http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=5065
Judge spanks lawyer for leaking personal details in brief
November 4, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Breaches, Court
Dan Goodin reports:
A judge has chastised a lawyer for including the social security numbers and birthdays of 179 individuals in an electronic court brief, ordering him to pay a $5,000 sanction and provide credit monitoring.
US District Judge Michael J. Davis said he was meting out the penalty under his “inherent power,” meaning no one in the court case had filed a motion requesting he do so. In an order issued late last month, he said the move was designed to prevent attorney Vincent J. Moccio from repeating the carelessness again.
Read more in The Register.
More interesting: How come no one else cares? I suspect there are many thousands (millions?) of Facebook/Blockbuster users who don't even notice this connection.
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=5054
Texas Woman Sues Facebook for Privacy Violations (Updated)
November 4, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Businesses, Court
Worried about your privacy online? So is a woman from Texas, who’s suing Facebook and Blockbuster for posting too much information about her online.
Cathryn Harris found out after the fact that Facebook added a note every time she rented a movie from Blockbuster — a note that contained her full name and the name of the movie she was renting.
[...]
The 25-year-old homemaker from Dallas County, Texas, said she made the discovery last year when she rented the 1985 adventure film “The Jewel of the Nile,” starring Kathleen Turner, Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito. She said an alert appeared on her Facebook profile detailing the transaction.
As a result, Harris filed two lawsuits — one last year against Blockbuster and one against Facebook last month. The suits claim a partnership between the two companies allowed Blockbuster to send Harris’ movie-renting habits to Facebook without fair opportunity to opt out.
Read more on Fox News
Update: EPIC filed a friend of the court brief with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, urging the Court to enforce federal privacy protections in the Video Privacy Protection Act for Facebook users who rented videos from Blockbuster, Facebook’s business partner.
(Related) Are you in a similar situation? Start by checking your Google profile. (An exercise for my Intro to Computer Security class)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10390941-265.html
Google Dashboard lifts curtain on stored data
by Tom Krazit November 4, 2009 1:12 PM PST
Google is proving to be well aware of the uneasiness among the public over the increasing amount of data it stores from users of its services.
Google is launching Google Dashboard, a service that lets you log into a console and see all the personal data that the company maintains on a Google Account user across all its products, from Gmail and YouTube to Blogger and Picasa. It allows users to log into the settings page of their Google account and review links to the personal data stored by Google across many of its products from a single Web page.
Users can delete data, change privacy settings, and read the privacy policies from various accounts on that page, which is scheduled to go live Thursday. Google had been prebriefing news outlets on the announcement, but a YouTube video outlining the service was somehow published on Google's Privacy Channel on YouTube and spotted by the Google Operating System blog.
One of the overarching themes with regards to Google this year has been the increasing discomfort among both the public and the government with the degree to which Google has grown to dominate the Internet. With nearly two-thirds of all Internet searches passing through its servers and growing numbers of people using its Google Docs, Gmail, and YouTube services, Google is a vital gateway to information for Internet users.
Google has tried to placate critics, recently emphasizing that it tries very hard to let users export any data they enter into one of Google's products through the work of the Data Liberation Front. Dashboard is another step in that direction as Google tries to emphasize that users have control over the data it stores on them.
[From the Blog:
More information about the new service in a YouTube video that was supposed to be "embargoed until 2am PT, November 5th".
Update: Google Dashboard is now available at http://www.google.com/dashboard.
Ever new uses for the DNA sample. They could do this if they had fingerprints, right?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=5062
Calif. Justices Seem OK With DNA-Based Warrant
November 4, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Court, U.S.
Mike McKee reports:
…..At issue in People v. Robinson , S158528, is whether an unknown suspect’s DNA profile — as opposed to a physical description — can satisfy the so-called particularity requirement for issuing a “John Doe” warrant, and whether such warrants toll the statute of limitations for bringing criminal charges.
A third issue is whether the unlawful collection of a blood sample violates the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
DeVito represented Paul Robinson, an alleged serial rapist found guilty of an August 1994 assault on a Sacramento woman who wasn’t sure of his race and had only a vague physical description.
Four days before the six-year statute of limitations for filing charges expired on Aug. 25, 2000, prosecutors filed a “John Doe” complaint describing the then-unknown defendant from a DNA profile developed from semen at the assault site. The next day, an arrest warrant was issued, tied to the DNA profile.
Read more on Law.com.
Another round of “We block you from actually getting what you pay for.”
Comcast's New Throttling Plan Uses Trigger Conditions, Not Silent Blocking
Posted by timothy on Wednesday November 04, @03:38PM from the sir-there's-some-whining-on-lines-1-through-57 dept.
clang_jangle writes with this excerpt from The Inquirer outlining Comcast's new traffic-throttling scheme, based on information from Comcast's latest FCC filing.
"Its network throttling implements a two-tier packet queueing system at the routers, driven by two trigger conditions. Comcast's first traffic throttling trigger is tripped by using more than 70 per cent of your maximum downstream or upstream bandwidth for more than 15 minutes. Its second traffic throttling trigger is tripped when the Cable Modem Termination System you're hooked-up to – along with up to 15,000 other Comcast subscribers – gets congested, and your traffic is somehow identified as being responsible. [In other words, you aren't using 70% of what you paid for, but you are responsible for reducing the volume available to 15.000 users? Was the system ever able to handle that volume? Bob] Tripping either of Comcast's high bandwidth usage rate triggers results in throttling for at least 15 minutes, or until your average [How is this calculated? Bob] bandwidth utilisation rate drops below 50 per cent for 15 minutes."
(Related) It's not always the user's fault.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10391092-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
T-Mobile says software error behind outage
by Ina Fried November 4, 2009 3:53 PM PST
T-Mobile said on Wednesday that a software glitch was to blame for a massive outage on Tuesday that left many customers unable to send or receive calls or text messages.
"After investigating the cause, we have determined that a back-end system software error had generated abnormal congestion on the network," T-Mobile said in a statement. "T-Mobile has since implemented additional measures to help prevent this from happening in the future."
Looks like the price of processors is going up again. Couldn't we just execute a few executives and keep everything else “as is?” (Nothing like documenting your crimes to make the prosecutors job easier...)
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/022731.html
November 04, 2009
NY AG Cuomo Files Antitrust Lawsuit Against Intel, World’s Largest Maker of Microprocessors
News release: "Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo today filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Intel Corporation, the world’s largest maker of computer microprocessors. The suit charges that Intel violated state and federal anti-monopoly laws by engaging in a worldwide, systematic campaign of illegal conduct - revealed in e-mails - in order to maintain its monopoly power and prices in the market for microprocessors. Over the last several years, Intel has extracted exclusive agreements from large computer makers in which they agreed to use Intel’s microprocessors in exchange for payments totaling billions of dollars. [If they had been listed as “volume discounts” would there still be a case? Bob] Intel also threatened to and did in fact punish computer makers that they perceived to be working too closely with Intel’s competitors. Retaliatory threats included cutting off payments the computer maker was receiving from Intel, directly funding a computer maker’s competitors, and ending joint development ventures."
At first I thought, “No way!” But then I realized I was giving lots of take-home exams anyway, so why not?
http://thenextweb.com/europe/2009/11/05/students-denmark-allowed-full-access-internet-exams/
Students in Denmark Allowed Full Access to the Internet During Exams
By Zee on November 5, 2009
… The country’s latest move see’s the Danish government preach that the Internet is so much a part of daily life, it should be included in the classroom and in examinations.
… They can access any site they like, including Facebook, but they cannot message each other or email anyone outside the classroom. How that is prevented I’m not quite sure, but government advisors say pupils are disciplined enough not to cheat and that they can rely on the integrity of the pupil and the threat of expulsion if they are caught.
For my Security (Hacker) classes
http://sixrevisions.com/tools/10-free-server-network-monitoring-tools-that-kick-ass/
10 Free Server & Network Monitoring Tools that Kick Ass
November 4th, 2009 by Ben Dowling
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