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Daily Archives: June 10, 2019

Microsoft says mandatory password changing is “ancient and obsolete”

ars technica – Bucking a major trend, company speaks out against the age-old practice. ” Microsoft is finally catching on to a maxim that security experts have almost universally accepted for years: periodic password changes are likely to do more harm than good. In a largely overlooked post published late last month, Microsoft said it was removing periodic password changes from the security baseline settings it recommends for customers and auditors. After decades of Microsoft recommending passwords be changed regularly, Microsoft employee Aaron Margosis said the requirement is an “ancient and obsolete mitigation of very low value.”

The change of heart is largely the result of research that shows passwords are most prone to cracking when they’re easy for end users to remember, such as when they use a name or phrase from a favorite movie or book. Over the past decade, hackers have mined real-world password breaches to assemble dictionaries of millions of words. Combined with super-fast graphics cards, the hackers can make huge numbers of guesses in off-line attacks, which occur when they steal the cryptographically scrambled hashes that represent the plaintext user passwords…”

Should Researchers Be Allowed to Use YouTube Videos and Tweets?

Slate – A new paper used YouTubers’ voices to guess what they looked like. We’re going to see more of this. “There’s a lot you might guess about a person based on their voice: their gender, their age, perhaps even their race. That’s your brain making an educated guess about the identity of a speaker… Continue Reading

Worried About the Future of the Monograph? So Are Publishers

The Chronicle of Higher Education interview with the president of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses), Jennifer Crewe: “…Our biggest challenge remains the low sales of scholarly monographs, such as revised dissertations or scholarly books with a narrow focus in a small field. Libraries share copies, and individuals don’t purchase the new books in their… Continue Reading

New video editing technology raises disinformation worries

Washington Post – A new algorithm developed by Stanford University engineers is putting the spotlight on advances in video editing that could make it more difficult to separate fact from fiction online. “A team of researchers has developed new technology allowing editors to alter the words of anyone who appears on video in an image from the… Continue Reading

Pennsylvania identity theft case trends

PA Courts: “Over the last five years, Pennsylvania has seen a gradual decrease in identity theft cases. Identity theft is defined as the fraudulent use of another person’s identifying information (social security number, bank account, birth certificate etc.). The infographic below highlights key data including defendant demographics, identity theft case counts and outcomes as well… Continue Reading

NASA dataset includes more than a Trillion precise measurements of Earth’s height at various locations

Center for Data Innovation: “NASA has released a dataset that includes more than a trillion precise measurements of the Earth’s height at various locations, including the height of glaciers and the height of the canopy of forests. NASA gathered the data, which includes the exact latitude and longitudes for a corresponding elevation, by shooting photons… Continue Reading

The United States Now Has a Federal Data Strategy

“Government agencies will implement the Federal Data Strategy through steps identified in annual government-wide Action Plans. These plans will identify priority Action Steps for a given year, incrementally build from year to year, and complement as needed requirements of new statute and policy. The priority of the draft 2019-2020 Federal Data Strategy Action Plan (hereinafter… Continue Reading

AI deepfakes are now as simple as typing whatever you want your subject to say

The Verge: “In the latest example of deepfake technology, researchers have shown off new software that uses machine learning to let users edit the text transcript of a video to add, delete, or change the words coming right out of somebody’s mouth. The work was done by scientists from Stanford University, the Max Planck Institute… Continue Reading