Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Not much important news today, there seems to have been some kind of election...



Spin over facts

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081104073757556

Baylor Health Care says laptop with patient data stolen

Tuesday, November 04 2008 @ 07:37 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews

A laptop computer containing limited health information on 100,000 patients was stolen from an employee's car in September, Baylor Health Care System Inc. said Monday.

A letter is being sent to the patients, including 7,400 patients whose Social Security numbers were stored on the computer.

Source - Dallas Morning News

[From the article:

"Fortunately, the laptop did not contain comprehensive patient medical records, and, according to law enforcement officials, it is rare that incidents such as this result in identity theft," Dr. Winter said.

The data consisted of names of patients and medical codes relating to the treatment they received. The codes are a series of numbers requiring a medical code book to interpret, [Or a query on Google Bob] said Nikki Mitchell, a Baylor spokeswoman.

... It was within the manager's job description to visit Baylor locations collecting patient data on the laptop, but she was fired because leaving the laptop in her car broke protocol, Ms. Mitchell said. [I approve! Bob]


Related

http://breachblog.com/2008/11/04/baylor.aspx?ref=rss

Baylor Health Care System employee is fired over stolen laptop



Interesting but not much detail available. Why were medical records in public storage? Did the crooks only steal the hard drives?

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081104180908356

AZ: Info of 40,000 kids on stolen hard drives (DES update)

Tuesday, November 04 2008 @ 06:09 PM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews

Arizona's Department of Economic Security said five hard drives stolen from a storage unit contained the personal information of up to 40,000 children.

The department sent letters to parents who had submitted their children for its "Early Intervention Program" informing them the children may be at risk of identity theft as a result of the October break-in at the public storage unit, KTVK-TV in Phoenix reported Tuesday.

"The hard drives contained info that might include name, address, insurance info, child disability, date of birth and Social Security number," the letters stated.

Source - Times of the Internet



If you can't get the death penalty for copyright violations in the US, add it into a secret treaty agreement, then claim we have to comply!

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/04/1923211&from=rss

Concerns About ACTA In EU, Canada

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 04, @03:29PM from the back-rooms-and-dark-alleyways dept. Privacy Government

Elektroschock writes

"An EU document on the Anti-Counterfeiting Treaty was leaked. The main purpose of the trade agreement is to impose the European enforcement measures for IPR infringements on the US and emerging economies, widen the enforcement measures to include criminal sanctions for patent infringements, and introduce internet content filtering measures. Civil society groups such as the FFII criticize the ACTA process because negotiation documents are not made publicly available by the governments. The EU document ('fact sheet') from the EU Trade Commissioner explicitly mentions: 'Internet distribution and information technology — e.g. mechanisms available in EU E-commerce Directive of 2000, such as a definition of the responsibility of internet service providers regarding IP infringing content.'"

And an anonymous reader adds Michael Geist's push for more transparency around ACTA negotiations in Canada.



Interesting application. As you use your browser, highlight text and a search engine plops results onto a sidebar.

http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/juiceapp-com-intelligent-discovery-engine

Juiceapp.com - Intelligent Discovery Engine

http://www.juiceapp.com

Developed by Linkool Labs, Juice is an intelligent discovery engine that has just been launched. This engine enables you to highlight a portion of text and process it in order to produce a set of content recommendations.

The Juice engine comprises a natural language processing system with a dictionary that connects keywords with the corresponding (and richest) content that can be found on the web, based on the information you drag and drop.

Moreover, the content that is discovered for you and put forward by Juice can easily be organized and categorized for browsing convenience. For instance, when a video is recommended you can simply add it to our video playlist and watch it afterwards. The same applies to any picture you come across – you can save it for ulterior viewing in a straightforward manner.

The supported browsers so far include only Firefox 3.0. It will be interesting to see if other browsers are taken into account as the project evolves. For the time being, Firefox users can check Juice out at Juiceapp.com and start discovering new content on the web right away.

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