• Link

    Social Security Numbers Deduced From Public Data using 'Tumbling'

    ledgergermane:

    • By analyzing a public data set called the “Death Master File,” which contains SSNs and birth information for people who have died, computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University discovered distinct patterns in how the numbers are assigned. In many cases, knowing the date and state of an individual’s birth was enough to predict a person’s SSN.
    • “We didn’t break any secret code or hack into an undisclosed data set,” said privacy expert Alessandro Acquisti, co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We used only publicly available information, and that’s why our result is of value. It shows that you can take personal information that’s not sensitive, like birth date, and combine it with other publicly available data to come up with something very sensitive and confidential.”
    • With just two attempts, the researchers correctly guessed the first five digits of SSNs for 60 percent of deceased Americans born between 1989 and 2003. With fewer than 1,000 attempts, they could identify the entire nine digits for 8.5 percent of the group.
    • There’s only a few short steps between making a statistical prediction about a person’s SSN and verifying their actual number, Acquisti said. Through a process called “tumbling,” hackers can exploit instant online credit approval services — or even the Social Security Administration’s own verification database — to test multiple numbers until they find the right one. Although these services usually block users after several failed attempts, criminals can use networks of compromised computers called botnets to scan thousands of numbers at a time.
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    Reblogged via ledgergermane: LedgerGermane

  • Image

    sevenarchive:

nerviosismo:

alaskamiller:

tumblr autopagerize x dualcolumns
1. install greasemonkey
2. install autopagerize script
3. install stylish
4. install dualcolumns script
to use, scroll or press space to the bottom and wait a second, the next page will automatically be loaded depending on your connection speed
to disable, click that happy monkey icon and paint canvas icon
to uninstall, click tools > addons and uninstall greasemonkey and stylish
thanks ak47


for my own reference - got a wide screen coming Thursday!

    sevenarchive:

    nerviosismo:

    alaskamiller:

    tumblr autopagerize x dualcolumns

    1. install greasemonkey

    2. install autopagerize script

    3. install stylish

    4. install dualcolumns script

    to use, scroll or press space to the bottom and wait a second, the next page will automatically be loaded depending on your connection speed

    to disable, click that happy monkey icon and paint canvas icon

    to uninstall, click tools > addons and uninstall greasemonkey and stylish

    thanks ak47

    for my own reference - got a wide screen coming Thursday!

  • See all 240 notes

    Reblogged via sevenarchive: sevenarchive

  • Link

    SoundCloud Threatens MySpace as Music Destination for Twitter Era

    roamin:

    Epicenter/ Wired

    “In a few short months SoundCloud has begun to give mighty MySpace a run for the hearts and minds of recording artists eager to interact more nimbly with fans than is possible on the giant social network which has, for the past five years, been the de facto online platform for musicians.

    Sonic Youth used SoundCloud to stream their latest album via Twitter while Moby uses it to promote his latest tracks on his site rather than on MySpace. And when Beck decided to trash his so-five-years-ago Flash-based site and start over with simple pages heavy on high-quality content and light on everything else, he too turned to SoundCloud.

    SoundCloud sounds like an obvious idea — like every good one does once somebody else has it. The necessity that was the mother to this particular invention was the absence of a truly collaborative online environment that could replicate the kind of back-and-forth spontaneity that musicians need to feed on and which proximity uniquely enables…”

    Continue reading this article on Wired

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    Reblogged via roamin: roamin

  • Image

    mills:

(From Little Potato: moss, diagrams, letters, colors, quincunx, more).
After a bad day, I came home to a small, meticulously-bundled world on my doorstep; it took me out of the large, carelessly-arranged world in which my day had spilled out earlier, and I liked it so much I didn’t know what to do.
That’s when cigarettes come in handy. I smoked one and read the enclosed essay, letters, and poetic fragments before silently thanking its creator, who is at once meticulous and accident-prone, such that this sublime world had both precise details almost too fragile to believe and an unintentional overwash of Orangina smudging many of its pages. That, of course, made it even better.

    mills:

    (From Little Potato: moss, diagrams, letters, colors, quincunx, more).

    After a bad day, I came home to a small, meticulously-bundled world on my doorstep; it took me out of the large, carelessly-arranged world in which my day had spilled out earlier, and I liked it so much I didn’t know what to do.

    That’s when cigarettes come in handy. I smoked one and read the enclosed essay, letters, and poetic fragments before silently thanking its creator, who is at once meticulous and accident-prone, such that this sublime world had both precise details almost too fragile to believe and an unintentional overwash of Orangina smudging many of its pages. That, of course, made it even better.

  • See all 34 notes

    Reblogged via mills: mills