What's going on here? A politician doing something smart? What am I missing?

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070912112843681

CT: Rell orders confidential data on state laptops encrypted or purged

Wednesday, September 12 2007 @ 11:28 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: State/Local Govt.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell, saying that last month's theft of a state computer containing personal information on 106,000 Connecticut taxpayers was "an accident that never should have happened," has ordered tighter controls on the use of restricted or confidential data on state laptops, Blackberries, and other mobile computing devices.

Under a policy the governor announced Monday, all state agencies are to be required to encrypt any data on a mobile device and require additional protections from unauthorized access and disclosure.

Source - Journal Inquirer

[From the article:

One taxpayer whose information was included on the stolen DRS computer, House Majority Leader Christopher G. Donovan of Meriden, told the JI last week that when he called the company recommended to him by DRS he was frustrated when a representative tried to sell him "extra" protection for "something like $199 [That's more like what I expect from governments... Bob]

Oneupmanship in the “I didn't know!” battle.

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070912193152561

UK: Lost hospital disk raises fears about protecting personal data

Wednesday, September 12 2007 @ 07:31 PM CDT Contributed by: Wiwoh News Section: Breaches

For the past month or so, Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust has been dealing with a problem that should not have happened - all because a computer hard drive containing sensitive patient information from a trust hospital was sold on the auction site eBay.

Losing disks loaded with confidential data is not a new thing; BT and Glamorgan University's forensics computing laboratory have been finding such hard drives every year as part of their annual survey designed to highlight the problem of people disposing of disks without destroying the data on them.

What is unusual [Unfortunately not very unusual... Bob] about this incident, which came to light in the latest survey, is that no-one knew that the computer was on the hospital network in the first place.

Source - Guardian.co.uk

What are the odds he was the only one doing this? Should be some interesting details if we get to see the trial transcripts...

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/valleyindependent/teenscene/s_526899.html

San Francisco man accused of selling stolen credit card numbers

By The Tribune-Review Tuesday, September 11, 2007

A man who used the Internet alias "Iceman" stole credit card and identity information from tens of thousands of people by hacking into the computers of financial institutions and credit card processing centers, federal authorities said today.

Max Ray Butler, 35, of San Francisco, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh on three counts of wire fraud and two counts of transferring stolen identity information.

Butler was charged in Pittsburgh because he sold more than 100 credit card numbers and related information to a western Pennsylvania resident who is cooperating with the investigation, said Margaret Philbin, spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan of Pittsburgh.

Authorities said Butler also operated a Web site that served as an online forum for people who steal, share or use others' credit card information illegally in a practice is known as "carding."

... The criminal complaint, which was unsealed Tuesday, details a wide-ranging ring that Butler allegedly ran from June 2005 until he was arrested last week.

... Witnesses told agents they were present as Butler moved to various hotel rooms where he would use a high-powered antenna to intercept wireless communications. That enabled him to hack into the computers and otherwise gain the confidential credit card information from financial institutions and credit card processing centers.

... Butler faces up to 40 years in prison and a fine of $1.5 million if convicted on all charges.

The markup technique is interesting...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070912072844291

FISA Fest at Georgetown Law

Wednesday, September 12 2007 @ 07:28 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Surveillance

A symposium held at Georgetown University’s Law Center on Sept. 10th was a veritable FISA fest for those interested in the complicated issues involving the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Hosted by the Law Center's new National Security Center, the symposium was organized by two of the most knowledgeable people on the planet in the arcane world of FISA law: James A. Baker, Lecturer at Harvard Law and still titular head of the Justice Dept's office that presents requests for warrants to the secret court that okays electronic surveillance and searches of those suspected of espionage, terrorism, or other acts of foreign intelligence; and David S. Kris, a former Associate Deputy Attorney General who was most responsible for tearing down "The Wall" between national security and criminal investigations, and who is the co-author of a weighty new tome, National Security Investigations and Prosecutions, destined to become the Bible for FISA nerds.

... In the meantime, David Kris has produced the single most valuable document ever created for the FISA nerd: a copy of the law as originally written in 1978, with all the changes enacted since Sept. 11, 2001, with each change helpfully color-coded (in SIX different colors!) so that you can keep track of what was added or subtracted when. I have been wallowing in it for the past 24 hours and highly recommend it.

Source - POGO (Project on Government Oversight)

(Props, Fergie's Tech Blog)

Is this the replacement for Carnivore? (Is it true that Democrats are defined as Terrorists?)

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/12/1728238&from=rss

NSF-Funded "Dark Web" to Battle Terrorists

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday September 12, @03:07PM from the whos-watching-the-watchers dept. The Internet Technology

BuzzSkyline writes "The National Science Foundation has announced a new University of Arizona project, which they call the Dark Web, intended to monitor all terrorist activity on the Internet. The project relies on 'advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis [to] find, catalog and analyze extremist activities online.' The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release."

Interesting argument

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/12/2252239&from=rss

Fair Use Worth More Than Copyright To Economy

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 12, @08:48PM from the make-more-money dept. The Internet The Almighty Buck IT

Dotnaught writes "The Computer and Communications Industry Association — a trade group representing Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, among others — has issued a report (PDF) that finds fair use exceptions add more than $4.5 trillion in revenue to the U.S. economy and add more value to the U.S. economy than copyright industries contribute. "Recent studies indicate that the value added to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion.", said CCIA President and CEO Ed Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion."

Worth look at this one!

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/12/1739215&from=rss

Bossie Awards Honor Open Source Software

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday September 12, @03:46PM from the something-for-everyone dept. Software IT

The Alliance writes "InfoWorld has announced the 2007 Bossie Awards for the Best of Open-Source Software. Awards were given to 36 winners across 6 categories. Honorees include (among others) SpamAssassin, ClamAV and Nessus in security, Wireshark and Azureus Vuze in networking, and ZFS for storage. Interestingly, they split the operating system winners across two distributions, with CentOS winning for server OS and Ubuntu for desktop."

Sound familiar?

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/12/1428210&from=rss

When Ethics and IT Collide

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday September 12, @11:47AM from the you-got-peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate dept. Security

jcatcw writes "IT workers have access to confidential data, and they can see what other employees are doing on their computers or the networks. This can put a good worker in a bad predicament. Bryan, the IT director for the U.S. division of German company, discovered an employee using a company computer to view pornography of Asian women and of children. He reported it but the company ignored it. Subsequently the employee was promoted and moved to China to run a manufacturing plant. That was six years ago but Bryan still regrets not going to the FBI. Other IT workers admit using their admin passwords to snoop through company systems. In a Ponemon Institute poll of more than 16,000 U.S. IT practitioners, 62% said they had accessed another person's computer without permission, 50% read confidential or sensitive information without a legitimate reason, and 42% said they had knowingly violated their company's privacy, security or IT policies. But in the absence of a professional code of ethics, companies struggle to keep corporate policies up to date."

Something for both e-Discovery and the IT shop.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201805279&cid=nl_IWK_daily

Everything You Need To Know To Get Started With Content Management Systems

Free and low-cost enterprise wiki tools and open-source content management systems are plentiful. Here's a quick guide to the available options.

By Peter Hagopian, InformationWeek Sept. 10, 2007

It can be easy to dump thousands of dollars into a content management system that no one in your company will want to (or can figure out how to) use. Here are some solutions that keep costs in check but deliver a useful, easy-to-use system with lots of capabilities.

In this article, we'll give an overview of the concepts behind enterprise content and document management, take a look at some practical applications for different types of organizations, and then discuss specific software packages, such as MediaWiki, Drupal, and others, that can be easy to use but also pack lots of functionality.

When (free) Open Office just won't do?

http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9777020-7.html

September 12, 2007 9:42 AM PDT

Microsoft says college students can 'steal' Office

Posted by Ina Fried

For college students who want Office 2007, but don't want to pay Microsoft a fortune, the software maker is offering another option: Steal it.

Well, actually Microsoft isn't encouraging piracy. Rather it is launching a promotion, dubbed "Ultimate Steal," in which college students can get the ultra high-end Ultimate edition of Office for just $60.

If nothing else, the free (downloadable) CD might be worth it...

http://lifehacker.com/software/lifehacker-top-10/top-10-wikipedia-tricks-298696.php

Top 10 Wikipedia Tricks

Without a doubt, Wikipedia is one of the most useful and amazing sources of information on the internet—but chances are you aren't using it to its full potential. Thanks to its freely available content base, lots of Wikipedia-related projects have sprung up that offer easy access to information every which way you need it. Whether you want to do a quick lookup on your mobile phone to settle a debate at the bar, mind map related articles, integrate Wikipedia lookups into your media player and instant messenger or simply need better and quicker search tools, check out our list of top 10 Wikipedia tricks.

Somehow this fits exactly into the Marketing class I'm teaching...

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2007203690913.gif