Don’t Give Away Historic Details About Yourself

With all of the recent security issues with Facebook, I think this advice from Krebs on Security is probably some of the most relevant information on the internet today.

From “Don’t Give Away Historic Details About Yourself“:

I’m willing to bet that a good percentage of regular readers here would never respond — honestly or otherwise — to such questionnaires (except perhaps to chide others for responding). But I thought it was worth mentioning because certain social networks — particularly Facebook — seem positively overrun with these data-harvesting schemes. What’s more, I’m constantly asking friends and family members to stop participating in these quizzes and to stop urging their contacts to do the same.

On the surface, these simple questions may be little more than an attempt at online engagement by otherwise well-meaning companies and individuals. Nevertheless, your answers to these questions may live in perpetuity online, giving identity thieves and scammers ample ammunition to start gaining backdoor access to your various online accounts.

These quizzes seem innocuous, but the data that can be harvested from them is enough identifiers to get into your phone account, your banking, your credit cards, and more. It seems harmless to fill in a answer but you are putting yourself at risk by exposing that history to data mining.

US Navy remotely lands F/A-18 Super Hornet on aircraft carrier

From FlightGlobal

Using the ATARI system, or aircraft terminal approach remote inceptor, landing signal officers demonstrated remote piloting of the F/A-18E Super Hornet while conducting carrier qualifications and flight testing aboard the Abraham Lincoln in March. The officers also demonstrated touch-and-go manoeuvres with the system.

It is kind of fitting that the system’s acronym is “ATARI”. What’s even more interesting, and somewhat terrifying, is that there was a pilot in the cockpit during the tests. Landing on a carrier deck is a mental test for a pilot when they are in control, it has to be even more of a mental test when someone else is control of the plane remotely.