Wednesday, September 01, 2010

The education of the Lower Merion School Board continues...

http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=13282

Lower Merion must pay $260k to student’s lawyer in webcam case

August 31, 2010 by Dissent

John P. Martin reports:

A federal judge Monday ordered the Lower Merion School District to pay about $260,000 now – and potentially much more later – to the lawyer who brought the lawsuit over the district’s webcam monitoring.

In a 14-page opinion, Senior U.S. District Judge Jan E. DuBois said Mark S. Haltzman deserved to be paid for work that led to a preliminary injunction against the district in May. And he said Haltzman could submit the rest of his bills when the case ended.

Read more on Philly.com.

It’s not clear to me whether the district will actually be stuck with the bill because back in April, the district’s insurance carrier, Graphic Arts Mutual, had sued in federal court for injunctive relief, claiming that it was not responsible for any costs involved in defending the district in this matter. That matter has not yet been decided by the court.

If you’d like to read the court’s 14-page memorandum, I’ve uploaded it here (pdf). The corresponding 2-page order can be found here (pdf).



This sounds like an ill-informed overreaction. Why limit access to voice? (Would they recognize encrypted voice or simply consider it some kind of document?)

http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=13277

India Threatens Ban On Google, Skype

August 31, 2010 by Dissent

Paul McDougall reports:

Having given RIM a 60-day reprieve from a ban on Blackberry messaging traffic, Indian authorities have now set their sites on Google and Skype.

As they did with RIM, authorities in the country are demanding access to data that flows across Google’s and Skype’s servers.

“The notices to these entities will be issued beginning Tuesday and all of them will be asked to comply with the directive or else they will have to close down their networks,” a senior government official said, according to The Times of India.

Read more on InformationWeek.

[From the article:

A new voice feature just added to Gmail is what put Google in the Indian government's crosshairs, the newspaper said.

Indian officials insist they need the ability to intercept mobile data in cases where they suspect the devices are being used to plot terror attacks or other crimes.



Is this practicing law without a license or is it merely providing a “Best Practices” checklist?

http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/generateprivacypolicy-com-generating-privacy-policies

GeneratePrivacyPolicy.com - Generating Privacy Policies

If you collect information of any kind from users on your site, then having a clear privacy policy is not just something advisable - it is something absolutely necessary. If you don’t have one, your business is completely exposed. You have to inform those who use it exactly how their data is going to be stored and managed to ensure that nobody will feel like his privacy has not been respected later on.

And there is not such a thing as a “universal” privacy policy that could be just applied to just any site on the Internet. Policies will always vary, to a lesser or bigger degree. But they are always going to be different from one another because the processes in which data is collected and the uses it is put to is never the same.

Which brings us to the Generate Privacy Policy website. The two preceding paragraphs and the name of the site already give you a clear idea of what it does, and why it is something important. The one and only thing that must be added is that you won’t be charged anything for your policy to be generated. The site is absolutely free to use.

http://www.generateprivacypolicy.com/



For the Network Security class

http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/08/31/2054225/Misconfigured-Networks-Main-Cause-of-Breaches?from=rss

Misconfigured Networks Main Cause of Breaches

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday August 31, @05:54PM

"Responses to a survey from attendees of the DEFCON 18 conference revealed that 73% came across a misconfigured network more than three quarters of the time – which, according to 76% of the sample, was the easiest IT resource to exploit. Results revealed that 18% of professionals believe misconfigured networks are the result of insufficient time or money for audits. 14% felt that compliance audits that don't always capture security best practices are a factor and 11% felt that threat vectors that change faster than they can be addressed play a key role."



For my Geeks...

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-free-computer-maintenance-tools/

Top 5 Free Computer Maintenance Tools You Should Know About



A hot new business area?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/01/textbook-rentals-go-into-hypergrowth-bookrenter-says-revenues-are-growing-725-percent/

Textbook Rentals Go Into Hypergrowth: Bookrenter Says Revenues Are Growing 725 Percent

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