Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it
A woman pretending to be Alan Turing daughter’s stole his doctoral degree, his knighthood medal, and other pieces of memorabilia from an archive in England in 1984 — Federal officials just announced that she was caught (2 years ago), and the materials recovered, in Boulder, Colorado
The Australian government’s Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) has spent more than A$200 million over the past five years developing a National Digital ID platform. If successful, the project could streamline commerce, resolve bureaucratic quagmires, and improve national security.
The emerging results of the project may give the Australian public cause for concern.
Two mobile apps built on the DTA’s Trusted Digital Identification Framework (TDIF) have recentlybeen released to consumers. The apps, myGovID and Digital ID, were developed by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and Australia Post, respectively.
Australia’s digital id is here
How the inventor of the web
plans to make it safe and accessible for everyone
§ Today, half the
world is online. While that access brings tremendous benefits, it also fosters
some of society’s worst behaviour. Inventor of the world wide web Tim
Berners-Lee suggests a contract for the web, a plan to make online activity
safe and accessible for everyone. Berners-Lee compares the contract the United
Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, enshrining dignity and freedom
for all people.
§ The contract outlines nine principles for governments,
companies, and the public, including commitments to ensure everyone can access
the internet, trust is secured through the protection of personal privacy and
that civility and dignity are front of mind. The document is backed by 150 tech
organizations, including Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. Source: World
Economic Forum, How the inventor of the web plans to make it safe and
accessible for everyone (11.27).
Who’s Watching Your Porch? - The New York Times – Ring offers a front-door view of a country where millions of Amazon customers use Amazon cameras to watch Amazon contractors deliver Amazon packages: “…The growth of easy-to-install home-surveillance equipment, and in particular doorbell cameras, has changed American life in ways obvious and subtle. Marketed in part as a solution to package theft, which has grown alongside e-commerce, especially from Amazon, Ring has found an ally in law enforcement. More than 500 police departments have partnered with the company, gaining access to a service called Neighbors Portal, which allows users to “ask Ring to request video footage from device owners who are in the area of an active investigation,” according to the company. (This footage is often shared by law enforcement with media organizations for broadcast segments.) Some police departments assist in marketing Ring devices to local citizens, in some cases offering government-subsidized discounts, according to documents obtained by Vice…”
London police to deploy facial recognition cameras across the city The Verge (resilc)
US citizen detained and interrogated by DHS agents about anti-war movement solidarity with Venezuela Grayzone
…Privacy is not private, because the effectiveness of these and other private or public surveillance and control systems depends upon the pieces of ourselves that we give up — or that are secretly stolen from us. Our digital century was to have been democracy’s Golden Age. Instead, we enter its third decade marked by a stark new form of social inequality best understood as “epistemic inequality.” It recalls a pre-Gutenberg era of extreme asymmetries of knowledge and the power that accrues to such knowledge, as the tech giants seize control of information and learning itself. The delusion of “privacy as private” was crafted to breed and feed this unanticipated social divide. Surveillance capitalists exploit the widening inequity of knowledge for the sake of profits. They manipulate the economy, our society and even our lives with impunity, endangering not just individual privacy but democracy itself. Distracted by our delusions, we failed to notice this bloodless coup from above…The belief that privacy is private has left us careening toward a future that we did not choose, because it failed to reckon with the profound distinction between a society that insists upon sovereign individual rights and one that lives by the social relations of the one-way mirror. The lesson is that privacy is public — it is a collective good that is logically and morally inseparable from the values of human autonomy and self-determination upon which privacy depends and without which a democratic society is unimaginable…”
Melbourne's red rain stain continues to cause cleaning pain
Tomato
sauce, coffee and red wine are notoriously difficult stains, but
Melbourne's coating of dust is quickly earning a spot at the top of the
list.
Interestingly, much like grammatical and spelling errors that often give away phishing emails and Web sites, the thieves who assembled the video for the screen for the fake ATM used in the April robbery appear have made a grammatical goof in spelling “país,” the Portuguese word for “country”; apparently, they left off the acute accent.Most skimming attacks (including the two mentioned here) take place over the weekend hours. Skimmer scammers like to place their devices at a time when they know the bank will be closed for an extended period, and when foot traffic to the machine will be at its highest.
This is like when the T-1000 in Termintor 2 can impersonate any person that it touches, except with cash machines. (I would read a book entirely composed of clever thieves’ inventions and techniques. I assume this already exists?)
People need to differentiate between legality and morality, and recognize that sometimes doing the right thing means breaking the law, Edward Snowden told Ecuador's former president Rafael Correa in a wide-ranging interview.
The NSA whistleblower, vilified by Washington after he leaked a trove of documents outlining mass surveillance techniques used by American intelligence agencies, argued that everyone has a duty to expose wrongdoing – regardless of legality.