We went through an Identity Theft slump for a while, but I had faith the Data Spills would return...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=2007080208113528

Personal information may be stolen at UT

Thursday, August 02 2007 @ 08:11 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

Personal information of some students and staff at the University of Toledo might have been [No one knows what's going on... Bob] on two hard drives stolen from the Health and Human Services Building, the university announced yesterday.

The hard drives, which are believed to have contained some names, Social Security numbers, and grade changes, were taken from UT’s department of health and rehabilitative services.

Source - Toledo Blade

[From the Blade article:

Ms. Espinosa’s computer is believed to have been taken between June 15 and June 18. Memory cards for the computer also were taken.

Mr. Tatchell’s computer was stolen after May 2, which he told police was the last time he was on campus.

When he returned July 12, the computer was missing, as were his degree plaques from Central Michigan University and University of Utah, which hung on his office wall, according to a UT police report.

No problem, it's only our employees.

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070802102700721

Laptop with E.On employee identity info stolen

Thursday, August 02 2007 @ 10:27 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

A Louisville accounting firm’s laptop with names, Social Security numbers and birth dates of most E.On U.S. employees and some retirees was stolen last month in Chicago, according to letters to potential victims from E.On and the accounting firm.

Mountjoy & Bressler, the accounting firm, and E.On sent letters to potential identity theft victims about a week after the July 20 theft of the computer, which contained 2005 data. The data did not include addresses.

Source - Courier-Journal

It's not as easy to get data in Australia...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070802173945350

Visa confirms data tapes theft

Thursday, August 02 2007 @ 05:39 PM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

Visa has confirmed that recent mass credit-card account cancellations at Westpac are related to a data tape theft in late May.

But just which payment gateway or third party vendor lost the tapes remains a mystery. So too does the extent of the security breach and how many card accounts have been affected.

Source - The Sheet

Neither of these article has much information. Perhaps it's hard to get data in Canada too...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070802204119989

Ca: Four laptops stolen from Capital Health

Thursday, August 02 2007 @ 08:41 PM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

Four laptop computers, including one containing patient information, were stolen from a Capital Health office in downtown Edmonton, the health region said today.

Source - Edmonton Journal

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070803062231995

Ca: Stolen health computer stored 20,000 names

Friday, August 03 2007 @ 06:22 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

Police and the office of the information and privacy commissioner are investigating a theft of four Capital Health computers - one containing 20,000 patient names, health card numbers, addresses and reason for admittance to hospital.

Source - Edmonton Sun

[Here's the correct link: http://www.edmontonsun.com/News/Alberta/2007/08/03/4390118-sun.html

... The computers were stolen from a secure desk with a cable lock in a secure downtown building on the evening of May 8.

... The laptops had two levels of password protection, so the risk of anyone accessing the patient data is virtually nil, [Nonsense Bob] Buick reiterated.

But Leroy Brower with the privacy commissioner's office said the data in the laptops was not encrypted, which simply means it wasn't passworded. [Someone should look up terms they don't understand... Bob] Encryption is a higher level of protection.

Sony rides again! Perhaps that plate was made by the Ginsu Knife Company?

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/ServiceArea/070802/

Public Notice to Owners of Sony "Cyber-shot" DSC-T5 Digital Still Cameras

2 August, 2007 Sony Corporation Sony Marketing (Japan) Inc. Sony EMCS Corporation

Thank you for your continued interest in Sony Products.

Sony has recently discovered that, with certain units of its Digital Still Camera "Cyber-shot" DSC-T5 released on the market in September 2005, there is the possibility that metal plating on the bottom of the camera unit may warp, causing slight cut or scratch to the skin of the user when it is directly touched.

Tools & Techniques Facilitating CyberStalking?

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1649121,00.html

Online Snooping Gets Creepy

By Anita Hamilton Thursday, Aug. 02, 2007

When Nazira Sacasa sent me a press release for a new clothing boutique late last month, she didn't know that I would launch a full-scale web search to learn everything I could about her. But I needed a victim [I like the way this lady thinks! Bob] to test out the new breed of people-search services on the web, and a paid publicity seeker seemed like fair game. And so, after just a few minutes of clicking around, I had found Sacasa's MySpace page, her age, home address and what appears to be quite a lot of information about her family in Florida — all without using Google or any other popular search site.

As recently as six months ago, online snooping was mostly done surreptitiously or under the polite guise of "social networking." Now all subtlety has been cast aside. An estimated 30% of all Web searches are aimed at finding people, according to industry statistics, and upstarts like PeekYou, Pipl, Spock, and Wink are vying for a piece of this potentially huge market. These free sites work by scouring the Web for any virtual footprints you might have on MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Yahoo!, Flickr and elsewhere, and then creating a fresh profile that organizes all that information on one page. Even Whitepages.com recently expanded its phone listings to include business addresses and other contact information culled from all sorts of mail-order marketing lists and business directories.

What makes these sites controversial is that they gather all this information without your permission. The resulting profiles can be embarrassing or simply wrong. And getting those profiles removed or changed can be impossible. While some sites say they will honor your request to have your profile deleted, they steer you toward "claiming" your profile and making corrections to it instead. Even then, you have limited control over the content and the way it is presented. (TIME.com got Sacasa's permission to mention the results of our search on her before posting this story.)

One of the most popular people search sites today is ZoomInfo, which in June got 824,000 unique visitors in the U.S., according to comScore Media Metrix. Focused on business profiles, it currently has 37 million of them posted online, which it culls using its own natural language search technology. Inaccuracies abound, as I learned firsthand when I checked my own profile and saw that everything from my telephone number to my full name were flat out wrong. "We're the first to admit that they are not 100% accurate," says ZoomInfo COO Bryan Burdick, who estimates that only 500,0000 — just 1% — of the profiles have been verified by the person they claim to identify. (To remove your profile, email your request and a link to your profile to remove@zoominfo.com.)

The newest people search site to launch is Spock, which received $7 million in venture capital financing last December, and will come out of its invitation-only beta version on Aug. 8. Aside from trolling the big social networks to populate its database, it also searches blogs, Yahoo! profiles, Wikipedia, and company sites to identify both you and other "related" people. (It lists Al Pacino, for example, as being related to Matt Damon and George Clooney.) To improve accuracy, the site lets users vote on all the information it has teased out in tags, such as "male", "Italian-American", "actor" and so on. If it turns out that you are Irish-American, and not Italian-American, for example, your friends (and even strangers) can weigh in and have the offending tag removed. And while anyone can "claim" their existing profile and make corrections, the Spock community gets the final vote on whether the information and links you provide are accurate. [Identity by committee? Bob]

Want to opt out? If politely asking to have your listing removed doesn't work, don't expect a lawsuit to help much either. According to Daniel Solove, a George Washington University law professor and author of the forthcoming book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor and Privacy On the Internet (coming out in October from Yale University Press), it's difficult to argue that these sites are either defamatory or a breach of privacy since the information is publicly available on the Internet. "It's very problematic, but it's also very difficult to solve," he says. "On the one hand you have freedom of speech, and on the other you have privacy. Both involve people's freedom."

Solove does question the sites' viability, however. "If these things are highly inaccurate, what's the business model?" [Same the the Tabloids? Bob] says Solove. While advertising revenue for online search as a whole reached $17 billion in 2006, almost none of it comes from searching for ordinary people. (When I type "Nazira Sacasa" or my own name in Google, for example, no ads pop up.) "It's challenging to construct a business model that does not generate revenue," [Not in my experience... Bob] notes Internet analyst David Card of Jupiter Research. Spock aims to get around this problem by offering broader people-search offerings on celebrities, people in the news and general categories like plumbers or singles. Meanwhile, ZoomInfo is selling a premium version of its service to recruiters and businesses. It might help if they got their facts straight first.

But will anything come of it?

http://techdirt.com/articles/20070802/001816.shtml

Bad Week For E-Voting Machines; Florida Follows California In Issuing Report About Security Holes

from the anyone-else? dept

E-voting firms aren't having a particularly good week. Just days after research commissioned by the state of California showed vulnerabilities in many e-voting systems, a study commissioned by the state of Florida found serious security issues with Diebold's optical scan technology. While the article suggests that this is one of the first times the security has been questioned on optical scan machines (where there is still a paper trail, but these machines are used for counting the votes), there have actually been numerous studies pointing out the problems with Diebold's optical scanners, and how they can easily be hacked. Of course, what's amusing here is that some of the first tests that found the problems with Diebold's optical scanners were done two years ago by a "rogue" elections official in Florida. Of course, back then, the state of Florida didn't launch an immediate investigation. The state hung the elections official, Ion Sancho, out to dry, as the e-voting companies cracked jokes about the vulnerability and teamed up to conspire against him. So, now, years later, we find out that the security vulnerabilities he pointed out then are actually there is anyone apologizing? [Are you kidding? Bob] Doesn't sound like it. In fact, it sounds like Florida politicians are downplaying the security problems with these machines.

Oh joy...

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/08/02/riaas-newest-enemy-the-social-network

RIAA's Newest Enemy: The Social Network

Submitted by Jason Lee Miller on Thu, 08/02/2007 - 14:40.

They've been railing against peer-to-peer for some time now, and more recently have put the squeeze on webcasters via royalty hikes, but it looks like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has added a new foe to its ever-expanding list: social networkers.

They must have read Entertainment Media Research's survey, which is limited to British respondents, which showed that 86 percent of (British) Internet users have used a social network, and that 43 percent of them were pirates. Of course, that survey was done in conjunction with a media law firm that represents the music industry.

So I'm sure the numbers aren't loaded at all.

Regardless, after receiving a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violation notice from the RIAA, Facebook promptly ejected Audio, an application developed for the social network that allows users to upload MP3s and share them within the site.

In just a week, the app was downloaded 750,000 times. And the RIAA didn't like that one bit. VentureBeat updates its original article to note that Audio plans to be back online soon, pending some sort of resolution.

Ganging up on the government?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/03/eaplanmap103.xml

Online map highlights possible changes to planning law

Graham Tibbetts Last Updated: 12:01am BST 03/08/2007

An online map highlighting the locations of more than 100 major new developments that could be forced through under changes to planning law has been launched.

Massive building projects ranging from nuclear power stations, wind farms and incinerators to airports, roads and reservoirs are all pinpointed on the software for the first time.

The map has been produced by the Planning Disaster Coalition, [ www.planningdisaster.co.uk ] an umbrella organisation of environmental and conservation groups that represents 5 million people, which is leading the opposition to the Government's planning white paper.

Now who wants to start a blog?

http://techdirt.com/articles/20070802/163514.shtml

Apparently Web Content Is Hot Again

from the content?--really? dept

Every few years, someone announces that "content is king" online and that the next big success stories are going to be all about the content. Of course, that never actually seems to happen -- perhaps because the content business is a tough one, prone to fads and mostly beholden to a cyclical advertising market. A few years back, some people expected a wave of "blog buyouts" after AOL paid $25 million for Engadget and a bunch of less popular Weblogs Inc. sites. However, not much came of it. Lately, however, Hollywood is turning its eye towards online content, and with it, we're seeing a small wave of online content buyouts. This week first had the announcement that yet another batch of Hollywood insiders were launching an online video property, following the lead of folks like Will Ferrell, who launched similar properties in the last few months. However, what may be more interesting are the content buyouts. First, Discovery Communications, parent of The Discovery Channel, bought the popular TreeHugger blog for $10 million and now HandHeld Entertainment picked up the well-known (and often infamous) eBaum's world for somewhere around $15 million (possibly more with earnouts). None of these deals are really that big, but it makes you wonder if there's going to be a run on various popular independent content sites, and whether or not content really will be king this time around.

Attention cell phone companies!

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/02/2041235&from=rss

Google Shows Off Ad-Supported Cell Phone

Posted by Zonk on Thursday August 02, @05:52PM from the gotta-love-freebies dept. Google Communications Technology

taoman1 writes "Today Google showed off a ad-supported cellphone that the company plans to offer for free to interested parties. The product could reach the marketplace within a year, and will offer Google search, email, and a web browser. ' The move would echo another recent product launched by a phone industry outsider, Apple Inc.'s iPhone. But Google's product would draw its revenue from a sharply different source, relying on commercial advertising dollars instead of the sticker price of at least US$499 for an iPhone and $60 per month for the AT&T Inc. service plan. Negotiating the fairest way to split those advertising revenues with service providers could be a big hurdle for Google, one analyst said. Another problem is the potential that consumers could be scared off by the prospect of listening to advertisements before being able to make phone calls, said Jeff Kagan, a wireless and telecommunications industry analyst in Atlanta.'"

Educating the educators

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=18870

Student disciplined for online postings sues Univ. of Del.

and By The Associated Press 08.02.07

A student suspended and banned from the University of Delaware over concerns about offensive material on his Web site filed a federal lawsuit yesterday claiming that the school had violated his constitutional rights to free speech and due process.

According to Maciej Murakowski, 19, the university makes its Internet server available for students to create their own Web sites, with no restrictions on content other than that it not violate state or federal law, and that it not be used for commercial purposes.

“As such, [the school] may not, consistent with the First Amendment, punish any student based on the content of his or her Web site, even though the content may have an adverse emotional impact on some readers,” the lawsuit states.

Related

http://www.cdt.org/headlines/1032

'Child Safe Viewing Act' Raises Serious Questions

- The Senate Commerce Committee today passed the Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007 (S. 602), which requires the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to study the "existence and availability" of filtering technologies for audio and video content transmitted over "wired, wireless, and Internet" platforms, as well as other devices. CDT does not oppose a purely fact-finding study, but maintains that a neutral, non-regulatory body such as the National Academy of Sciences would be better suited to such a project. More importantly, CDT is concerned that this legislation may represent a step toward expanding the FCC's censorship authority to include Internet content. August 02, 2007

Research. Good point!

http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/2007/08/02/what-keywords-are-being-used-on-social-sites/

What Keywords Are Being Used On Social Sites?

Filed under: Net-Tech-Tools, Net-Web

Let me risk beating a point into the ground: in order to find things when you search you have to use the proper vocabulary. And on the Internet, the proper vocabulary is changing constantly, especially in the arenas of tech and popular culture. SiteVolume, at http://sitevolume.com/, is a nifty little tool letting you know how much vocabulary words are being used across certain social sites like MySpace, Digg, and Flickr.

You can enter up to five words and get a bar graph of how often the words appear on each site. It was interesting comparing the name of Web tools, search engines, and technologies. Especially the word Twitter, which was almost nonexistent some places but which showed up fairly frequently other places (besides Twitter itself, of course.)

How to suck money from cat lovers (Is there one for dogs, birds,goldfish, horses, etc?)

http://www.killerstartups.com/Social-Networking/mycatspace--MySpace-for-Felines/

MyCatSpace.com - MySpace for Felines

posted 5 Hours 25 Minutes ago by Siri | Visit http://www.mycatspace.com

I've suggested a business model like this for several years now. I imagined videos that address simple topics (How to calculate Standard Deviation, How to balance you checkbook) on an ad sponsored site. Is this one too expensive?

http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/learnitfirst--Online-Video-Training/

LearnItFirst.com - Online Video Training

posted 7 Hours ago by bigtoga | Visit http://www.learnitfirst.com/

... Learnitfirst.com allows the users to learn how to use many programs by a fee of less than $50 dollars!

[They do offer some free: http://www.learnitfirst.com/FreeVideos/default.aspx

Another one of those lists I like so much...

http://digg.com/software/Best_Freeware_Design_Software

Best Freeware Design Software

Image editing, Ilustration, Authoring Tools, Animation, 3D Modeling & CAD.....

http://lifehacker.biz/articles/best-freeware-design-software/