http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081206152455652
Symantec employee data on stolen laptop
Saturday, December 06 2008 @ 03:24 PM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
Symantec recently notified the Maryland Attorney General's Office that a laptop stolen from an employee's home contained some employees' names, addresses, and social security numbers.
No information was provided as to when the laptop was stolen, where it was stolen, how many employees had data on the laptop and whether the data were encrypted or if there were any other security measures in place. [You think they would brag if their products had protected this laptop... Bob]
Letters are getting better, but information is still lacking or slanted.
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=2008120615443378
FedEx loses backup of Howland Capital Management client data
Saturday, December 06 2008 @ 03:44 PM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
Howland Capital Management has notified the Maryland Attorney General's Office that FedEx notified it at the end of July that a package it had shipped on July 24th containing backup media had not arrived at its intended destination. As of its October 30th letter to the state, the missing backup media had still not been located.
Information on clients included names, addresses, driver's license numbers, social security numbers, and account numbers. The total number of clients whose data are missing was not indicated; 6 are Maryland residents.
The missing backup media is password-protected, and according to the notification to the state, "cannot be accessed without a propietary Sungard Series 7 Trust accounting platform." [I can't find anything to support that statement. Bob]
As a result of this incident, Howland no longer sends backup media off-site and reports that "information is now electronically transferred in real time across a dedicated line to a remote disaster recovery site." The company has also implemented other security policies and practices to enhance the security of its clients' data.
Comment: this is one of the most detailed notification letters I've read in a long time, and their letter to those affected is worth reading. I not only like their level of explanation and detail, but the personal touch of the President of Howland signing the letter "Tony" is bound to create a warmer note than many typical notifications. -- Dissent
Small breach (probably) but well written notice to customers!
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081206144827131
Suspicious behavior by Kraft contractor triggers breach notification
Saturday, December 06 2008 @ 02:48 PM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
By letter dated November 7th to the Maryland Attorney General's Office, James S. Portnoy of Kraft Foods reported that:: "We recently learned that an employee of Affinitas, the company that manages outbound telephone sales of products for Kraft's Gevalia subsidiary, copied personal information regarding 11 of our customers, including names and credit card numbers. The same individual had access to personal information provided by approximately 174 other customers."
As of the date of notification, the company had no indication that any of the data had been misused. A copy of the notification and offer of free credit-monitoring services to those other customers is attached to the letter, but no copy of the letter sent to the 11 customers whose data were copied was appended to the report.
Comment: This was another clearly written notification letter to customers accompanied by an offer of two years of free credit monitoring. The letter also indicates that the company is working with its contractor to ensure that Affinitas strengthens its privacy protections. -- Dissent
Could be large – over 700 in Maryland alone. Two months to report?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081206141834140
Stolen Wells Real Estate Funds contained sensitive customer financial data
Saturday, December 06 2008 @ 02:18 PM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
In what has become an all-too-frequent occurrence, Wells Real Estate Funds joined the ranks of those notifying customers that their personal information was on a laptop stolen from an employee's vehicle.
By letter dated November 5th to the Maryland Attorney General's Office, Kirk Montgomery, Legal Counsel for Wells, reported that the theft occurred in Suwanee, Georgia on October 6th.
Information on the laptop may have included customers' Wells account numbers, third party account numbers, tax identification numbers, Social Security numbers, and specific investment information. 704 customers in Maryland were affected, but the total number of customers with information on the laptop was not indicated in the report.
Just a thought, but rather than putting a red ribbon on the file, wouldn't it be more useful to remove the foster care address from the file?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081206185355529
UK: Children put at risk by data blunder
Saturday, December 06 2008 @ 06:53 PM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
VULNERABLE Scots children have been exposed to a serious risk of violence following an "incredible" data blunder by the organisation supposed to look after them. The scandal involves children taken from their parents for their own safety and given new homes. On at least 12 occasions in the past year, details about the children, including their secret addresses, were accidentally passed to their abusive or neglectful birth parents
... Last night, the Scottish Children's Reporter Administration (SCRA) admitted the mistake and issued a full apology. But officials privately admit they could face a string of legal claims for substantial damages following the data fiasco.
Source - Scotland on Sunday
If Dilbert markets this security device, I'm buying one!
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-12-07/
Lots of interesting (but perhaps not too accurate) speculation in the article.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F06%2F230221&from=rss
NSA Is Building a New Datacenter In San Antonio
Posted by kdawson on Sunday December 07, @02:17AM from the panopticon-economy dept.
An anonymous reader writes in with an article from a Texas paper on the NSA's new facility in San Antonio.
"America's top spy agency has taken over the former Sony microchip plant and is transforming it into a new data-mining headquarters... where billions of electronic communications will be sifted in the agency's mission to identify terrorist threats. ... [Author James] Bamford writes about how NSA and Microsoft had both been eyeing San Antonio for years because it has the cheapest electricity in Texas, and the state has its own power grid, making it less vulnerable to power outages on the national grid. He notes that it seemed the NSA wanted assurance Microsoft would be here, too, before making a final commitment, due to the advantages of 'having their miners virtually next door to the mother lode of data centers.' The new NSA facility is just a few miles from Microsoft's data center of the same size. Bamford says that under current law, NSA could gain access to Microsoft's stored data without even a warrant, but merely a fiber-optic cable."
The article mentions the NRC report concluding that data mining is ineffective as a tactic against terrorism, which we discussed a couple of months back.
Not great, but shows multiple images from the video, which is helpful.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/019997.html
December 06, 2008
Beta Video Search Engine Provides Access to Specific Scenes and Content
"Using a unique combination of new computer vision and fast computation methods, VideoSurf has taught computers to “see” inside videos to find content in a fast, efficient, and scalable way. Basing its search on visual identification, rather than text only, VideoSurf’s computer vision video search engine provides more relevant results and a better experience to let users find and discover the videos they really want to watch.
With over 10 billion (and rapidly growing) visual moments indexed from videos found across the web, VideoSurf allows consumers to visually navigate through their results to easily find the specific scenes, people or moments they most want to see."
Kinda old school, but interesting.
http://www.text-image.com/index.html
TEXT-IMAGE.com
Here you can easily generate cool text-images from almost any picture you have on your computer.
You know times are tough when...
Amsterdam to close many brothels, marijuana cafes
By TOBY STERLING, Associated Press Writer – Sat Dec 6, 12:11 pm ET
This looked interesting enough for me to try – I'll let you know what I think.
Zotero
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources.
A very simple overview of the elements. More for my website students than Chemistry majors.
http://www.periodicvideos.com/#
Periodic Table of Videos
One of many, but simple to use...
http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/fluidsurveys-com-free-online-survey-software
FluidSurveys.com - Free Online Survey Software
It goes without saying that surveys and polls are one of the most effective ways of spicing user interaction and extending the amount of time visitors spend at any given site. As such, there are many tools for creating and implementing surveys, and this one is the new kid on the block.
In addition to enabling you to create surveys and making polls, this particular solution includes the tools for generating reports and analyzing results in the same package.
As far as the surveys itself go, features like advanced branching and skipping logic are fully taken into consideration along with several question types to choose from. There is also support for multipage surveys (but only for paid accounts).
Speaking of accounts, these include a free version (limited to 20 questions for survey) along with three different paid plans: “Basic”, “Premium” and “Ultra”. The latter is suitable for those that intend to deploy very large-scale surveys, and it can accommodate up to 2,000 responses per survey. Pricing considerations are clearly accounted for online, so once you pick out a plan you think will suit you fine the same can easily be implemented.
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