I’m updating as I type this blog entry.
Hackers Hid
Backdoor In CCleaner Security App With 2 Billion Downloads -- 2.3
Million Infected
Users of Avast-owned security application CCleaner
for Windows have been advised to update their software immediately,
after researchers discovered criminal hackers had installed a
backdoor in the tool. The tainted application allows for download of
further malware, be it ransomware or keyloggers, with fears millions
are affected. According to Avast's own figures, 2.27 million ran the
affected software, though the company said users should not panic.
… The malware would send encrypted information
about the infected computer - the name of the computer, installed
software and running processes - back to the hackers' server. The
hackers also used what's known as a domain generation algorithm
(DGA); whenever the crooks' server went down, the DGA could create
new domains to receive and send stolen data. Use of DGAs shows some
sophistication on the part of the attackers.
A good summary, but nothing new.
Social media has to respond to government
“requests” to keep operating in that country. There is no higher
court to appeal to.
Snapchat
blocks Al Jazeera in Saudi Arabia at government’s request
Social media app Snapchat has blocked access to Al
Jazeera articles and videos on the platform in Saudi Arabia,
following a request from Saudi authorities.
Snapchat said it blocked access to AJ’s Discover
Publisher Channel at the request of authorities because it allegedly
violated Saudi laws.
Al Jazeera, a Qatari-backed broadcaster, was one
of the points of contention in the ongoing dispute between Qatar on
one side and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the UAE on the other.
All cut ties with Qatar for allegedly supporting terrorism. Doha
denies the accusation.
The complete shutdown of Al Jazeera was included
in the list of 13 conditions which Saudi Arabia gave to Qatar in
return for the removal of sanctions.
(Related). The law is whatever we say it is.
… Mr. Tuan’s arrest came just weeks after
Facebook offered a
major olive branch to Vietnam’s government. Facebook’s head
of global policy management, Monika Bickert, met with a top
Vietnamese official in April and pledged to remove information from
the social network that violated
the country’s laws.
While Facebook said its policies in Vietnam have
not changed, and it has a consistent process for governments to
report illegal content, the Vietnamese government was specific. The
social network, they have said, had agreed to help create a new
communications channel with the government to prioritize Hanoi’s
requests and remove what the regime considered inaccurate
posts about senior leaders.
Populous, developing countries like Vietnam are
where the company is looking to add its next billion customers —
and to bolster its ad business. Facebook’s promise to Vietnam
helped the social media giant placate a government that had called on
local companies not
to advertise on foreign sites like Facebook, and it remains a
major marketing channel for businesses there.
The diplomatic
game that unfolded in Vietnam has become increasingly common for
Facebook. The internet is
Balkanizing, and the world’s largest tech companies have
had to dispatch envoys to, in effect, contain the damage such
divisions pose to their ambitions.
… As nations try to grab back power online, a
clash is brewing between governments and companies. Some of the
biggest companies in the world — Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon
and Alibaba among them — are finding they need to play by an
entirely new set of rules on the once-anarchic internet.
And it’s not just one new set of rules.
According to a review by The New York Times, more than 50 countries
have passed laws over the last five years to gain greater control
over how their people use the web.
At least they don’t have to record their choices
in cursive. Perhaps we will soon need a new acronym: TO;CG (too old,
call grandpa)?
LOL
Democracy! Young Voters Are Baffled by Mail-In Ballots
Both sides in
Australia’s referendum on same-sex marriage wonder if millennials,
more accustomed to texting and social media, actually know how to
send a letter.
The future of democracy faces an unexpected
challenge from within.
Can young voters learn to use a mailbox?
The outcome of a national mail-in vote in
Australia this fall on sanctioning same-sex marriage may teeter on
the answer. “I don’t really know what the go is with post boxes,
stamps, that kind of thing,” says 23-year-old Anna Dennis. Ms.
Dennis, a sociology student at the elite Australian National
University, says the last time she had to mail a parcel “I took my
dad to help.”
… Tiernan Brady was recruited to run the
Equality Campaign after heading Ireland’s same-sex marriage
referendum in 2015. He says he starts campaign events by asking,
“How many people have posted a letter in the past year?”
Typically, “only a handful of hands go up,”
Mr. Brady says.
“Australians don’t do postal votes,” he
says. “The last one was in 1917, so we can safely say no one alive
remembers it.”
Like elsewhere, instant-message apps and email
have taken their toll. Mail volume has plummeted, according to
Australia Post, the national mail service: Australians sent a billion
fewer letters last year than a decade ago. Business and government
mail account for 95% of all letters.
Postal service appears to have joined the list of
habits abandoned by millennials, including paying by check and
answering the doorbell, a device that a majority in a recent Twitter
poll agreed was “scary weird.”
… Sending a letter is like recalling the times
table from grade-school arithmetic, says Yan Zhuang, a 21-year-old
politics major at the University of Melbourne. “You sort of
remember,” she says, “but not really.”
Australia Post says it doesn’t know how many
young people send mail. A 2015 study for the Royal Mail in the U.K.
found a third of them believe “writing letters is a thing of the
past.” Half said they wrote friends on social media every day;
most said they mailed about one letter a year.
Just out of curiosity, I’d like to see the cost
projections they based this advertising scheme on.
Verizon said it sent notices of disconnection to
the affected customers this month and those customers will have until
October 17th to find new mobile service. Verizon says that’s
plenty of time for people to find new networks as the customers
generate more in roaming charges than they generate income for
Verizon.
“These customers live outside of areas where Verizon operates our own network. Many of the affected consumer lines use a substantial amount of data while roaming on other providers’ networks and the roaming costs generated by these lines exceed what these consumers pay us each month.”
The interesting part of this story is that
Verizon’s letter to customers doesn’t provide any way for them to
stick with Verizon by reducing their data use. The letter simply
states the October 17 cut-off period. One affected customer
contacted
Ars Technica and said her family only used 50GB across 4
lines, which is well below the 22GB cut-off.
Verizon maintains that these customers are getting
the boot because of their roaming charges, but also fails to mention
that it advertised its own unlimited plans directly to these rural
customers in order to entice them to get plans. Now that the cost
has become more than Verizon can bare, they’re giving those
customers the boot.
Would lawyers use/trust/admit to a free resource?
New on LLRX
– The Fight to Bring Legal Research to the Front
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Sep 17, 2017
Via LLRX
– The
Fight to Bring Legal Research to the Front – Law librarian and
professor Brandon Adler identifies core issues to support educating
third year law students in a wide range of reliable free and low cost
legal resources. Many law librarians acknowledge that there is a
lack of awareness and use of alternative legal resources, with the
law student community as well across a large swath of attorneys in
firms both large and small.
Perhaps not the most comprehensive review, but at
least it’s a start.
New on LLRX
– AI And The Rule Of Law
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Sep 17, 2017
Via LLRX – AI
And The Rule Of Law – Our exposure to and reliance upon an
increasingly ubiquitous range of technology is intertwined with
issues related to intellectual property law. With smartphone cameras
used to capture and share what their respective creators otherwise
claim as intellectual property, to the devices, services and
applications that comprise the Internet of Things (IoT), Ken
Grady raises significant and as yet unresolved concerns
about how the rule of law will be applied in response to the use, and
misuse, of AI and digital personal assistants.
Why lies work? Why it is hard to change the first
thing you learn? The importance of a reliable first source?
Debunking
Study Suggests Ways to Counter Misinformation and Correct ‘Fake
News’
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Sep 17, 2017
News
release: “It’s no
use simply telling people they have their facts wrong. To
be more effective at correcting misinformation in news accounts and
intentionally misleading “fake news,” you
need to provide a detailed counter-message with new
information – and get your audience to help develop a new
narrative. Those are some takeaways from an extensive
new meta-analysis [fee req’d] of laboratory debunking studies
published in the journal Psychological Science. The analysis, the
first conducted with this collection of debunking data, finds that a
detailed counter-message is better at persuading people to change
their minds than merely labeling misinformation as wrong. But even
after a detailed debunking, misinformation still can be hard to
eliminate, the study finds. “The effect of misinformation is very
strong,” said co-author Dolores Albarracín, professor of
psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “When
you present it, people buy it. But we also asked whether we are able
to correct for misinformation. Generally, some degree of correction
is possible but it’s very difficult to completely correct…”
“Debunking: A Meta-Analysis of the Psychological
Efficacy of Messages Countering Misinformation” was conducted by
researchers at the Social
Action Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and
at the Annenberg
Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The
teams sought “to understand the factors underlying effective
messages to counter attitudes and beliefs based on misinformation.”
To do that, they examined 20 experiments in eight research reports
involving 6,878 participants and 52 independent samples. The
analyzed studies, published from 1994 to 2015, focused on false
social and political news accounts, including misinformation in
reports of robberies; investigations of a warehouse fire and traffic
accident; the supposed existence of “death panels” in the 2010
Affordable Care Act; positions of political candidates on Medicaid;
and a report on whether a candidate had received donations from a
convicted felon. The researchers coded and analyzed the results of
the experiments across the different studies and measured the effect
of presenting misinformation, the effect of debunking, and the
persistence of misinformation.”
(Related). Think this will help?
Bing now
shows fact checks in search results
Perspective. You think I would have run into any
Social Media tool this big, but strangely I have not.
Slack
valued at $5.1 billion after new funding led by SoftBank
Software
startup Slack Technologies Inc said it raised $250 million from
SoftBank Group Corp (9984.T)
and other investors in its latest funding round, boosting the
company’s valuation to $5.1 billion.
… Slack’s sizeable funding round reflects
the trend of a growing number of $100 million-plus checks pouring
into technology startups. In the second quarter this year, there
were 34 venture capital deals of $100 million or more, nearly triple
the 12 such transactions in the first quarter, according to data firm
PitchBook Inc.
Perspective. Maybe Apple is not crazy.
How Apple’s
Pricey New iPhone X Tests Economic Theory
Thorstein Veblen was a cranky economist of
Norwegian descent who coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption”
and theorized that certain products could defy the economic laws of
gravity by stoking more
demand with superhigh prices.
His 1899 book, “Theory of the Leisure Class,”
made him famous in his time and more than a century later his ideas
are embodied in products like Hermès handbags, Bugatti cars and
Patek Philippe watches.
For my students? Probably not…
Borrow,
Read, and Listen - The Open Library
The Open Library
is a part of the Internet Archive.
The Open Library is a
collection of more than one million free ebook titles. The
collection is cataloged by a community of volunteer online
librarians. The ebooks in the Open Library can be read online,
downloaded to your computer, read on Kindle and other ereader
devices, and embedded into other sites. Some of the ebooks, like
Treasure Island, can also be listened to through the Open Library.
Much like Google Books, the Open Library can be a
great place to find free copies of classic literature that you want
to use in your classroom. The Open Library could also be a good
place for students to find books that they want to read on their own.
The audio option, while very electronic sounding, could be helpful
if you cannot locate any other audio copies of the book you desire.
(Related). But, just in case…
eBooks and
Texts
The Internet Archive offers over 12,000,000
freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a
collection of 550,000
modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free
archive.org account.
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