Two quick thoughts about the Sony hack today. First: Haven’t we all seen (or, not seen) this movie before? The one where a corporation is brought to its knees, allegedly by hackers from a foreign enemy upset about an offensive movie? And second: Where’s the gloating? The hackers’ silence right [Keep reading]
Oct 23, 2012 — The attacks seem straight out of a movie plot: An anonymous note is posted online — usually on a Monday or early Tuesday — declaring that week’s victims. The targets then are besieged at some point during that Tuesday through Thursday stretch. On Friday, the group [Keep reading]
Wireless giant Sprint enabled hidden-fee abuse of its customers for nearly a decade, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alleged on Wednesday. Sprint allowed third-party firms to “cram” unwanted services onto consumer bills, and kept about one-third of the proceeds for itself, the CFPB said. In other words, Sprint was complicit [Keep reading]
I don’t know if the North Korean government has anything to do with the Sony hack, though I seriously doubt it. I don’t know if the group connected to it has any ability to carry out real-world attacks, though I have even more doubts about that. I don’t know what [Keep reading]
Sony reminds me of the chaos theory in the hacking world. Yes, you should be very afraid of what’s happening at Sony right now. Here’s why. Four years ago, I wandered the halls at the giant RSA security conference collecting scuttlebutt. Companies spend thousands, even millions of dollars, to make a splash at [Keep reading]
There’s a simple way to end the theft of millions of credit card numbers from merchants like Target or Home Depot: Stop giving merchants credit card numbers in the first place. One way to do that is to replace credit card account numbers with “token” data that merely represents the [Keep reading]
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who disagrees that America’s schools are in need of serious reform. And it’s an obvious leap to think technology is the fast lane to improvement. “Ed-tech” is where some of America’s thorniest issues collide, however. Big Brother. Marketing to kids. Privacy. Boondoggles. Attention deficit [Keep reading]
If you want to know why Gotcha Capitalism persists, so stubbornly in America — corporations surviving mostly on their ability to trick consumers — I can explain it to you in four words. No material financial impact. Recently, 45 states attorneys general thought enough about complaints about satellite radio firm [Keep reading]
You might think it’s weird that Comcast is planning to turn your home into a public WiFi hotspot, but two plaintiffs in California think it’s illegal. A lawsuit filed in a California federal court seeks class-action status, claiming Comcast is costing consumers electricity and bandwidth, and creating security risks, with [Keep reading]
In case you had any doubt about how hostile America is to workers right now, the U.S. Supreme Court has cleared that up. Unanimously. In a twisted ruling that only a corporation could love, the court yesterday ruled that Amazon (via its contractor) does not have to pay warehouse workers [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan