Data breaches keep happening, they keep getting worse, and yet companies keep collecting our data in ever-more-invasive ways, subjecting it to ever-longer retention, and systematically underinvesting in security.

Why does this keep happening? Because it's affordable. In 2014, Home Depot breached more than 50,000,000 credit-cards; in 2016, they paid less than $0.34/customer in restitution.

There are longer-term reputational costs associated with breaches, but these are not generally factored into the quarterly-earnings-focused mindsets of corporate execs and strategists.

An awful lot of change could be made simply by adjusting the law, and it needn't even be something as far reaching as the European General Data Protection Regulation: even establishing a set of statutory damages that people caught in breaches were entitled to collect, and banning the use of binding arbitration clauses to escape these liabilities would go a long way.

Following a shocking exposé in the New York Times revealing how Facebook resorted to guerilla tactics to deflect blame amid their various scandals, including hiring Republican PR firm Definers which cast liberal critics as operatives for liberal financier George Soros, top representatives for the Hungarian-American billionaire have demanded answers.

While Facebook was under fire on Capitol Hill for allowing Russians to purchase advertising during and after the 2016 US election, liberal critics blamed the company for Hillary Clinton's loss - including activist protesters who put a public face on liberal opposition to the social media giant.

Defenders sought to discredit the activists by linking them to Soros.

A research document circulated by Definers to reporters this summer, just a month after the House hearing, cast Mr. Soros as the unacknowledged force behind what appeared to be a broad anti-Facebook movement.

Microsoft this week rereleased the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, version 1809, after fixing its data-deletion mess. But the new build still has an old mapped-drives bug that's causing headaches for admins.

Within days of Microsoft's first release of Windows 10 1809 at the beginning of October, IT pros noticed that Windows File Explorer indicated that mapped network drives appeared to be broken.

"Testing the new 1809 update, and everything seems to be fine except all mapped drives to Windows 2012 file servers show disconnected (red x) after reboots or logoff/on," wrote one IT pro on October 5, with many others confirming the same issue on company networks.

Some of the the UK's largest companies are planning to implant their staff with microchips to “improve security” and restrict employees from accessing “sensitive documents,” sparking ethical concerns over such a move.
The Swedish firm, Biohax, which makes human chip implants, claims it is in talks with a number of the UK’s major businesses from the financial and legal sectors, to implant their employees with the devices, the Telegraph reports.

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Jowan Österlund, founder and CEO of Biohax who is a former body piercer, told the paper that his microchips, which cost £150 each, could help financial and legal companies enhance security.

“These companies have sensitive documents they are dealing with. [The chips] would allow them to set restrictions for whoever,” he told The Telegraph

Cryptocurrency mining malware has been one of the most prolific forms of malicious software distributed by cyber criminals throughout 2018, but given how some view it as relatively benign compared with other more damaging attacks like ransomware and trojans, it's occasionally overlooked as a threat.

However, cryptojacking malware - which secretly hijacks the processing power of infected machines to mine for cryptocurrency on behalf of the attacker - is still ultimately a form of malware and users can't afford to be complacent about it.

That's because cryptocurrency miners give attackers a foothold into PCs which can be exploited to deliver more damaging malware in future, security firm Fortinet has warned in its latest threat landscape report - noting that underestimating cryptojacking places organisations under heightened risk.

The perpetrator's nickname was later used by another persona, which was allegedly involved in hacking the DNC’s servers and publishing information from them via WikiLeaks ahead of the US presidential elections in 2016.

Romania has conditionally released Marcel Lazar Lehel, a hacker known by the nickname Guccifer, and who in 2016 claimed to have hacked former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email account. However, his release only served as a means to extradite the hacker to the US, where he is set to face another sentence lasting 52 months, a court in Alba Iulia reported, citing Interpol. The extradition took place several days ago.

Google has been hit by the 'worst ever' internet hijack in the company's history, security experts say.

Information from users' Google searches, cloud-hosting services and the company's bundle of collaboration tools for businesses - known as G Suite - were all affected.

Data belonging to users across the globe was intercepted by servers in Nigeria, China and Russia - including those run by major state-owned telecoms providers.

Security experts suggested the hack was a 'wargame experiment' - meaning it may prelude similar, more wide-scale attacks from the nations involved in future.

Google is downplaying Monday's incident, saying it does not believe it was malicious, but has failed to allay fears that the personal data of millions of users may have been compromised.

In recent weeks, NATO conducted its largest military exercises in decades in the frigid waters and icy mountains of Norway. But something odd happened. The GPS signals guiding ships, aircraft, tanks, trucks and troops started to fail.

Civilian airliners, cars, trucks, cargo ships and smart phones operating in and around Norway and Finland experienced similar disruptions.

Why?

Russia is the chief suspect.

It was riled by the scale and location of NATO’s Trident Juncture manoeuvres — despite having itself conducted several massive military exercises in the Baltics recently.

Is Florida gearing up for Bush vs. Gore redux?

It's starting to look that way.

As Fox News reports, lawyers are arriving in Democratic strongholds in Florida as the state prepares for a recount in Broward County, the epicenter of the vote-counting controversy that led to Bush vs. Gore, and Palm Beach County. Both are Democratic strongholds that have been extremely slow to deliver final ballot totals for Tuesday's election.

To try and push for a hand recount, defeated incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson has hired Democratic attorney Marc Elias of law firm Perkins Coie to help plead his case and point out suspicious "inconsistencies" with the vote count in Broward, where more than 20,000 voters voted in down-ballot races but left out their votes for governor's race, in which Nelson's Democratic ally, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, has already conceded to Republican Ron DeSantis.

A newly-out memo containing the Obama admin’s talking points about “Russian hacking” in the 2016 election reveals how US spy agencies attributed email leaks to Kremlin by saying it’s “consistent” with what they think Russia does.

The seven-page document was contained within the 49 pages published on Friday by BuzzFeed, which obtained them through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) inquiry from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in late October. At the root of it is a November 29 letter by several Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, asking then-President Barack Obama to declassify documents concerning “Russian Active Measures.”

Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Justice Department for all records of communications relating to the investigation into former Democratic information technology (IT) staffers Abid Awan, Imran Awan, Jamal Awan and Hina R. Alvi (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-02563)).

Imran Awan and his family were banned from the House computer network in February 2017 after the House’s top law enforcement officer wrote that Imran is “an ongoing and serious risk to the House of Representatives, possibly threatening the integrity of our information systems,” and that a server containing evidence had gone “missing.” The inspector general said server logs showed “unauthorized access” and procurement records were falsified.

Apple has long understood that hardware products that last a long time result in falling unit sales, as customers opt to keep their old machines instead of buying the latest models; that's part of why the company led the charge that killed every single Right to Repair bill introduced last year -- less repairs leads to more "recycling," which is Applespeak for dropping used units into giant shredders without harvesting any usable parts first.

Every year, refurbishers rescue thousands of used Apple products from the e-waste streams, and every year, Apple finds new ways to frustrate their efforts.

The latest wrinkle: Apple has gotten Amazon to agree to ban the sale of refurbished Apple products except those that come from Apple directly.

Aaron Perzanowski, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and coauthor of The End of Ownership, told me in an email that this decision is a dangerous infringement of ownership rights.

The war in Washington will not end until the presidency of Donald Trump ends. Everyone seems to sense that now.

This is a fight to the finish.

A postelection truce that began with Trump congratulating House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — “I give her a great deal of credit for what she’s done and what she’s accomplished” — was ancient history by nightfall.

With the forced resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his replacement by his chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, the long-anticipated confrontation with Robert Mueller appears at hand.

Sessions had recused himself from the oversight role of the special counsel’s investigation into Russiagate. Whitaker has definitely not.

Before joining Justice, he said that the Mueller probe was overreaching, going places it had no authority to go, and that it could be leashed by a new attorney general and starved of funds until it passes away.

We’ve been warning about this moment since the first day TruePublica went online. We said that the government would eventually take the biometric data of every single citizen living in Britain and use it for nefarious reasons. DNA, fingerprint, face, and even voice data will be included. But that’s not all.

The excuse to be used, as ever, will be national security or terrorism, despite the huge fall in fatalities from terrorism and terror-related incidents since the 1970s.

Apart from crime-fighting, the Home Office also proposes in its long-awaited report that it will use the centralized database for vetting migrants on the streets and borders of Britain.

This year Facebook filed two very interesting patents in the US. One was a patent for emotion recognition technology; which recognises human emotions through facial expressions and so can therefore assess what mood we are in at any given time-happy or anxious for example. This can be done either by a webcam or through a phone cam. The technology is relatively straight forward. Artificially intelligent driven algorithms analyses and then deciphers facial expressions, it then matches the duration and intensity of the expression with a corresponding emotion. Take contempt for example. Measured by a range of values from 0 to 100, an expression of contempt could be measured by a smirking smile, a furrowed brow and a wrinkled nose. An emotion can then be extrapolated from the data linking it to your dominant personality traits: openness, introverted, neurotic, say.

If Microsoft wants to treat Windows 10 as a service, it has a responsibility to its customers to provide accurate information about problems with that service. Over the last month, the company has failed miserably in that regard.

n so many ways, elections in America have become just another manifestation of bread and circuses; like watching a reality TV show when your house is on fire. It’s why this article was almost named:

“The Inevitableness of Reality Requires Honesty and Acceptance”

Of course, the 2018 Midterm Elections will be analyzed ad nauseam, with other writers and pundits parsing it better than this blogger. However, suffice it to say: There was no Blue Wave and Trump has now solidified leadership of his Republican Party; at least more so than during the last two years of his administration.

In a raucous press conference the day after, Trump claimed victory and said his party “defied history to expand our Senate majority”. The president also said his focus in the days prior to the election remained on the senate and pointed out that most of the candidates for whom he campaigned had won their respective races.

Communicating is the most vulnerable element in any foreign agent operation, particularly as counter-intelligence services commit major resources to cracking the systems used to link an agent in the field with his case officer or handler, who might be in the same country under diplomatic cover but just as easily might be in another nearby country or halfway around the world.

Britain's unwillingness to launch a thorough investigation into the alleged hacking of Belgacom exposed in 2013 amounts to nothing less than an international scandal, IT specialists told Sputnik, suggesting that European nations need to form an open alliance for defence and intelligence to mitigate risks and reduce reliance on other nations.

"That Belgacom, an EU member state-owned telecommunications company, is alleged to have been targeted for monitoring/hacking by GCHQ spies is staggering enough, but the fact that the UK is seemingly not interested in cooperating with the Belgian government to get to the bottom of this is downright scandalous," Robin Wauters, European technology journalist and founding editor of Tech.eu, Belgium, told Sputnik.

A surgeon has described the tense atmosphere in an operating theatre as a pioneering robotic heart operation went catastrophically wrong.

At one point one of the assisting medics had his arms knocked by the robot which was being used to repair retired music teacher and conductor Stephen Pettitt's heart valve, an inquest was told.

Communication between lead surgeon Sukumaran Nair and his assisting surgeon Thasee Pillay was difficult because of the 'tinny' sound quality coming from the robot console being operated by Nair.

Eric Adams, the president of Brooklyn Borough, and state Senator Kevin Palmer are currently writing the proposed legislation, which would give law enforcement authorities the power to check up to three years of an individual’s social media accounts and internet search history before they are allowed to buy a gun, WCBS Newsradio 880 reported. One of the main aims is to identify any hate speech shared by the users, as the politicians noted that such offensive comments are generally only discovered after mass shootings occur.

The facile explanation for this ridiculous piece of legislation is this: somehow the Pittsburgh shooter might have been prevented from buying a gun because he posted anti-Semitic content to a social media platform.

The motivation behind this move is that the government thinks that the word is too broad and is urging people to employ more specific phrases such as “disinformation” and “misinformation” instead.

The most troubling aspect about all of this, however, is that the British government could abuse this new stance to censor free speech on social media. The Telegraph reported that the Digital, Culture, Media, and Sports (DCMS) Committee, whose inquiry prompted this policy, wrote in its interim report earlier this summer that “With such a shared definition, and clear guidelines for companies, organisations, and the Government to follow, there will be a shared consistency of meaning across the platforms, which can be used as the basis of regulation and enforcement.”

WHEN A COMPANY called HawkEye 360 wanted to test its wares, it gave an employee a strange, deceptive task. While the worker stood in Virginia, he held the kind of transceiver that ships carry to broadcast their GPS locations. Usually such a signal would reveal his true position to a radio receiver, but he’d altered the broadcast to spoof his GPS position, making it seem like he was in fact off the coast of Maine.

But his company’s instruments, which in this test were carried by Cessnas flying routes over East Coast waters, picked up on the chicanery. Now HawkEye 360, the satellite startup that made the detectors, plans to send its first three instruments into space later this month. Called Pathfinder, the cluster of satellites will work together to locate and make sense of radio emissions beamed up from the ground. With it, HawkEye 360 gains access to communications information that has mostly been controlled by governments.

This week, arch-technocrat and welfare tax-queen, Elon Musk, was caught fear-mongering on the specter of A.I again,

“He reiterated those fears in an interview published Friday with Recode’s Kara Swisher, though with a little less apocalyptic rhetoric. “As AI gets probably much smarter than humans, the relative intelligence ratio is probably similar to that between a person and a cat, maybe bigger,” Musk told Swisher. “I do think we need to be very careful about the advancement of AI.” (Vox.com)

What he didn’t mention is how he just received SEC approval to start raising millions in capital for his new start-up company Neuralink, a company that seeks to create Brain Chip Interfaces, “BCI’s” for human’s to interface with computers. Yes, $100 million dollars in first round funding to plug the human mind into future advanced systems that he constantly puts down and deems a threat to the species.

A number of Republican political operatives are growing concerned that a voter app developed by former Obama aides will help the Democrats win the turnout war -- and the House majority.

“It just blew my mind when I saw it,” said a top Republican adviser of the phone app called VoteWithMe.

“This is the most ingenious and devious thing the Democrats have come up with and I bet you’ll be writing about it as the key to any victory if they win,” said another former party official.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has launched a "Magna Carta for the web", warning that tech giants must change their ways to save the online world from the dangerous forces they have unleashed.

Sir Tim, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989, called for a "revolution" in how the internet is regulated and monetised in order to stem abuse, political polarisation and fake news.

The 63-year-old was speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon to launch a new "contract for the web" which asks internet companies to uphold a set of principles such as protecting privacy and being transparent about their algorithms.

Facebook and Google have backed the contract, which will be agreed in detail next year, despite both companies being mentioned by its creator as examples of how "the web we know and love" is under threat.

EFF filed papers with the court in its long-running Jewel v. NSA mass spying case today that included a surprising witness: Edward Snowden. Mr. Snowden’s short declaration confirms that a document relied upon in the case, a draft NSA Inspector General Report from 2009 discussing the mass surveillance program known as Stellar Wind, is actually the same document that he came upon during the course of his employment at NSA contractor. Mr. Snowden confirms that he remembers the document because it helped convince him that the NSA had been engaged in illegal surveillance.

At least three US states have activated and put National Guard cyber-security units on standby for midterm elections. The three states are Washington, Illinois, and, more recently, Wisconsin.

According to officials, these cyber-security teams will be prepared to assist state election officials in the event of a cyber-security incident during the elections.

Iran says it has successfully thwarted a wave of cyber attacks apparently staged by Israel to target the country's communications infrastructure, saying it will certainly follow up on the “hostile” scheme via international mechanisms.

Hamid Fatahi, CEO of Iran’s Telecommunications Company, took to Twitter on Monday to report an attempt by “an occupying regime” to launch “sporadic” cyber assaults against the Islamic Republic’s communications infrastructure, in reference to the regime in Tel Aviv.

All the attacks, he added, “were firmly foiled.”

“They showed to the Int’l community that their accusation against Iran for #CyberAttacks was just a ridiculous delusion. Remember Stuxnet,” Fatahi added in a consecutive tweet, saying defeating the attackers had been such an easy feat for Iranian experts.