Please try the URL privacy information feature enabled by clicking the flashlight icon above. This will reveal two icons after each link the body of the digest. The shield takes you to a breakdown of Terms of Service for the site - however only a small number of sites are covered at the moment. The flashlight take you to an analysis of the various trackers etc. that the linked site delivers. Please let the website maintainer know if you find this useful or not. As a RISKS reader, you will probably not be surprised by what is revealed…
Given the troubles over the Brexit referendum, where at present no acceptable solution appears to be possible, Great Britain seems likely to be splitting altogether. A new proposal is that England itself would splinter, with London, Oxbridge, and a few other regions becoming part of France (Fritainnia?) to remain within the EU, while the rest of England would become something like Less Britain. [Some pundits mistakenly see a parallel with the Greater Antilles and the Lesser Antilles, although in that case, size was the primary measure for the naming.] Despite the troubles over the Troubles, it appears that Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have finally decided to merge, with a new capital city to be built on the border (perhaps Dubbel, with the combined population, although Dubfast and Belin might also be under consideration). Reversing the 1973 referendum to split, this would enable Northern Ireland to remain within the EU, in the face of the uncertainties noted above. Scotland and Wales are still contemplating whether to join the new Fritainnia, or the new United States of Ireland; remaining with Less Britain somehow seems less likely to many observers. Finally, given all of the above, the British Parliament seems most likely to abolish itself altogether, starting first with the House of Lords (long overdue), and then Commons. [So, why is this relevant to RISKS? Once again, late-stage maneuvering seems to be just one more example of the results of short-term optimization instead of long-term planning. The Foresight Saga strikes again. PGN]
Cambridge, MA—The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ("MIT") today announced that—in addition to the usual SAT, ACT, etc., standardized tests—applicants to MIT will now also have to pass a Turing Test. “The Turing test, developed by [famed English WWII codebreaker and computer scientist] Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.''—Wikipedia “We've been overwhelmed by applications from robots,'' said Dr. Noah Gnurds, MIT Director of Admissions. Dr. Gnurds continued, "If we didn't filter out robot applications, our current acceptance ratio of 7.9% would be 10^-3 times as large. As it is, we send out ten times as many acceptance letters to robots as to human applicants. This new test will ensure that we admit people, not test scores." https://mitadmissions.org/apply/firstyear/tests-scores/ NYTimes reporter Ivy Leek asked, “Is MIT's announcement related in any way to the recent 'Operation Varsity Blues' college admissions scandal?'' “Not really. We doubt that MIT will be implicated, because MIT doesn't admit applicants too stupid not to use Tor, Signal and untraceable blockchain cryptocurrencies for their legacies,'' Dr. Gnurds responded. When asked how these new Turing Tests would be administered, Dr. Gnurds said, “Due to the substantial effort required to administer these tests, MIT has developed a new Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning program in conjunction with IBM's Watson research effort. IBM believes that Watson can sniff out even the most sophisticated robots.'' “Isn't there some irony in utilizing a robot to test for robots?' asked a reporter from MIT Technology Review. Noah replied, “It takes one to know one.''
WASHINGTON DC (4/1/2019)—Sources close to the recent Mueller probe leaked an unlikely finding in the investigation of Russian interference in U.S. elections. According to experts, social-media hackers engineered the upset victory of the mayor of a small city in Idaho. Vladimir Jackson won the top office of Moscow ID. with an astounding 97% of votes cast. "The election had to be rigged," said Solomon Spaulding, owner and operator of Moscow Haircuts. "I know most everybody in town, and nobody I know voted for him." Jackson, originally from New York City, ran on a black separatist platform, which advocates the creation of an independent Afro-American state in a region that is presently in Idaho. Reached for comment, Jackson denied any illegitimacy in the election. "Isn't that the way it always is?," he asked. "When a white guy gets elected nobody says the election is rigged, but when a black guy gets elected people just assume it can't be kosher. Give me a break!" "There is no doubt that Russians exerted influence in the Moscow mayor's race," said an informed source on condition of anonymity. "What we don't know is whether it's because the town's name is Moscow, the candidate's name is Vladimir, or maybe they sought to sow discord by supporting black separatism." A spokeperson for the Russian embassy denied any involvement, saying, "Why do we care about mayor? We got bigger fish. This is only to make us look bad. We no do it."
WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a nationwide sting operation involving 600 federal marshals and over 20 FBI field offices, the Justice Department indicted the principals of ThickerThanWater.com (TTW), a startup specializing in human DNA analysis. The indictment also names intelligence and law enforcement personnel. TTW had planned their initial public offering the following week. TTW was a deep-state cover business established for one purpose: Create, manage, and monetize a vast human DNA database to accelerate cold-case closure, exonerate the wrongly convicted, and track foreign espionage sleeper agents. To promote these objectives, TTW funded a "blood bounty" program enlisting nearly 10,000 phlebotomists over a 9-month interval. Records show that each participating phlebotomist pocketed almost $500/day, at $5 per sample cash, with no questions asked by patients subject to routine blood extraction per hospital or doctor wellness visit. Dropoff locations reportedly overflowed with blood samples containing personal identifying information. Hospital administrators were blind to the blood sample tube inventory turnover; the extra consumables were never missed. TTW's corporate charter sought to commercially exploit DNA telomeric extrapolation maps. These maps, when combined with Turing's tNose, enabled human exposome tracking. The exposome is the unique aroma, a scent-like fingerprint, that each person exudes from interactions between skin bacteria and pheromones. Telomeric extrapolation maps predetermine each person's mix of skin bacteria and pheromone, coupled to DNA replication and protein synthesis. Approximately 250 million DNA profiles were created by TTW and their army of phlebotomists-for-hire. Each profile was subject to real-time exposomal tracing. The Justice Department released a 2 minute-long videoclip of TTW's SOC “ Smell Operation Center “ showing red, blue, and green exposomal tracks with metadata updates across a large tessellated display. A Justice Department spokeswoman refused to comment on cold-case closures, prisoner releases, or sleeper spy discoveries. "I thought I was being patriotic when TTW called," said Ann, a phlebotomist with 12 years of experience. "I figured that law enforcement and intelligence agencies needed the help. The bounty added up quickly. Of course, I reported every nickel of bounty-earned income on my taxes—I kept sample records on my phone!" As TTW's CEO was perp-walked and frog-marched under police custody, she shouted, "Blood is thicker than water!"
I've lived around seaplanes all my life. At one point I spent a lot of time traveling up and down the coast in seaplanes, particularly Beavers. So I was very interested in this story about Harbour Air converting float planes to battery power. https://www.harbourair.com/harbour-air-and-magnix-partner-to-build-worlds-first-all-electric-airline/ https://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/harbour-air-to-add-zero-emission-electric-plane-aims-to-convert-whole-fleet-1.23770626 The initial conversion of a Beaver will be intriguing. I'll be fascinated when they get to convert an Otter (a candidate for world's noisiest aircraft) to electricity. (I know Harbour Air has a number of them.) I'll be wondering how well electric engines get along with salt water. Most of my flying time was at longer distances, so I'm curious about the half-hour range. (Although that's well within most of Harbour Air's scheduled flights.) I'll be interested in recharge time and reliability. (Harbour Air planes do tend to spend a lot of time sitting at the dock in the bay.) The complete changeover from turbine engine to electric infrastructure will be a non-trivial accomplishment. But, if it works, it could be pretty great ...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2019/03/25/british-airways-flight-lands-525-miles-away-destination-scotland-london-germany/3267136002/
The outage affected American Airlines, JetBlue, and other major airlines. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/26/18282767/sabre-outage-american-airlines-jetblue-alaska-delays
Widespread adoption of the web encryption scheme HTTPS has added a lot of green padlocks and corresponding data protection—to the web. Almost all of the popular sites you visit every day likely offer this defense, called Transport Layer Security (TLS), which encrypts data between your browser and the web servers it communicates with to protect your travel plans, passwords, and embarrassing Google searches from prying eyes. But new findings from researchers at Ca' Foscari University of Venice in Italy and Tu Wien in Austria indicate that a surprising number of encrypted sites still leave these connections exposed. https://www.wired.com/2016/11/googles-chrome-hackers-flip-webs-security-model/ In analysis of the web's top 10,000 HTTPS sites—as ranked by Amazon-owned analytics company Alexa—the researchers found that 5.5 percent had potentially exploitable TLS vulnerabilities. These flaws were caused by a combination of issues in how sites implemented TLS encryption schemes and failures to patch known bugs (of which there are many in TLS and its predecessor Secure Sockets Layer. But the worst thing about these flaws is they are subtle enough that the green padlock will still appear. https://www.wired.com/2014/04/heartbleed-embedded/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/poodle-explained/ https://www.acunetix.com/blog/articles/tls-vulnerabilities-attacks-final-part/ "We assume in the paper that the browser is up to date, but the things that we found are not spotted by the browser," says Riccardo Focardi, a network security and cryptography researcher at Ca' Foscari University, who also co-founded the auditing firm Cryptosense. "These are things that are not fixed and are not even noticed. We wanted to identify these problems with sites' TLS that are not yet pointed out on the user side." The researchers, who will present their full findings at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May, developed TLS analysis techniques and also used some from existing cryptographic literature to crawl and vet the top 10,000 sites for TLS issues. And they developed three categories for the types of vulnerabilities they found... https://www.wired.com/story/https-isnt-always-as-secure-as-it-seems/
An Israeli watchdog group has discovered a network of hundreds of fake Twitter accounts, all promoting the candidacy of PM Netanyahu and his party, using exact wordings of the party's official messages. These accounts "like" and re-tweet each other, in an attempt to create the impression of large grass-roots support. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/world/middleeast/netanyahu-fake-twitter.html Luckily, bots cannot actually vote (yet?)
The basics of the safety change were first described to airlines and pilot groups last November https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-scrutinize-timeline-for-boeing-737-max-software-fix-11553601603
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47715415 "Under the ISA system, cars receive information via GPS and a digital map, telling the vehicle what the speed limit is. This can be combined with a video camera capable of recognising road signs. Under the ISA system, cars receive information via GPS and a digital map, telling the vehicle what the speed limit is. This can be combined with a video camera capable of recognising road signs." RISKS Trifecta: GPS spoofing, digital map inaccuracies, digital image recognition.
A large-scale analysis of data has discovered widespread Russian government spoofing of the country's satellite navigation system. The findings underscore the dangers of relying on global positioning data. (This could also presumably lead to problems with Russian time enthusiasts using GLONASS for time synchronization in computer networks.) https://www.darkreading.com/risk/russia-regularly-spoofs-regional-gps/d/d-id/1334262
Millions of us now have virtual assistants, in our homes and our pockets. Even children's toys are getting smart. But when we talk to them, who is listening? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/26/smart-talking-are-our-devices-threatening-our-privacy
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