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Beyond ‘Likes’: CrowdOptic Uses Google Glass To Map Your Focus

October 4, 2013 Paul Roberts

Sometimes a technology becomes so ubiquitous and obviously useful that we (humans) cease to think critically about its shortcomings. As an illustration of this, imagine yourself teleported back in time to the island of Manhattan in 1900. You’d find a bustling metropolis, for sure. You might look around and notice that the people dressed differently, or that the skyline was different from what we’re used to. But I bet one of the things you’d notice first was the stench emanating from the piles of horse manure and puddles of urine. As this (great) post at The Daily Kos points out, there were 200,000 horses working in New York City by 1900. Those horses were dropping 4 million pounds of manure and 40,000 gallons of urine on city streets every day. “The ubiquitous street sweepers could only pile the stuff up in vacant lots, occasionally to the height of sixty feet. To […]

Health Exchanges Need A Fail Whale

October 3, 2013 Paul Roberts

In a blog post on Veracode’s blog today, I write about the problems encountered at government-run online health exchanges that were intended to connect millions to private insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act. The exchanges opened to the public on Tuesday, and they got off to a rocky start, with reports of web sites paralyzed as millions of uninsured Americans logged on to sign up for subsidized health insurance. In some cases, the problems appear to have been caused by “external factors.” New York State’s online health exchange was felled by the weight of more than 10 million requests of dubious origin, The New York Post reported. But other exchanges, including Healthcare.gov the federal government’s main health insurance storefront, which is used by residents or more than half of the states, were victims of their own success: overwhelmed when the doors swung open and millions of eager customers poured […]

FDA Will Regulate Some Apps As Medical Devices

September 24, 2013 Paul Roberts

In an important move, the U.S. Food And Drug Administration (FDA) has released final guidance to mobile application developers that are creating medical applications to run on devices like the iPhone and Android mobile devices. Some applications, it said, will be treated with the same scrutiny as traditional medical devices.* The statement is the final word from the FDA on the approach it will take when enforcing federal regulations regarding the safety of medical devices to the large and fast-growing category of medical applications. The agency said on Monday that, while it doesn’t see the need to vet “the majority of mobile apps,” because they pose “minimal risk to consumers,” it will exercise oversight of mobile medical applications that are accessories to regulated medical devices, or that transform a mobile device into a regulated medical device. In those cases, the FDA said that mobile applications will be assessed “using the same […]

Internet of Things Demands New Social Contract To Protect Privacy

September 19, 2013 Paul Roberts

Changes brought about by the Internet of Things demands the creation of a whole new social contract to enshrine the right to privacy and prevent the creation of technology-fueled Orwellian surveillance states in which individual privacy protections take a back seat to security and “control.” That, according to an opinion piece penned by the head of the European Commission’s Knowledge Sharing Unit. Gérald Santucci, in an essay written for the web site privacysurgeon.org, argues that technology advances, including the advent of wearable technology and the combination of inexpensive, remote sensors and Big Data analytics threaten to undermine long-held notions like personal privacy and the rights of individuals. The essays says that current approaches to data protection are “largely inadequate” to the task of reigning in the asymmetrical changes wrought by new technology. “Data collection and video surveillance will continue to grow as ubiquitous computing pervades almost all areas of our […]

APT-For-Hire: Symantec Outs Hidden Lynx Hacking Crew

September 17, 2013 Paul Roberts

This site and others have been writing about the “Advanced Persistent Threat” problem, which has generally been treated as a euphemism for the government and military of The People’s Republic of China or – in some cases – Russia, Iran, North Korea or other un-friendlies. Firms like Mandiant have taken pains to separate the concept of APT from run of the mill cyber criminal hacking groups whose motivation is profit, rather than the acquisition of information that can be used to advance geopolitical or economic goals. Cyber criminal groups may well use “advanced” in their attack methods and “persistent” in their efforts to compromise victim networks, but they weren’t “APT.” Now Symantec Corp. has put a fly into that ointment: publishing a report that pulls the covers off an APT group dubbed “Hidden Lynx” that it claims is responsible for some of the most sophisticated and large scale hacks of […]