The Panama Papers – Exponential Growth in Data Leaks will Continue
One of the largest news stories to break this week, over a year in the making, are the so-called “Panama Papers”. There’s been a lot of discussion over them, but as they deal with something largely invisible, namely the movement of funds from offshore accounts to shell companies, the true power and extend of the Papers has yet to be seen.
That’s not to say that we haven’t already seen some intense action around the revelations in the first few days of release. Vladimir Putin might shrug it off in his own country, and david Cameron might not have to resign after admitting his own involvement, but there have already been a few casualties. The prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, was forced to resign earlier this week. His party has already chosen a successor, knowing that if an election was forced today, the Iceland Pirate Party would be likely to claim power. The CEO of Hypo Landesbank Vorarlberg, Michael Grahammer, is also out, and there are bound to be others by the end of the week. The Panamanian Government has created a ‘panel of experts’ to help improve the image of the country home to law firm Mossack Fonseca, whose internal leaked files show billions of dollars in illegal money transfers.
These kind of leaks are bound to get more common and larger over time, not less. When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he had spent many months photocopying over 7,000 documents by hand. Chelsea Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of documents that were smuggled out in CD-R’s and camera memory cards. Edward Snowden and unknown sources behind NSA and Hacking Team leaks were able to physically and digitally move millions of documents in one of the nights of endless copying that Ellsberg had to take when his sources were physical pages. The 11.5 million files that are being examined and tracked in the Panama Papers are a harbinger of the future of leaks, where coordinated research and clandestine transfer of digital files leave it to a matter of when, not if, the dirty secrets of the powerful are revealed to all. How we react to them is what truly defines us.
On a side note, as a WordPress developer I always tell my clients and everyone around me to keep their sites up to date, including plugins, themes, and WordPress core. Turns out that failure to do so might have helped the hackers who breached the Mossack Fonesca email servers.
Meet the bughunters: the hackers in India protecting your data
Vidhi Doshi, The Guardian
Most large tech companies offer bug bounties, rewards for finding flaws in their code, mainly security flaws. The idea is that offering up incentive for general users to discover and hand over this information will make the systems stronger and more secure overall, as well as stop bad-actors from using it for personal gain.
The intersection of edge-case testing from non US devices and modest rewards that can be especially substantial in developing countries have made developers like Anand Prakash in India the leaders in bug hunting. These testers are at least partly motivated by altruism, as these same bugs could be sold on the black market, potentially for much more than the original companies offer.
CNBC’s secure password tutorial sent your password in the clear to 30 advertisers
Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing
CNBC had a good idea when they created a password testing tool, but they had a bad idea when they didn’t do anything to stop the passwords entered from being stored and transmitted to third party sites, over thirty different advertisers to start with. The form was also submitted in the clear, meaning that others on the network used when testing could see the passwords being tested, ostensibly passwords that the visitors actually used. They claimed not to store the information, yet Google security engineer Adrienne Porter Feltshowed that all submissions were written to a Google Drive Sheet. Even better, the form was poorly estimating the strengths of the passwords entered.
.@__apf__ And the pwd strength meter @hsimpnet is still dangerously weak imho. Author working on that though, with input from experts.
— Per Thorsheim (@thorsheim) March 29, 2016
The Way I Work: Jason Fried of 37Signals
Liz Welch, Inc
Jason Fried, founder of 37Signals, likes the phrase “less is less”. Exhibit A: the company, renamed Basecamp last year to represent their shift of focus to their most popular product, the eponymous project management tool, focuses solely on that service, shuttering or merging other tools that ended up being more of a time grab than core business. Read his interview on simplicity and company culture at Basecamp, which essentially boils down to don’t waste time, and treat people like equals who are deserving of respect, employees and customers alike. Words that I am working to take to heart, one step at a time.
Your Healthy Lifestyle Won’t Necessarily Make You Healthier
Sandro Galea, Wired
We’ve got a plethora of apps and gadgets designed to get you healthy, or at least remind you that you’re unhealthy as they sit unused in your app dock and on the nightstand after the battery died and you never bothered to recharge them. The question for even those of you using fitness tech on a regular basis is: does it even work? We like to think that we’re in control of our own destinies, including our physical and mental health, but studies on a variety of illnesses continually show that action or inaction on your part can potentially alleviate symptoms, but not reverse course on most illnesses.
GIPHY CAPTURE. The GIF Maker
Not a paid promo or anything, just a cool new tool from the team behind Giphy, the gif database that makes it much easier to find the perfect expression of “That thing when” for your Slack channel. Currently for Mac, you can use the tool to make a gif of any portion of your desktop, making it easy to create your own gifs from videos, or make short tutorials on how to accomplish some task. Bask in my posting of the newsletter!
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