


"Lives of artificial bliss handed to us on a platter of biochemical and neuroelectronic manipulation may well turn out to be stifling, unchallenging lives, and the human imagination, if it is not stunted and stupefied by virtual reality and other illusions, is likely to find unpredictable ways to subvert them. We will have found out that gods are never happy." … [Read More]

 ‘We’ll never be the same’: A hydroponic tomato garden led police to raid Kansas family’s home

NOTHING SUSPICIOUS HERE: Wasserman Schultz Seemingly Planned To Pay Suspect Even While He Lived In Pakistan 

Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz seemingly planned to pay cyber-probe suspect and IT aide Imran Awan even while he was living in Pakistan, if the FBI hadn’t stopped him from leaving the U.S. Monday. Public statements and congressional payroll records suggest she also appears to have known that his wife, a fellow IT staffer, left the country for good months ago — while she was also a criminal suspect.
In all, six months of actions reveal a decision to continue paying a man who seemingly could not have been providing services to her, and who a mountain of evidence suggests was a liability. The man long had access to all of Wasserman Schultz’s computer files, work emails and personal emails, and he was recently accused by a relative in court documents of wiretapping and extortion. 
Records also raise questions about whether the Florida Democrat permitted Awan to continue to access computers after House-wide authorities banned him from the network Feb. 2. Not only did she keep him on staff after the ban, but she also did not have any other IT person to perform necessary work that presumably would have arisen during a months-long period, according to payroll records.


Let me add that the Daily Caller has owned this story. There’s been some coverage from the Miami Herald and Politico, but the Caller has done the heavy lifting, and by all appearances they’ve done it responsibly, thoroughly, and well.

China and India Torn Between Silk Roads and Cocked Guns Pepe Escobar, Counterpunch




Defence goes back to basics as it prepares for the multipolar world. By appointing a relative young-gun to run the Department of Defence, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has bucked a 40-year trend and opens the way for a fresh look at entrenched orthodoxies.




Cyber origin is a tricky concept

Is the world really better than ever? Guardian  Paging Dr. Pangloss

Hackers break into voting machines in minutes at hacking competition The Hill

WITH DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ AND THE PAKISTANI COMPUTER GUYS,THERE’S MORE THAN BANK FRAUD GOING ON HERE, ANDREW McCARTHY WRITES: “This appears to be a real conspiracy, aimed at undermining American national security.”

Telecommunications: Information on Vendors and Cyber-Threat Nations,GAO-17-688R: Published: Jul 27, 2017. Publicly Released: Jul 27, 2017.“Federal telecommunications systems can include a variety of equipment, products, and services which may be produced by foreign manufacturers—and may potentially be vulnerable to manipulation by a cyber-threat nation like China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia



Photo Editor John Morris, Who Created Our Images Of WWII And Vietnam, Has Died At 100


Morris, who edited Robert Capo's D-Day pictures and got them to Life in time for its first post-D-Day issue, was photo editor of The New York Times for six years during the Vietnam War. "He successfully argued for front-page display of Eddie Adams’s photograph of a Saigon police chief shooting a suspected Vietcong insurgent in the head. It appeared as the lead picture on Feb. 2, 1968, and became one of the most indelible images to emerge from the war." …[Read More]

Email whenever you like ...

A Divine, and Divisive, Institution Handelsblatt. Bundesbank turns 60.
Imperial Collapse Watch

How thousands of Britons are at risk from ‘world’s biggest online scam’ Independent



Digital Continuity 2020 Policy: will major office machines meet the deadline? It's easy to forget paper processes also need to come along for the digital transformation ride. These are the questions to ask to make it happen.
Three Big Data Developments No One is Talking About