Tag: researcher

Georgia voter records sitting on a state website – available to anyone

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County employees checking crappy out-of-date touchscreen voting machines

❝ A security researcher disclosed a gaping security hole at the outfit that manages Georgia’s election technology, days before the state holds a closely watched congressional runoff vote on June 20.

The security failure left the state’s 6.7 million voter records and other sensitive files exposed to hackers, and may have been left unpatched for seven months. The revealed files might have allowed attackers to plant malware and possibly rig votes or wreak chaos with voter rolls during elections…

❝ Logan Lamb, a 29-year-old Atlanta-based private security researcher…made the discovery last August. He…felt the election center had not been serious enough about security and came forward with his findings, this week.

❝ Lamb discovered the security hole — a misconfigured server — one day as he did a search of the Kennesaw State election-systems website. There, he found a directory open to the internet that contained not just the state voter database, but PDF files with instructions and passwords used by poll workers to sign into a central server used on Election Day. Lamb said he downloaded 15 gigabytes of data, which he later destroyed…

The directory of files “was already indexed by Google,” Lamb said in an interview — meaning that anyone could have found it with the right search.

❝ “I don’t know if the vote could have been rigged, but compromising that server would have served as a great pivot point and malware could have been planted easily,” he added.

❝ Lamb said he notified the center’s director, Merle King, who assured him the hole would be patched and who asked to keep his discovery to himself.

RTFA for the details. Usually, we can categorize information like this as either stupid or ignorant. Maybe we should add incompetent.

Prostitute, Belle du Jour, reveals herself as research scientist

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The secret life of Dr Brooke Magnanti, an obscure research scientist, is revealed…as she unmasks herself as the writer behind the pseudonym Belle de Jour.

Her identity has been one of the great literary mysteries of the decade after the publication of bestselling books about her secret life as a prostitute.

Magnanti is a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology in a hospital research group in Bristol. Six years ago, in the final stages of her PhD thesis, she ran out of money and turned to prostitution through a London escort agency, charging £300 an hour. Already an experienced science blogger, she began writing about her experiences in a web diary that was adapted into books and a television drama starring Billie Piper.

There has been huge speculation about Belle’s real identity, including a theory that she was a well-known author because of the quality of her writing. The blog and books were also criticised for suggesting prostitution could be glamorous. Last week Magnanti contacted one of Belle’s sternest critics, India Knight, the Sunday Times columnist, saying she wanted to reveal her identity.

The scientist, a petite 34-year-old, has no regrets about her 14 months as a prostitute. “I’ve felt worse about my writing than I ever have about sex for money,” she said. Anonymity had become “no fun”, however: “I couldn’t even go to my own book launch party.”

Until last week, not even her agent knew her real name. A month ago she revealed her secret to her colleagues at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health, who were “amazingly kind and supportive”. She was preparing to tell her parents this weekend…

Her future lies in medical science, but she also has a literary streak. She has been writing a novel, and the Belle blog will “continue for a bit — I’d like her to have happy ending”.

RTFA. Western moralists – religionists mostly – are still in a flap because she chose to earn an income from the sex trade for a spell.

And maybe it’s s good sign that one of Rupert Murdoch’s favorite conservative newspaper properties still demonstrates the freedom to deal with liberated lives and individual choices beyond the 19th Century.