The FBI had obtained a warrant from a federal judge authorizing them to search and seize – to delete copies of – malicious software that had been surreptitiously installed in privately owned servers used to manage emails using Microsoft Exchange. The noteworthy part: The FBI was removing the malware first and attempting to notify the servers’ owners after the fact. This approach is almost unprecedented.
The United States needs a new social contract for the digital age—one that meaningfully alters the relationship between public and private sectors and proposes a new set of obligations for each. [...]
A similarly innovative shift in the cyber-realm will likely require an intense process of development and iteration. Still, its contours are already clear: the private sector must prioritize long-term investments in a digital ecosystem that equitably distributes the burden of cyberdefense. Government, in turn, must provide more timely and comprehensive threat information while simultaneously treating industry as a vital partner. Finally, both the public and private sectors must commit to moving toward true collaboration—contributing resources, attention, expertise, and people toward institutions designed to prevent, counter, and recover from cyber-incidents.
Facebook paid a cybersecurity firm six figures to develop a zero-day in Tails to identify a man who extorted and threatened girls.
Because we are intertwined in ways that make us vulnerable to each other, we are responsible for each other’s privacy. I might, for instance, be extremely careful with my phone number and physical address. But if you have me as a contact in your mobile phone and then give access to companies to that phone, my privacy will be at risk regardless of the precautions I have taken.
While it's creepy to imagine companies are listening in to your conversations, it's perhaps more creepy that they can predict what you’re talking about without actually listening.
Some good tips from Will Larson on internal platform design, fit, onboarding, and self-service.
Culture is not about the furniture in your office. It is not about how much time you have to spend on feel-good projects. It is not about catered food, expensive social outings, internal chat tools, your ability to travel all over the world, or your never-ending self-congratulation.
Culture is about power dynamics, unspoken priorities and beliefs, mythologies, conflicts, enforcement of social norms, creation of in/out groups and distribution of wealth and control inside companies. Culture is usually ugly. It is as much about the inevitable brokenness and dysfunction of teams as it is about their accomplishments. Culture is exceedingly difficult to talk about honestly.
A team of computer scientists has come up with a dramatically faster algorithm for one of the oldest problems in computer science: maximum flow. The problem asks how much material can flow through a network from a source to a destination if the links in the network have capacity limits.
The new algorithm is "absurdly fast," said Daniel Spielman of Yale University. "I was actually inclined to believe … algorithms this good for this problem would not exist."
For years, people have wondered not if, but how much, the Department of Homeland Security accesses mobile location data to monitor US citizens. This week, the American Civil Liberties Union released thousands of heavily redacted pages of documents that provide a "glimpse" of how DHS agencies came to leverage "a shocking amount" of location data, apparently purchasing data without following proper protocols to ensure they had the authority to do so.
In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has – without any judicial, legislative or public oversight – reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S., whose records can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.