http://www.databreaches.net/?p=11119
How Identity Theft Is Like the Ford Pinto
April 8, 2010 by admin
Over on Concurring Opinions, Dan Solove describes a new paper by Chris Hoofnagle:
Professor James Grimmelmann likes to shop at Kohl’s. So much so that he applied for credit at Kohl’s. And he got it.
The problem is that James Grimmelmann didn’t really apply for anything. It was an identity thief.
Grimmelmann was a participant in Chris Hoofnagle’s study about identity theft. In a really eye-opening paper, Internalizing Identity Theft, 2010 UCLA J. of L. & Tech (forthcoming), Hoofnagle has concluded that one of the main reasons identity theft happens is because companies let it happen. It is an economic decision.
Back in 1981, in the famous case involving an accident due to a defect in a Ford Pinto, it came to light that Ford knew about the design defect in the car but ignored it because it calculated that paying damages in lawsuits would be less than fixing the design flaw.
Read more on Concurring Opinions.
Were Health Care providers exempt from other breach laws?
http://www.phiprivacy.net/?p=2407
Virginia Adds Medical Information Breach Notice Law
By Dissent, April 8, 2010 7:31 am
David Navetta writes:
The state of Virginia has passed a breach notice law requiring notice of security breaches involving medical information.
[...]
“Breach of the security of the system” means unauthorized access and acquisition of unencrypted and unredacted computerized data that compromises the security, confidentiality, or integrity of medical information maintained by an individual or entity. Good faith acquisition of medical information by an employee or agent of an individual or entity for the purposes of the individual or entity is not a breach of the security of the system, provided that the medical information is not used for a purpose other than a lawful purpose of the individual or entity or subject to further unauthorized disclosure.
Read more on InformationLawGroup.
[From the article:
[One definition of information covered: An individual's health insurance policy number or subscriber identification number, [Interesting. These numbers are used in place of the SSAN. First time I've seen this. Bob] any unique identifier used by a health insurer to identify the individual, or any information in an individual's application and claims history, including any appeals records.
… Even if the data is encrypted, the law requires notice if the breach involved a person with access to the encryption key. [i.e. a disgruntled employee? Bob]
Technology – surveillance made simple.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20001951-1.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Study: Maybe time to hide phone from mate?
by Dong Ngo April 7, 2010 1:43 PM PDT
Your significant other's asleep in the bedroom and you spot his or her phone lying on the couch. Would you take a peep at the text messages? According to a recent survey from consumer electronics shopping site Retrevo, there's a 38 percent chance you would if you're 25 or younger (or, one assumes, married to Tiger Woods).
Another benefit of Cloud Computing, the ability to switch some or all of your computing power to a Cloud vendor when you don't need it. The flip side is, you can purchase more compute=power just as easily.
Wall St. Trading Servers To Power Off-Hour Clouds?
Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 07, @04:38PM
miller60 writes
"As cloud computing gains traction, some Wall Street firms running armadas of servers to power high-frequency trading operations are contemplating leasing out their excess computing capacity after the trading day ends at 4 p.m. 'Once 4:30 rolls around, we don't need those machines,' said one CTO of a market data firm. 'There may be an opportunity there.' A similar revelation led to the creation of the cloud computing operation at Amazon.com, which built its infrastructure to handle peak Christmas-season loads that lasted just a few weeks each year."
Something for my geeks to track?
Researcher Releases Hardened OS "Qubes"; Xen Hits 4.0
Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 07, @02:11PM
Trailrunner7 writes
"Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher known for her work on virtualization security and low-level rootkits, has released a new open-source operating system meant to provide isolation of the OS's components for better security. The OS, called Qubes, is based on Xen, X and Linux, and is in a basic, alpha stage right now. Qubes relies on virtualization to separate applications running on the OS and also places many of the system-level components in sandboxes to prevent them from affecting each other. 'Qubes lets the user define many security domains implemented as lightweight virtual machines (VMs), or 'AppVMs.' E.g. users can have 'personal,' 'work,' 'shopping,' 'bank,' and 'random' AppVMs and can use the applications from within those VMs just like if they were executing on the local machine, but at the same time they are well isolated from each other. Qubes supports secure copy-and-paste and file sharing between the AppVMs, of course.'"
Xen's also just reached 4.0; some details below.
Research tool.
http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/livepdf-search-engine-for-pdf-files/
Live-PDF: Search Engine For PDF Files & E-books
Similar Tools: PDF Search Engine, PDFGeni, and ManyBooks.
Ditto
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-wikipedia-search-engines/
10 Websites That Make Browsing Wikipedia More Fun
[Try the WikiMindMap Bob]
A site for my remedial Math students
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Learn Your Tables - Math Practice
Learn Your Tables is a neat little site for students to use to learn and develop multiplication skills. The site offers two basic games on two different levels.
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