Tag: Network Newsletters

Your City, Your State, Your K12 Public School all attacked using NSA weapon.

Your City, Your State, Your K12 Public School all attacked using NSA weapon.

In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen N.S.A. Tool Wreaks Havoc
By Nicole Perlroth and Scott Shane
May 25, 2019

In Pennsylvania School Districts Stockpiling Huge budget surplus accounts, while still raising property taxes every year

WannaCry? Hundreds of US schools still haven’t patched servers
A dive into vulnerability data shows even big districts’ servers still offering up SMB v. 1.

I think patching your software and making backups will protect you better than blaming the Gov’t
or
… than blaming the government who weaponized an unknown flaw in software and made sure not to tell the software vendor, in order to prevent a patch which customers could install, you mean?
or
Microsoft was warned, and the patch came out a month before Shadow Brokers dumped it.

If you’re wondering why ransomware continues to be such a problem for state and local governments and other public institutions, all you have to do to get an answer is poke around the Internet a little. Publicly accessible security-scan data shows that many public organizations have failed to do more than put a bandage over long-standing system vulnerabilities that, if successfully exploited, could bring their operations to a standstill.

While the method by which RobbinHood ransomware infected the network of Baltimore City two weeks ago is still unknown, insiders within city government have pointed to the incomplete efforts by the Office of Information Technology to get a handle on the city’s tangle of software, aging servers, and wide-flung network infrastructure. Baltimore isn’t even the only city to have been hit by ransomware in the last month—Lynn, Massachusetts, and Cartersville, Georgia, both had electronic payment systems taken offline by ransomware this month. Greenville, North Carolina, was struck by the same RobbinHood ransomware affecting Baltimore in April.

But cities aren’t the only highly vulnerable targets to be found by would-be attackers. There are hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected Windows systems in the United States that still appear to be vulnerable to an exploit of Microsoft Windows’ Server Message Block version 1 (SMB v. 1) file sharing protocol, despite repeated public warnings to patch systems following the worldwide outbreak of the WannaCry cryptographic malware two years ago. And based on data from the Shodan search engine and other public sources, hundreds of them—if not thousands—are servers in use at US public school systems. Even in cases where Microsoft’s patch of SMB v. 1 has been applied, the protocol remains a potential security problem—one that some organizations can’t completely close because some vendors still require the protocol for applications such as networked copiers and scanners.

While conducting research as a follow-up to our coverage of Baltimore City’s ongoing ransomware attack, Ars discovered that neighboring Baltimore County’s public school system had eight publicly accessible servers that still were running in configurations that indicated they were vulnerable to EternalBlue, the Equation Group exploit exposed by Shadow Brokers in April 2017 and then used as part of the WannaCry malware a month later. The exploit is now packaged as part of multiple malware kits, according to security researchers.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/two-years-after-wannacry-us-schools-still-vulnerable-to-eternalblue/

SEE

Where are the State AG’s in protecting the citizens from malware that “gets away” from the NSA? The weaponized software created by the NSA…. when employees who have been taught everything by the NSA leave their jobs and take what they know with them then form companies and sell their “knowledge /skills / know how” learned on the job by working for America to enemies.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/12/former-nsa-employee-pleads-guilty-to-taking-classified-data/

02
Dec 17

Former NSA Employee Pleads Guilty to Taking Classified Data

A former employee for the National Security Agency pleaded guilty on Friday to taking classified data to his home computer in Maryland. According to published reports, U.S. intelligence officials believe the data was then stolen from his computer by hackers working for the Russian government.

Nghia Hoang Pho, 67, of Ellicott City, Maryland, pleaded guilty today to “willful retention of national defense information.” The U.S. Justice Department says that beginning in April 2006 Pho was employed as a developer for the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit, which develops specialized hacking tools to gather intelligence data from foreign targets and information systems.

According to Pho’s plea agreement, between 2010 and March 2015 he removed and retained highly sensitive classified “documents and writings that contained national defense information, including information classified as Top Secret.”

Pho is the third NSA worker to be charged in the past two years with mishandling classified data. His plea is the latest — and perhaps final — chapter in the NSA’s hunt for those responsible for leaking NSA hacking tools that have been published online over the past year by a shadowy group calling itself The Shadow Brokers.

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/436950-former-cia-nsa-employees-sue-agencies-over-alleged-censorship

Ex-NSA employees criticize Mike Rogers’ role with Israeli venture firm

In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen N.S.A. Tool Wreaks Havoc By Nicole Perlroth and Scott Shane May 25, 2019

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.

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.

< – >

WHERE ARE THE CLASS ACTION SUITS?

WHY DOESN’T THE STATE HOLD THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT ACCOUNTABLE FOR THE DAMAGE DONE TO THEIR CITIZENS?

Breaking news. Patch yourself for the CVEs exploited by NSA tools on the loose. This includes major cities!

ETERNALBLUE was initially nicknamed EternalBluescreen —NSA never seriously considered alerting Microsoft about discovering the vulnerability (before Shadow Brokers happened), and —“held on it” (“used it,” presumably) for more than five years
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/us/nsa-hacking-tool-baltimore.html


NEW: Baltimore was hit with an NSA hacking tool that is being used to hijack U.S. cities. ⁦⁩ and I spent months looking into the origins of EternalBlue, a stolen NSA weapon that is popping up in more and more attacks across the country.

The NSA spent more than a year searching for the flaw in Microsoft’s software and writing the code to exploit it.

NSA TAO operators jokingly referred to it as “EternalBluescreen” because it often crashed computer systems, a risk they might tip off targets. It took months to hone. Once it became a reliable espionage tool, it netted some of the NSA’s best counter-terrorism intelligence, and there was never any serious consideration that NSA would turn over the underlying flaw to Microsoft for patching.

The NSA kept it for 5+ years until unidentified hackers threatened to publish it.

In April 2017, the group, which calls itself the ShadowBrokers, dumped it online, where it has been picked up by North Korea, Russia, Iran and, just this week, China in attacks that have cut a path of destruction around the globe. But in the last year, it has boomeranged back to the NSA’s own backyard, hitting Baltimore, Allentown, San Antonio and countless other cities in attacks that have paralyzed municipal operations and alarmed government officials, who privately say the NSA needs to account. The NSA refuses to discuss the incidents or even acknowledge that the dumped tools were part of its cyber arsenal, but in an unusually candid interview, NSA former director Mike Rogers, who oversaw the agency during the leak, deflected blame. “If Toyota makes pickup trucks and someone takes a pickup truck, welds an explosive device onto the front, crashes it through a perimeter and into a crowd of people, is that Toyota’s responsibility?…

“The N.S.A. wrote an exploit that was never designed to do what was done.”

Microsoft rejects that analogy: “These exploits are developed and kept secret by governments for the express purpose of using them as weapons or espionage tools. They’re inherently dangerous. When someone takes that, they’re not strapping a bomb to it. It’s already a bomb.”

EternalBlue is being packaged as part of many malware attacks as one possible lateral movement tool. Making a bomb is very much responsibility of the creator.

NSA toyota analogy was not correct. Exploit is like a bomb its a different matter who detonate it and where. NSA is very much responsible for their malicious espionage tools.

https://twitter.com/waveslide/status/1132442317372219392

EternalBlue was leaked 2 years ago. MS patched BEFORE it hit the wild. Some industry gossip the NSA knew they’d lost control and gave MS a heads-up. THIS PATCH HAS BEEN OUT FOR TWO YEARS! If it hits your network now, you deserve it. Usually, it’s a component of a malware package.

China has also been able to intercept an NSA tool as it attacked their networks. They stopped it, copied it, modified it, and sent it back to us and all of our allies.


‏ @bitsdigits
No, it wasn’t the NSA hacking tool that did this. It was basic exemptions to the #Baltimore #CIO policies that didn’t address patch management deficiencies that did this. Has anyone looked at what .gov requirements are
https://home.dotgov.gov/registration/requirements/

In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen N.S.A. Tool Wreaks Havoc

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/us/nsa-hacking-tool-baltimore.html

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.

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.

< – >

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/us/nsa-hacking-tool-baltimore.html

In Pennsylvania School Districts Stockpiling Huge budget surplus accounts, while still raising property taxes every year

[ECP] NetHappeinings 3/12/19 #K12 #CPO

#NetHappenings @Nethappenings

3/12/19 #Web30 The World Wide Web turns 30 today!

Do you remember what life was like 30 years ago, pre-www,  when cyber-utopians heralded the new era of human collaboration and communication to  the underworld of social media posts called  ‘e-bile’?

Who Invented the Internet?
Who Controls The Internet?
Seven people control the system at the heart of the web: the domain name system, or DNS.

NetHappenings Where Internet Pioneer Gleason Sackmann got things started.

► @NetHappenings 

► K12PlayGround TM 
1st and oldest online K12 School directory in the World ©1993 History:
Be a part of Internet History!
Find, Edit, and Submit your K12 school information.
Join a #STEAM Project link to video project  find with #hashtags
@K12PlayGround

► EduTech of ND @EduTechND History: Where Internet Pioneer Gleason Sackmann got things started.
EduTech provides information technology services and education technology professional development to K-12 educators in ND.

https://twitter.com/edutechnd

Girls Go CyberStart. The 2019 Girls Go CyberStart program is a series of online challenges that allow students to act as cyber protection agents to solve cybersecurity-related puzzles and explore related topics such as cryptography and digital forensics.
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► NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system. It is available for a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices.

Marcus J. Ranum, #Computer and #NetworkSecurity Researcher is now discussing our assumptions about #ComputerSecurity at #govsatcom 2019 #CyberSecurity #Luxembourg

2011 “The Internet will remain as insecure as it is possible to be and still function. ” -Marcus Ranum

► Amnesty Demands Israel Revoke NSO’s License After Haaretz Report on Firm’s Negotiations With Saudis Israeli Firm’s Spyware Was Used to Track Khashoggi

► Coinbase’s Newest Team Members Helped Authoritarians Worldwide Monitor Journalists and Dissidents H — king team
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/26/fear-this-man-cyber-warfare-hacking-team-david-vincenzetti/

Never underestimate power, never underestimate fame. And our nation is run on loyalty, whether it be in Congress or your own little home, we’re positively tribal. Being rich and famous does not entitle you to break society’s rules. From time immemorial the wealthy have paid for silence, look at banks and offshore tax accounts.

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How much less California spends on each public school student than other states.
$25.4k per student in NYC, $16.7k in PA and $10.4k here in California.
How do young families keep moving  to CA?

Rankings of the States 2017 and Estimates of School Statistics 2018

California is 41st in the nation in per pupil K-12 spending, 

California is “No. 1 in per prisoner” spending.

Mostly True: You are shocked because the stats are bunk. Look at how much California teachers make (2nd highest in US) and then ask how overall spending could rank 41st? Answer: the 41st stat, like the $10.4k per student stat, has been helpfully “adjusted” to eliminate salary differences.

FALL ENROLLMENT 49,800,148 children
Average Daily Attendance 46,457,525 children

2017 High School Graduates 3,238,440 page 18

AVERAGE SALARY OF INSTRUCTIONAL STAFF 60,206 page 25
AVERAGE SALARY OF TEACHERS  58,479 page 26

How Much Federal Money follows the child out of the public school system into for profit charter follows no rules companies.

PUBLIC SCHOOL REVENUE PER STUDENT IN FALL ENROLLMENT page 29
PERCENTAGE OF COMBINED STATE & LOCAL REVENUE 49.8 page 34

The exceptions start on page 83
example: Enrollment figures only include students attending public schools and do not include those students attending private schools at public expense.

WHAT ABOUT ALL THE MONEY FROM THE LOTTERY?

Is The Lottery Shortchanging Schools?

Powerball Windfall? Schools Don’t Always Benefit From Lottery Sales

“Revenues generated from lottery have very little or no impact on overall education spending,” said Lucy Dadayan, a senior policy analyst at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, an Albany, New York, think tank. The reason: State legislatures often use the millions of dollars that come in from the lottery as an opportunity to reallocate other funds intended for schools from the state’s general revenue, making the overall education budget barely higher than it was before lottery money was added. “The state legislators added the funding in to the budget, and then they take it out,” said John O’Neil, communications director for the Virginia Education Association, an organization of more than 50,000 teachers and school professionals.

►Public school districts large systems that serve close to or more than 100,000 students have No Chief Privacy Officers.

Who is senior-level official who is responsible for the organization’s privacy policies and data governance in your school district?

Big Education Ape: Oakland, CA: Billionaires Will Convene to Discuss New Plans for Privatizing Public Schools | Diane Ravitch’s blog

Stats already show that Charter Schools do not graduate their students from high school.

Billionaires want all the K12 Department of Education money meant for the common good, the commons, our common wealth for their own pocket. These billionaires want the tax payers money for their own private  gain just to enrich themselves.

This has NOTHING to do with the quality of K12 Education.

The big business of selling student information and they do not protect their rights to privacy.

This is the art of the Steal.

https://www.newschools.org/about-us/team/donors/

Buying and selling the Data!

Anonymous at the top of the list
Chan Zuckerberg Foundation
Charles & Helen Schwab Foundation
The Walton Family Foundation
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
Perkins Hunter Foundation (Perkins family wealth started by opium drug running pirates)
The College Board
Michael & Susan Dell Foundation
John & Ann Doerr
Omidyar Network

► THERE ARE NO CHIEF PRIVACY OFFICERS IN K-12 EDUCATION

Children’s Rights K12 School Rights vs. Students Online privacy rights.

#StudentPrivacyRights

#ChiefPrivacyOfficer #CPO #K12CPO

STUDENT RIGHTS TO PRIVACY AND K12 SCHOOL RIGHTS VS. STUDENTS ONLINE PRIVACY RIGHTS.
 and

DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR STATE IS COLLECTING ABOUT YOUR CHILD?There isn’t a single school district with a K-12 CPO. In fact, it is still extremely rare for districts to hire even one full-time employee dedicated to privacy.

Student Privacy Bill Protection : No Parental Consent Needed for Data Mining

Anyone who tells you they don’t need privacy because they “have nothing to hide” is a sheep that will enable a total surveillance state. Just don’t do it. Privacies protect our basic human rights.

► This story on IBM hoovering up millions of Flickr photos to power its facial recognition machine learning is fascinating and a nightmare

►Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information

► : “Screen-grabbed from Facebook: a teacher had her students turn their phone volume up and create a collective record

Alex Stamos on Twitter: “This explains how Facebook plans to monetize a unified, 2 billion user end-to-end encrypted messaging service. I can’t think of a tech project with a more important privacy/safety balancing act than this one. I hope my friends working on it start public discussions on that.

Bob Lefsetz Zuckerberg’s Blog Post
A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking
This isn’t about privacy, this is about MONOPOLY!

 

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► COLLEGE ADMISSIONS IS BRIBED

A few months ago I was interviewing a college admissions coach who told me the following about how big of a donation it takes to get a child into an Ivy no questions asked: “There’s a certain magic number. It’s way higher than people think: $10 million.”

“what it takes to break into the 1% in various countries

$25 million nationwide college admissions cheating scam

“This case is about the widening corruption of elite college admissions through the steady application of wealth combined with fraud,” Andrew Lelling, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said at a news conference. According to Lelling, the ringleader of the scam is William Singer, owner of a college counseling service called Key Worldwide Foundation, who accepted bribes totaling $25 million from parents between 2011 and 2018 “to guarantee their children’s admission to elite schools.”
“The parents are a catalog of wealth and privilege,” Lelling said. “They include, for example, the CEOs of private and public companies, successful securities and real estate investors, two well-known actresses, a famous fashion designer and the co-chairman of a global law firm.”
Also named as defendants in the indictment are Robert Zangrillo, founder and CEO of the private investment firm Dragon Global; Bill Glashan, a businessman and international private equity investor; and Gordon Caplan, a New York attorney.

► Former PIMCO CEO Doug Hodge Named In Fraud Complaint Alongside Aunt Becky From “Full House”
Imagine surviving years of working with Bill Gross only to be taken down by bribing your kid into college. Um, Doug? You do have to talk in code. You’re doing a fraud.
JFC, you’d think a guy who spent that much time with Bill Gross would know how to bullshit properly.

@shamuskhan When I did my research on elite schooling, an admin officer/development person told me, “The price of admission to UPenn is $5M”; meaning that a gift of that amount would pretty much get your kid in. Other Ivies were “a bit more.” There’s been a pathway through development…
► ETHICS Labor Secretary’s @POTUS Tweets Raise Ethics Fears in Department
The question isn’t whether a Trump Cabinet member and public affairs workers running an agency Twitter account can “at” the president; it’s whether they can use social media to declare that a president seeking another term in office is responsible for new jobs and wage growth using figures the agency is tasked with compiling.
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Agence-France Presse ( @AFP ) is 51% owned by the French government, where little #Manu is channelling #Napoleon on a crusade to ‘control’ a
In August, I showed that was mixing its lobbying activity for reform and particularly with its news reporting, which should be independent. Making the video for  @Europarl_EN is a blatant conflict of interest.
How a Bicoin Evangelist Made Himself Vanish, in 15 (Not So Easy) Steps
#10 Buy a decoy house to fool the D.M.V.
2 Billion Unencrypted Records Leaked In Marketing Data Breach
What Happened And What To Do Next
EXCERPT:
I woke up this morning to discover, yet again, that I was one of a stupidly large number of people whose personal data had been leaked in the latest mega breach. Troy Hunt’s ‘have i been pwned? https://haveibeenpwned.com/‘ service informed me that 763,117,241 people have had their records leaked by Verifications IO: including verified emails, phone numbers, addresses, dates of birth, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram account details, credit scoring and even mortgage data such as amount owing and interest rates being charged. Which wasn’t the best news to receive first thing on a Sunday morning. But then things got even worse, a lot worse. SC Media UK reports <https://www.scmagazineuk.com/2-billion-records-leaked-breach-triple-size-earlier-reports/article/1578429> that Andrew Martin, CEO & founder of cybersecurity company DynaRisk, has revealed the true number of leaked records is much higher. How much higher? How does a total of 2,069,145,043 unencrypted records grab you?
So, what actually happened?

► 80 million records Data Breach Bleeping Computer <https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/insecure-database-leads-to-over-800-million-records-data-breach/> an unprotected MongoDB database was discovered by security researcher Bob Diachenko. Having cross-referenced the data, sitting there in plain text, with the have i been pwned site, Diachenko was able to conclude this was fresh to the market new information and not just a dump of previously breached data as has been seen with the recent Collection 1 leak <https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2019/02/01/2-2-billion-accounts-found-in-biggest-ever-data-dump-how-to-check-if-youre-a-victim/>. After doing some more investigative work, Diachenko was able to track the database back to the Verifications IO enterprise email validation service. This company validates bulk email lists for companies wanting to remove inactive addresses from newsletter mailouts. Diachenko reported, working alongside researcher Vinny Troia, that a total of 808,539,939 records had been leaked. The ‘mailEmailDatabase’ contained three sections: Emailrecords, emailWithPhone and businessLeads containing that data. However, Dynarisk CEO, Andrew Martin, also analyzed the data and came to the conclusion that on the one server exposed to the web there were actually four databases not just the one. He told The Register <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/08/verificationio_database_hole/>”Our analysis was conducted over all four databases and extracted over two billion email addresses. The additional three databases were hosted on the same server, which is no longer accessible.”

What data was leaked?

The security researcher who made the discovery, Bob Diachenko <https://securitydiscovery.com/800-million-emails-leaked-online-by-email-verification-service/>, says that “although not all records contained the detailed profile information about the email owner, a large amount of records were very detailed.” That detail included commonplace breach data such as email addresses and phone numbers, but went far beyond the basics as well. Information such as dates of birth, mortgages amounts and interest rates and social media accounts related to the emails in question. But it doesn’t stop there, you can also throw in basic credit scoring data, company names and revenue figures as well.

Should you be worried?
Yes, of course you should. This was, after all, a massive leak of the kind of personal information that would be a goldmine for the phishers and spammers of this world. However, that concern can be diluted by a number of factors. Not least there’s the small matter that nobody has found any compelling evidence that the data has actually been used for any criminal purpose as of yet. Although the databases were accessible for some time, as soon as the problem was disclosed to Verifications IO the service was taken offline and remains so. Which means that bad guys alerted by this news won’t be able to exploit it. What’s just as important as what was in the breach is what wasn’t. So, there were no social security numbers, no credit card numbers, no passwords. And, importantly, this was a leak not a hack: white hat researchers found the data was accessible rather than black hats looking to exploit it.
Can you mitigate your risk?…

► And they call crypto “magic money”
@ecb The European Central Bank is the central bank for Europe’s single currency, the euro. Its main task is to maintain the euro’s purchasing power.
Praet: As a central bank, we can create money to buy assets.
Kinda like ‘counterfeiting’ eh?!
Central bank monetary intervention of this distorted magnitude is the equivalent of mankind attempting to manipulate the weather….it likely has catastrophic consequences in the end.
Come on people, just let them do god’s work.  Goldman Sachs’ Blankfein on Banking: ‘Doing God’s Work’
HSBC warned of BOV hackers last year
Dozens of companies leaked sensitive data thanks to misconfigured Box accounts
Hospitals have ‘holy grail of personal data, ‘ yet their spending lags on 
digital security
Car alarms with security flaws put 3 million vehicles at risk of hijack
Drop Huawei or See Intelligence Sharing Pared Back, U.S. Tells Germany
Defense tech founded by Trump’s most prominent Silicon Valley supporters wins secretive military AI contract
Dreamers and Dropouts: Stories From Stanford, Cradle of Unicorns: The Good and the Bad of Stanford’s Massively Successful Startup Scene
Yes: a flying, jet-powered motorcycle As spec’ed out, the commercial speeder will weigh 231 lbs and be powered by four jet engines fueled with kerosene, diesel or Jet-A fuel. An ultralight version of the speeder will fly 60mph and won’t require a pilot’s license; alternatively, an experimental version of the craft will be able to fly over 150mph, but will require a formal license to fly. That aircraft should also have 30 minutes of flight time with 1200lbs of max thrust and a flight ceiling of 15,000 feet, though JetPack fully admits that most of its customers won’t need that…
Cyberization means it’s not your daddy’s war anymore: Kurdish rebels are exploiting an app to befriend and get information from Turkish soldiers. Reminiscent of the dating apps used by Hamas recently to spy on Israeli soldiers.

 NYC Media Lab newletter – https://nycmedialab.org/data/
How AI Will Rewire Us
Nicholas A. Christakis, Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale and author of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, believes AI is the only general purpose technology (GPT) that will fundamentally change our relations towards each other. If you look at any other GPT – the steam engine, electricity, the internet – these have changed everything around us except our “love, friendship, cooperation, and teaching” – what Christakis calls our evolutionary social suite. In this Atlantic piece, he explores how AI will be the first GPT to affect our social suite. Christakis noticed some peculiar things at his Yale lab. For one, when you include a cheerful bot who admits to occasional mistakes in a group assignment, the humans in the group work better together, vs. groups with bland robots. This holds true in larger experiments, with thousands of participants: “groups with mistake-prone bots consistently outperformed groups containing bots that did not make mistakes”. ~ Joly MacFie

John Gilmore  **Copyright seizure approaching** SpaCCS 2019 CFP (10+SIs): The 12th International Conference on Security, Privacy and Anonymity in Computation, Communication and Storage

Don’t submit your paper to this conference!  When researchers refuse to
supply their papers to the publishers who extort monopoly fees from
academic librarians, they have found the easiest way to tear down these
monopolies.

If you submit any paper to this conference, you will be forced
to assign your entire copyright in the paper to “Springer Nature
Switzerland AG”, now and forever, for their profit and your loss
and the public’s loss (see below).

Jun Feng is a program chair.  He should know to warn authors that
the whole conference is a scam on academic authors, which steals their
copyrights in order to extract large fees from academic libraries.  But
perhaps he did not mention this because he’s helping to run the scam.

I recommend publishing your work in Open Access conferences and journals in which (1) you are free to retain your copyright and control your
rights, and (2) the public is free to read your paper without paying
exhorbitant fees to a walled-garden publisher that prevents public
access to your scholarship.  See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access . 

For example, the USENIX
Association runs many respected conferences and does Open Access
publication of their proceedings (https://www.usenix.org/).  The Public
Library of Science journals are also Open Access
(https://www.plos.org/).  Open access publishing increases your impact,
because all potential readers can actually read your paper.  Many
funders and academic institutions *require* that your work be published
with open access, because they have seen how the academic publishing
monopoly has damaged academic libraries (and science in general).

For general info about the highly profitable scams around academic
publishing, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_publishing#Publishers_and_business_aspects

Jun Feng <

ju********@gm***.com











> wrote:

Papers must be clearly presented in English, must not exceed 14 pages (or
up to 20 pages with the pages over length charge) in Springer LNCS format (
https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines),

5G the Free WiFi Killer

From: Dave Burstein dslprime.com
Date: Monday, August 24, 2015
Subject: “5G the Free WiFi Killer” EE Times

The Intel/Verizon/Ericsson model of future wireless has everything controlled by a (carrier-managed) gateway. This report from the Intel Developers’ Forum suggests troubling consequences.
The EE Times article below may be making some assumptions I don’t share, but the underlying point is on target. The author fears a carrier gateway will impede WiFi and more. To be proven.
50-70% of wireless traffic now goes over WiFi, a figure that will increase as faster WiFi routers become common and more home gateways are configured to share unused bandwidth.
That’s an existential threat to phone companies depending on revenue from expanding data usage. They are fighting back in industry fora, including defining LTE-U/LAA as “LTE spectrum owners only” and seeking to dedicate 40 MHz of current WiFi spectrum to the 4 telcos.
Anyone who believes in a “multi-stakeholder” “open” Internet should be worried. In particular, the carriers are bringing this to industry only organizations especially 3GPP (the LTE standard setter), EU 5G groups, the Flex5GWare project and Horizon2020.
​
We badly need to get a consumer voice in these groups. I’ve raised the issue to Larry Strickling (U.S. Gov) and Kathy Brown (ISOC). vocal supporters of “multi-stakeholder.” The decisions being made in these groups will have more impact on consumers than the limited scope of the ITU/ICANN debate. I’m only one voice and I hope more speak up on the importance of the public interest.

5G the Free WiFi Killer

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327482&

Integrating comm comes at a price
8/21/2015 09:50 AM EDT
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—5G may be not much more than a moniker for what comes after 4G, but Intel clarified its vision recently at a keynote during the Intel Developer Forum 2015 (IDF, San Francisco, Aug.18-20). “Seamless” is the goal and it comes at a price.
The top-line is that Intel hopes to apply all its expertise in computing, networking and wireless communications to make a seamless 5G solution that incorporates distributed intelligence at all levels–from the smartphone to the router to the basestation aggregator to cloudlets, clouds and our fastest supercomputers.
The bottom line is that cellular, WiFi, centimeter- and millimeter wavelength bands must be seamlessly integrated from the user’s point-of-view, according to Aicha Evans, vice president of platform engineering group and general manager of the communications and devices group at Intel.
“5G is not about faster, but about integrating all types of connectivity,” Evans told her keynote attendees at IDF. “The building blocks of 5G are already here today.”
To the carriers this integration will come at a price, since 5G-for-all presents the opportunity to kill free WiFi and instead charge users for every data packet they send or receive, no matter which of the integrated communications technologies is used. At Evans’ keynote she gathered together carriers, service providers and strategists to outline what it is that they expect from 5G, including Alex Choi, chief technical officer (CTO) of SK Telecom (Asia), Bin Shen, Verizon’s vice president of strategy (U.S.) and Paul McNamara, vice president of Ericsson’s corporate strategy group (Europe).

However, before the panel painted the world-changing picture of extraordinary speeds and ultra-low latency–at a price–Intel’s Sandra Rivera, vice president of the data center group and general manager of the Internet of Things (IoT) described the benefits of 5G to the users.

“Intelligence will begin with at the base station,” Rivera asserted to the crowd at IDF. <snip>

—

Editor, Fast Net News, Net Policy News and DSL Prime
Author with Jennie Bourne  DSL (Wiley) and Web Video: Making It Great, Getting It Noticed (Peachpit)

XRay, first step in understanding how personal data is being used on web services

New tool makes online personal data more transparent

8/18/14 Columbia Engineering researchers develop XRay, first step in understanding how personal data is being used on web services like Google, Amazon, and YouTube

New York, NY—August 18, 2014—The web can be an opaque black box: it leverages our personal information without our knowledge or control. When, for instance, a user sees an ad about depression online, she may not realize that she is seeing it because she recently sent an email about being sad. Roxana Geambasu and Augustin Chaintreau, both assistant professors of computer science at Columbia Engineering, are seeking to change that, and in doing so bring more transparency to the web. Along with their PhD student, Mathias Lecuyer, the researchers have developed XRay, a new tool that reveals which data in a web account, such as emails, searches, or viewed products, are being used to target which outputs, such as ads, recommended products, or prices. They will be presenting the prototype, which is designed to make the online use of personal data more transparent, at USENIX Security on August 20. The researchers have posted the open source system, as well as their findings, online for other researchers interested in studying how web services use personal data to leverage and extend.
“Today we have a problem: the web is not transparent. We see XRay as an important first step in exposing how websites are using your personal data,” says Geambasu, who is also a member of Columbia’s Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering’s Cybersecurity Center.
We live in a “big data” world, where staggering amounts of personal data—our locations, search histories, emails, posts, photos, and more—are constantly being collected and analyzed by Google, Amazon, Facebook, and many other web services. While harnessing big data can certainly improve our daily lives (Amazon offerings, Netflix suggestions, emergency response Tweets, etc.), these beneficial uses have also generated a big data frenzy, with web services aggressively pursuing new ways to acquire and commercialize the information.
“It’s critical, now more than ever, to reconcile our privacy needs with the exponential progress in leveraging this big data,” says Chaintreau, a member of the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering’s New Media Center. Geambasu adds, “If we leave it unchecked, big data’s exciting potential could become a breeding ground for data abuses, privacy vulnerabilities, and unfair or deceptive business practices.”
Determined to provide checks and balances on data abuse, XRay is designed to be the first fine-grained, scalable personal data tracking system for the web. For example, one can use the XRay prototype to study why a user might be shown a specific ad in Gmail. Geambasu and Chaintreau found, for example, that a Gmail user who sees ads about various forms of spiritualism might have received them because he or she sent an email message about depression.
Developing XRay was challenging, say the researchers. “The science of understanding the use of personal web data at a fine grain—looking at individual emails, photos, posts, etc.—is largely non-existent,” Geambasu notes. “There really isn’t anything out there that can accurately pinpoint which specific input—which search query, visited site, or viewed product—or combination of inputs explains which output. It was clear that we needed to come up with a new, robust auditing tool, one that can be applied effectively to many different services.”
How it Works
“We knew from the start that our biggest challenge in achieving transparency would be scale—how do we continue to track more data while using minimum resources?” Chaintreau says. “The theoretical results were encouraging, but seemed too good to be true. So we tested XRay in actual situations, learning from experiments we ran on Gmail, Amazon, and YouTube, and refining the design multiple times. The final design surprised us: XRay succeeded in all the experiments we ran, and it matched our theoretical predictions in increasingly complex cases. That is when we finally thought that achieving web transparency at large is not a dream in a distant future but something we can start building toward now.”
The current XRay system works with Gmail, Amazon, and YouTube. However, XRay’s core functions are service-agnostic and easy to instantiate for new services, and they can track data within and across services. The key idea in XRay is to use black-box correlation of data inputs and outputs to detect data use.
To assess XRay’s practical value, the researchers created an XRay-based demo service that continuously collects and diagnoses Gmail ads related to a set of topics, including various diseases, pregnancy, race, sexual orientation, divorce, debt, etc. They created emails that included keywords closely related to one topic and then launched XRay’s Gmail ad collection and examined the targeting associations. XRay’s data is now available online to anyone interested in sensitive-topic ad targeting in Gmail.
“We’ve just started to peek into XRay’s targeting data and even at this early stage, we’ve seen a lot of interesting behaviors,” Geambasu says. “We know that we need larger-scale experience to formalize and quantify our conclusions, but we can already make several interesting observations.”
The researchers note that (1) It is definitely possible to target sensitive topics in users’ inboxes, including cancer, depression, or pregnancy. (2) For many ads, targeting was extremely obscure and non-obvious to end-users, which opens them up to abuses. (3) The researchers have already seen signs of such abuses, for instance, a number of subprime loan ads for used cars targeting debt in users’ inboxes. Examples of ads and their targeted topics can be found on the XRay website.
The tool can be used to increase user awareness about how their data is being used, as well as provide much needed tools for auditors, such as researchers, journalists, and investigators, to keep that use under scrutiny. Geambasu and Chaintreau, who recently won a Magic Grant from the Brown institute for Media Innovation to build better transparency tools, have made the XRay prototype available for auditors at http://xray.cs.columbia.edu.
“Our work calls for and promotes the best practice of voluntary transparency,” says Chaintreau, “while at the same time empowering investigators and watchdogs with a significant new tool for increased vigilance, something we need more of every day.”

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