Recent iPhone thefts highlight the danger of using passcodes in public

As the late, great Robin Williams said "Cocaine is God's way of saying you're making too much money"

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Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, February 26, 2023:  Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. 

Four highlights from this week: These 26 words ‘created the internet.’ Now the Supreme Court may be coming for them; Global internet connectivity at risk from climate disasters; Zelle fraud claims surge. How can you protect yourself?; and Email security still has a forwarding problem.

Recent iPhone thefts highlight the danger of using passcodes in public

9To5Mac: “A new report from The Wall Street Journal looks at a recent trend of iPhone thefts that have happened across the US. Instead of just looking to snatch devices, these thieves are watching for passcodes so they can immediately get into iPhones, change Apple ID passwords, access financial accounts, and more. Here’s a look at the risks of using an iPhone passcode in public, how much power the passcode wields, and some steps to keep yourself safer. WSJ’s Joanna Stern has been hearing from victims about a specific kind of iPhone theft.

 What’s happening is thieves are watching for people to enter their passcodes in public places like bars before stealing the devices, sometimes right out of their hands. Joanna interviewed one victim whose entire digital life was lost after her iPhone was stolen with the thieves changing her Apple ID password within 3 minutes of taking her smartphone. 

Then they stole thousands of dollars through Apple Pay, opened an Apple Card to make fraudulent charges, and more using the passcode they obtained. 

These thieves often work in groups with one distracting a victim while another records over a shoulder as they enter their passcode. Others have been known to even befriend victims, asking them to open social media or other apps on their iPhones so they can watch and memorize the passcode before stealing it…”

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Why we can’t stop making fun of managers

There is grandeur in ownership. There is dignity in labour. It is the management tier in between that has to plead for its reputation.

Janan GaneshContributor

Feb 26, 2023 

I am able to report solid progress in the central mission of my life. Readers of long standing will know my dream is to retire without ever having managed another person. I have managed no one in London. I have managed no one on two US coasts. I am trying to decide which Asian city I one day want to manage no one in.

What explains the reluctance? Personal taste, yes. But also the lack of status, if not the outright stigma, that attaches to management among the British.

No policy, no round of investment in business schools, will save British management. AP

This is the culture that invented David Brent to laugh at. Last year, Keir Starmer, Britain’s likeliest next prime minister, called an opponent a “middle manager”. Think about that. Anyone who has a junior at work but isn’t the overall chief of their organisation is a middle manager of sorts. That is a lot of voters. Yet, a politician of some nous felt comfortable scorning them.

It owes something to Marx and something to Musk, this disdain. For the left, the manager is a collaborator with capital, a parasite on the value created by real workers. For the libertarian right, reared on Ayn Rand, the manager is a “bureaucrat”, a dead weight on those with vision and animal spirits.

If you want to elicit cross-partisan applause, say Britain’s National Health Service needs more nurses and fewer penpushers. Of the elite corporate professions – law, finance, consultancy – the first two are vilified as ruthless. But only the third is seen as outright bullshit.

We could take this stigma head on. We could say that indifference to how things are run, and who runs them, cost Britain its industrial supremacy in the 19th century.

We could cite the World Management Survey, which attributes much of the productivity gap between and within countries to management. Yes, it is hard to say “section head” or “departmental leader” without a sneer in the UK. It is fun to tease the US as the land of the joyless organigram and the extortionate MBA.

The first purpose of bureaucracies, state or corporate, isn’t to achieve positive acts. It is to resist zealots.

But the joke is on the British: in ailing companies, in lower output per head, in a health service that needs better running, not just a hike in the funding that is already about the rich-world average. England hasn’t produced a Premier League-winning coach. It is a fact about which this soccer-barmy nation is amazingly incurious.

And there is the point. No policy, no round of investment in business schools, will save British management. There is, at root, a cultural problem. It is as old as the reluctance of Victorian industrialists to be seen near the factory, lest it mar their social ascent.

There is grandeur in ownership. There is dignity in labour. It is the tier in between that has to plead for its reputation. Why this should be, in a nation that was so quick to evolve a middle class, isn’t clear. But the prejudice is real. And, for the country, expensive. Until a manager can state their profession at a party without a self-mocking joke, people of talent (and me) won’t volunteer for the role.

We can say all of this. We can deny that managers, to quote the line about teachers, can’t do. But it’s possible to go further. Even if management really is a quagmire, where the ideas and energy of others get stuck, what of it?

The first purpose of bureaucracies, state or corporate, isn’t to achieve positive acts. It is to resist zealots. It is to keep the institutional organism from infection by rogue elements, even at the cost of curbing a genius or two along the way.

Even before Brexit, there were those who saw the civil service as an inert blob and others who thought it a precious thing. But what if it is an inert blob and therefore a precious thing?

What if there is social value in all that intransigence and procedural pettiness? In other words, even when management is true to the worst clichés about itself, it is of some use.

That those uses are invisible – the crackpot scheme that never happens, the fanatic who leaves in a huff – does not make them less real. It just means no one is thanked.

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Janan Ganesh is the principal political columnist for the Financial Times.

“A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.”

How to delete Twitter - Twitter Just Weakened Account Security For Almost 368 Million Users

  “Human beings can’t help it: we need to belong.” 

— Seth Godin, Tribes. 

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How to delete your Twitter account and protect your data, too

ZDNet: “Even before all of the turmoil that’splagued Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover, there were many reasons why people wanted to leave it. From social media detoxes, to simply migrating to a new platform, the transition happens more than you might think. Now, since Elon Musk appears to be failing in his promise not to turn Twitter into a Hellscape, a new flood of individuals are looking for greener pastures. Given the chaos at the company, it’s more important than ever for you and your data to handle that exit the right way. Unlike most sites that we frequent on the web, leaving Twitter isn’t as simple as signing off for the final time and never going back. That’s because of the massive amounts of data sites like this collect about us while we’re using them. To ensure that Twitter won’t continue exploiting your data after you’ve gone, you need to take the proper steps to fully delete your account and all of the data tied to it on your way out…” [Please consider joining me on Mastodon, where I post new research related content on multiple subjects, including law and technology, throughout each day. Masotdon is free, independent, has millions of users, and does not collect or monetize any data about you.]

Twitter Just Weakened Account Security For Almost 368 Million Users

Forbes: “The latest twist in the Twitter tale since Elon Musk bought the company is one of the most worrying to date. In a truly bizarre move, which appears to put penny-pinching before account security, Twitter has announced it will limit the use of SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) to Twitter Blue subscribers from March 20. Twitter disables SMS 2FA for the majority of users – In a notice posted to the Twitter help center’s two-factor authentication pages, Twitter states that “Effective 20 March 2023, we will no longer support two-factor authentication using text messages for non-Twitter Blue subscribers.” 

With as many as 368 million active monthly users, of which less than 300,000 are thought to subscribe to Twitter Blue, that leaves a huge number of people with potentially weakened account security. Indeed, even if you are a Twitter Blue subscriber, that doesn’t mean you will necessarily still be able to use SMS-based 2FA. The announcement notice added that “the availability of text message 2FA for Twitter Blue may vary by country and carrier.”

See also Wired – How to Protect Yourself From Twitter’s 2FA Crackdown. “Twitter is disabling SMS-based two-factor authentication. Switch to these alternatives to keep your account safe.”

IRS Needs to Complete Modernization Plans and Fully Address Cloud Computing Requirements

 “Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”

– Aristotle

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The federal government will appoint a senior official within the Department of Home Affairs to lead efforts on cybersecurity amid growing attention to threats to consumers from attacks that steal personal data and put services at risk.

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PETER DRUCKER ON EDUCATION, FROM 1969:

The most serious impact of the long years of schooling is, however, the “diploma curtain” between those with degrees and those without. It threatens to cut society in two for the first time in American history…By denying opportunity to those without higher education, we are denying access to contribution and performance to a large number of people of superior ability, intelligence, and capacity to achieve…I expect, within ten years or so, to see a proposal before one of our state legislatures or up for referendum to ban, on applications for employment, all questions related to educational status…I, for one, shall vote for this proposal if I can…

History shows a frightening parallel to the way our education is going everywhere in the world today. It is the decline of the world’s most creative, most advance, and most exciting civilization, that of China in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Until then, China had led the world in the arts and the sciences, in medicine and in mathematics, in technology and in statecraft. The reaction against independent thinking and artistic creativity that followed the invasion of the Mongols in the thirteenth century imposed the Confucian system of purely literary and purely imitative “liberal education” to the exclusion of everything else. Within a century China had become sterile and had lost her capacity to do anything new, to imagine anything new, to perceive anything new. We are, I am afraid, on the same road–and we have traveled very far along it.

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IRS Needs to Complete Modernization Plans and Fully Address Cloud Computing Requirements

Information Technology: IRS Needs to Complete Modernization Plans and Fully Address Cloud Computing Requirements, GAO-23-104719 Published: Jan 12, 2023. Publicly Released: Feb 07, 2023. “The Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) legacy IT environment includes applications, software, and hardware, which are outdated but still critical to day-to-day operations.

Specifically, GAO’s analysis showed that about 33 percent of the applications, 23 percent of the software instances in use, and 8 percent of hardware assets were considered legacy. This includes applications ranging from 25 to 64 years in age, as well as software up to 15 versions behind the current version. 

As GAO has previously noted, and IRS has acknowledged, these legacy assets will continue to contribute to security risks, unmet mission needs, staffing issues, and increased costs. Modernization best practices call for documenting plans that include three key elements: milestones, work to be performed, and disposition of legacy systems. 

As of August 2022, IRS had documented plans for the 21 modernization initiatives that were underway, including nine associated with legacy systems. All 21 plans addressed two key elements. However, the plans for six of the nine initiatives did not address the disposition of legacy systems (see table). Officials stated they would address this key element at the appropriate time in the initiatives’ lifecycle; however, they did not identify time frames for doing so.”

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"To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well." Isaac Asimov, Foundation (Foundation, #1)