Miscellaneous Tech News
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How insurance companies are fueling a rise in ransomware attacks
Insurers prefer to pay the ransom. Why? ProPublica says attacks are good for business.
On June 24, the mayor and council of Lake City, Fla., gathered in an emergency session to decide how to resolve a ransomware attack that had locked the city's computer files for the preceding fortnight. Following the Pledge of Allegiance, Mayor Stephen Witt led an invocation. "Our heavenly father," Witt said, "we ask for your guidance today, that we do what's best for our city and our community." Witt and the council members also sought guidance from City Manager Joseph Helfenberger. He recommended that the city allow its cyber insurer, Beazley, an underwriter at Lloyd's of London, to pay the ransom of 42 bitcoin, then worth about $460,000. Lake City, which was covered for ransomware under its cyber-insurance policy, would only be responsible for a $10,000 deductible. In exchange for the ransom, the hacker would provide a key to unlock the files. "If this process works, it would save the city substantially in both time and money," Helfenberger told them. Without asking questions or deliberating, the mayor and the council unanimously approved paying the ransom. The six-figure payment, one of several that US cities have handed over to hackers in recent months to retrieve files, made national headlines. -
@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
How insurance companies are fueling a rise in ransomware attacks
Is anyone actually shocked about this? Restoring an entire city is no small feat and paying your insurance premium is an easy way to get back to operational if in fact the keys work.
So of course Insurance would want people to get hit, pay the ransom and move on, they make money, increase the monthly premium and move on.
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@DustinB3403 said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
How insurance companies are fueling a rise in ransomware attacks
Is anyone actually shocked about this? Restoring an entire city is no small feat and paying your insurance premium is an easy way to get back to operational if in fact the keys work.
So of course Insurance would want people to get hit, pay the ransom and move on, they make money, increase the monthly premium and move on.
You could almost call it a conflict of interest.
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@nadnerB said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@DustinB3403 said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
How insurance companies are fueling a rise in ransomware attacks
Is anyone actually shocked about this? Restoring an entire city is no small feat and paying your insurance premium is an easy way to get back to operational if in fact the keys work.
So of course Insurance would want people to get hit, pay the ransom and move on, they make money, increase the monthly premium and move on.
You could almost call it a conflict of interest.
All insurance is a conflict of interest.
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Chrome's Tab Context Menu Is Losing Options
If you're a power user reliant on the Chrome web browser, you're probably going to miss some of the menu options being removed.
If you're a Chrome user who regularly right-clicks tabs to access the context menu options, prepare yourself for some changes. That menu is about to get a lot shorter. As Techdows reports, after years of debate on the matter and a lot of data crunching, the Chromium team has decided to remove four options from the tab context menu. There's a discussion on the Chromium bugs forums dating back to 2015 discussing the removal of context menu options "if the usage does not outweigh the cost." A 2016 usage review found all of the above options now being removed had well below 10 percent usage by Chrome users. Bookmark all tabs was the lowest with 0.64 percent. -
@mlnews I can honestly say "Bookmark All Tabs" is a bizarre feature that I'm glad to see go.
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@mlnews I can honestly say "Bookmark All Tabs" is a bizarre feature that I'm glad to see go.
really? why? that solves the - I need to reboot but I have 40 tabs open and want them back after the reboot.
I have a plug-in just for that purpose called Tab session manager - it records the tabs I have open like once an hour and allows me to restore those tabs later.
This is really helpful if the browser crashes, or, as I mentioned, I need to reboot and don't want to loose all of my tabs.
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@mlnews I can honestly say "Bookmark All Tabs" is a bizarre feature that I'm glad to see go.
I use "Bookmark All Tabs" when I wanted temporary add them to my Read Later folder.
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@Dashrender said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
really? why? that solves the - I need to reboot but I have 40 tabs open and want them back after the reboot.
There are other tools for that that don't create a huge sprawl of bookmarks that need to be immediately cleaned up. That's not what that tool is good for, because it doesn't even reopen them. Chrome does that on its own, though.
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@Dashrender said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
This is really helpful if the browser crashes, or, as I mentioned, I need to reboot and don't want to loose all of my tabs.
I don't think my browser has crashed in years without bringing all of the tabs back for me. The protection against that is already built in to all major browsers, has been for a long time.
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BackBlaze opens new Data Center
Announcing Our First European Data Center
Big news: Our first European data center, in Amsterdam, is open and accepting customer data! As part of this launch, we are also introducing storage regions. When creating a Backblaze account, customers can choose whether that account’s data will be stored in the EU Central or US West region. Whether you choose EU Central or US West, your pricing for our products will be unchanged. Learn more about all our settings and options to take advantage of our new European data center in today's announcement. -
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@black3dynamite said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/08/microsoft-is-bringing-exfat-to-the-linux-kernel
Nice, that'll be very helpful.
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
BBC News - Facial recognition: School ID checks lead to GDPR fine
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49489154That's fucked. Why would you have any expectation of privacy in a public school?
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@JaredBusch said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
BBC News - Facial recognition: School ID checks lead to GDPR fine
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49489154That's fucked. Why would you have any expectation of privacy in a public school?
Why would anyone have any expectation of privacy in public?
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Privacy is one thing, I imagine that the underlying concern is the persistence and use of the data that's being collected without peoples' permission
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@notverypunny said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Privacy is one thing, I imagine that the underlying concern is the persistence and use of the data that's being collected without peoples' permission
Except it was used with permission
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@JaredBusch said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@notverypunny said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Privacy is one thing, I imagine that the underlying concern is the persistence and use of the data that's being collected without peoples' permission
Except it was used with permission
Exactly. And they don't need to keep the video - just record the results of the facial recognition.
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Unix at 50: How the OS that powered smartphones started from failure
Today, Unix powers iOS and Android—its legend begins with a gator and a trio of researchers.
Maybe its pervasiveness has long obscured its origins. But Unix, the operating system that in one derivative or another powers nearly all smartphones sold worldwide, was born 50 years ago from the failure of an ambitious project that involved titans like Bell Labs, GE, and MIT. Largely the brainchild of a few programmers at Bell Labs, the unlikely story of Unix begins with a meeting on the top floor of an otherwise unremarkable annex at the sprawling Bell Labs complex in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was a bright, cold Monday, the last day of March 1969, and the computer sciences department was hosting distinguished guests: Bill Baker, a Bell Labs vice president, and Ed David, the director of research. Baker was about to pull the plug on Multics (a condensed form of MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service), a software project that the computer sciences department had been working on for four years. Multics was two years overdue, way over budget, and functional only in the loosest possible understanding of the term. -
State by State: Alaskans Spend the Most Time in Front of Screens
Without even including time at work, watching TV, or playing games, the results reveal state-by-state that Americans spend from 45 minutes to over 3 hours a day online.
If you've ever heard of the American Time Use Survey (from the Bureau of Labor Statistics), you probably have time on your hands. According to the survey, most people don't—it measures time spent doing just about everything, from work, to volunteering, to taking care of kids. It also happens to ask people how much time they spend in front of screens. The folks at authorized Verizon reseller VerizonSpecials.com decided to look at the data in the ATUS and see what the average leisure time spent online really amounts to, using data collected from 2013 to 2017. This doesn't even include what we really spend most of our time doing on screens: watching TV, gaming, and, mostly, working. It's all about all that other mind-numbing screen-staring we do for "fun," including browsing, social networking, watching online video, and waiting for things to download. Then they broke it down by state (but only 47 states are included—Maryland, Rhode Island, and Hawaii didn't have enough data).
