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Category Archives: E-Records

End of Term Presidential Harvest 2020

“The Library of Congress, Internet Archive, University of North Texas Libraries, George Washington University Libraries, Stanford University Libraries, EDGI, and the U.S. Government Publishing Office have joined together for a collaborative project to preserve public United States Government web sites at the end of the current presidential administration ending January 20, 2021. This harvest is… Continue Reading

The CDC’s failed race against covid-19: A threat underestimated and a test overcomplicated

Washington Post: “A new virus was exploding in Wuhan, a Chinese city with 11 million people connected by its airport to destinations around the world. In the United States, doctors and hospitals were waiting for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop a test to detect the threat. On Jan. 13, the World Health… Continue Reading

2,000 Parents Demand Major Academic Publisher Drop Proctorio Surveillance Tech

Vice: “On Friday, digital rights group Fight for the Future unveiled an open letter signed by 2,000 parents calling on McGraw-Hill Publishing to end its relationship with Proctorio, one of many proctoring apps that offers services that digital rights groups have called “indistinguishable from spyware.” As the pandemic has pushed schooling into virtual classrooms, a… Continue Reading

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, December 20, 2020

Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, December 20, 2020 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly… Continue Reading

IMF – Your Credit Score Should Be Based on Your Web History

Gizmodo: “With more services than ever collecting your data, it’s easy to start asking why anyone should care about most of it. This is why. Because people start having ideas like this. In a new blog post for the International Monetary Fund, four researchers presented their findings from a working paper that examines the current… Continue Reading

How U.S. agencies’ trust in untested software opened the door to hackers

Politico – The government doesn’t do much to verify the security of software from private contractors. And that’s how suspected Russian hackers got in: “The massive monthslong hack of agencies across the U.S. government succeeded, in part, because no one was looking in the right place. The federal government conducts only cursory security inspections of… Continue Reading

Civil rights groups move to block expansion of facial recognition in airports

The Verge: “A coalition of civil rights groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union have filed an objection to the proposed expansion of Customs and Border Protections facial recognition at land and sea ports. The National Immigration Law Center, Fight for the Future, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are also participating in the motion,… Continue Reading

How Russian hackers infiltrated the US government for months without being spotted

MIT Technology Review – And why it could take months more to discover how many other governments and companies have been breached – “To carry out the breach, the hackers first broke into the systems of SolarWinds, an American software company. There, they inserted a back door into Orion, one of the company’s products, which… Continue Reading

The SolarWinds cyberattack: The hack, the victims, and what we know

Bleeping Computer: “Since the SolarWinds supply chain attack was disclosed last Sunday, there has been a whirlwind of news, technical details, and analysis released about the hack. Because the amount of information that was released in such a short time is definitely overwhelming, we have published this as a roundup of this week’s SolarWinds news.… Continue Reading

SolarWinds Attack—No Easy Fix

CRS Insight, December 15, 2020. SolarWinds Attack—No Easy Fix: “On December 13, 2020, the cybersecurity firm FireEye published research that a malicious actor was exploiting a supply chain vulnerability in SolarWinds products to hack into government and private sector information technology (IT) networks. SolarWinds confirmed the security incident.The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued… Continue Reading

U.S. Schools Are Buying Phone-Hacking Tech That the FBI Uses to Investigate Terrorists

Gizmodo: “In May 2016, a student enrolled in a high-school in Shelbyville, Texas, consented to having his phone searched by one of the district’s school resource officers. Looking for evidence of a romantic relationship between the student and a teacher, the officer plugged the phone into a Cellebrite UFED to recover deleted messages from the… Continue Reading