dreamdancer 0 #1 August 2, 2011 interesting... QuoteA picture of your face is all it takes for Alessandro Acquisti at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to access a wealth of personal information. He and colleagues used PittPatt facial recognition software - which was developed at CMU and recently bought by Google - to match people with their Facebook profiles and gather names, birth dates and other demographics for one in three test subjects. The researchers then used this data to correctly predict the first five digits of the subjects' social security number, using a technique they developed in 2009. In principle it should be possible to identify the full number, but the sample size of 93 was too small to do this accurately. This kind of identification relies on people sharing their information on social networks in the first place, but of course many happily do this. What they may not realise is that information from different networks or or even their friends can be linked, building up a surprisingly rich picture of their identify. "It's like a domino effect," says Acquisti, who will will present the research at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this week. "It has become truly difficult for us to tightly seal our personal information." Acquisti has also developed an augmented reality smartphone app that can perform the facial recognition in real time then overlay their online information in a matter of minutes. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/08/facial-recognition-identifies.htmlstay away from moving propellers - they bite blue skies from thai sky adventures good solid response-provoking keyboarding Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
champu 1 #2 August 2, 2011 Bullshit headline is bullshit. It's not suprising they can get the first five, all you need is place and date of birth to predict it pretty accurately. Here's an article from a couple years ago where they talk about it. It's like saying "With just your last name, date of birth, and sex I can tell you what your Illinois drivers license number would be" ... well, yeah, that's how they assign them. The take away from all this is we just have to hope that people who think your social security number is a secure way of identifying you all die off such that the ridiculous notion is purged from humanity. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
dreamdancer 0 #3 September 7, 2011 QuoteIT IS another escalation in the computer security arms race. Software that can uncover all of a person's online activity could, in the hands of the police, put more sex offenders behind bars - but it may also be exploited to develop new ways of avoiding being caught. Researchers from Stanford University in California have managed to bypass the encryption on a PC's hard drive to find out what websites a user has visited and whether they have any data stored in the cloud. "Commercial forensic software concentrates on extracting files from a disc, but that's not super-helpful in understanding online activity," says Elie Bursztein, whose team developed the software. "We've built a tool that can reconstruct where the user has been online, and what identity they used." The open-source software, Offline Windows Analysis and Data Extraction (OWADE), was launched at the Black Hat 2011 security conference and works with PCs running on the Windows operating system. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128285.300-new-forensics-tool-can-expose-all-your-online-activity.htmlstay away from moving propellers - they bite blue skies from thai sky adventures good solid response-provoking keyboarding Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
