Wednesday, October 13, 2021

You’re one of 125,698,496 people pwned in the LinkedIn Scraped Data data breach

 The Facebook Files – A Wall Street Journal investigation – “Facebook Inc. knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands. That is the central finding of a Wall Street Journal series, based on a review of internal Facebook documents, including research reports, online employee discussions and drafts of presentations to senior management. Time and again, the documents show, Facebook’s researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects. Time and again, despite congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn’t fix them. The documents offer perhaps the clearest picture thus far of how broadly Facebook’s problems are known inside the company, up to the chief executive himself…”



The Nobel Peace Prize Acknowledges a Dangerous Era for Journalists New Yorker


As Catholic order fought sex abuse claims, secret trusts devoted to it poured millions into American rental properties ICIJ



Zobor hill in Nitra a stone throw from the Army Baracks 

(There are six springs on Zobor and in the Bronze Age around 3,600 years ago there was a vast fort on this position.)


Life sure ain't like what it's made out to be in the movies. This casino cheating expert does an effective job at deconstructing some of those fever dreams and mirages that casino movies can impart upon their viewers. Hopefully, some folks that were actually thinking about trying their luck by cheating the house, get convinced to do otherwise after watching this video. 

Casino Cheating Expert Reviews Card Counting and Casino Scams From Movies


How to end the pandemic: The case for eradicationWSWS


You’re one of 125,698,496 people pwned in the LinkedIn Scraped Data data breach

You signed up for notifications when your account was pwned in a data breach and unfortunately, it’s happened. Here’s what’s known about the breach: Education levels, Email addresses, Genders, Geographic locations, Job titles, Names, Social media profiles. During the first half of 2021, LinkedIn was targeted by attackers who scraped data from hundreds of millions of public profiles and later sold them online. Whilst the scraping did not constitute a data breach nor did it access any personal data not intended to be publicly accessible, the data was still monetised and later broadly circulated in hacking circles. The scraped data contains approximately 400M records with 125M unique email addresses, as well as names, geographic locations, genders and job titles. LinkedIn specifically addresses the incident in their post on An update on report of scraped data…”


Center for Data Innovation: “FlowingData, an online publication that creates data visualizations, has created a visualization depicting the daily activities of men and women – How Men and Women Spend Their Days. The visualization shows what activities men and women devote their time to throughout the day based on their employment status. For example, the visualization shows that employed men and women have similar working hours and daily activities, whereas unemployed men tend to devote more of their time to socializing than unemployed women.”

Take a look.


There’s a Multibillion-Dollar Market for Your Phone’s Location Data 

The MarkUp – A huge but little-known industry has cropped up around monetizing people’s movements – “Companies that you likely have never heard of are hawking access to the location history on your mobile phone. An estimated $12 billion market, the location data industry has many players: collectors, aggregators, marketplaces, and location intelligence firms, all of which boast about the scale and precision of the data that they’ve amassed. Location firm Near describes itself as “The World’s Largest Dataset of People’s Behavior in the Real-World,” with data representing “1.6B people across 44 countries.” Mobilewalla boasts “40+ Countries, 1.9B+ Devices, 50B Mobile Signals Daily, 5+ Years of Data.” X-Mode’s website claims its data covers “25%+ of the Adult U.S. population monthly.”

In an effort to shed light on this little-monitored industry, The Markup has identified 47 companies that harvest, sell, or trade in mobile phone location data. While hardly comprehensive, the list begins to paint a picture of the interconnected players that do everything from providing code to app developers to monetize user data to offering analytics from “1.9 billion devices” and access to datasets on hundreds of millions of people. Six companies claimed more than a billion devices in their data, and at least four claimed their data was the “most accurate” in the industry…”


This wild Chrome extension lets you bend websites to your will - FastCompany – “PixieBrix can declutter Amazon, bring to-do lists into Gmail, add custom search options to Google, and more…The ability to remove the unwanted parts of any website is just one of PixieBrix’s features. You can also add custom action buttons to your favorite sites, create sidebars that gather supplemental information as you browse, and send webpage data off to other services like Google Sheets or Trello. PixieBrix originally launched last year, but now it’s releasing a simplified version of its original product, with a marketplace where users can find new ways to modify their favorite sites. (The New York-based company is also announcing seed funding of $3.5 million.)..”