Perspective?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20061213/100038.shtml
Once, Twice, Three Times A Loser... Wait, Make That Four
from the when-you're-in-a-hole-stop-digging dept
Last November, we wondered exactly why a Boeing employee was carrying around a laptop containing the names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and bank account info of 161,000 thousand current and former employees. That laptop was, of course, stolen. That breach didn't seem to teach the company anything, as five months later, another laptop was stolen, though it had info on "only" 3,600 workers. Another one was stolen from an employee's home last month, containing info on 762 people. But, in a remarkable show of stupidity hardheadedness, Boeing says a laptop containing the information of a staggering 382,000 current and former employees was stolen from an employee's car earlier this month. It's hard to know where to start here, but obviously Boeing deserves a lot of criticism for allowing this to happen three times, which is just ridiculous. It's still completely unclear why an employee needs to be carrying this sort of information around, but even more mind-boggling is after being bitten the first time, Boeing didn't put a stop to it. More perplexing still is why the company allowed it to go on after the second incident -- or the third. The company says it will make the standard offer of credit monitoring for three years to those whose data was lost, which really means little. Boeing's repeated loss of personal information once again highlights how little motivation companies have to protect this information, given the lack of liability they apparently enjoy and the toothless punishments they receive (if any) for the leaks. Above all, the fundamental question remains: what good reason is there for a company to allow this sort of information to be carried around on a laptop, given the obvious risk such activity invites? Boeing, we're all ears.
Read this!
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/013283.html
December 13, 2006
Gartner Releases 10 IT Predictions for 2007 and Beyond
Press release: Among the predicitions, is the following - "Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007. Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers. Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007."
Why do you think this is so?
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/013288.html
December 13, 2006
Internet Users Increasingly Turn to Online House Hunting
Pew Internet & American Life Project: "For Americans on the move, the Internet is becoming an increasingly important resource for researching housing options. The number of online house hunters has increased by two thirds since March 2000. On average, more than three million Internet users are online on any given day searching for a new place to live."
Looking for Information About a Place to Live, December 13, 2006
This is not the first time we've seen this. Makes you wonder what he does with those cameras when he is home... Did his wife know they were there?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061213/od_nm/brazil_odd_camera_dc
Man in Germany stops Brazil robbery via Internet
Wed Dec 13, 9:38 AM ET
A Brazilian businessman traveling in Germany watched by live video as a burglar robbed his house on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil.
He alerted the police, who rushed to the house and arrested the robber as he was trying on his clothes.
The businessman, Joao Pedro Wettlauser, was in Cologne this weekend when he received an alert on his cell phone from the security system in his beach house in Guaruja in Sao Paulo state, police said on Tuesday.
He logged on to his laptop and via the Internet saw live images of the burglar at work. He then phoned his wife, who was not at the house but called the local police.
"She told us the details about the thief and where in the house he was as we surrounded the house," police officer Americo Rodrigues told Reuters.
The burglar used a ladder to break into the house. When the police entered, he had a pile of goods such as the stereo system in the kitchen ready to be taken away, Rodrigues said.
"He was surprised when realized he was being seen by cameras connected to the Internet," Rodrigues said.
Dec 13, 4:16 PM EST
Villanova Heads Most-Wired College List
By JUSTIN POPE AP Education Writer
BOSTON (AP) -- Villanova University is higher education's high-tech hotspot, claiming the No. 1 ranking in a new list of "Top 20 Wired Colleges."
The school, in suburban Philadelphia, tops the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Indiana University in the rankings, a joint project of PC Magazine and The Princeton Review, a college advising and test-prep company.
About 240 colleges responded to the survey, which asked about such topics as availability of online learning, faculty computer training, music downloading policies, and hardware and software provided to students.
At Villanova, first-year students are given laptops - and replacements after their sophomore year. Nursing students get personal digital assistants, and engineers get tablet PCs. Over the Internet, students can register for classes, download lectures, take exams and get grades. Tech-support calls are guaranteed a response within 24 hours.
No. 2 MIT boasts its own operating system and open courseware available via the Web to educators and students around the world. No. 3 Indiana boasts the country's fastest university-owned supercomputer and largest disk-based storage facility.
Those schools were followed by Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and Creighton University in Nebraska, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Michigan Technological University, University of Southern California, Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and the University of Oklahoma.
The list and profiles appear in the PC Magazine issue hitting newsstands Dec. 26 and on its Web site on Saturday.
For you Patent Lawyers, a question: If Google is better at this that the patent office, will the government close that office to save taxpayers money?
http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Patent_Search
Google Patent Search
breezy submitted by breezy 11 hours 27 minutes ago (via http://www.google.com/patents )
As part of Google ’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, we’re constantly working to expand the diversity of content we make available to our users. With Google Patent Search, you can now search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you.
http://digg.com/tech_news/If_You_Can_Hum_It_Nayio_Might_Find_It
If You Can Hum It, Nayio Might Find It
charbarred submitted by charbarred 22 hours 21 minutes ago (via http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9667815-2.html?part=rss )
This morning, the music software and remixing company Nayio is launching its Humming Search feature in the U.S. This tool is supposed to be able to identify songs by listening to you hum a few bars.
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