Monday, June 16, 2008

...because...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080616065218111

Data “Dysprotection:” breaches reported last week

Monday, June 16 2008 @ 06:52 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

A recap of incidents or privacy breaches reported last week for those who enjoy shaking their head and muttering to themselves with their morning coffee.

Source - Chronicles of Dissent



Interesting. They aren't posting on a web site, just gathering all the data into a single database. I doubt that dismissing the parent's concerns is the best way to address this.

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080616053550588

AU: Parents livid over database putting student profiles, pictures online

Monday, June 16 2008 @ 05:35 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Non-U.S. News

With the State government planning to post the profile of every state school student on its intranet database, called OneSchool, parents in Australia are livid over the fact that it will make their kids vulnerable to paedophiles.

OneSchool, will provide each and every detail of the state's 480,000 public school students enrolled from Prep to Year 12, for which, the photographs, personal details, career aspirations, off-campus activities and student performance records are already being collected from all 1251 state schools.

Source - TopNews.in Related - Sydney Morning Herald

[From the article:

"The social fabric of hackers is such that this database (OneSchool) is going to be a fair target. People are going to try and get in. There is no doubt in my mind," The Courier Mail quoted professor Mark Looi, Queensland University of Technology deputy dean of Information Technology, as saying.

... One of the readers, Sari, of Brisbane, suggested that firstly, personal information of politicians, their wives and children should be posted on the net.

“Then we'll see how safe it is before adding school children,” she said.

... According to Education Minister Rod Welford, if the parents refuse to give their consent to their child being profiled, they could also be denied access to public education. [Ah! A new definition of “consent” Bob]

... He also said that till date no one to his knowledge had gained unauthorised access [That's the point isn't it? Bob] to Education Queensland's other online databases.



Tools & Techniques

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/15/2223259&from=rss

User Not Found, Email Drops Silently

Posted by timothy on Sunday June 15, @06:40PM from the silent-but-obnoxious dept.

shervinafshar writes with an International Herald Tribune story explaining just why it is failed emails don't always result in a helpful error message for the sender, which also gives some insight into ways that email can be used to spy on recipients.

"In last lines of the article, two companies are introduced which provide services that can 'spy' on your email reading habits. They also can 'call home' too: 'Some entrepreneurs have seen that uncertainty and offered senders the ability to obtain receipts that a given message has been read — without the recipient knowing that a confirmation has been sent back to the sender. ReadNotify, based in Queensland, Australia, started in 2000 and promised to report not only on whether a message was read, but also on how long it was opened for reading on the recipient's PC. It can also send the message in "self-destructing" form, preventing forwarding, printing, copying and saving. ' IHT also is asking its readers to comment about these kind of services being against user privacy."



Worth a read!

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/15/182221&from=rss

Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality

Posted by timothy on Sunday June 15, @02:31PM from the in-this-corner-weighing-61-trillion-dollars dept. The Internet

penciling_in writes

"CircleID has a post by Richard Bennett, one of the panelists in the recent Innovation forum on open access and net neutrality — where Google announced their upcoming throttling detector. From the article: 'My name is Richard Bennett and I'm a network engineer. I've built networking products for 30 years and contributed to a dozen networking standards, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi. I was one of the witnesses at the FCC hearing at Harvard, and I wrote one of the dueling Op-Ed's on net neutrality that ran in the Mercury News the day of the Stanford hearing. I'm opposed to net neutrality regulations because they foreclose some engineering options that we're going to need for the Internet to become the one true general-purpose network that links all of us to each other, connects all our devices to all our information, and makes the world a better place. Let me explain ...'

This article is great insight for anyone for or against net neutrality."



http://news.cnet.com/IBM-may-open-source-DB2/2100-7344_3-6241694.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-5&subj=news

IBM may open-source DB2

By Tom Espiner Special to CNET News.com Published: June 16, 2008 5:14 AM PDT

IBM is positive about the possibility of bringing out its DB2 database management software under an open-source license.

While the computing giant has no immediate plans to open-source DB2, market conditions may make it unavoidable, according to Chris Livesey, IBM's U.K. director of information management software.

"We have a light version of the product offered for free, which is a step towards exposing our core (DB2) technology," said Livesey.

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