The EU is offering a 3 month grace period before it starts to enforce the death of safe harbour. No data of EU citizens to repressive regimes!
Source: Europe’s top privacy watchdog calls on firms to curb U.S. data transfers
British broadband provider TalkTalk has admitted that all of its 4 million customers’ names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers and bank details may have stolen by hackers.
Source: Huge Hack Hits 4 Million British Broadband Customers
Bitcoin transactions will be exempt from Value Added Tax (VAT), the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled.
Source: Bitcoin is Exempt from VAT, Rules European Court of Justice
Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have created a process that can manufacture 3D-printed teeth and braces which are actually good for your other teeth, and dental health in general.
Source: 3D-printed teeth can kill 99% of bacteria
Light up your house if fire alarm or outage. Prevent break-ins and intrusions by making home look lived-in.
Source: Proactive Home Protection: Safety and Security
Let’s Encrypt has received cross-signatures from IdenTrust, which means that our certificates are now trusted by all major browsers. This is a significant milestone since it means that visitors to websites using Let’s Encrypt certificates can enjoy a secure browsing experience with no special configuration required.
Source: Let’s Encrypt is Trusted
Let’s Encrypt wants to offer free trusted SSL certificates to everyone to ensure an encrypted web.
Security researchers at Pen Test Partners have found a security vulnerability in the iKettle Wi-Fi Electric Kettle that allows attackers to crack the password of the WiFi network to which the kettle is connected. Researchers say that using this simple trick and information about iKettles, they drove around London, cracked home WiFi networks, and created a map of insecure WiFi networks across the city. The same researchers cracked a Samsung smart-fridge this summer to disclose Gmail passwords. If you have 6 minutes, there’s a YouTube video you can watch.
Source: Tattling Kettles Help Researchers Crack WiFi Networks In London – Slashdot
This rig is able to send radio waves at an iPhone or Android with its headphones still plugged in, using the headphone cable as a receiver that picks up the radio signals and relays them to the operating system’s voice recognition software.
Source: Hackers Can Use Radio Waves to Hijack Androids and iPhones via Siri and Google Now
When companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe first invited people to send in their DNA for genealogy tracing and medical diagnostic tests, privacy advocates warned about the creation of giant genetic databases that might one day be used against participants by law enforcement.
Source: Cops are asking Ancestry.com and 23andMe for their customers’ DNA
So, people are surprised that they are mistakenly used as suspects? And how surprised will they be when they find out that insurance companies have been dipping into these databases to find genetic defects?
Lockheed Martin claims to have overcome a major obstacle to shooting high-power laser weapons from high-speed aircraft, saying it has successfully completed 60 Aero-adaptive Aero-optic Beam Control (ABC) laser turret flight tests over the past year. The turret uses a green, low-power laser to measure the system’s effectiveness at jet cruise speeds and at different angles off the aircraft. Lockheed says one of the greatest obstacles to fielding a powerful airborne fibre laser weapon to shoot down enemy
Source: Lockheed touts ABC laser turret as testbed completes 60 flights
MIT researchers aim to take the human element out of big-data analysis, with a new system that not only searches for patterns but designs the feature set, too. To test the first prototype of their system, they enrolled it in three data science competitions, in which it competed against human teams to find predictive patterns in unfamiliar data sets. Of the 906 teams participating in the three competitions, the researchers’ “Data Science Machine” finished ahead of 615.
In two of the three competitions, the predictions made by the Data Science Machine were 94 percent and 96 percent as accurate as the winning submissions. In the third, the figure was a more modest 87 percent. But where the teams of humans typically labored over their prediction algorithms for months, the Data Science Machine took somewhere between two and 12 hours to produce each of its entries.
Source: System that replaces human intuition with algorithms outperforms human teams
Flat, firewall-free network was a walk in the park, boffins say.[…]They say the casino lacked even basic firewalls around its payment platforms and did not have logging.
“It was a very flat network, single domain, with very limited access controls for access to payment systems,” Emmanuel Jean-Georges told the Cyber Defence Summit (formerly Mircon) in Washington DC today.
“Had this casino hotel operator had even minimal or basic protections in place like a firewall with default deny systems to limit access to PCI (payment) systems … it would have slowed down the attackers and hopefully set off red flags.”
Source: Jackpot: New hacking group steals 150,000 credit cards from casino
“It appears that the focus was to obtain contact information such as names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers of current and former subscribers in order to send fraudulent solicitations.”[…]“As part of the investigation to date, we also determined that payment card and contact information for fewer than 3,500 individuals could have been accessed, although we have discovered no direct evidence that information was stolen,” the letter says. Those individuals are being contacted directly by Dow.
And if you believe that these details weren’t taken while they were in plain view (as well as their encrypted passwords) you’ll believe anything. I have a great deal on used camels for you.
Source: Dow Jones the latest big-name breach
We’ve all become used to the idea of ads online — it’s something that has become part and parcel of using the internet — but in Windows? If you’ve updated to build 10565 of Windows 10, you’re in for something of a surprise: the Start menu is now being used to display ads.
Source: Microsoft now uses Windows 10’s Start menu to display ads
It’s not enough that all your search data, browsing habits and file listings are sent to Microsoft, you are now pushed with ads. Please, Microsoft, just release a paid, non-invasive version of Windows 10?
Source: MPs to hold emergency debate over politicians’ communications being spied upon
hahahaha it turns out that they are not exempt from GHCQ spying after all – and now they care!
Stanford sociologist Robb Willer finds that an effective way to persuade people in politics is to reframe arguments to appeal to the moral values of those holding opposing positions.[…]Conservative participants were ultimately persuaded by a patriotism-based argument that “same-sex couples are proud and patriotic Americans … [who] contribute to the American economy and society.”[…]”Moral reframing is not intuitive to people,” Willer said. “When asked to make moral political arguments, people tend to make the ones they believe in and not that of an opposing audience – but the research finds this type of argument unpersuasive.”
Source: New research shows how to make effective political arguments, Stanford sociologist says
Dridex, which seeks to harvest users’ banking credentials, apparently originates with what the NCA’s release describes as ‘technically skilled cyber criminals in Eastern Europe’, and is said to target both individuals and consumers alike. Losses in the UK to the attacks are currently estimated at £20mn.
Source: FBI and NCA join forces against Dridex banking malware
Depressingly familiar and stupid mistakes in EEG kit, health org’s storage of recorded brains
Source: Hackers can steal your BRAIN WAVES
EEG results are basically not encrypted or stored or transmitted any way securely, allowing them to be stolen, replayed and altered in transit. It’s not too much of a problem to fix, but it should be fixed.
Top legal experts met this week in Estonia for a drafting session of the substantially expanded and updated edition of the handbook on applicability of international law to the cyber realm. […] The Tallinn Manual process is funded, hosted and facilitated by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence.
Source: Tallinn Manual 2.0 to Be Completed in 2016 | CCDCOE
The Myo armband is a gesture control device that lets you take control of your phone, computer, and so much more, touch-free.
Source: Myo Gesture Control Armband – Wearable Technology by Thalmic Labs
I know the French were collaborators during WWII, but shouldn’t they have learned their lesson then?!
France wants proposed rules applied to EU citizens as well
Source: Fingerprints, facial scans, EU border data slurp too tasty for French to resist
Today’s release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions wouldn’t survive to the end of the negotiations.
Source: The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Copyright, one of the largest blockers of innovation and totally ridiculous: why not work for a living instead of coasting on a past success is now set to life + 70 years!
DRM is no longer allowed to be circumvented. “someone tinkering with a file or device that contains a copyrighted work can be made liable (criminally so, if wilfullness and a commercial motive can be shown), for doing so even when no copyright infringement is committed.”
Hackers can now be rersecuted for minor infringements…
It’s a mess 🙁
In comparison with those who read the transcripts, the evaluators who heard pitches judged the candidates to have greater intellect (to be more rational, thoughtful, and intelligent), on average. They also liked the individuals more, had a more positive overall impression, and — perhaps most important — were more interested in hiring the candidates. Evaluators who saw the videos appeared to be even more favorably impressed, but there was no statistically significant difference between the evaluations of video and audio.
Source: The Science of Sounding Smart
