Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for August 23, 2019

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Authored by @remlaps

MoviePass leaked thousands of unencrypted credit card numbers; Another argument against the current thinking about "old age"; Biology's role in defining moods, behavior, and identity; A Block.One patent filing for blockchain-based digital identity; Google discovered a twenty year old Windows security bug.
Straight from my RSS feed
Whatever gets my attention

Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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  1. MoviePass exposed thousands of unencrypted customer card numbers - Working for SpiderSilk, Chief Security Officer, Mossab Hussein discovered a MoviePass database that was open to the public and not protected by a password. The database was growing in real time, and contained a variety of information including customer names and unencrypted credit card numbers. Although Hussein contacted MoviePass CEO, Mitch Lowe, by e-mail over the week-end, the company took no action until Tuesday when they were contacted by TechCrunch. Hussein has also recently reported leaks from Elsevier and Samsung. At this point, consumers should probably just assume that anyone who has their private information has already leaked it.

  2. “Old age” is made up—and this concept is hurting everyone - Continuing one theme from yesterday1 and another from the day before2, this article notes the irony in the fact that companies face retirement crises as baby-boomers retire en masse at the same time as workers in their 50s and later are "fighting outright ageism," being involuntarily severed from their jobs, and experiencing difficulty finding new ones. It also points out the economic boon that would benefit programs like social security and medicare if workers who are living longer were also more productive. The author, Joseph Coughlin heads up the MIT Age Lab, which focuses on "the profound mismatch between products built for older people and the products they actually want." According to Coughlin, the source of this expectations gap is what he refers to as, "the golden years hoax" - a disconnect between how people think of old age and the reality of life in a time when life expectancy and personal health as we age have both advanced in ways that far outpaced social norms. Although Coughlin casts a skeptical eye towards the free market, he notes that people over 50 control 83% of household wealth, and suggests that this immense wealth should create an immense profit incentive for entrepreneurs to close the expectatons gap. [Refs: (1.) What if aging weren’t inevitable, but a curable disease? and (2.) A Psychological Approach to Human-Automation Interaction]

  3. STEEM The Role Biology Plays in Defining Who We Are - A Critical Discussion. - In this essay, @abigail-dantes discusses some aspects of biology as it pertains to mood, starting with the idea from Arthur Schopenhauer, a 19th century German philosopher who observed that all of life has a bias towards survival, and suggested that the main difference between humans and animals is our degree of self-awareness (which he believed was a source of unhappiness). Contrasting this with Darwin, @abigail-dantes introduces the perpetual debate between nature and nurture as our primary shaping factors for behavior and mood. Pointing out that mood is associated with the exchange of neurotransmitters in the brain, but also with genes and social environment, the essay cites the biopsychosocial model and argues that: "mental states and their corresponding behaviours generally result from the interplay that occurs between biological, psychological and social elements. All of which influence and modify one another.". (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @abigail-dantes.)

  4. STEEM [Cryptonomics] Block.one Patents Unique ID Solution [video] - I usually only include one Steem post, because it often takes so long to search through the fluff and find engaging posts, but I had an easy time finding two this time. This is the second one. @rycharde embeds a youtube video discussing a new patent by @dan and others, for US Patent: US10325084B1 - Systems and methods for creating a secure digital identity. I haven't (yet) listened to the full 28 minute video, but according to @rycharde, "This is not so much Know Your Customer (KYC) as Track Your Customer (TYC)." From the beginning of the video, the basic technique is that Bob and Alice take photos of each other at the same time and place, and they use unique "certified devices" and also maybe other forms of government ID or biometrics to establish a unique digital identity. The identity can be strengthened with multiple photos at different times, or if a clique of 3 or more people all go through the same process at the same time. As @rycharde also notes that it's not clear what happens if the device is lost or stolen. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been assigned to @rycharde for this post.)

    Here is the video:


  • A look at the Windows 10 exploit Google Zero disclosed this week - On Tuesday, Google Zero's Tavis Ormandy released ctftool to demonstrate a 20 year old bug in the Windows Text Services Framework that lets the user gain system-level privileges on any unpatched Windows 10 computer. The patch to close this vulnerability is KB4512508. As-of now, there is no evidence that this has ever been used "in the wild". Here is the full writeup of the discovery. h/t Bruce Schneier

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