Coffee Break // Cyber News 006
It’s been a slow start to my day, I confess.
Awaking with a head-ache (Don’t stay up past midnight, kids) I enjoyed a lemon-lime Gatorade before my coffee today… meandering through my emails and a handful of communications left over from the day before, I turned at last to blessed caffeine.
Today I’m enjoying a Nespresso Capriccio. Nespresso encourages consumers to let this capsules “light acidity and a savory cereal note surprise you in this refreshing but deep light-roasted Arabica-Robusta espresso blend.”
Between you and me, I think it tastes like every espresso I’ve ever tried. Which, to be fair, is good.
After coffee, I adjust the parameters of Cold Turkey, an application and URL blocker that I use to stay focused on my work. Only the good lord knows why it took me this long to realize I could both block YouTube, and exempt specific educational channels in the same rule.
Confidently assured of my productivity, I spend too much time calibrating my AutoHotKey macros. I obsess over every keystroke saved by these trivial optimizations…
Practicing for the Sec+ Exam…
After breakfast/lunch, I consume a cup of half-caf and attempt a 90-minute practice exam from Professor Messer’s set. I just can’t quite come to the surface today… 80% correct, right on the line again.
The topics that threw me off all come from the sections on Security Architecture and Operations, with a few oddball questions about Encryption that I wasn’t sure about. It’s always nice to be able to see where you went wrong, and where you need to study up.
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In the news.
I didn’t have much brain-power for the news today, but I did want to highlight a story from last week: a class action lawsuit against major credit reporting agency TransUnion. The TL;DR here is that TransUnion did not delete consumer data from its databases. This is an extremely common violation of consumers data rights—my gut instinct is that most companies don’t properly delete data they no longer should have because it is a) hard to enforce and b) they often have a financial incentive to continue leveraging that data.
In the case of credit reporting agencies like TransUnion, any user data is a data they can potentially sell to anyone who wants to evaluate a lendee’s likelihood of repayment.
How does it make you feel that credit reporting agencies are selling you as a product even when they shouldn’t?
