Quick Take

I Don’t Use Apple Pay Because It’s Less Secure …: Perception of Security and Usability in Mobile Tap-and-Pay

Apple Pay was launched more than 3 years ago to provide a “fast and secure” method of payment and quickly became very popular in the US. It was shortly followed by Android Pay which is also becoming popular.  However, not everyone uses these systems despite their claimed security, convenience and speed. Jun Ho Huh, Saurabh …

Privacy Loss in Apple’s Implementation of Differential Privacy on MacOS 10.12

Differential privacy (DP) provides a way to quantify privacy. A privacy budget quantitatively measures by how much the risk to an individual’s privacy may increase due to the inclusion of certain data. The higher the value, the less privacy protection is provided. This paper by Jun Tang, Aleksandra Korolova, Xiaolong Bai, Xueqiang Wang, and Xiaofeng Wang identifies the components …

Mining the Networks of Telecommunication Fraud Groups using Social Network Analysis

Telecommunications fraud groups, the ones running scams over the telephone are a problem around the world. Taiwan is no exception with a number of related arrests in the past decade.  Telecom fraud group. Yi-Chun Chang, Kuan-Ting Lai, Seng-Cho T. Chou and Ming-Syan Chen wanted to learn more about how these fraud groups operate through Social …

Online Sexual Violence, Child Pornography or Something Else Entirely? Police Responses to Non-Consensual Intimate Image Sharing among Youth

The sharing of intimate images by digital means is something that has created new issues for Canadians.  This is reflected in the creation of laws for non-consensual intimate image sharing or ‘revenge porn’ laws.  The issues get murkier when it comes to intimate images and youth as child pornography laws often also apply to the …

How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument

There is a considerable amount of evidence on the control and censorship of social media in China.  On top of this there has long been suspected that there is a system of astroturfing, or the posting of large numbers of comments from fake accounts to direct online conversation.  In China people hired to make these …