You’ve probably never heard of many of the data firms registered under a new law, but they’ve heard a lot about you. A list, and tips for opting out.
FastCompany.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
Will you use this list to opt out?
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Earlier this month, security researcher Victor Gevers found and disclosed an exposed database live-tracking the locations of about 2.6 million residents of Xinjiang, China, offering a window into what a digital surveillance state looks like in the 21st century. …
EFF.org click the link to read the rest of the story.
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Data has been called the new oil and for good reason. While as recently as a decade ago our ability to use data effectively was limited by technology, today our access is nearly unlimited. New platforms like Hadoop and Spark allow us to analyze hundreds —or even thousands — of databases at once. … Many managers pride themselves on being “data driven,” but that’s a fairly meaningless term. Data, by itself, tells you nothing. That’s why the first thing … to do is ask the right questions, form hypotheses and use data to test them.
Forbes.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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Facebook has been actively pursuing the blockchain space for the past few months, with the news of fiat-backed Crypto being recent in a string of initiatives taken to explore & eventually harness the DLT. Stable coins have been the latest buzz word for the Cryptoverse with a bunch of them launched this year alone…
Medium.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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Billionaire Masayoshi Son–not Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg–has the most audacious vision for an AI-powered utopia where machines control how we live. And he’s spending hundreds of billions of dollars to realize it. Are you ready to live in Masa World?
FastCompany.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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Amazon’s ambition goes far beyond dominating markets, says Stacy Mitchell, an economics researcher and co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “Its intention is to control the basic infrastructure that commerce runs on.” Thus far it’s been smooth sailing for the company …
Medium.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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As an avid Google Maps user on both a personal and business level, I’ve often wished for a more interactive and all-inclusive experience. For instance, wouldn’t it be great to get suggestions for options like the closest coffee shop or lunch spot while I’m driving from Point A to Point B? Sure, I could pull over, open up Google and search for these things separately, but who wouldn’t welcome a truly responsive and local experience within Google Maps?
SearchEngineLand.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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As the hearing got under way, Pichai struggled to make sense of the questions that lawmakers put to him. Even friendly Democratic queries asking him to explain how search-engine rankings worked were met with hesitation and stilted rhetoric. If a rep said a keyword he was prepared for, he gave a scripted response, even if it was only sort of responsive. …
TheAtlantic.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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Warning: this story gets very cringeworthy.
How did I find out? Well I got an email saying that some malicious software had been downloaded on my computer and had obtained some scandalous information about me. The email threatened to release the information they captured if I did not pay them with Bitcoin.
Apparently this is a fairly common email scam that goes around. …
Hackernoon.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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Going into the experiment, I realized that there was a good chance I’d come crawling back to some of the Big Five services when it was over. Yet as I discovered over the four weeks, switching to independent alternatives didn’t negatively affect most parts of my life, but it did take a little getting used to.
Before diving into the nitty gritty of what worked and what didn’t, however, let me explain the limits of the experiment.
Motherboard.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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We’ve all started taking this free software for granted. Hell, I’ve watched people get indignant that an app maker would even dare ask a user to pay money. After all, all the other apps are free.
Except that they’re not. The programmers who made that software need to eat. Presumably, they eat, which means someone’s paying them. If it’s not you, then who?
If you aren’t paying to use the software you use, that means someone else is paying for you.
Medium.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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Let’s start with a quick history lesson about bitcoin. Bitcoin was officially unveiled to the public in a white paper published October 31st, 2008. The white paper is actually extremely readable, very short (just 8 pages), and incredibly elegantly written. If you want to understand why bitcoin is so compelling straight from the horse’s mouth, you must read this paper. It will explain everything better than I or anyone else likely ever could.
I won’t delve too much into the technical details of how bitcoin works (which are better elucidated in the white paper), but will instead focus on a broader exploration of its history and implications.
Medium.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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What happens when private firms have cyberweapons as powerful as those owned by governments?
ForeignPolicy.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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Commander of the United States Cyber Command, Gen. Paul Nakasone was asked whether our adversaries think they will suffer if they strike us with cyberweapons. “They don’t fear us,” General Nakasone replied. So while the United States remains the greatest cyberpower on earth, it is increasingly losing daily cyberconflicts. The range of American targets is so wide and deep that it is almost impossible to understand all of the vulnerabilities. And because most of those targets don’t belong to the government…
NYTimes.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
Are you concerned that hackers could destroy your business?
Fifteen years ago, cybersecurity could be boiled down to a simple strategy: Secure the perimeter. [Today]…
Many businesses use 10, 20 or 30 different security products to protect their systems. They all have advantages, and security practitioners will use different combinations to investigate a potential threat. If a team has access to 15 tools, for instance, one engineer might think to use three of them while another tries a completely different subset. There isn’t enough time to try them all, so experts pick products based on their experience and what they believe will be best suited to the task.
It’s a messy problem that doesn’t have a simple answer.
Engadget.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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The paradox about Bitcoin is that it may well turn out to be a genuinely revolutionary breakthrough and at the same time a colossal failure as a currency. As I write, Bitcoin has increased in value by nearly 100,000 percent over the past five years, making a fortune for its early investors but also branding it as a spectacularly unstable payment mechanism. The process for creating new Bitcoins has also turned out to be a staggering energy drain.
NYTimes.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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Legendary venture capitalist Mary Meeker has just released the 2018 version of her famous Internet Trends report. It covers everything from mobile to commerce to the competition between tech giants. Check out the full report below, and we’ll add some highlights soon. Then come back for our slide-by-slide analysis of the 20 most important parts of the 294 page report.
TechCrunch.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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In the summer of 2003, there was an off-site meeting at Jeff Bezos’s house. We were doing this exercise, looking at what we thought our core competencies were as a company. We started off with fairly obvious things, like we were good at having a lot of selection in retail, and we were good at fulfilling that selection.
But when we looked into it more deeply, we realized that in building Amazon’s consumer business as fast as we had in the first eight years, we’d gotten really good at operating infrastructure services, things like computing and storage and database. And because our retail business was a very low-margin business…
NYmag.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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It’s been over a week since Facebook announced that, thanks to a coding vulnerability, access tokens for at least 50 million* accounts were stolen. Access tokens are important. As Facebook explained in its blog detailing the hack, they are “the equivalent of digital keys that keep people logged in to Facebook so they don’t need to re-enter their password every time they use the app.”
The hack also impacted Facebook’s Single Sign-On, which lets people use one account to log into other sites, meaning the impact of the breach is perhaps wider than even Facebook initially reported. Still, at the moment, there’s no way to know how big of a problem it is, or will be. Nor do we know who did it. We’re in the dark for one simple reason: Facebook has said next to nothing about what it knows — or if it knows much at all. Ad-driven platforms tend to succeed thanks to one thing: our vulnerability.
Medium.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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Yes, everyone shopped their wallets dry on Amazon during the big holiday sales push. But don’t forget that the AWS public cloud side of Amazon is likely to drive valuation and operating income going forward.
zdnet.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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Ransomware attacks are proliferating unimaginably. Coming year might come along with some more serious threats. We hope security researchers come up with sure solutions for these robust malware program and innocent users aren’t harmed anymore.
Above all, we highly recommend all user to take offline backup of their data. Even if they are attacked with any such attack, they won’t end up becoming a victim.
SysTweak.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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A new development in fibre optics could make internet speeds up to 100 times faster – by detecting light that has been twisted into a spiral. … By twisting light into a spiral, engineers effectively create a third dimension for light to carry information: the level of orbital angular momentum, or spin. “It’s like DNA, if you look at the double helix spiral,” said Min Gu from RMIT University. “The more you can use angular momentum the more information you can carry.”
TheGuardian.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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China is aggressively seeking to dominate the Internet of Things and plans to use access to billions of networked electronic devices for intelligence-gathering, sabotage, and business purposes, according to a forthcoming congressional report.
Freebeacon.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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Encryption has plenty of uses. It defends state secrets, and the corporate sort. It protects financial flows and medical records. And it makes the $2trn e-commerce industry possible. Without it, credit-card details, bank transfers, emails and the like would zip around the internet unprotected, for anyone so minded to see or steal. Nobody, however, is certain that the foundation of all this is sound.
economist.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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A former Huawei employee has accused the company of trying to steal intellectual property in order to help China achieve technological dominance over the US by using a lawsuit against his Silicon Valley start-up.
scmp.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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One constant throughout my career has been my fascination with what can be learned about an organization from basic public records. The aggregation of a multitude of small pieces of information can paint a picture that is sometimes startling in its completeness. Then some holes can be filled-in with small logical leaps and inferences.
specterops.io click the link to read the rest of the story.
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The truth is a messy business, but an information revolution is coming. Danny Hillis and Peter Hopkins discuss knowledge, fake news and disruption at NeueHouse in Manhattan.
bigthink.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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The best description of the data economy comes from AOL, of all places. The once-mighty internet service provider now runs a tidy business in the ad-exchange space. The site promoting the service is hip and tasteful, showing happy, partying people and white text that spells out things like “Monetize your most valuable asset” in all caps. “A publisher’s audience is their currency,” the site says. “No matter how they make money from content—be it through advertising, paid subscription or syndication, a publisher’s core asset is audience and audience data.” This is weapons-grade marketing speak, but it’s also a surprisingly honest assessment of digital media’s beating heart—one that pumps out content and takes in reams of data from the people who consume that content. And somewhere, unseen, money is being made from what we see and do online.
pcmag.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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The improvements with this latest generation of wifi are in two key areas: Raw speed and throughput (if wifi was a highway, we’d be talking about a higher maximum speed limit for vehicles, as well as more lanes to handle more vehicles at once). Wi-Fi 6 will support 8K video streaming…
gizmodo.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web … is working on a plan to radically alter how all of us live and work on the web. “The intent is world domination” … “It’s a historical moment.” Ever since revelations emerged that Facebook had allowed people’s data to be misused by political operatives, Berners-Lee has felt an imperative to get this digital idyll into the real world. …
The difference here is that, on Solid, all the information is under his control. Every bit of data he creates or adds on Solid exists within a Solid pod–which is an acronym for personal online data store.
Fastcompany.com click the link to read the rest of the story.
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