Spreadsheets do not attach themselves to emails. Registration (or BugMeNot) required.
http://www.summitdaily.com/article/20070218/NEWS/102180051
Around the Mountains: Steamboat Resort mistakenly sends out spreadsheet with personal information
BY ALLEN BEST special to the daily February 18, 2007
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS - The Steamboat Ski and Resort Corp. mistakenly sent out an e-mail to an unspecified number of people that contained a spreadsheet. The contents of that spreadsheet contained addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses for 399 customers, although no credit card numbers.
The ski company was hard at work doing damage control, contacting each of the 399 customers, but did not immediately know what else may be done. One Steamboat Springs resident who is an expert on identity theft, told the Steamboat Pilot & Today that the ski company might consider offering a year of credit-monitoring to the individuals whose private information was inadvertently disclosed.
How knowledgeable should policy maker be? The question applies to congress and the courts as well.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/17/1932247&from=rss
5 Things the Boss Should Know About Spam Fighting
Posted by Zonk on Saturday February 17, @04:36PM from the never-give-up-never-surrender dept. Networking Communications Spam IT
Esther Schindler writes "Sysadmins and email administrators were asked to identify the one thing they wish the CIO understood about their efforts to fight spam. The CIO website is now running their five most important tips, in an effort to educate the corporate brass. Recommendations are mostly along the lines of informing corporate management; letting bosses know that there is no 'silver bullet', and that the battle will never really end. There's also a suggestion to educate on technical matters, bringing executives into the loop on terms like SMTP and POP. Their first recommendation, though, is to make sure no mail is lost. 'This is a risk management practice, and you need to decide where you want to put your risk. Would you rather risk getting spam with lower risk of losing/delaying messages you actually wanted to get, or would you rather risk losing/delaying legitimate messages with lower risk of spam? You can't have both, no matter how loudly you scream.'"
Not exactly the way RFID is used in passports, but it makes you wonder if it is the technology or just another poorly designed/executed government IT project.
DHS Nixes Use Of RFID In Border Security Program
Marc L. Songini
February 15, 2007 () The Department of Homeland Security is abandoning plans to use radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in a key part of its border security system after it failed to work as expected in a 15-month test.
... The agency tested the technology in an effort to improve its U.S. Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program, created by Congress in Jan., 2004 to track foreign nationals within the United States. The US-VISIT spokeswoman said the agency hoped to use RFID technology to automate and speed up the process of getting an accurate record of who left the country.
... In his testimony, Chertoff cited a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, released on Jan. 31, that also found the RFID test to be a failure due to performance and reliability problems.
... The GAO report found that during a one week period at one test site, only 14% of 166 RFID tags that crossed the border were read by scanners. The DHS had set a goal for the test of reading 70% of tagged documents crossing the border.
The GAO report also noted that even if RFID tags were read as they crossed the border, the DHS had no way to prove that the person carrying the document was the one to whom it was issued.
First Amendment or another group that believes you can successfully censor the Internet?
http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=115068
Attorneys General of 21 States Lash Out at Bud.tv Age Checks
Anheuser-Busch's Status as 'Media Owner' Cited as a Concern
By Jeremy Mullman and Ira Teinowitz Published: February 19, 2007
CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- Dealing a blow to the $40 million experiment hailed as ushering in a new era for marketer-generated media, the attorneys general of 21 states are attacking Bud's groundbreaking online TV network, charging that it's too easily accessed by people below legal drinking age.
Sharply worded letter
The irony is that the stance taken in a sharply worded letter to the brewer directly contradicts that of many critics -- including one at this publication -- who have described A-B's heavy-handed attempts to block underage users as diminishing Bud.tv's effectiveness. As so often seems to be the case today, the marketer finds itself trapped between the easy-access advocates among internet-savvy consumers and the lawyers and politicos who often seem to have advertisers in their cross hairs.
The missive could be read as a warning to any marketer delivering its own content. While it glosses over the fact that you can't actually buy beer on the A-B site, it stresses in several places that the states' concerns are heightened precisely because the marketer "controls the medium and the message." It also refers to such ventures as moving into "unknown and unmeasured" territory.
... The attorneys general found further fault with Bud.tv functions that allow users to download programs to their iPods and sent via e-mail to their friends. "If the programming on your site can be downloaded and shared freely ... what's the purpose of engaging any age verification at all?"
Prediction: Someone will create a blatantly false (or racist or just plain irritating) ad for or against someone who will be smart enough to trace it back to the opposition candidate. At minimum, we will see every statement challenged. (Imaging politicians being factual/honest/accurate? Oh, the horror!)
http://www.wral.com/business/blogpost/1199687/
Speaking of Popular Videos: New Site for Campaign Commercials
Posted: Feb. 10, 2007
Last week I talked about Super Bowl commercials, which are astoundingly popular. (And speaking of that, congratulations to Five Point Productions for winning the Doritos Super Bowl ad contest!) A couple days later I found out about another Web site for popular videos -- except these are political ads.
Yup, November 2008 is just around the corner. Campaignads.org plans to offer a "non-partisan website that will provide a vehicle for creative artists, political activists, issue advocates, political and advertising professionals to come together, decide what is important and then affect the debate."
... Online video is getting to be a really big deal. I suspect we're going to see huge amounts of campaign materials crafted specifically for online consumption. And -- for the first time? -- we're going to see a massive pushback of voters creating their own marketing materials and distributing them to a nationwide audience. If Campaignads.org lives up to its promise it'll give you a front row seat.
Free is good! (Note: Why aren't more students blogging?)
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070216/091918.shtml
More Universities Recognize The Value Of Free
from the free-the-lectures dept
We've written many posts on business models that involve giving something away for free, and one of the points we've tried to hit home is that giving things away for free is not some utopian, un-capitalist notion. It's often an important component of a solid, profit-making business model. The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today looking at how universities are increasingly embracing this concept, with many top schools offering things like class notes and lecture videos free to the public. Some schools, like MIT, have been doing this for awhile, but what's interesting is how many schools are now pushing more and more free material out to the public. Ostensibly, the reason for doing this is to "democratize education", but there's clearly self-interest as well. Schools compete with each other for students, professors and money, and they hope that by showing off their academics in this way, they can do better at acquiring these things. Individual professors also recognize the potential for increased prestige, which is evidenced by the number of professors that are now blogging. Of course, there remains a big gap between the value of free downloadable lectures and that of a paid university education, so there's little chance that doing this will eat into their core business. For other business -- and the music industry is a prime example -- the challenge should be expanding this gap, by offering something of real value above and beyond what's available for free.
If you have to run Windows...
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Convert_Physical_Windows_Systems_Into_Virtual_Machines_To_Be_Run_On_Linux
Convert Physical Windows Systems Into Virtual Machines To Be Run On Linux
This article shows how you can convert a physical Windows system into a VMware virtual machine with VMware Converter. The resulting virtual machine can be run in the free VMware Player and VMware Server. Vmware Converter comes in handy if you want to switch to a Linux desktop, but feel the need to run your old Windows desktop from time to time.
http://www.howtoforge.com/vmware_converter_windows_linux
Interesting indeed!
http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/massive-google-hard-drive-survey-turns-up-very-interesting-thing/
Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things
Posted Feb 18th 2007 9:47PM by Ryan Block Filed under: Peripherals
When your server farm is in the hundreds of thousands and you're using cheap, off-the-shelf hard drives [Interesting choice, Google. Bob] as your primary means of storage, you've probably good a pretty damned good data set for looking at the health and failure patterns of hard drives. Google studied a hundred thousand SATA and PATA drives with between 80 and 400GB storage and 5400 to 7200rpm, and while unfortunately they didn't call out specific brands or models that had high failure rates, they did find a few interesting patterns in failing hard drives. One of those we thought was most intriguing was that drives often needed replacement for issues that SMART drive status polling didn't or couldn't determine, and 56% of failed drives did not raise any significant SMART flags (and that's interesting, of course, because SMART exists solely to survey hard drive health); other notable patterns showed that failure rates are indeed definitely correlated to drive manufacturer, model, and age; failure rates did not correspond to drive usage except in very young and old drives (i.e. heavy data "grinding" is not a significant factor in failure); and there is less correlation between drive temperature and failure rates than might have been expected, and drives that are cooled excessively actually fail more often than those running a little hot. Normally we'd recommend you go on ahead and read the document, but be ready for a seriously academic and scientific analysis. [Warning: PDF link] http://216.239.37.132/papers/disk_failures.pdf
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