At first glance, I wondered why they even reported the loss of encrypted data. This is small potatoes, but an interesting twist on obfuscation...
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080428184852570
Concord Regional Visiting Nurse Association reports laptop stolen
Monday, April 28 2008 @ 06:48 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches
The Concord Regional Visiting Nurse Association reported [pdf] to the New Hampshire Department of Justice that a laptop was stolen from a staff member’s vehicle on April 16. The laptop contained birth date and social security numbers for 15 clients.
CRVNA believes that the risk of ID theft is low because of the three layers of security protection used, including encryption.
[The report actually states that the third password was stored in encrypted form – the file itself was unencrypted. Therefore there was no real protection for the data. Bob]
Sub-optimal security from a sub-prime mortgage company? Who'd-a thunk it?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080428174713905
CO: Hundreds Of Mortgage Files Found In Dumpster
Monday, April 28 2008 @ 05:47 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches
The Arapahoe County District Attorney's Office is advising anyone who has used Cove Creek Mortgage to watch out for identity theft after hundreds of mortgage files were dumped in a public trash bin over the weekend.
Cove Creek's owner had abandoned his Englewood office in January and property managers had not been able to find him, investigators said. On Saturday, the property manager cleaned out his office and put all items from the office -- including complete mortgage files -- into two Dumpsters.
Source - The Denver Channel
[From the article:
David Peters who works in the same complex found the files Monday morning.
"I was taking some other trash out to the garbage can and opened the lid and on there was a couple of laptops," said Peters. "Directly underneath them were files with people's names on it and was like, well this is not right." [Like, well said, Dude! Bob]
... While there are civil laws against dumping such documentation, Chambers said it is not against the law. [Okay, I'm gonna need a lawyer to explain that statement. Bob]
Tools & Techniques
Police investigate multi-state credit card scam
Updated: 04/28/2008 06:34 PM By: Iris St. Meran
HERKIMER, N.Y. -- Herkimer police have confiscated nearly 100 gift cards and debit cards as well as other items that were taken from Wal-Mart stores on April 8th.
"We were called to the Wal-Mart store regarding suspicious activity involving debit cards and or credit cards. The person was trying to swipe several different cards to obtain a gift cards," said Herkimer Police Investigator Robert Risi.
This resulted in the arrest of Alex Prime and Quincy Thompson both of Brooklyn, New York. Police say the credit and debit card information was taken from around the country and used in the Wal-Mart stores in Rome and Herkimer to buy mostly electronic products.
"During the course of our investigation we found that the back of the debit cards were altered with credit card information that was stolen. We don't know where from, they were stolen but that credit card information was placed on the back of the debit card magnet strip," said Risi.
In order to get a card holder's account information, a device called a skimmer is used. It's about the size of cell phone. A person can just swipe a credit card and have the personal information they need. [Can I get one on e-Bay? Bob]
"The information is then downloaded off the skimmer into a computer and they have the technology to take that information and put it on the magnetic strip of a gift card," said Herkimer Police Captain Scott Scherer.
Herkimer Police say this is the largest fraud investigation they have seen in the area and that Wal-Mart has reported nearly $900,000 lost in merchandise. [At these two stores? Bob] Wal-Mart declined comment during the investigation.
The FBI, Secret Service and U.S. Postal service as well as other police departments are assisting in this investigation.
Another risk of television? “Instead of pulse rate, we get re-runs of 'I Love Lucy'”
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9930441-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
Hospital techies urge limits on 'white space' Wi-Fi
Posted by Anne Broache April 28, 2008 2:00 PM PDT
About a decade ago, wireless heart monitors hooked to patients at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas went on the fritz, causing much scrambling among the building's engineering team.
The culprit, as it turned out, was interference from a nearby broadcast television station, which was testing its digital signal on the same channel where some of the medical devices operated, as detailed in the journal Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology a few years ago. The Federal Communications Commission ultimately cordoned off spectrum just for that purpose, although migrating there was largely voluntary.
Now, hospital administrators and medical device manufacturers fear similar problems could happen again if federal regulators don't place limits on requests by Google, Microsoft, and other high-tech companies to free up spectrum "white spaces" between television channels.
What happens when you just don't trust your government... No doubt encryption vendors will now claim their products offer a green alternative to flying...
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/29/003253&from=rss
Lawyers Would Rather Fly Than Download PGP
Posted by kdawson on Monday April 28, @08:19PM from the fly-once-to-exchange-keys dept. Privacy Encryption The Courts Politics
An anonymous reader writes
"The NYTimes is running a front-page story about lawyers for suspects in terrorism-related cases fearing government monitoring of privileged conversations. But instead of talking about the technological solutions, the lawyers fly halfway across the world to meet with their clients. In fact, nowhere in the article is encryption even mentioned. Is it possible that lawyers don't even know about PGP?"
The New Yorker has a detailed piece centering on the Oregon terrorism case discussed by the Times.
Interesting comments on this “military justice blog” and a good set of links...
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080428092427548
Government computers and expectation of privacy
Monday, April 28 2008 @ 09:24 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: In the Courts
In the first part of its opinion in United States v. Larson, __ M.J. ___, No. 07-0263/AF (C.A.A.F. Apr. 25, 2008), CAAF rather easily rules that an Air Force major had no expectation of privacy in his government computer, which he used to set up a rendez-vous with a civilian police detective who was posing on the computer as a 14-year-old girl and on which pornographic images were stored. The computer was located in a private office assigned to Major Larson and the office was capable of being locked. "[B]ut other Air Force personnel, including the fire department and the command's facility manager also had keys to his office." Id., slip op. at 5. The computer itself was government property that had been provided to Major Larson "to accomplish official business." Id. Major Larson "could secure the computer with a personal password, but a system administrator could still access the computer." Id. [There is a trend to have employees purchase and use their own computers. This could be interesting... Bob] When Major Larson "logged on to the computer, he was required to click a button accepting conditions listed in a banner, which stated that the computer was Department of Defense property, was for official use, and that he consented to monitoring." Id., slip op. at 5-6. "The military judge found that, while Appellant 'reasonably understood that he was allowed to send personal e-mail or visit the internet as long as it didn't interfere with [his] duties,' this did not change the fact that the government owned the computer and had a right to access it." Id., slip op. at 6.
Source - CAAFlog
[From the article:
The actual practices of the network administrator may either support or refute a reasonable expectation of privacy. See Larson, slip op. at 10. [This is scary. Your prosecution or defense could rest on the understanding of entry level employee... Bob]
How could I resist an article with this title?
http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/62779.html?welcome=1209472608
The Art of Cyber Warfare, Part 1: The Digital Battlefield
By Jack M. Germain TechNewsWorld 04/29/08 4:00 AM PT
Computer network attacks are often perpetrated by gangs of criminal hackers attempting to break into a system for financial gain. However, cyber attacks for political purposes could just as easily be -- and sometimes are -- perpetrated. A country's national security could be severely threatened should a team of hackers successfully crack certain computer systems.
... FBI reports from last year show that 108 countries have dedicated cyber attack capabilities, he added. Kellerman also serves on the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency and is a former senior data risk management specialist for the World Bank Treasury Security Team.
... Beginning April 27, 2007, about 1 million computers worldwide were reportedly used to conduct denial-of-service attacks on Estonian government and corporate Web sites. Over a three-week period, the attacks swamped Estonia's computer network with so much traffic that the government there was forced to shut them down. [Imagine a similar outcome with the attack limited to Wall Street... Bob]
Related?
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/018206.html
April 28, 2008
Law Enforcement Strategy to Combat International Organized Crime
News release: "Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey announced a new strategy in the fight against international organized crime that will address this growing threat to U.S. security and stability. The Law Enforcement Strategy to Combat International Organized Crime (the strategy) was developed following an October 2007 International Organized Crime Threat Assessment (IOC Threat Assessment) and will address the demand for a strategic, targeted and concerted U.S. response to combat the identified threats. This strategy builds on the broad foundation the Administration has developed in recent years to enhance information sharing, and to secure U.S. borders and financial systems from a variety of transnational threats."
I thought SCO was dead months age.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/29/1141231&from=rss
SCO v. Novell Goes to Trial Today In Utah
Posted by timothy on Tuesday April 29, @08:41AM from the smell-of-napalm-in-the-morning dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The day many have been waiting for has finally arrived, the day SCO gets torn apart in court by Novell. Each side gets 10 hours, and Novell managed to get them to agree to a stipulation (PDF) that should make things go a lot faster. With any luck, we will soon have an official ruling that SCO does not own much of anything and then we just have to wait for SCO to exhaust its appeals. This would've been over a long time ago, but SCO filed for bankruptcy on the eve of trial, stopping the clock. One can only wonder what trick they will try to pull this time."
Backgrounder... Why social networks are important.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/28/morgan-stanleys-march-internet-trends-report-social/
Morgan Stanley’s March Internet Trends Report: Social Applications Dominating
Michael Arrington April 28 2008
[From the Key takeaways:
YouTube + Facebook page views > Google or Yahoo page views (and may be bigger than both combined)
6/10 top internet sites are social (youtube, live.com, facebook, hi5, wikipedia, orkut); none were on the list in 2005
>50% of Facebook users log in daily, 95% of Facebook users have used at least one third party application
14 million photos uploaded daily on Facebook [Still hard to find the truly incriminating ones... Bob]
Google + Yahoo = 61% of U.S. Online Ad Revenue
Most interesting because of their first “do not use” recommendation – Adobe Reader. That;s not the only pakage you might be using...
http://lifehacker.com/384545/superior-alternatives-to-crappy-windows-software
Superior Alternatives to Crappy Windows Software
... it's time to replace stinky Windows software with its superior (but lesser-known) alternative.
Interesting that the author views this as a genealogy source...
http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/2008/04/28/what-happened-at-the-old-bailey/
What Happened At the Old Bailey?
28th April 2008, 10:40 pm
If you have English ancestry, an interest in your family’s history, and some patience, do I have a site for you. It’s a Web site aggregating the proceeding of the trials at the Old Bailey (the Central Criminal Court in England) from 1674-1913. This site covers almost 200,000 trials.
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/index.jsp
Perhaps they don't teach “the logic of the Internet” in Law School?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080428/194905972.shtml
RIAA Now Decides That Not Enough People Have Heard Of Project Playlist
from the reverse-attention-whores dept
There they go again. The RIAA and MPAA keep picking totally random, mostly unknown, startups and suing them -- giving them all sorts of free publicity. They did it years ago with Napster and more recently with The Pirate Bay. And yet... they keep doing it. In the latest example, the RIAA is suing a company called Project Playlist, which offers apps for MySpace and Facebook that let you play music found elsewhere online. There are a bunch of similar offerings out there (some of which I think are even more well known). If this case goes forward, it could be quite interesting, as again it's hard to see how Project Playlist is the liable party. It just lets users point its player to mp3 files that are found on other sites. Those files may be infringing, but Project Playlist is just the player. It would be like suing Sony for making a Walkman on the assumption that most tapes used in Walkmen include infringing copies of songs.
There are worse things than driving while talking on a cell phone...
French police stop video-watching man driving at 200 km an hour
Mon Apr 28, 12:06 PM ET
French police said Monday they had caught a man driving on a motorway at 200 kilometres (125 miles) an hour while watching a video.
The 21-year-old was watching the video on a mobile viewer placed on the dashboard of his vehicle when police stopped him Sunday on the highway near the western city of Tours, police said.
... Police impounded his car and confiscated his licence while he awaits a court appearance.
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