Monday, January 14, 2019

Poland arrests two, including Huawei employee

Here Are the Finance Firms Cutting Jobs Amid 2019 Market Turmoil Bloomberg. “…. Then they came for me.”





Poland arrests two, including Huawei employee, over spying allegations


Poland has arrested a Chinese employee of Huawei and a Polish national involved in cyber business on allegations of spying, Polish media reported.



Why 1984 isn't banned in China
The different treatment of 1984 and Animal Farm helps illuminate the complicated reality of censorship in China. It’s less comprehensive, less boot-on-the-face ‒ as Orwell might have put it ‒ and quirkier than many Westerners imagine.



Tories move away from famous Crosby Textor polling firm
While the Liberal Party in Australia still uses the firm, Sir Lynton Crosby will not longer be running UK campaigns.


The Market Economy Model Has Crippled All Sorts Of Professions

We are all customers now; we are all supposed to be kings. But what if ‘being a customer’ is the wrong model for healthcare, education, and even highly specialised crafts and trades? – Aeon

Labor vows to halt 'rampant' development in parts of Sydney


Labor leader Michael Daley says western Sydney has been "clobbered" by unfair housing targets and he wants to go back to the drawing board.


Read the Scientific American article the government deemed too dangerous to publish Muck Rock. Bill B: “This is by one of the scientific giants of the era. I recall watching him stroll out of the Newman Nuclear Research Lab every evening at the same time.”:
What would an all-out war fought with hydrogen bombs mean? It would mean the obliteration of all large cities and probably of many smaller ones, and the killing of most of their inhabitants. After such a war, nothing that resembled present civilization would remain. The fight for mere survival would dominate everything. The destruction of the cities might set technology back a hundred years or more.
In a generation even the knowledge of technology and science might disappear, because there would be no opportunity to practice them. Indeed it is likely that technology and science, having brought such utter misery upon man, would be suspected as works of the devil, and that a new Dark Age would begin on earth. We know what physical destruction does to the moral values of a people. We have seen how many Germans, already demoralized by the Nazis, lost all sense of morality when during and after the war the bare necessities of life, food, clothing and shelter were lacking. Democracy and human decency were empty words; there was no reserve strength left for such luxuries. If we have learned any lesson from the aftermath of World War II, it is that physical destruction brings moral destruction.


Commercialization effects in universities Stumbling and Mumbling (UserFriendly)

Oil Fall Gumroad. Matsens: “On the inevitability of renewables. 105 pages behind a paywall, but Gregor Macdonald has his finger on the pulse of energy. Twitter @GregorMacdonald.”



Please Forget Where I Was Last Summer: The Privacy Risks of Public Location (Meta)Data. [This is an extended version of our paper that will appear at NDSS 2019]

“The exposure of location data constitutes a significant privacy risk to users as it can lead to de-anonymization, the inference of sensitive information, and even physical threats. In this paper we present LPAuditor, a tool that conducts a comprehensive evaluation of the privacy loss caused by publicly available location metadata. First, we demonstrate how our system can pinpoint users’ key locations at an unprecedented granularity by identifying their actual postal addresses. Our experimental evaluation on Twitter data highlights the effectiveness of our techniques which outperform prior approaches by 18.9%-91.6% for homes and 8.7%-21.8% for workplaces. Next we present a novel exploration of automated private information inference that uncovers “sensitive” locations that users have visited (pertaining to health, religion, and sex/nightlife). We find that location metadata can provide additional context to tweets and thus lead to the exposure of private information that might not match the users’ intentions. We further explore the mismatch between user actions and information exposure and find that older versions of the official Twitter apps follow a privacy-invasive policy of including precise GPS coordinates in the metadata of tweets that users have geotagged at a coarse-grained level (e.g., city). The implications of this exposure are further exacerbated by our finding that users are considerably privacy-cautious in regards to exposing precise location data. When users can explicitly select what location data is published, there is a 94.6% reduction in tweets with GPS coordinates. As part of current efforts to give users more control over their data, LPAuditor can be adopted by major services and offered as an auditing tool that informs users about sensitive information they (indirectly) expose through location metadata.”Tony Issa: $1.3m one-day property profit for father of council employee
Posted by at