Saturday, September 16, 2017
Thursday, September 14, 2017
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
The iPhone X's Face ID is a major privacy concern.
"It takes a lot of selling points to justify a $1,000 phone, and one of the most enticing features of Apple’s new iPhone X is Face ID, which unlocks your phone by simply looking at you. It is also the creepiest.
Rather than asking you to touch the home button with your finger to unlock, the iPhone X will use its camera to compare your face to scans stored on the phone—a method the company claims is much more secure than a fingerprint.
But unlocking your phone with your face also unlocks a flood of privacy and usability concerns, not the least of which being whether someone will be able to unlock your phone with your picture. (Apple says that will probably be impossible.) And then there’s potential scenario of police confiscating your phone and unlocking it by holding it up to your face."
The iPhone X's Face ID is a major privacy concern.
Sunday, September 10, 2017
The Sun has produced a whole bunch of solar flares this week - The Verge
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"While the hurricanes popping up in the Atlantic has captured everyone’s attention, the Sun has had its own active week as well. A total of six solar flares have erupted from the same active sunspot since Monday — including the largest flare the Sun has produced in its current cycle.
Sunspots are cool, dark regions on the Sun’s surface with strong magnetic fields. These solar phenomena pop up on the Sun from time to time, sometimes relatively frequently. In fact, the Sun has a roughly 11-year sunspot cycle — the result of the its changing magnetic field. Magnetic material inside the Sun is always moving and rising to the surface, and it eventually causes the Sun’s north and south poles to flip. Because of this, the Sun alternates between two periods: solar maximum — when sunspots are much more frequent on the Sun’s surface — and solar minimum — when the Sun’s surface is relatively sunspot free.
Right now the Sun is actually on the downswing, heading toward solar minimum. But NASA says sunspots can still form on the Sun, and they can sill lead to powerful solar flare eruptions. These flares don’t pose any significant threats to Earth, but they can mess with our power systems. Flares are associated with something called coronal mass ejections, when high-energy plasma is sent out into space. When this reaches Earth, the plasma interacts with the magnetic field and particles surrounding our planet, causing geomagnetic storms that can impact satellites and even electronics on the ground.
The biggest flare to erupt from this active sunspot occurred on September 6th, and apparently the radio blackout that it caused has already passed. Check out the flares below, thanks to observations from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory — a satellite that has been monitoring the Sun since 2010."
The Sun has produced a whole bunch of solar flares this week - The Verge
Friday, September 08, 2017
Equifax Must Pay | Sascha Segan | PCMag.com
"Credit monitoring company Equifax is now in the running for the worst handling of a data breach ever.
Not only did it potentially give up ready-made identity theft packages for more than half of all adult Americans, its response has been heartless verging on evil. The company should be prosecuted and severely financially damaged, but it's acting like it's above the law.
The "full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers." This is far worse than your usual name-and-email breach, or even name-email-and-password, because it gives thieves everything they need to open bank accounts, credit cards, and get loans in your name.
The data was accessed via a "US website application vulnerability." Let that sink in. A company with power over the financial destiny of most Americans—you cannot opt out of data collection if you want to participate easily in the modern American economy—let everyone's data be exposed through its public-facing website.
Equifax responded to the breach with supreme arrogance. After hiding it from the public for more than a month (giving the CFO a ), it directs people to a website where they have to enter the last six digits of their Social Security number to see if they've been pwned. Because, of course, right now you want to trust Equifax with your Social Security number. It then responds with a confusing message about signing you up for credit monitoring.
But oh, it only gets more sinister from there. Twitterer Zack Whittaker points out that even by checking to see if your info was stolen, you to sue Equifax for their malfeasance, which has since of regulators.
Equifax Must Be Punished
The government needs to come down on Equifax hard. The problem is that Equifax offers a privatized, quasi-government function. If you want to participate in the modern US economy, you're subject to the company's rating and arbitration. If you want to rent or buy a home, get a car loan or a cell phone plan, Equifax and its two interchangeable quasi-competitors get to decide your financial fate.
("Not so!" says one commenter, looking up from sewing his handmade clothes in his solar-paneled cabin which he paid for with cash. Okay, Mr. Unabomber, moving on.)
The Washington Post says by why Equifax is acting with such a tin ear. I'm not puzzled; the answer is impunity. When you feel like you have nothing to lose, like you're not under threat, you're going to do the absolute minimum in situations like this. That's what Equifax is doing.
Equifax Must Pay | Sascha Segan | PCMag.com
Not only did it potentially give up ready-made identity theft packages for more than half of all adult Americans, its response has been heartless verging on evil. The company should be prosecuted and severely financially damaged, but it's acting like it's above the law.
The "full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers." This is far worse than your usual name-and-email breach, or even name-email-and-password, because it gives thieves everything they need to open bank accounts, credit cards, and get loans in your name.
The data was accessed via a "US website application vulnerability." Let that sink in. A company with power over the financial destiny of most Americans—you cannot opt out of data collection if you want to participate easily in the modern American economy—let everyone's data be exposed through its public-facing website.
Equifax responded to the breach with supreme arrogance. After hiding it from the public for more than a month (giving the CFO a ), it directs people to a website where they have to enter the last six digits of their Social Security number to see if they've been pwned. Because, of course, right now you want to trust Equifax with your Social Security number. It then responds with a confusing message about signing you up for credit monitoring.
But oh, it only gets more sinister from there. Twitterer Zack Whittaker points out that even by checking to see if your info was stolen, you to sue Equifax for their malfeasance, which has since of regulators.
Equifax Must Be Punished
The government needs to come down on Equifax hard. The problem is that Equifax offers a privatized, quasi-government function. If you want to participate in the modern US economy, you're subject to the company's rating and arbitration. If you want to rent or buy a home, get a car loan or a cell phone plan, Equifax and its two interchangeable quasi-competitors get to decide your financial fate.
("Not so!" says one commenter, looking up from sewing his handmade clothes in his solar-paneled cabin which he paid for with cash. Okay, Mr. Unabomber, moving on.)
The Washington Post says by why Equifax is acting with such a tin ear. I'm not puzzled; the answer is impunity. When you feel like you have nothing to lose, like you're not under threat, you're going to do the absolute minimum in situations like this. That's what Equifax is doing.
Equifax Must Pay | Sascha Segan | PCMag.com
Our entire credit bureau system is broken - The Verge
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"This week saw the biggest public breach in the history of credit reporting, as Equifax reported a hack affecting as many as 143 million customers. The hack exposed Social Security numbers, birthdays, and, in some cases, even credit cards. The attackers gained access as early as May, so the data has now been circulating for months. For years, experts have said you should assume your Social Security number and birthday are already available on criminal marketplaces — and with more than half of the adult US population implicated, that logic is now hard to avoid.
Beyond the immediate damage, the breach reveals some deep absurdities in Equifax’s business model. The company was one of the central stores of personal data, the place you checked to make sure you weren’t writing a mortgage to an impostor. But now the impostors have the same data as everyone else. If you can’t keep it secure, why stockpile the data in the first place?
The same questions come up when you look at the data itself. It’s bad to have your Social Security number and birthday stolen because criminals can use that information to apply for credit in your name. Why make that data so useful in the first place? There’s nothing magical about a Social Security number. We only use them for credit reporting because every US citizen has one, and they’re all supposedly secret. But those numbers haven’t been truly secret for a long time. Before the Equifax breach, there was the Experian breach, the Anthem breach, and the OPM breach. For millions of people, authentication by Social Security number no longer works. So why are we still using a credit system that relies on breachable data?
THE ENTIRE CONCEPT OF A BREACH IS THE RESULT OF A FAILED IDENTITY MODEL
The credit bureau system is broken, and it’s been broken for a long time. The entire concept of a breach — hackers stealing corporate-held data for identity theft — is the result of a failed identity model that’s long outlived its usefulness. It’s easy to point to Equifax as the problem, and its poor handling of the breach (and possible insider trading) certainly doesn’t help. But the problem is bigger than any single company. In a world flooded with information, we’re still relying on a tiny set of sensitive data to protect us from fraud, and putting the burden on the average consumer when that data leaks out. We treat data as private when it’s already been exposed in breach after breach. This system has reached its breaking point. It’s time to burn it all down and start over.
In the most basic terms, credit bureaus work as a reputation service. You submit someone’s name and get back a report on all the money they’ve borrowed over the years and how it’s been repaid. That’s valuable information if you’re deciding whether to lend someone money, so businesses (or their customers) are often willing to pay for it. In that situation, the biggest risk to the lender is an impostor who runs up someone else’s tab and then skips town. So along the way, credit bureaus have become an identity service, too. Along with the potential client’s name, they ask for a Social Security number, and if those things don’t match, they know they’re dealing with fraud.
This is a terrible way to manage identity. From afar, a Social Security number looks kind of like a password. But you can change a password, and you shouldn’t use the same one with every service. To get slightly more technical, you can hash passwords, which lets services verify your identity without keeping your exact password easily available. Right now, I could count the number of places my Gmail password exists anywhere on one hand, whereas I’ve been writing my Social Security number on forms since I was 12. By now, hundreds of organizations have it, from old jobs to old dentists. That number was never going to be safe from scammers. The system was set up for failure from the very beginning.
Even worse, all this information is generally being shared without your consent. The three big credit bureaus — Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian — see their customers as the businesses checking people out, not the people themselves. They’re worried about keeping banks and car dealers happy, but the targets themselves are an afterthought. As a result, even basic inaccuracies can persist for years, bouncing between the three major bureaus. (Convincing credit bureaus that you’re not dead, for instance, is much harder than you think.) There have been a few regulations aimed at fixing that — most notably the Fair Credit Reporting Act — but it’s still an extremely clunky system, and the average consumer has little awareness or control over their own profile....
Our entire credit bureau system is broken - The Verge
Thursday, September 07, 2017
Saving DACA will be uphill battle for Facebook, Apple - CNET
"The tech industry is leading the charge to pressure Congress to pass a bill to protect so-called Dreamers from deportation. But how effective will the push be?
President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he's making good on a promise to officially end the Obama-era program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which lets immigrants brought to the US illegally as children before 2007 stay without fear of deportation. The decision to rescind DACA could affect as many as 800,000 Dreamers, nicknamed after an earlier, failed piece of legislation.
The Trump administration said the program would get six months before the Dreamers lose their right to work and live in the US, giving Congress time to craft a legislative solution to the situation.
But that's a short window, considering how long the saga has gone on in Congress. For 16 years, advocates have tried -- and failed -- to pass legislation to protect these young immigrants from deportation."
'Saving DACA will be uphill battle for Facebook, Apple - CNET
Wednesday, September 06, 2017
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