http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=10869
Connecticut Attorney General Asks Google If It Collected Wireless Network Data Without Permission In CT
June 7, 2010 by Dissent
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is asking Google whether its “street view” cars collected personal information transmitted over wireless networks without permission while photographing Connecticut streets and homes.
Google has acknowledged that “street view” cars in some locations have intercepted information from unsecured personal WIFI networks.
In Europe, notably Ireland, Google admitted intercepting packets of data from unsecured WIFI networks. Private litigation alleges that Google also did so in the United States. Published reports say the captured, private online information may include general web browsing, passwords, personal emails and other data.
Blumenthal wrote Google asking the company whether it gathered such data in Connecticut. If it did, the attorney general is demanding that the company tell his office how much and what kind of information it collected, when and where it did so, why, where the data is stored and other information.
“Driveby data sweeps of unsecured WIFI networks here would be deeply disturbing, a potentially impermissible, pernicious invasion of privacy,” Blumenthal said. “Consumers and businesses rightly expect Google to respect their privacy, not invade it by vacuuming up confidential data.
“I am demanding Google reveal any WIFI data collection in Connecticut. If it occurred, the company should provide my office a full explanation, including what it gathered, when, where and why. My office can evaluate whether laws were broken. Concealed Internet capture by Google’s high tech cars may violate valid expectations of privacy — making it possibly illegal. If personal data was collected, Google must disclose how widely it was captured, how it was stored, who had access to it and the purpose.
“Unauthorized surveillance of wireless network data is the dark side of the new Internet era — and I will fight it.”
Source: Attorney General Richard Blumenthal
Hack-du-jour
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/view-hidden-content-facebook-fan-pages-fan/
How To View Hidden Content on Facebook Fan Pages Without Becoming a Fan
(Related)
Privacy, Schmivacy: Facebook Is Attracting Near-Record Numbers Of New Visitors
See? Someone has been listening to my rants about shared access fiber to the home!
NZ Plan For Fiber To the Home
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 08, @02:20AM
Ars has a note about New Zealand's plans for nationwide broadband access, which will induce envy in many North American readers.
"New Zealand has decided not to sit around while incumbent DSL operators milk the withered dugs of their cash cow until it keels over from old age. Instead, the Kiwis have established a government-owned corporation to invest NZ$1.5 billion for open-access fiber to the home. By 2020, 75 percent of residents should have, at a bare minimum, 100Mbps down/50 Mbps up with a choice of providers. Crown Fibre Holdings Limited is the company, and it's wholly owned by the government — for now — and the company's mission couldn't be any clearer. Two of its six guiding principles include 'focusing on building new infrastructure, and not unduly preserving the "legacy assets" of the past' and 'avoiding "lining the pockets" of existing broadband network providers.'"
If the newspaper industry won't change itself, Google will change for it.
Google's Plan To Save the News Through Reinvention
Posted by Soulskill on Monday June 07, @01:48PM
"It's no secret that Google doesn't create content, but rather helps people find it. And Google News is no different. So what does the company plan to do about complaints from the news industry that profits are dropping drastically? In a lengthy and comprehensive article, The Atlantic diagnoses the problem and looks at Google's plan to 'save' the symbiotic organism it is attached to, which older generations have traditionally branded 'the news.' The answer, of course, hinges on moving news from dead tree print to the information age via Google's many projects: Living Stories, Fast Flip, and YouTube Direct. But Google is also exploring the more traditional options of displaying ads and designing a paywall so users can easily migrate back to subscriptions like the newspapers of yore. You may also recall that last week the Internet was abuzz with the idiocy of suggestions the FTC had aggregated from inside the industry. Ars brings mention of other proposed plans, both good and bad, from the FTC's report on ideas that newspaper companies are kicking around."
Too simple?
Monday, June 7, 2010
Illustrated and Narrated Explanation of Creative Commons
The nuances of Copyright and Creative Commons and the differences between them can be confusing. I recently came across this neat little video that does a good job of explaining Creative Commons and what Creative Commons licenses allow or do not allow people to do with your works. A PDF of the images in the video can be found here.
For my Disaster Recovery class. Failure to understand Murphy's Law? "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong"
Water Main Break Floods Dallas Data Center
Posted by Soulskill on Monday June 07, @05:25PM
"IT systems in Dallas County were offline for three days last week after a water main break flooded the basement of the Dallas County Records Building, which houses the UPS systems and other electrical equipment supporting a data center in the building. The county does not have a backup data center, despite warnings that it faced the risk of service disruption without one."
For my next Statistics class. And my Data Analysis class
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/024428.html
June 07, 2010
WolframAlpha Adds Computational Power for Climate Data from Around the Globe
Follow up to postings on climate change, this news release: "Since Wolfram|Alpha launched in 2009, we’ve had numerous requests to add data on climate. As part of our one-year anniversary release, we recently added a vast set of historical climate data, drawing on studies from across the globe, which can be easily analyzed and correlated in Wolfram|Alpha. You can now query for and compare the raw data from different climate model reconstructions and studies, as reported in peer-reviewed journals and by government agencies, many of them covering more than a thousand years of history. The full set of reconstructions was chosen from as broad a collection of sources as possible, from well-known records such as ice cores and tree rings, to corals, speleothems, and glacier lengths — and even some truly unusual ones, like grape harvest dates. Or are you more interested in global greenhouse gas concentrations? If you’re interested in exploring this vast area of climatology yourself, you can start by looking at a detailed summary of the most prominent models in literature: simply ask Wolfram|Alpha about “global climate”, which will bring up a selection of data sets that have figured prominently in the news over the past few years."
(Related)
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/024429.html
June 07, 2010
UK Government releases system to access financial data from across the public sector
"COINS - the Combined On-line Information System - is used by the Treasury to collect financial data from across the public sector to support fiscal management, the production of Parliamentary Supply Estimates and public expenditure statistics, the preparation of Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) and to meet data requirements of the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Up to nine years of data can be actively maintained [not so vast, but at least half-vast. Bob] - five historic (or outturn) years, the current year and up to three future (or plan) years depending on the timing of the latest spending review. COINS is a consolidation system rather than an accounts application, and so it does not hold details of individual financial transactions by departments. COINS contains millions of rows of data; as a consequence the files are large and the data held within the files complex. Using these download files will require some degree of technical competence and expertise in handling and manipulating large volumes of data. As such it is likely that this data will be most easily used by organisations that have such expertise, rather than individuals. More directly useful and accessible datasets that draw on the contents of the COINS database will be made available by August 2010."
For my website class: a graphic description of HTML5
http://www.focus.com/images/view/11905/
HTML5
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