FBI catches heat, HS kids catch a hacking rap, and Albany catches a ransomware infection This week had an Apple engineer fighting the government, an Apache update release, and a security scare at Mar-a-Lago. While that was going on, here are a few more bits of news that broke. NAS-ty hole spotted in iSCSI boxes Another day, another massive data exposure from devices erroneously left wide open to the public …
Lucky Albany government workers will be able to add birth records (and delete death records) while "restoring" the data. They could offer a real bargain to crims too busy to prowl graveyards for ill-maintained headstones with plausible birth dates for a new ID.
Come to think of it, the ransomware itself might be able to do something similar.
What Brave New World!
Instead of "Fast and Furious" or "Gone in 60 Seconds", it is far better to quietly infiltrate and then slowly exfiltrate the goodies. Think "Low and Latent". It'd make a really long film.
(Wasn't there an "On Call" or "Who me?" article recently that mentioned a production line where every 123rd bottle of beer/scotch/whisky was shoved sideways off the belt into a large box for alternative delivery? This discovered in some really _really_ old machine controller code?)
‘The investigation noted that among the failings of the program were an epidemic of typographical errors .. "The FBI established Cyber Guardian for tracking thee production, dissemination, and disposition of cyber vlctim notifications’
Do they mean like the one in the above quote?
I'd bet a very small fraction of the US population can name the capitals of all 50 states. Probably the fraction that can name all the states in the first place is not large. Without trying it I'm not sure I wouldn't have a moment coming up with the lot.
There are quite a few states where the capital is not the best-known or most-prominent city. Michigan's capital isn't Detroit. Oregon's isn't Portland. Washington's isn't Seattle. Nebraska's isn't Omaha. Louisiana's isn't New Orleans. Missouri's isn't St Louis or Kansas City (though the latter would be a confusing choice, and both have the disadvantage of being located on the border).
The capital of Kansas is Topeka, which probably isn't the first city in Kansas that most people think of, though to be honest most people asked to think of a city in Kansas probably get stuck wondering whether Kansas City is in Kansas. (It is, if you're talking about Kansas City, Kansas. Kansas City, Missouri, isn't. And, yes, they're adjacent.)
Then there are edge cases like Texas - Austin is pretty well-known these days, but a few decades ago was more obscure outside the state. Or New Mexico; Santa Fe is actually the oldest continuously-inhabited city which is a US state capital, but most folks outside NM have probably only heard of Albuquerque and, for cultural reasons, places like Roswell and Los Alamos. (The latter not to be confused with the Alamo, which is in San Antonio, Texas. Remember the Alamo?) Or Vermont; it's hard to say whether Montpelier is as well-known (for smallish values of "well") as Burlington. Probably not.
And I don't know how many people on the street could, if pressed, name a single city in, say, Montana or Wyoming.
I'd bet a very small fraction of the US population can name the capitals of all 50 states.
It's roughly equivalent to the proportion of 5th graders in the general population.
Missouri's isn't St Louis or Kansas City (though the latter would be a confusing choice, and both have the disadvantage of being located on the border).
It's not a disadvantage to live on the Missouri side of the border as much as it is unfortunate that folks in those cities haven't managed to escape yet.
I don't know how many picked up on it, but the article hinted at the fact that Albany is the cliche question for knowledge of state capitals, and I was taking a poke at what counts as a meaningful education. I'm a technical person, and those trivia quizzes that check if anybody remembers things requiring wrote memorization from elementary school are not really my thing. So, I to am one of those that only knows a few state capitals, though I do know that large cities are not necessarily state capitals. However, for the sake of keeping up with the news, I did find a nice web site for making a game of knowing where states and countries are, so I'm doing pretty good with those. I don't know if I'll ever bother doing the same for state capitals. If anything, nations' capitals would be next, though I know a few of those as well. In a technical field, trivia is just for conversation and doesn't get the job done.
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