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Security

NSA's Guide For Choosing a Safe Text Chat and Video Conferencing Service (zdnet.com) 73

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) published last week a security assessment of today's most popular video conferencing, text chatting, and collaboration tools. From a report: The guidance contains a list of security criteria that the NSA hopes companies take into consideration when selecting which telework tool/service they want to deploy in their environments. The NSA document is not only meant for US government and military entities but the private sector as well. The idea behind the NSA's initiative is to give military, public, and private organizations an overview of all of a tools' features, so IT staff don't make wrong decisions, expecting that a tool provides certain features that are not actually living up to the reality. Per the NSA's document, the assessed criteria answers to basic questions like:

Does the service implement end-to-end (E2E) encryption?
Does the E2E encryption use strong, well-known, testable encryption standards?
Is multi-factor authentication (MFA) available?
Can users see and control who connects to collaboration sessions?
Does the tool's vendor share data with third parties or affiliates?
Do users have the ability to securely delete data from the service and its repositories as needed (both on client and server-side)?
Is the tool's source code public (e.g. open source)?
Is the service FedRAMP approved for official US government use?
Firefox

Firefox Starts Blocking Third-Party Cookies By Default (venturebeat.com) 51

Posted by BeauHD from the privacy-improvements dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Mozilla today announced a slew of privacy improvements. The company has turned on Enhanced Tracking Protection, which blocks cookies from third-party trackers in Firefox, by default. Mozilla has also improved its Facebook Container extension, released a Firefox desktop extension for its rebranded Lockwise password keeper, and updated Firefox Monitor with a dashboard for multiple email addresses.

If you download a fresh copy of Firefox today, Enhanced Tracking Protection will be on by default as part of the Standard setting. That means third-party tracking cookies are blocked without users having to change a thing. You will notice Enhanced Tracking Protection working if there is a shield icon in the address bar. If you click on the shield icon and open the Content Blocking section and then Cookies, you'll see a Blocking Tracking Cookies section. There you can see the companies listed as third-party cookies and trackers that Firefox has blocked. You can also turn off blocking for a specific site. The feature focuses on third-party trackers (the ad industry) while allowing first-party cookies (logins, where you last left off, and so on). Mozilla says it is enabling Enhanced Tracking Protection by default because most users don't change their browser settings.
Music

Apple Sued By iTunes Customers Over Alleged Data Misuse (cnet.com) 29

Posted by BeauHD from the hands-off-my-data dept.
Three iTunes customers have filed a lawsuit against Apple accusing the company of sending personal user data to third parties to boost its revenues. "It is alleged that Apple is selling, renting or disclosing full names, addresses, genres of music and specific titles of songs purchased on the iTunes Store app on iPhones without consent or notification," reports CNET. From the report: According to documents filed with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday, Apple does this "to supplement its revenues and enhance the formidability of its brand in the eyes of mobile application developers," the lawsuit alleges. "None of the information pertaining to the music you purchase on your iPhone stays on your iPhone," the lawsuit further alleges. "While Apple profits handsomely from its unauthorized sale, rental, transmission and/or disclosure of its customers' Personal Listening Information, it does so at the expense of its customers' privacy and statutory rights."

First reported by Bloomberg, the plaintiffs -- Leigh Wheaton from Rhode Island, and Jill Paul and Trevor Paul from Michigan -- allege third parties then use this data to append several more categories, including age, gender, income, educational background and marital status. This "enhanced" data is then allegedly sold on to other third parties, the lawsuit says. The plaintiffs are representing other iTunes customers in their respective states, seeking $250 for Rhode Island class-action members under the Video, Audio, And Publication Rentals Privacy Act and $5,000 for Michigan class-action members under the Preservation of Personal Privacy Act.
Education

Some Business Schools Are Shutting Down Their MBA Programs (forbes.com) 165

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The University of Illinois' Gies College of Business has become the latest school to announce that it is getting out of the full-time, on-campus MBA market. From a report: Instead, Gies will focus more aggressively on its online MBA option, the $22,000 iMBA, which has seen big growth since being launched in 2015. Why is Gies giving up on its full-time MBA? For one thing, the school admits it is losing money on the program. While it may surprise many observers given how high tuition rates are for MBA programs, many of these programs are actually loss leaders or "show" programs to get a U.S. News ranking. Secondly, applications to most MBA programs have been declining for years, evidence that there is less interest in the degree.

Just look at the numbers at the University of Illinois' full-time MBA, ranked in the top 50 by U.S. News. Applications to Gies' full-time program fell to 290 this year from 386 in 2016. The school actually enrolled fewer than 50 full-time students in each of the past three years. Even when apps were nearly 100 higher in 2016, Gies was only able to enroll a class of 47 students. There are a surprising number of schools in this same predicament. They have sub-optimally sized programs that cannot support the expenses required to deliver a quality program. And that is why we have seen a number of schools drop out of the full-time MBA market. The list includes the University of Iowa, Wake Forest University, Thunderbird School of Global Management, Virginia Tech, and Simmons College.
Government

In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen NSA Tool Wreaks Havoc (nytimes.com) 117

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
For nearly three weeks, Baltimore has struggled with a cyberattack by digital extortionists that has frozen thousands of computers, shut down email and disrupted real estate sales, water bills, health alerts and many other services. From a report: But here is what frustrated city employees and residents do not know: A key component of the malware that cybercriminals used in the attack was developed at taxpayer expense a short drive down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway at the National Security Agency, according to security experts briefed on the case. Since 2017, when the N.S.A. lost control of the tool, EternalBlue, it has been picked up by state hackers in North Korea, Russia and, more recently, China, to cut a path of destruction around the world, leaving billions of dollars in damage. But over the past year, the cyberweapon has boomeranged back and is now showing up in the N.S.A.'s own backyard. It is not just in Baltimore. Security experts say EternalBlue attacks have reached a high, and cybercriminals are zeroing in on vulnerable American towns and cities, from Pennsylvania to Texas, paralyzing local governments and driving up costs.

The N.S.A. connection to the attacks on American cities has not been previously reported, in part because the agency has refused to discuss or even acknowledge the loss of its cyberweapon, dumped online in April 2017 by a still-unidentified group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. Years later, the agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation still do not know whether the Shadow Brokers are foreign spies or disgruntled insiders.
Mars

NASA Will Carry Your Name On a Chip To Mars (theverge.com) 50

Posted by EditorDavid from the rocket-chips dept.
NASA will etch your name onto a silicon chip that will be carried to Mars by a rover in 2020:

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: The rover's primary mission is to get us closer to answering that fundamental question: did Mars ever host alien life? The robot is equipped with tools and instruments that will help scientists figure out if the planet may have hosted life in the past. On top of that, the rover will also be drilling and collecting samples of Martian dirt. It'll then leave those samples on the ground, where they could potentially be picked up someday by another spacecraft and brought back to Earth. And while the Mars 2020 rover is doing all of this, your name could be along for the ride.

If you send in your name sometime before September 30th, NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will etch it onto a silicon chip with an electron beam, and then the rover will carry it on its journey. The names are going to be pretty teeny, though -- about one-thousandth the width of a human hair. That's small enough so that more than a million names can be included on a single chip as big as a dime -- but big enough for any Martian microbes to read (only kidding... Martians can't read).
Government

Grindr Let Chinese Engineers See Data From Millions of Americans (reuters.com) 159

Posted by EditorDavid from the swiping-right dept.
JustAnotherOldGuy shared this story from Reuters: Early last year, Grindr LLC's Chinese owner gave some Beijing-based engineers access to personal information of millions of Americans such as private messages and HIV status, according to eight former employees, prompting U.S. officials to ask it to sell the dating app for the gay community.
Engadget explains what the concerns were about Grindr's owner, Beijing Kunlun: Reuters sources have claimed that Beijing Kunlun triggered alarms after it gave engineers in Beijing access to Grindr's database for several months. While there wasn't evidence that the company misused the data, the tipsters believe the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) was worried that the Chinese government could comb the database to find info on US intelligence and military personnel.
Engadget says the confrontation "reflects the U.S. government's increasingly strict approach to Chinese companies -- it doesn't want even the slightest risk of China's having access to private information."

Comment Re: Oh Elon... (Score 1) 221

I'm not seeing it either... Elon has such vision, according to himself, which is, by and large, detached from what we all experience, henceforth called reality.

Have you ever been in a pileup in a tunnel?

I'm guessing that Elon has never been in a tunnel crash waiting for hours to get out... choking on fumes... I think, he sees his Tesla cars driving the perfect route, bumper-to-bumper, and it's all hunky-dorey. In reality, a train would be better suited for a tunnel... or an elevated track. Cars should remain on the ground, for obvious reasons.

On a separate note, there was this cab driver in the news...he decided to go Dukes of Hazzard one night. The cops said he got at least a hundred feet linear of air on about 10-15' vertical so he was going about 120, at least.
Math

How a Professor Beat Roulette, Crediting a Non-Existent Supercomputer (thehustle.co) 156

Posted by EditorDavid from the imaginary-friends dept.
I loved this story. The Hustle remembers how in 1964 a world-renowned medical professor found a way to beat roulette wheels, kicking off a five-year winning streak in which he amassed $1,250,000 ($8,000,000 today). He noticed that at the end of each night, casinos would replace cards and dice with fresh sets -- but the expensive roulette wheels went untouched and often stayed in service for decades before being replaced. Like any other machine, these wheels acquired wear and tear. Jarecki began to suspect that tiny defects -- chips, dents, scratches, unlevel surfaces -- might cause certain wheels to land on certain numbers more frequently than randomocity prescribed. The doctor spent weekends commuting between the operating table and the roulette table, manually recording thousands upon thousands of spins, and analyzing the data for statistical abnormalities. "I [experimented] until I had a rough outline of a system based on the previous winning numbers," he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1969. "If numbers 1, 2, and 3 won the last 3 rounds, [I could determine] what was most likely to win the next 3...."

With his wife, Carol, he scouted dozens of wheels at casinos around Europe, from Monte Carlo (Monaco), to Divonne-les-Bains (France), to Baden-Baden (Germany). The pair recruited a team of 8 "clockers" who posted up at these venues, sometimes recording as many as 20,000 spins over a month-long period. Then, in 1964, he made his first strike. After establishing which wheels were biased, he secured a £25,000 loan from a Swiss financier and spent 6 months candidly exacting his strategy. By the end of the run, he'd netted £625,000 (roughly $6,700,000 today).

Jarecki's victories made headlines in newspapers all over the world, from Kansas to Australia. Everyone wanted his "secret" -- but he knew that if he wanted to replicate the feat, he'd have to conceal his true methodology. So, he concocted a "fanciful tale" for the press: He tallied roulette outcomes daily, then fed the information into an Atlas supercomputer, which told him which numbers to pick. At the time, wrote gambling historian, Russell Barnhart, in Beating the Wheel, "Computers were looked upon as creatures from outer space... Few persons, including casino managers, were vocationally qualified to distinguish myth from reality." Hiding behind this technological ruse, Jarecki continued to keep tabs on biased tables -- and prepare for his next big move...

In the decades following Jarecki's dominance, casinos invested heavily in monitoring their roulette tables for defects and building wheels less prone to bias. Today, most wheels have gone digital, run by algorithms programmed to favor the house.
AT&T

'The Future of AT&T Is An Ad-tracking Nightmare Hellworld' (theverge.com) 133

Posted by EditorDavid from the every-move-you-make dept.
There's something scary in Fortune's new article about AT&T: "Say you and your neighbor are both DirecTV customers and you're watching the same live program at the same time," says Brian Lesser, who oversees the vast data-crunching operation that supports this kind of advertising at AT&T. "We can now dynamically change the advertising. Maybe your neighbor's in the market for a vacation, so they get a vacation ad. You're in the market for a car, you get a car ad. If you're watching on your phone, and you're not at home, we can customize that and maybe you get an ad specific to a car retailer in that location."

Such targeting has caused privacy headaches for Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, of course. That's why AT&T requires that customers give permission for use of their data; like those other companies, it anonymizes that data and groups it into audiences -- for example, consumers likely to be shopping for a pickup truck -- rather than targeting specific individuals. Regardless of how you see a directed car ad, say, AT&T can then use geolocation data from your phone to see if you went to a dealership and possibly use data from the automaker to see if you signed up for a test-drive -- and then tell the automaker, "Here's the specific ROI on that advertising," says Lesser. AT&T claims marketers are paying four times the usual rate for that kind of advertising.
"This is a terrifying vision of permanent surveillance," argues the Verge (in an article shared by schwit1): In order to make this work, AT&T would have to:

- Own the video services you're watching so it can dynamically place targeted ads in your streams

- Collect and maintain a dataset of your personal information and interests so it can determine when it should target this car ad to you

- Know when you're watching something so it can actually target the ads

- Track your location using your phone and combine it with the ad-targeting data to see if you visit a dealership after you see the ads

- Collect even more data about you from the dealership to determine if you took a test-drive

- Do all of this tracking and data collection repeatedly and simultaneously for every ad you see

- Aggregate all of that data in some way for salespeople to show clients and justify a 4x premium over other kinds of advertising, including the already scary-targeted ads from Google and Facebook.

If this was a story about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, this scheme would cause a week-long outrage cycle...

AT&T can claim up and down that it's asked for permission to use customer information to do this, but there is simply no possible way the average customer has ever even read their AT&T contracts, let alone puzzled out that they're signing up to be permanently tracked and influenced by targeted media in this way.
Television

Will Disney+ Destroy Netflix? (forbes.com) 348

Posted by EditorDavid from the mauled-by-a-mouse dept.
"Netflix has 175 days left to pull off a miracle... or it's all over," argues a headline at Forbes for an article by the chief analyst at disruption research firm RiskHedge: Netflix is not the future of TV. Netflix changed how we watch TV, but it didn't really change what we watch... Netflix has achieved its incredible growth by taking distribution away from cable companies. Instead of watching The Office on cable, people now watch The Office on Netflix. This edge isn't sustainable.

In a world where you can watch practically anything whenever you want, dominance in distribution is very fragile. Because the internet has opened up a whole world of choice, featuring great exclusive content is now far more important than anything else... Netflix management knows content is king. The company spent $12 billion developing original shows last year... To fund its new shows, Netflix is borrowing huge sums of debt. It currently owes creditors $10.4 billion, which is 59% more than it owed this time last year. The problem is that no matter how much Netflix spends, it has no chance to catch up with its biggest rival...

in about 175 days, Disney is set to launch its own streaming service called Disney+. It's going to charge $6.99/month -- around $6 cheaper than Netflix. And it's pulling all its content off of Netflix. This is a big deal. Disney owns Marvel, Pixar Animations, Star Wars, ESPN, National Geographic, Modern Family, and The Simpsons. Not to mention all the classic characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. In six of the past seven years, Disney has produced the world's top-selling movie... Disney has shown it can produce movies and shows people want to watch. No competitor comes within 1,000 miles of Disney's world of content. Disney's ownership of iconic franchises like Star Wars gives it something no money can buy.

Meanwhile, Netflix will lose a lot of its best content -- and potentially millions of subscribers who switch to Disney+. While Netflix is running into debt "trying out" new shows, Disney already has the best of the best in its arsenal.
Earth

What If We Could Reuse The Packaging on Consumer Products? (adage.com) 178

Posted by EditorDavid from the chamber-of-recommerce dept.
"The shampoo bottle, the deodorant stick, razors and even your toothbrush -- they all get thrown away when they're empty or worn out. But if they were reusable -- or refillable -- just imagine how much waste could be avoided."

That's how Bloomberg describes the new "Loop" initiative being tested for one year by the New Jersey recycling company TerraCycle: This week, Loop began its U.S. trial, allowing consumers to use steel, glass and durable plastic reusable packaging for everyday items. Kroger Co. and Walgreens, along with such consumer brands as Procter & Gamble, Nestle, The Clorox Co. and Unilever, are taking part... For the trial, Loop is available online to customers in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. You can order products made by the participating companies that will be delivered to you in special reusable packaging.

Under the program, manufacturers have redesigned product containers for some of their most well-known products. Loop will collect a refundable deposit, sometimes $5 to $10, that customers will get back when they return their containers. UPS will pick up your empties for no additional charge... Procter & Gamble has unveiled its Crest mouthwash in a sleek glass bottle -- with a rubber base to prevent breakage. It also has non-electric Oral B toothbrushes that have a head that pops off so users can keep the base and replace the brush. But it was the stainless steel ice cream container for Nestle's Haagen-Dazs (which isn't too cold to the touch but keeps ice cream cool longer) that was the crowd favorite at a Manhattan rollout this week.... During Loop's trial, returned containers will go to New Jersey and then Pennsylvania for washing, then back to the companies' factories for refilling...

[W]hile reusable packaging may require more energy and materials when first made, Tom Szaky, chief executive of TerraCycle, said the carbon cost becomes equal to that of disposable packaging after just two or three uses. His goal, he said, is to produce items that can be reused 100 times... Szaky explained that Loop is all about bringing back the milkman model, where glass bottles of milk were left on your porch, and you put the empties there to be picked up...

"We want you to see Loop packaging 50 years from now still going around," Szaky said.
Businesses

TurboTax Is Using A 'Military Discount' to Trick Troops Into Paying to File Their Taxes (propublica.org) 90

Posted by EditorDavid from the happy-Memorial-Day dept.
"Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, created and promoted a 'military discount' that charges service members who are eligible to file for free," reports ProPublica, in a story co-published with The Military Times: In patriotism-drenched promotions, press releases and tweets, TurboTax promotes special deals for military service members, promising to help them file their taxes online for free or at a discount. Yet some service members who've filed by going to the TurboTax Military landing page told ProPublica they were charged as much as $150 -- even though, under a deal with the government, service members making under $66,000 are supposed to be able to file on TurboTax for free...

To find TurboTax's Free File landing page, service members typically have to go through the IRS website. TurboTax Military, by contrast, is promoted on the company's home page and elsewhere. Starting through the Military landing page directs many users to paid products even when they are eligible to get the same service for no cost using the Free File edition...

The New York regulator investigating TurboTax is also examining the military issue, according to a person familiar with the probe.
The authors of the article tested the software by entering tax information for a military household in Virginia that was eligible for free filing. TurboTax Military "tried to upgrade us or convince us to pay for side products six times. We declined those extras each time.

"Finally, the program told us we had to pay $159.98 to finish filing. And that 'military discount'? All of $5."
Power

The First Usable Electric Car Was Invented In Britain In 1884 (historycollection.co) 68

Posted by EditorDavid from the remembering-pioneers dept.
"Thomas Parker, sometimes described as the 'Edison of Britain', was a British engineer and electrical technologies inventor working in the 1800s who was also one of the world's first environmentalists," remembers Slashdot reader dryriver.

Parker had been troubled by the pollution in coal-burning cities around London -- and decided to do something about it: Parker was very adept both at inventing new things and at significantly improving technologies that others had invented before him. He improved everything from steam pumps, to electrical batteries, electric motors, alternators and dynamos, invented the award winning "Kyrle Grate," which was designed to allow anthracite coal to be burned inside of it, and was responsible for the electrification of London's "Underground" Subway system and tramways build in other British cities.

There has been attempts at electrical cars before Parker's going back as far as the 1830s, but his was revolutionary in many aspects. The Elwell-Parker car was fitted with Parker's high-capacity rechargeable batteries, and later vehicles had hydraulic brakes on all four wheels, as well as four-wheel steering. These features are even now being described as revolutionary.

While Parker's electrical cars were quite popular in America and Britain for a number of years (read more here), soon improved gas- and diesel-based vehicles caused public interest in electric cars to wane. Parker's company Elwell Parker, which survives to this day, then focused on making electrical speciality vehicles for factories and warehouses -- electric carts for moving equipment and crates around, and precursors of modern forklifts, for example.

While everybody knows electrical inventors like Edison and Tesla today, Thomas Parker is barely known and barely remembered...

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