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Submission + - Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint (mozilla.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The event that puts San Francisco at the center of an extraordinary, two-day global blitz for web literacy and connected learning: the Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint. The event under way in San Francisco, like the others in the Science Lab Global Sprint, are part of Mozilla’s two month “Maker Party” campaign to promote web literacy around the world. Tens of thousands of people will be taking part in close to 2,000 Maker Party events in 350 cities around the world between July 15 and September 15 as part of Mozilla’s drive to educate all web users on the mechanics, culture and citizenship of the internet – and to encourage everyone to acquire and apply the basic web literacy that Mozilla believes is central to survival and success in the 21st century.

For more information, check out http://software-carpentry.org/...

Submission + - When Google Sells Your Data, It Might Be Illegally Killing Your Phone's Battery

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: Personal information about you and your browsing, email, and app-using habits is regularly sent between apps on your Android phone, a potentially illegal practice that could be killing your battery life. A federal judge ruled that the claim, raised in a class action lawsuit against the company, "requires a heavily and inherently fact-bound inquiry."
That means that there's a good chance we're about to get a look into the ins and outs of Google's advertising backbone: what information is shared with who, and when.

Comment Re:It's not just the refund (Score 1) 137

by Zaelath (#47446753) Attached to: Amazon Fighting FTC Over In-App Purchases Fine

it doesn't matter if you pirate anymore (because pirates can't do IAPs and can be put in a disadvantage).

You might wanna have a look at Minion Rush.. either people on the top of the high score charts are *regularly* forking out $1000 to run up massive scores, or they're using a hack to get them tokens/bananas.

I've seen a lot of games that can "restore" purchases, but that's a lot different to confirming your current in-game balance as accurate every time you start the game.

Comment Re:meanwhile in the rest of the world (Score 1) 128

by Zaelath (#47374109) Attached to: FAA's Ruling On Smartphones During Takeoff Has Had Little Impact

BTW, the actual 2001 report from NASA on PED's admits that all the evidence is purely anecdotal and the ONLY thing that attempts to lend the data any credibility is pilot flying hours:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/n...

Even though ASRS PED events are anecdotal there is one category of the database that provides
supporting credibility to these events--pilot flight hours. The total mean flight time of 10,790
hours from Table 1 indicates that pilots reporting PED events are very experienced. In order to
gain some appreciation of what constitutes a very experienced pilot it is helpful to consider the
significance 10,790 hours converted to years of aviation experience. In today's market a typical
recruiting company's hiring minimums are 3300 military hours or 5300 civilian hours for a
position with a major airline. Once hired a pilot could then acquire approximately 700 to 800
hours annually. If, for example, a military pilot with 3300 hours starts flying with a major airline
averaging 700 hours a year it would take that person about 11 years to reach 10,790 hours.
Finally, if it took 10 years, a conservative estimate, for that pilot to accumulate the initial 3300
hours then 10,790 hours would have taken 20 years to accumulate. That amount of time is
indicative of a very experienced pilot.

So flying hours makes one an electrical engineer? That's some pretty piss-poor science.

Comment Re: Data Security Officer (Score 1) 192

by Zaelath (#47366573) Attached to: Improperly Anonymized Logs Reveal Details of NYC Cab Trips

I don't have a sample of the full dataset, or really the time to get/assess it fully :) If I was going to hazard a guess, your method would be closely related to timestamps on the data?

I think your assertion is quite possible, but it involves a lot more work and third party data sources to correlate back to otherwise properly anonymised IDs than the fairly pedestrian realisation for a 100% result in the source article.

Regarding work, short answer is probably; DevOps in a company that spends a lot of time thinking about security ;p

Comment Re: Data Security Officer (Score 1) 192

by Zaelath (#47330511) Attached to: Improperly Anonymized Logs Reveal Details of NYC Cab Trips

Your point holds if say, the cab driver's home address is listed as one of the data points, since that's personally identifying.

So if you're saying the point that "you can't convert a OTP back to the original data" is moot, then you're arguing a different position to everyone else in the conversation. The original article was entirely about being able to reverse the hashing algorithm.

Comment Re: Data Security Officer (Score 1) 192

by Zaelath (#47322201) Attached to: Improperly Anonymized Logs Reveal Details of NYC Cab Trips

Yeah, no. You're wrong, though entertaining.

Tiny Key Space: Bob, Alice, Claire
Anonymised Key List: A, B, C

Resultant Data:
A travelled between points X and Y
B travelled between points P and Q
C travelled between points Q and Y
A travelled between points Y and Q
C travelled between points Y and Q
A travelled between points Q and P

I maintained the hash table in memory long enough to know which person is which so that you can determine A travelled from X to Y to Q to P, B from P to Q, and C from Q to Y and return. But there is not enough data to know who A, B, or C are. And no, A != Alice, B != Bob, C !=Claire.

The original OTP proponents point is that you can't recreate the algorithm to convert from Name to Hash, and since this is anonymisation and NOT password management, you don't need to. /hands you back the shovel

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