Month: January 2022

IRS Will Require Facial Recognition Scans to Access Your Taxes Online

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IRS Will Require Facial Recognition Scans to Access Your Taxes Online

 

source: gizmodo.com, contributed by Artemus FAN, Stephen Page  |  image:  stockvault.com

You will have to submit sensitive government documents, your Social Security number, credit history, and a face scan to ID.me, a third-party company.

 

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that you can still file and pay taxes without logging into an IRS account or providing biometric data. This contradicts information an IRS spokesperson previously provided to Gizmodo. See the full details in the frustrating correction below.

Online tax filers in the United States will soon be required to submit a selfie to a third-party identity verification company using facial recognition tech in order to access their IRS accounts.

Starting this summer, according to an IRS spokesperson, users with an IRS.gov account will no longer be able to log in with a simple username and password. Instead, they will need to provide a government identification document, a selfie, and copies of their bills to Virginian-based identity verification firm ID.me to confirm their identity. That change, first noticed by Krebs on Security, marks a major shift for the Internal Revenue Service, which previously allowed users to access their IRS accounts without submitting personal biometric data.

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Apple AirTags – ‘A perfect tool for stalking’

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Apple AirTags – ‘A perfect tool for stalking’

 

source:  bbc.com  |  image: pixabay.com

 

Amber Norsworthy lives in Mississippi with her four children.

It had just turned 3pm when she got home on 27 December. She received a notification on her phone.

“My phone made a ding that I’d never heard before”, she says.

The notification told her that an unknown device had been following her movements.

Ms Norsworthy, who’s 32, went on to the ‘Find My’ app on her iPhone.

“It showed me my whole route. It said ‘the last time the owner saw your location was 15:02’ and I was like, ‘that’s now, I’m at home’.”

She rang the police, who told her they didn’t know what to do. She has yet to find the device, which she believes is somewhere in her car. She says Apple Support was able to confirm it was an AirTag. “I watch my surroundings very closely now,” she says.

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OPINON: 4 Industries on the Brink of Technological Disruption

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OPINON: 4 Industries on the Brink of Technological Disruption

 

source: technewsworld.com  |  image:  pixabay.com

One of the stories told in management classes as an example of a recurring mistake companies make when their industry is transitioning focuses on buggy makers at the turn of the last century.

Those that figured out they were in the personal transportation business pivoted to cars. Most of the others that thought they were only in the buggy business became extinct because their market moved to cars, and they didn’t.

Seems obvious after the fact, but clearly at the time it didn’t seem obvious at all because most buggy makers and those that sold horses and did blacksmithing went out of business.

In the case of autonomous cars, we are looking at moving from car ownership to a service like Uber that will provide a car just when we need it.

But, going further, initially with services like Zoom and eventually with the metaverse extending the concept of holoportation — coupled with drone delivery and the pandemic — will we even need cars as much, or at all, in the future?

Holoportation, or the use of avatars to travel virtually, is not considered personal transportation today. But if it is successful, it could eliminate most personal transportation in the future, and in turn put existing car makers in the same category as those buggy makers were a century ago.

Should holoportation be considered part of the transportation industry, or should existing personal transportation be considered part of old school collaboration, social networking, and shopping?

Let’s talk about some of these big coming technology disruptions. Then we’ll close with my product of the week, a head-mounted display from TCL called the Nxtwear Air that could become this year’s must-have gadget.

Personal Transportation

Before the pandemic, personal transportation was mostly focused on cars with air transport, human powered transport, and even motorcycles largely falling into different classes. But with the increased use of video conferencing and collaboration products like Zoom, Teams, and Webex, the need for business travel has taken a significant hit.

Among the cool stuff at CES this year, Portl and La Vitre demonstrated a way to visit family and friends virtually, while a solution from ARHT Media called Holopresence showed how you can speak at any remote event without ever leaving your home, yet appear to actually be there.

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NCA: Kids as Young as Nine Have Launched DDoS Attacks

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NCA: Kids as Young as Nine Have Launched DDoS Attacks

source: infosecurity-magazine.com  | Photo by SoraShimazaki from Pexels

UK police have launched another initiative designed to persuade young people not to get involved in cybercrime after claiming that children as young as nine have launched DDoS attacks in the past.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) has teamed up with Schools Broadband, part of ISP the Talk Straight Group, on a new education campaign.

It said that students searching for specific terms associated with DDoS and other cybercrimes would be shown a warning message and suggested redirection to the Cyber Choices website. The aim is to educate young people about the Computer Misuse Act and the consequences of cybercrime.

A trial scheme is said to have significantly reduced searches for terms such as “stresser” and “booter” associated with DDoS, and it will now be rolled out nationwide to over 2000 primary and secondary schools.

The NCA said data from its National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU) reveals a 107% increase in reports from the police cyber prevent network of students deploying DDoS attacks from 2019 to 2020.

The median age for referrals to the NCCU’s Prevent team is reportedly 15, but some offenders are as young as nine.

“Education is a key pillar in preventing crime and these messages highlight the risks and consequences of committing cyber offenses, which can result in a criminal record,” saidJohn Denley, deputy director of the NCA’s NCCU.

“Law enforcement plays a critical role in tackling cybercrime and keeping the country safe. School outreach is important to educate a younger audience and this initiative will continue to help divert young people away from criminality.”

A National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) report from 2019, which polled 430 schools across the UK, found that over a fifth (21%) reported unauthorized use of computers, networks or servers by pupils – almost twice the number (11%) who claimed the same of staff.

The report warned that such schools might be at risk of failing GDPR compliance as a result.

6 Ways to Delete Yourself From the Internet

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6 Ways to Delete Yourself From the Internet

source: wired.com | image by pexels.com

You’ll never be able to get a clean slate—but you can significantly downsize your digital footprint.

DEPENDING ON WHEN you were born, there’s a good chance you’ve spent either several decades online or have never known an offline world. Whatever the case, the internet and its advertising giants know a huge amount about your life.

Amazon, Facebook, and Google all have reams of data about you—including your likes and dislikes, health information and social connections—but they’re not the only ones. Countless murky data brokers that you’ve never heard of collect huge quantities of information about you and sell it on. This data is then used by other companies you’ve likely never heard of to nudge you into buying more stuff. On top of that, all your ancient web forum comments and ill-advised social media posts are still out there, waiting to turn you into a milkshake duck.

At this stage it’s going to be very difficult to completely delete yourself from the internet, but there are some steps you can take to remove a lot of it. Removing personal information and deleting accounts is a fiddly process, so it’s better to break it down into a few smaller steps and tackle them over time.

Opt Out From Data Brokers

Collecting and selling your data is big business. In 2019 the US state of Vermont passed a law requiring all companies buying and selling third-party personal information to register: In response, more than 120 firms logged their details. They included companies building search tools to look up individuals, firms handling location data, and those specializing in your health data. These companies collect everything from your name, address, and date of birth to your social security number, buying habits, and where you went to school and for how long.

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Meta alerts 50,000 users to targeting by ‘surveillance-for-hire’ companies

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Meta alerts 50,000 users to targeting by

‘surveillance-for-hire’ companies

 

source: theverge.com  |  image from meta.com. | contributed by FAN, Stephen Page

The users, including journalists and human rights activists, were based in more than 100 countries around the world

Facebook’s parent company Meta has alerted 50,000 users of Facebook and Instagram that their accounts were spied on by commercial “surveillance-for-hire” schemes around the globe.

The users were targeted by seven entities and located in more than 100 countries, according to an update posted on Meta’s news page today.

Targets included journalists, dissidents, critics of authoritarian regimes, families of opposition, and human rights activists, the post said. The surveillance was uncovered in a monthslong investigation in which Meta identified spying groups and removed them from the platform.

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Top 15 cybersecurity predictions for 2022

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Top 15 cybersecurity predictions for 2022

 

 

source: securitymagazine.com. |  image by pexels.com.

Over the past several years, cybersecurity risk management has become top of mind for boards. And rightly so. Given the onslaught of ransomware attacks and data breaches that organizations experienced in recent years, board members have increasingly realized how vulnerable they are. 

This year, in particular, the public was directly impacted by ransomware attacks, from gasoline shortages, to meat supply, and even worse, hospitals and patients that rely on life-saving systems. The attacks reflected the continued expansion of cyber-physical systems — all of which present new challenges for organizations and opportunities for threat actors to exploit.

There should be a shared sense of urgency about staying on top of the battle against cyberattacks. Security columnist and Vice President and Ambassador-At-Large in Cylance’s Office of Security & Trust, John McClurg, in his latest Cyber Tactics column, explained it best: “It’s up to everyone in the cybersecurity community to ensure smart, strong defenses are in place in the coming year to protect against those threats.”

As you build your strategic planning, priorities and roadmap for the year ahead, security and risk experts offer the following cybersecurity predictions for 2022.

Prediction #1: Increased Scrutiny on Software Supply Chain Security, by John Hellickson, Cyber Executive Advisor,Coalfire

“As part of the executive order to improve the nation’s cybersecurity previously mentioned, one area of focus is the need to enhance software supply chain security. There are many aspects included that most would consider industry best practice of a robust DevSecOps program, but one area that will see increased scrutiny is providing the purchaser, the government in this example, a software bill of materials. This would be a complete list of all software components leveraged within the software solution, along with where it comes from. The expectation is that everything that is used within or can affect your software, such as open source, is understood, versions tracked, scrutinized for security issues and risks, assessed for vulnerabilities, and monitored, just as you do with any in-house developed code. This will impact organizations that both consume and those that deliver software services. Considering this can be very manual and time-consuming, we could expect that Third-Party Risk Management teams will likely play a key role in developing programs to track and assess software supply chain security, especially considering they are usually the front line team who also receives inbound security questionnaires from their business partners.”

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World’s tiniest camera the size of a grain of salt

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World’s tiniest camera the size of a grain of salt

source: studyfinds.org. |. Photo by Polina Tankilevitch from Pexels.  | contributed by Artemus founder, Robert Wallace

 

PRINCETON, N.J. — The world’s smallest camera, the size of a grain of salt, may soon be coming to mobile phones everywhere. Computer scientists from Princeton University and the University of Washington say the small device they created can take crisp, full-color pictures just as well as conventional cameras which are 500,000 times bigger.

The new technology may help doctors to diagnose and treat diseases far less invasively than traditional endoscopy can today. It will also make imaging better, as thousands of tiny devices could cover the whole surface of a smartphone to become one giant camera

Traditional cameras use several curved glass or plastic lenses to bend light rays into focus, but the new device uses a “metasurface” which developers can make just like a computer chip. The metasurface is just half a millimeter wide and is made up of 1.6 million tiny posts, which are all shaped like cylinders but none of them look exactly the same.

When the antennae-like tiny posts interact with light, with the help of algorithms, they produce better pictures and capture a wider frame of view than any full-color metasurface camera created so far. The metasurfaces are made from silicon nitride, a glass-like material which can be manufactured easily and produced more cheaply than lenses in conventional cameras.

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