http://www.databreaches.net/?p=13404
B.C. Lottery relaunches gambling site after costly breach
August 20, 2010 by admin
Emily Jackson reports that the B.C. Lottery Corp. is relaunch its online gambling website, PlayNow. com. A security breach during its debut last month had compromised personal information of 134 players and exposed 12 players’ information to other users.
The breach apparently cost them a lot compared to any delay they might have incurred in further testing the software to uncover any potential problems:
Approval to put the site back online at 7 p.m. was given by the province’s gambling policy and enforcement branch and the B.C. information and privacy commissioner following a review by consulting firm Deloitte, BCLC president and CEO Michael Graydon said.
[...]
Shutting down the website cost the B.C. Lottery Corp. $150,000 a day in revenue, Graydon said. The problems required more than five weeks of troubleshooting, for a total revenue loss of more than $5 million.
Graydon would not divulge the cost of the outside investigation.
Read more in the Vancouver Sun.
Never having read Machiavelli's “The Prince,” they are dribbling out the “bad stuff” rather than doing it all at once. Thus they are constantly in the news as “destroyers of privacy!”
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=12961
Facebook Places could spark new privacy fire
August 20, 2010 by Dissent
Sharon Gaudin reports:
With its new location-based Places feature, Facebook may have just lit the match that will ignite another round of privacy controversy.
On Wednesday, Facebook took the wraps off of Places, a smartphone-based service that enables users to tell their friends where they are, and to track friends. The service, which is slowly being rolled out to users, enables people to share their friends’ locations.
After dealing with angry and frustrated users for months this year, Facebook is jumping into what have already been tumultuous privacy waters with this new location-based service.
Any location-based service will instill some trepidation in users who see it as a stalker’s best friend. Want to know where someone is? Check Places. Want to know when someone is away from home so you can break in and steal their flat-screen TV? Check Places.
Read more on Computerworld.
Rumblings from overseas have already started.
What? Privacy laws aren't perfect?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=12963
Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization
August 20, 2010 by Dissent
Paul Ohm’s article, “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization,” appears in the August issue of the UCLA Law Review. The abstract:
Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques that protect the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers. These scientists have demonstrated that they can often “reidentify” or “deanonymize” individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease. By understanding this research, we realize we have made a mistake, labored beneath a fundamental misunderstanding, which has assured us much less privacy than we have assumed. This mistake pervades nearly every information privacy law, regulation, and debate, yet regulators and legal scholars have paid it scant attention. We must respond to the surprising failure of anonymization, and this Article provides the tools to do so.
You can read the full article here (pdf). Paul always provide a lot of food for thought.
If technology keeps progressing(?) we will soon be able to read and modify your DNA as we drive by your home. On the other hand, maybe they are only irradiating lawyers?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20014196-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Senators rebuke Obama admin. on full-body scans
Six U.S. senators delivered a sharp rebuke to the Obama administration on Thursday, saying that they were "disturbed" to learn that thousands of images produced by full-body scanners at security checkpoints were surreptitiously recorded.
The bipartisan group of senators demanded a detailed explanation from the U.S. Marshals Service, which installed the millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of at a Florida courthouse. (See CNET's earlier article about the Marshals Service admitting the recording took place.)
Does a corporation have the same rights as a real person?
German Photog Wants to Shoot Buildings Excluded From Street View
Posted by timothy on Thursday August 19, @10:44PM
crf00 writes with this report excerpted from Blogoscoped:
"'Spiegel reports that German photographer and IT consultant Jens Best wants to personally take snapshots of all those (German) buildings which people asked Google Street View to remove. He then wants to add those photos to Picasa, including GPS coordinates, and in turn re-connect them with Google Maps. Jens believes that for the internet "we must apply the same rules as we do in the real world. Our right to take panoramic snapshots, for instance, or to take photographs in public spaces, both base laws which determine that one may photograph those things that are visible from public streets and places.' Jens says that for his believe in the right of photographing in public places, as last resort he's even willing to go to jail. Spiegel says Jens already found over 200 people who want to help out in this project and look for removed locations in Google Street View, as there's no official list of such places published by Google."
The Forever War (1974 by Joe Haldeman) is being recreated in the courtroom. How will we deal with multi-generational lawsuits? At least, this is how I see things – attorneys who actually know something about technology spending their entire career working on a very narrow legal niche which they must explain to their fellow attorneys, then explain to the judge, then explain to the jury, then do all over again for the next case...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/08/20/0436209/Legal-Analysis-of-Oracle-v-Google?from=rss
Legal Analysis of Oracle v. Google
Posted by timothy on Friday August 20, @01:54AM
"InfoWorld's Martin Heller provides an in-depth analysis of Oracle's legal argument against Google, a suit that includes seven alleged counts of software process patent infringement and one count of copyright infringement. 'Oracle's desired relief is drastic: not just permanent injunctions, but destruction of all copies that violate copyright (thus, wiping all Android devices), plus triple damages and legal costs. Also, it demands a jury trial,' Heller writes, and while this amounts mainly to saber-rattling, the Supreme Court's recent Bilski ruling did not completely invalidate software process patents despite their shaky ground due to prior art."
(Related)
When Attorneys General Attack
Earlier this year Topix CEO Chris Tolles got the call no one wants to get – that they were under investigation by a government entity. Two attorneys general, one of which was deep into his senate run, were leveling accusations of abuse at Topix. The company eventually settled with thirty three AGs, plus two U.S. territories. We asked Chris to tell us about his experience dealing with these people. Too often, we’ve found, the office of attorney general is used for little more than a way to advance one’s political career. [I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIX_0nMlIBU Bob]
For an estimate of scale... And a comparison with US caps that start at 5GB per month.
ISP's top data hog gobbles 2.7TB of data in a month
ISPs sometimes complain about "data hogs," often in the service of ridiculously tight-fisted data caps on Internet service. But there are users who deserve the porcine label, and Belgian ISP Telenet recently offered a rare picture of them. Can you imagine downloading 2,680GB of data in a single month?
One Belgian can. Between July 4 and August 6 of this year, Telenet's single largest user slurped up 2.7TB of data. He was followed by similarly impressive downloaders who transferred 1.9TB, 1.5TB, and 1.3 TB.
These numbers drop off quickly, though. Only a single user on the entire network topped 2TB in a month, while another seven topped 1TB.
Telenet recently published a list of its top 25 downloaders to a discussion forum—but the goal wasn't to demonize the users. Instead, it was to show other people just how much data could be transferred in a single month. The ISP hopes to encourage people to migrate up from its least-expensive plans (with 50GB and 80GB data caps, respectively) to its more expensive "fair use" plans.
For the Security Folder...
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/bitdefender-rescue-cd-removes-viruses-fails/
BitDefender Rescue CD Removes Viruses When All Else Fails
I recently shared the 10 best free antivirus programs, and these tools are all worth checking out.
… Sometimes, however, none of these programs will work, because Windows simply won’t start or the virus is blocking the installation of other anti-virus programs (even in safe mode!)
In situations like these you need an antivirus that runs on an operating system other than your default.
You could attempt to get your antivirus program of choice running from a self-built Windows live CD, but if you’re looking for something a little simpler I highly recommend the BitDefender Rescue CD.
… This little-advertised free product can scan your unbootable or corrupt Windows setup safely from a Linux Live CD.
Don’t panic! You don’t need to know anything about Linux to use this disk. All you need to know how to do is burn an ISO and boot from it.
To start go ahead and download the ISO file from BitDefender’s semi-secret system rescue CD site.
… A number of other useful tools are included on the BitDefender Rescue CD, including:
Thunar File Browser.
Firefox (browse while you scan!).
Terminal, with access to entire Ubuntu repositories via apt-get.
When you have a scanned image of a page, who ya gonna call?
Online OCR
Free Online OCR service allows you to
Recognize text and characters from PDF scanned documents (including multipage files), photographs and digital camera captured images. Service allows users to select 32 languages to recognize multilingual documents.
Convert to your favorite formats Converted documents look exactly like the original - tables, columns, bullets and graphics.
Store OCRed files online in your secure workspace. Also you can download these files on your PC, edit text and print.
I keep getting more and more virtual textbooks with no good way to organize and read them. Here's another option for me to try.
http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/bookworm-personal-ebook-library/
Bookworm: Personal eBook Library To Store & Reads Books Online
… Bookworm is compatible with dedicated e-book devices like the Sony Reader and the iRex iLiad, and also iOS4 devices with the Stanza app. Bookworm only supports uploads in ePub format, but you can easily convert your other books to epub using software like Calibre.
Similar Tools: IbisReader, and Zinepal.
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