by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 9, 2016 | Initiative
More and more people are backing off from the Internet, frightened of cybercrime, privacy violations and very valid fears about the ever-more-glaring inadequacies of cybersecurity.
The Guardian reported: “When cybersecurity professionals converged in Las Vegas last week to expose vulnerabilities and swap hacking techniques at Black Hat and Defcon, a consistent theme emerged: The Internet is broken, and if we don’t do something soon, we risk permanent damage to our economy.”
“Half of all Americans are backing away from the net due to fears regarding security and privacy,” longtime tech security guru Dan Kaminsky said in his Black Hat keynote speech, citing a July 2015 study by the {U.S.} National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
“We need to go ahead and get the Internet fixed or risk losing this engine of beauty.”
Meanwhile, The Guardian reports: “The online crooks’ weapon of choice: crypto-ransomware, which encrypts all the data files on a user’s machine, making them inaccessible. The malware, which accounts for nearly 60% of all infections, according to research firm Malwarebytes, then displays a screen demanding hundreds of dollars. If victims don’t pay up in time, the files are destroyed.
“’Over the last few years attackers realized that instead of going through these elaborate hacks – phishing for passwords, breaking into accounts, stealing information, and then selling the data on the internet’s black market for pennies per record – they could simply target individuals and businesses and treat them like an ATM,’ says Brian Beyer, CEO and founder of enterprise security firm Red Canary.”
To read a Guardian article on this, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 8, 2016 | News
Japanese Emperor Akihito, in a rare televised address to the nation, talked about his ill health and cast doubts on his ability to carry out his duties as emperor much longer. He said that he wanted an orderly imperial family succession. Observers speculated that perhaps a regent might be appointed.
But Japanese law says the emperor must serve until death and is barred from appealing directly to be allowed to retire or abdicate. Thus legal changes may be needed for Emperor Akihito to step aside.
To read The Guardian’s story on this, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 8, 2016 | Initiative
Reuters has reported that Facebook is rejecting claims by German officials that the social-media company was reluctant to co-operate with them on criminal investigations of recent violent incidents in the country . The company says that many of the government’s requests for user data were incorrectly formatted.
To read the Reuters story, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 5, 2016 | News
This week’s show trials of lawyers who had the courage to defend those campaigning for human rights in the increasingly tough dictatorship of Chinese President Xi Jinping may be in the short-term interest of the Chinese government, but it will hurt the regime in the long term, writes the BBC’s Carrie Gracie.
“With many of the bravest and most defiant in China’s legal community now humiliated, cowed, discredited and jailed, who will represent the child poisoned by toxic milk powder, the ethnic minority academic accused of separatism, the feminist protesting sexual harassment or the citizen maimed by unaccountable thugs? In a world full of danger and drama, the Tianjin {show} trials have won little attention at home or abroad.
“Only China watchers and human rights campaigners freeze to attention as a mighty country, one which says it is ruled by law, holds a group of lawyers for a year without access to family or representation, and then convicts them in trials unworthy of a great nation.”
To read the essay, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 5, 2016 | News
To read about seven of Africa’s most innovative, if sometimes controversial, technology hacks, please hit this link.
African technologists are good at making lemonade from the sour lemons of unreliable power and corrupt governments.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 5, 2016 | Initiative
There is no such thing as a safe place in the cyberworld:
Cyber researchers have told Reuters that Iranian hackers have broken into more than a dozen accounts on the Telegram instant messaging service and identified the phone numbers of 15 million Iranian users, the largest known breach — so far — of the encrypted communications system.
Reuters reported that the attacks “jeopardized the communications of activists, journalists and other people in sensitive positions in Iran, where Telegram is used by some 20 million people, said the independent cyber researcher Collin Anderson and the Amnesty International technologist Claudio Guarnieri, who have been studying Iranian hacking groups for three years.”
“Telegram promotes itself as an ultra-secure instant messaging system because all data is encrypted from start to finish, known in the industry as end-to-end encryption. A number of other messaging services, including Facebook’s WhatsApp, say they have similar capabilities.”
But of course none of them are safe.
To read The Guardian’s story on this, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 4, 2016 | News
India seems about to launch the biggest economic reform since a huge deregulation program was enacted in 1991.
The upper house of India’s Parliament has passed a bill to streamline and unify taxes on 15 goods and services taxes across the country, which has long had an extremely balkanized tax and regulatory system.
The Washington Post reported:
“Analysts expect the federal goods and services tax rate to be set around 18 percent. That is lower than the current tax rate on many items, such as automobiles and most retail goods. With a lower tax rate, and with hopes for greater transport efficiency, business are expected to lower prices, spurring greater demand. Arun Jaitley, India’s finance minister, has said he hopes that all this will spur GDP growth by an extra 2 percent and create millions of jobs — once it goes into effect, that is”
To read the story on this news, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 4, 2016 | News
China is trying to create what it calls an anti-terrorism alliance with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, Chinese state media said on Aug. 4. China has faced Islamic terrorism in some of its western region.
China envisions a “four-country mechanism” for intelligence-sharing and training.
To read The Reuters on this, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 4, 2016 | News
Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai says that foreign forces should either leave Afghanistan to deal with its civil war, or focus on the Taliban’s foreign backers in Pakistan. And he says that bombing Taliban positions just makes things worse.
He told The Guardian:
Karzai emphasized to The Guardian that he is not “anti-Western”, and that he is “very, very sorry” for Western military lives lost in Afghanistan. But, “he warned that if foreign forces don’t change approach, those soldiers may have died for nothing.”
‘“NATO has been here for 14 years,’ he said, adding that foreign forces are fighting for the same districts as they were when they had 150,000 troops. ‘Are we better off? Do we have more security? No.
“’It means something is wrong. The way things are done, it has been in vain for us.”’
To read The Guardian’s story, please hit this link.
