Saturday, June 26, 2010

The Lower Merion “spying on student” case drags on – at least the school district's dispute with the Insurance company.

http://mainlinemedianews.com/articles/2010/06/23/main_line_times/news/doc4c2227a4278d1936110971.txt

Attorney: Defendants failed to respond to summons in webcam-related suit

Published: Wednesday, June 23, 2010

An attorney Friday filed documents against the plaintiffs in the Lower Merion School District webcam case for failing to respond to a summons filed in April.

… Morrison represents Graphic Arts Mutual Insurance Company, one of the Lower Merion School District’s insurance companies. He filed suit in April seeking a declaratory judgment so his client would not to have to pay its part of the legal bills for the school district in the webcam case.



This “All we did was fail to secure the data” attitude bothers me. Are they surprised that there are people who want to steal this data?

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2365004,00.asp

AT&T Blames Hackers for iPad Breach

AT&T on Sunday apologized for a glitch that accidentally exposed the e-mail addresses of 114,000 Apple iPad users, and blamed the incident on hackers who exploited a function intended to let users more quickly log-in to their accounts.

… The breach came to light after Gawker.com received a tip from Goatse Security [“Oh, and we don't bother to monitor system activity either...” Bob]



Gary Alexander sent along this link to a Ponemon study. It's good to have confirmation of my suspicions!

http://www.cio.com/documents/whitepapers/FinancialServices.pdf

Privacy & Data Protection Practices

Benchmark Study of the Financial Services Industry

The findings of this study reveal that despite the numerous privacy regulations ranging from Gramm-Leach-Bliley to the recent Red Flags Rule, the vast majority of participating financial institutions have significant gaps in their privacy and data protection programs. We believe the most significant gaps are in the areas of addressing the insider threat, the outsourcing of sensitive data to third parties and issues related to customer trust.


(Related) Cisco will sell you a “solution” of course, but the findings are probably accurate.

http://www.techeye.net/security/employees-consistently-breach-security-policies-report-finds

Employees consistently breach security policies, report finds

Employees always breach security policies and are less likely to take a job with strict security policies, according to a report by Cisco released today.

The report reveals that more than half of the over 500 IT security professionals polled in the survey were aware of their employees using unsupported applications, primarilly social networking, but collaborative, peer to peer, and cloud services also featured high on the list. Nineteen percent saw social networking as the biggest security risk.

Forty-one percent said that their employees were using unsupported network devices, such as smartphones, while a third of that number said there was a breach or loss of information due to these unsupported devices.

Despite this, 53 percent have planned to allow personal devices to be used within the company network, while seven percent already allow them.



What is the objective here? To allow me to trust you online, or to force me to rely on the government to vouch for you? Why do I need the government's involvement?

http://www.databreaches.net/?p=12264

White House seeks comment on trusted ID plan

June 25, 2010 by admin

Grant Gross reports:

The White House is seeking comment on a draft plan for establishing a trusted identity system online, with the goal of making Internet transactions more secure and convenient.

Howard Schmidt, the White House cybersecurity coordinator and special assistant to President Barack Obama, released a draft version of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace on Friday.

The plan calls for the federal government to work with private companies to create an Identity Ecosystem, an online environment “where individuals, organizations, services, and devices can trust each other because authoritative sources establish and authenticate their digital identities.”

Read more on Computerworld.

[From the article:

The White House is seeking comments on the draft plan on a Web page at ideascale.com. A handful of people had already commented on the plan by Friday afternoon.


As long as we don't need to wait for everyone to agree, I kind of like this idea. Problem is, Apple thinks Microsoft is an infection and Google thinks Yahoo is and...

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/06/26/0253250/US-Shows-Interest-In-Zombie-Quarantine-Code?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

US Shows Interest In Zombie Quarantine Code

Posted by timothy on Saturday June 26, @02:00AM

"Barack Obama's cyber-security coordinator has shown interest in an e-security code of practice developed in Australia that aims to quarantine Internet users infected by malware, also known as zombie computers. He reportedly said it would be a useful role model for the US to adopt. One suggestion within the code is to put infected users into a 'walled garden,' which limits Internet access to prevent further security problems until quarantined. Another is to throttle the speed of an infected users' Internet connection until their computer fixed. The code is also being considered by other Asia-Pacific countries, ZDNet reports."


(Related) Probably less a need for change than a “Us Democrats are in charge now, so we want to change it to conform to our way of doing things”

http://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/06/25/176238/Experts-Say-Wiretap-Law-Needs-Digital-Era-Update?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

Experts Say Wiretap Law Needs Digital Era Update

Posted by Soulskill on Friday June 25, @01:50PM

"Experts at a Congressional hearing Thursday said the government needs to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to reflect changes in technology, notably location-based services. On one hand, legal experts argue tracking a mobile user's location should require a higher burden of proof than simply intercepting their communications. On the other hand, first responders may need location data in order to save lives and respond to 911 calls. Either way, expect legislation from the committee later this year."


(Related) Is this the future we're shooting for?

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2010-06-24-n15.html

How to Access the Internet (A Guide from 2025)



E-Discovery and Internet traffic.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/devil-details-dhs-monitoring-web-wrong-words%C2%A0

The Devil Is In The Details: DHS Monitoring Web & "Wrong" Words

Cyber-terrorists and the dreaded cyberwar have escalated to the point of the "feds" pulling the plug on the Internet in case of an emergency. Then DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said that in the future there will be "increased" Internet monitoring of U.S. citizens due to the dangers of homegrown terrorism. Napolitano remarked on how "wrong" it is to believe that if "security" is embraced, that liberty will be sacrificed.

I'm not saying that we don't need security because we do. To say it will not impact liberty or privacy is naive, a "big mistake," and I "strongly disagree."

Blaming the Internet for terrorism is like blaming money for corruption or blaming guns for murders; it's "dumb." Not all people who have money are corrupt and not all who have guns are murderers. Not all of us on the Internet are terrorists. No amount of monitoring, regulating, or censoring will change the behavior of people who wield those things for evil.

You may be wondering why some italicized words are in quotation marks. They are search terms that attorneys investigating Lehman Brothers had used to dig through 34 million pages of documents. Use those words paired with others listed in the examiner's report from pages 158 - 284 and you could be busted for incriminating correspondence. It's a "significantly" long list.



I'm not sure how they do this (and avoid lawsuits) but they seem to have a good selection of classics and contemporary novels.

http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/readanybook-com-read-all-the-books-you-want

ReadAnyBook.com - Read All The Books You Want

http://www.readanybook.com/

Read Any Book is an online repository of books ranging far and wide. Titles that go from classics literary works to the newest pieces of fiction are included. You can find titles such as Grabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years Of Solitude” and Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” as easily and naturally as you can find books like the ones making the “Twilight” saga and the latest titles by Dan Brown. And once you have found something that you like, you can proceed to read the book right on your browser - there is no need to download anything. You don’t have to download the book, and you don’t have to download a tool for reading it either. It is all supplied on the site.



For my Statistics class

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm

American Time Use Survey Summary

[Fun statistics, like this:

On the days that they worked, 24 percent of employed persons did some or all of their work at home, and 84 percent did some or all of their work at their workplace. Men and women were about equally likely to do some or all of their work at home.



May be useful for students too

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/06/bounce-share-and-collaborate-on-screen.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+freetech4teachers%2FcGEY+%28Free+Technology+for+Teachers%29

Bounce - Share and Collaborate on Screen Captures

Bounce is a neat application that not only allows you to make annotated screen captures of websites but also allows you to instantly share those screen captures with others. To use Bounce, type in the url of any website then click "Bounce." Bounce will then create an image of that website on which you can draw boxes and annotate those boxes. You can create as many boxes and notes as you like. When you're done creating notes, Bounce will provide you with a unique url for your screen captures that you can share with others. If you create a Bounce account (optional) you and other Bounce users can annotate the same screen capture.



For my Website students and those who rely on cartoons for all their knowledge of the world...

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/06/animated-explanations.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+freetech4teachers%2FcGEY+%28Free+Technology+for+Teachers%29

Animated Explanations

Animated Explanations is a website for finding animated explanations of topics and concepts in the fields of health, technology, and work. The animations can be embedded in your blog or website.



In my case, this would be almost as good as encryption.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-a-font-from-your-own-handwriting-and-use-it-to-send-emails/

Create A Font From Your Own Handwriting and Use It To Send Emails

There is a new website called PilotHandwriting that allows you to create a font out of your own handwriting and send emails (or letters as they call them) with it.

I will show you how it works and how to capture the text for use in your own images using a little bit of a workaround. We have to use that workaround because as of now, PilotHandwriting does not allow you to download your font. If you are looking to be able to download the font for use in your word processing application then check out 2 Free Tools To Make Your Own Text Font.



MakeUseOf does good guides!

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/ultimate-guide-gmail-pdf/

The Ultimate Guide To Gmail [PDF]

So get your Gmail game on and download MakeUseOf’s Ultimate Guide To Gmail now or read it online at Scribd.

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