CNBC March for Our Lives gun control rally only hints at the political power of Generation Z According to a recent survey commissioned by Northeastern University, only 3% of GenZers view political leaders as role models. And although less than a third of these estimated 78 million Americans will be old enough to vote in this year’s midterms, a politically engaged generation that has little to no tolerance for the semantically empty […]
CNBC Popular tax software may expose users to phishing attacks Try not to click on any links within an email, said Engin Kirda, professor at the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. “If you can avoid this, you will be much safer against attacks,” Kirda said.
To detect threats and prevent suicides, schools pay company to scan students’ social media posts Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox says social media scanning brings up another set of problems for law enforcement and school administrators.
To understand digital advertising, study its algorithms Alan Mislove studies algorithms. Recently, his research at Northeastern University, in Boston, has shown that Facebook’s software was leaking users’ phone numbers to advertisers. He has also found new ways to audit that same software for racial bias. But work like his faces challenges. Scraping data from public-facing websites often sails close to breaching their […]
WGBH Suicide and solitary confinement in Massachusetts county jails Joe Mathieu sat down with WGBH Legal Analyst and Northeastern law professor Daniel Medwed to talk about these lawsuits and why suicide rates in county jails are trending higher than in state prisons. Medwed explains that county jails are holding places for people awaiting trial or serving sentences of under two and half years. For […]
A typical small business website is attacked 44 times a day “Small and medium-size businesses typically have fewer resources (e.g., money as well as knowledgeable people) to secure their IT infrastructure as well as maintain a good backup strategy,” Engin Kirda, professor of computer science at Northeastern University, told TechRepublic. “Hence, whenever a ransomware attack happens, they often end up having to pay the ransom to […]
Technology helps catch serial bombers, but ego is their biggest vulnerability Enzo Yaksic, who runs Northeastern University’s Atypical Homicide Research Group, said serial killers are enamored of the ability to control a community, and also hope to garner sympathies from those who might admire or commiserate with them.
It’s too late “Selling the data was nominally against Facebook’s developer terms, but so many of these apps were ephemeral, and as far as we know, there was little enforcement,” Alan Mislove, a researcher at Northeastern University who has studied data broker activity on Facebook’s platform, told me. “You can absolutely still use old data in the new […]
Texas bomber’s change in tactics could hint at future plans “Successful serial murderers are determined, adaptable and cognizant of their surroundings, which allows them to learn from their mistakes, improve their abilities and implement new tactics to remain steps ahead of those searching for them,” said Enzo Yaksic, co-director of Northeastern University’s Atypical Homicide Research Group.
Trump’s latest ideas to combat the opioid epidemic are also his dumbest “These sorts of laws already exist, so people shouldn’t be so outraged ― they should be outraged that they already exist and are on the books and haven’t been reformed,” said Leo Beletsky, an associate professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University.
Tech Republic The average SMB website is attacked 44 times per day “Small and medium-size business typically have fewer resources (e.g., money as well as knowledgeable people) to secure their IT infrastructure as well as maintain a good backup strategy,” Engin Kirda, professor of computer science at Northeastern University, told TechRepublic. “Hence, whenever a ransomware attack happens, they often end up having to pay the ransom to […]
When towns lose their newspapers, disease detectives are left flying blind Social media cannot fill the gap created by the declining local news coverage, she and others involved in this type of research argued. “With Twitter … you are picking up a signal, but that signal might not be precise,” said Alessandro Vespignani, a professor at Northeastern University whose research focuses on modeling of epidemics. And […]