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A huge defense contractor hack, plus Spotify arrives in the U.S.

Molly Wood Jul 15, 2011
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A huge defense contractor hack, plus Spotify arrives in the U.S.

Molly Wood Jul 15, 2011
HTML EMBED:
COPY

Although this hack on a defense contractor took place last March, it only came to light when the Pentagon revealed it during an announcement of a new strategy on cyber security. The attack is said to have come from outside the United States, although no other countries were named.

We talk to Anup Ghosh from the security firm Invincea. He says, “The tech deployed today including firewalls, intrusion detection systems, antivirus, was developed in late ’90s. And these attacks are evolving every week. So we don’t have the technologies on our networks to defend these types of attacks.”

“It’s important to note that 24,000 seems like a large number, that’s just from one network. As they say, terabytes of data are being extracted by foreign intruders, so the problem is much larger than 24,000 files, and that’s the important takeaway here.”

Also on today’s program, we talk about Spotify. It’s an online music service that has been available and widely used in Europe for a while now but is finally available in the United States.

Spotify has a fairly extensive musical library, although fans of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Def Leppard may be disappointed to see little or no offerings from those bands. You can search by song title, artist, genre. You can save songs to a playlist.

As for price, there’s a free ad-supported version where you get 20 songs a month. Five bucks gets you unlimited music. For 10 bucks a month, you get unlimited plus you can play your music on mobile devices.

We talk to Casey Rae Hunter of the Future of Music Coalition about the social features of Spotify: “You can integrate it with Facebook. You can see folks, their avatars, click on their head and their playlist will come up. So you can start playing their playlist. Open it up on mobile. It’s very easy to dive into someone’s music collection. It would be like going to all of your friend’s houses and looking at their CD racks.”

Also in today’s show, we talk to Dr. Marek Michalowski from the Robot Film Festival taking place this weekend in New York. He shares his thoughts as both a roboticist and movie buff.

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