As easy as 123456: the 25 worst passwords revealed | Technology Good news! People are still astonishingly bad at picking secure passwords, and if you run your fingers across the top row of your keyboard, you will probably type seven of the 15 most-used passwords at once. When we say “good news”, we mean “good news for people who want to break into password-protected accounts”, of course. If you are one of the people with a bad password, that is very bad news indeed. Password management firm SplashData has compiled more than 2m passwords leaked over the course of 2015, to find the 25 worst passwords – those used by the most people at the same time. Topping the list for yet another year is the gold standard of awful passwords, 123456, while hot on its heels is perhaps the only password worse still: password. Of course, there will always be some passwords which are the most used passwords. But Brian Spector, the chief executive of security firm Miracl, argues that the list is yet more evidence that passwords are broken altogether. 1) 123456 (unchanged)
Halamka: Time is right for patient-generated data, care traffic controllers needed Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is gearing up to get data from patients’ consumer devices like Fitbit, Jawbone UP, or Withings weight scale into their EHR, according to CIO and emergency room physician Dr. John Halamka. Halamka says a number of factors make now the time for patient-generated data: devices have reached the maturity and ease of use needed to be a part of people’s care regimen; changing payment models are incentivizing the shift; and the emergence of middleware like Apple’s HealthKit will present hospitals with the piece that’s hitherto been missing in the patient generated data puzzle. “In Massachusetts, it turns out fee for service is dying fast and being replaced with alternative quality contracts,” Halamka told MobiHealthNews. Halamka offered up his own Withings Pulse O2 tracker and weight scale as an example of what’s possible now from low-cost consumer trackers. “This is exactly what has been in production for the last year or so,” Halamka said.
Home Would The Real ‘Alec Couros’ Please Stand Up? Last September, I wrote a post about how scammers had been using my photos to lure women into online, romantic relationships for the purpose of ‘borrowing’ or extorting money. Since that time, the scams have continued. I get, on average, one new report a day from women (and occasionally men) who have been tricked, or nearly tricked, into sending money. These scams are likely not perpetrated by a single individual. Searching ‘alec couros’ on Skype gets these resultsThese fake accounts are often deliberately difficult to detect because the scammers have blocked you from them. Likely, what I’ve learned the most throughout this predicament is that we need better systems for identity verification. Now, please share this post (or the key ideas within) with your colleagues, parents, friends, children, students, etc.
Apple bans developers from selling HealthKit data to ad platforms Late last week the Financial Times (sub. req.) reported that Apple had modified its iOS developer license agreement, its rules for developers that create apps for its devices, to ban developers from selling health data collected by HealthKit. The company wrote that developers must “not sell an end-user’s health information collected through the HealthKit API to advertising platforms, data brokers or information resellers”, according to the report. The agreement further demands that developers not use HealthKit’s API or the information collected from it “for any purpose other than providing health and/or fitness services”. In June Google announced its plans for Google Fit, a similar but more fitness-focused platform to Apple’s HealthKit, which already boasts partnerships with EHR vendors and various health systems across the country. In recent days a few reported details about Apple’s long-rumored iWatch device also emerged.
Welcome to 'uber-veillance' says Australian Privacy Foundation Regulators are way behind the game when it comes to wearable and IoT privacy, and users are willingly conspiring with companies that don't care about them to help create a society of “uber-veillance”. That's the grim conclusion reached by Australian Privacy Foundation (APF) board member and University of Wollongong researcher Katina Michael in conversation with The Register. In light of the US Federal Trade Commission's warning at CES that it's watching the Internet of Things closely, Vulture South wondered how things might stand in Australia and asked Michael for her views on the topic. One of the things that makes it hard for a regulator to formulate privacy rules covering things like RunKeeper, Fitbits and the like is that so much of the privacy invasion seems almost voluntary. “We know about peoples' measurements – sleeping, health, where they are, who they're with, engaged in sex, walking, running, speeding, burning calories”, Michael told Vulture South.
Lessons learned from social media identity theft - Regina MOOSE JAW – Kathy Cassidy has over a dozen followers in her grade one classroom at Westmount Elementary School in Moose Jaw. Online, she has over 8,000. But that popular identity was stolen. “The first feelings are panic and betrayal,” Cassidy said. “You feel so vulnerable.” An imposter quickly gained hundreds of Twitter followers, while posting crude and offensive things that Cassidy – a classroom technology advocate – never would. “It had the same photo, the same header, same background picture, the same biography, the same links,” she said. “The only thing different was the username.” Duplicating an online profile only takes seconds, according to Alec Couros. The social media expert and University of Regina professor says a well-known identity on the web not only fuels impersonation, but is also the solution. “To be able to say, ‘I know this person, I know that’s not this person who is online, that you’re being impersonated,’ is the number one skill to have,” said Couros. 1. 2. 3.
Google Genomics storing genomes in the cloud for longterm big data play Google’s genomics browser, from a video the company released last year. Between contact lenses for diabetes, big data baseline health studies, and a tiny pill that scans for cancer (not to mention curing death and setting up telemedicine visits based on search results), Google is casting a wide net in the health care field. But the company’s biggest contributions might come in an area where Google’s expertise is already established: storing and searching through large datasets. A new initiative, called Google Genomics, is courting researchers in an effort to store human genome data for them in a secure cloud for $25 per year. The MIT Technology Review recently reported that Google has, in fact, been quietly rolling out this service for months, but Google’s spat of other health projects overshadowed the news. Google isn’t the only one working on this project: Amazon is too, and a number of smaller players are lining up behind both databases.
TheGoodData wants your browsing data to benefit good causes A new scheme called TheGoodData launched on Thursday to help people protect their online privacy – or, if they’d rather allow themselves to be tracked, to allow the monetization of the resulting data for the benefit of microloan schemes in developing countries. The U.K.-based “data cooperative” has produced a Chrome plugin — based on Disconnect’s open-source technology — that acts as a blocker for the myriad advertising and analytics trackers that infest many webpages, stopping the data brokers behind those tools from following the user’s search and browsing history. If the user gives her permission, then TheGoodData itself acts as a data broker of sorts, albeit one that ensures the anonymization of the user data (including non-sensitive search queries) that it sells to ad vendors. “This is an issue of owning your personal data,” TheGoodData director Marcos Menendez said in a statement.
No, You Can’t Use My Photo for Your Fake Identity, and No, I Can’t Prevent It That’s my photo, but that’s not my name or occupation. My mug has been hijacked by someone pretending to be someone who does not exist. Like many of you, I had no idea this kind of thing went on. It’s called Catfishing. Welcome to the dark underbelly of openness. I’ve read with the greatest respect how Alec Couros has dealt with this. It’s happened a lot to Dean Shareski, too. Maybe it’s just Canadian educators who’s photos get stolen to create fake online identities to lure woman on dating sites to somehow con them. It’s the kind of thing that makes you say ‘GROSSSSSS’. My number came up today; a fellow flickr user sent me a message to say she had seen my photos reported on romancescam as some dude named David Frederickson (not the most suave non de plume -why is it not Dirk Savage, or Hank Grockman), with links on Facebook and LinkedIn. This is the photo David is using to be me. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog But what I can do is ask for help and
Now Google Wants Your Genome, Too Google is approaching hospitals and universities with a new pitch. Have genomes? Store them with us. The search giant’s first product for the DNA age is Google Genomics, a cloud computing service that it launched last March but went mostly unnoticed amid a barrage of high profile R&D announcements from Google, like one late last month about a far-fetched plan to battle cancer with nanoparticles (see “Can Google Use Nanoparticles to Search for Cancer?”). Google Genomics could prove more significant than any of these moonshots. Google began work on Google Genomics 18 months ago, meeting with scientists and building an interface, or API, that lets them move DNA data into its server farms and do experiments there using the same database technology that indexes the Web and tracks billions of Internet users. Some scientists scoff that genome data remains too complex for Google to help with. The explosion of data is happening as labs adopt new, even faster equipment for decoding DNA.
How do I permanently delete my account? | Facebook Help Centre 7AAICC39 The Social Life of Big Data 7AAICC39 The Social Life of Big Data Taught by Dr Mark Coté This module will provide students with the opportunity to explore an array of theories, concepts and practices in big data with a specific focus on its ‘social life’; that is, the data that we collectively generate through our myriad mediated cultural practices. Draft outline Week 1: What is Big Data? Key reading Beer, David, and Burrows, Roger. (2013) “Popular Culture, Digital Archives and the New Social Life of Data.” One essay of 4000 words (100%) Download your data - Accounts Help Important: If you download your Google data, it doesn’t delete it from Google’s servers. Learn how to delete your account or how to delete your activity. You can export and download your data for the Google products you use, for example: Email Documents Calendar Photos YouTube videos (Tip: If you can't find some of your YouTube videos, check if you have a Brand Account. If you have a Brand Account, you may need to switch accounts.) To keep your records or transfer your data to another service, you can create an archive. Important: If your actions seem risky, in order to protect your account, your actions may be delayed or unavailable. Step 1: Select data to include in your download archive Log into your Google Account. Step 2: Customize your archive format Delivery method** Send download link via email We'll email you a link to download your Google data archive. For "Delivery method," select Send download link via email. Add to Drive For "Delivery method," select Add to Drive. Add to Dropbox 1.