Month: February 2020

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John Strand breaks into things for a living. As a penetration tester, he gets hired by organizations to attack their defenses, helping reveal weaknesses before actual bad guys find them. Normally, Strand embarks on these missions himself, or deploys one of his experienced colleagues at Black Hills Information Security. But in July 2014, prepping for a pen test of a South Dakota correctional facility, he took a decidedly different tack. He sent his mom.

In fairness, it was Rita Strand's idea. Then 58, she had signed on as chief financial officer of Black Hills the previous year after three decades in the food service industry. She was confident, given that professional experience, that she could pose as a state health inspector to gain access to the prison. All it would take was a fake badge and the right patter.

"She approached me one day, and said 'You know, I want to break in somewhere," says Strand, who is sharing the experience this week at the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco. "And it's my mom, so what am I supposed to say?"

Enlarge / Pictured: a full set of Office 365 icons on the taskbar. Not pictured, for good reason: "Cortana, play Old Town Road." (credit: Microsoft)

Today, Microsoft announced a major shift in focus for its personal assistant, Cortana: she's getting out of the consumer gadget business and focusing on productivity. The new version of Cortana will debut with the next major update to Windows 10, expected to roll out in April.

Microsoft is tightening access to Cortana considerably. First and foremost, no more Cortana use for anyone only using local accounts. Cortana access will only be available to those logged in with school work domain accounts or Microsoft online accounts—Windows 10 users sticking to local accounts only will also be out of luck.

The new Cortana's focus will be on a productivity-focused chat UI. Users will be able to review or set calendar items and tasks in natural English as well as query or create emails, set alarms and timers, open apps, and find people or files. She'll also search the Internet for you—using Bing, of course—or offer jokes.

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The big four mobile carriers face fines of between $12 million and $91 million each for selling their customers' real-time location data to third-party data brokers without customer consent, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's office announced today.

These are "proposed" fines, meaning the carriers can dispute them and try to get them reduced or eliminated. The proposed fines are $91 million for T-Mobile, $57 million for AT&T, $48 million for Verizon, and $12 million for Sprint. That's a total of $208 million.

The FCC announcement said the carriers' punishments are for "apparently selling access to their customers' location information without taking reasonable measures to protect against unauthorized access to that information." The FCC said it also "admonished these carriers for apparently disclosing their customers' location information, without their authorization, to a third party."

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Update: As of 7:00pm Eastern on Friday, February 28, GDC has thrown in the towel. "After close consultation with our partners in the game development industry and community around the world," the organization writes in an update, "we’ve made the difficult decision to postpone the Game Developers Conference this March.

"We're genuinely upset and disappointed not to be able to host you at this time," the update continues, adding that the organization "fully intend[s] to host a GDC event later in the summer," about which it will provide more information in the coming weeks.

[Update (March 17): The Game Developers Conference announced it's planning to hold a rescheduled "GDC Summer" event in San Francisco's Moscone Center from August 4 through August 6. The "three-day celebration of the art, craft and business of game development" will include a similar mix of technical talks, roundtables, and "fireside chats" as the usual annual GDC gathering, according to the announcement from organizer Informa Tech.

San Francisco continues to operate in a state of emergency, with residents in the area ordered to shelter in place while non-essential businesses have been ordered to stay closed for at least the next three weeks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Gatherings of 100 or more people in the city have been banned through the end of April.]