Imagine what a more subtle “false news story” might accomplish...

PBS Web Sites and Databases Hacked

"Late Sunday night, hackers gained access to several areas of PBS Web servers and were able publish a fake news story on a PBS news blog. The group also published PBS internal user login information that they were able to siphon out of PBS databases. The fake story was about rapper Tupac Shakur, who died in 1996 after being shot in Las Vegas, being been found alive and well in a small resort in New Zealand. A group going by the name of 'LulzSec' claimed responsibility for the hack, saying the attack was a protest against a PBS Frontline broadcast last week about WikiLeaks."

“We never intended for the government to comply with the law – after all we just make rules, we don't follow them.

http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=23147

Conservative group accuses Education Dept of invading students’ privacy with new FERPA rules

May 30, 2011 by Dissent

Matthew Boyle reports:

A conservative non-profit is raising privacy concerns over a Department of Education (DoED) rule change that will allow for “personally identifiable information” about students to be shared with other government departments. Personally identifiable information that could potentially be shared includes hair color, blood type, family health history and students’ grades and other academic records.

The DoED rule changes are part of a reinterpretation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA). The proposed changes have conservative group American Principles in Action (APIA) up in arms. APIA says they are a breach of students’ and families’ privacy rights.

Read more in The Daily Caller

The DOE’s proposal is not only in conflict with the intentions of FERPA, but the government appears actually stupid about data security issues if they think that appointing a Chief Privacy Officer is any protection. The DOE and states have all failed to ensure adequate data protection of student and employee personal and sensitive information and this is a nightmare waiting to happen.

[From the article:

“Under the proposed changes, students and parents would lose their right to prevent disclosure of personal information and, in most cases, would have no way of knowing that a disclosure has even been made,” APIA wrote in its official comment to the DoED in early May.

Gagging gossiping Twits may be as difficult as herding cats... Is “I heard it was Joe Blow” a gag order violation?

http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=23150

New Twitter breach as claims of celebrity gagging orders published

May 30, 2011 by Dissent

Paul Cahalan reports:

Lawyers and media specialists last night called on the courts to take action to enforce injunctions broken over the internet after another social media user purported to publish details of celebrity gagging orders.

A newly created Twitter account posted details of 13 alleged injunctions early yesterday morning, directing users to a website for further detailed information. After attracting more than 500 followers within the first 10 hours of publication, the tweets were removed, but Mark Stephens, a media lawyer who represents WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, said the courts would now be compelled to act.

Read more in The Independent.

Interesting economic question: Another “too big to fail” problem? Would FdEx or UPS buy all or part of the Postal Service?

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/027377.html

May 30, 2011

Commentary: The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse

Bloomberg BusinessWeek: "The USPS is a wondrous American creation. Six days a week it delivers an average of 563 million pieces of mail—40 percent of the entire world's volume. For the price of a 44¢ stamp, you can mail a letter anywhere within the nation's borders... If your recipient can no longer be found, the USPS will return it at no extra charge. It may be the greatest bargain on earth. It takes an enormous organization to carry out such a mission. The USPS has 571,566 full-time workers, making it the country's second-largest civilian employer after Wal-Mart Stores (WMT). It has 31,871 post offices, more than the combined domestic retail outlets of Wal-Mart, Starbucks (SBUX), and McDonald's (MCD). Last year its revenues were $67 billion, and its expenses were even greater. Postal service executives proudly note that if it were a private company, it would be No. 29 on the Fortune 500. The problems of the USPS are just as big. It relies on first-class mail to fund most of its operations, but first-class mail volume is steadily declining—in 2005 it fell below junk mail for the first time. This was a significant milestone. The USPS needs three pieces of junk mail to replace the profit of a vanished stamp-bearing letter. During the real estate boom, a surge in junk mail papered over the unraveling of the postal service's longtime business plan. Banks flooded mailboxes with subprime mortgage offers and credit-card come-ons. Then came the recession. Total mail volume plunged 20 percent from 2006 to 2010. Since 2007 the USPS has been unable to cover its annual budget, 80 percent of which goes to salaries and benefits. In contrast, 43 percent of FedEx's (FDX) budget and 61 percent of United Parcel Service's (UPS) pay go to employee-related expenses. Perhaps it's not surprising that the postal service's two primary rivals are more nimble. According to SJ Consulting Group, the USPS has more than a 15 percent share of the American express and ground-shipping market. FedEx has 32 percent, UPS 53 percent. The USPS has stayed afloat by borrowing $12 billion from the U.S. Treasury. This year it will reach its statutory debt limit. After that, insolvency looms."

It's good to see that once again the EU has the answer to “Life, the Universe and Everything.”

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/027382.html

May 30, 2011

EU Commission sets out "blueprint" for Intellectual Property Rights to boost creativity and innovation

EUROPA press release: "Intellectual property rights (IPR), which comprise patents, trademarks, designs and geographical indications, as well as copyright (authors' rights) and rights related to copyright (for performers, producers and broadcasters), have been around for centuries. Often, without our even realising, they affect our daily lives: they protect the technology we use (cars, mobile phones, trains), the food we eat and the music we listen to or the films we watch. But in the last few years, technological change and, in particular, the growing importance of online activities, have completely changed the world in which IPR operate. The existing mix of European and national rules are no longer adapted and need to be modernised. That is why the Commission has adopted today a comprehensive strategy to revamp the legal framework in which IPR operate. Our objective is to enable inventors, creators, users and consumers to adapt to the new circumstances and to enhance new business opportunities. The new rules will strike the right balance between promoting creation and innovation, in part by ensuring reward and investment for creators and, on the other hand, promoting the widest possible access to goods and services protected by IPR. Getting this balance right will make a real difference to businesses (from the individual artist working alone to the big pharmaceutical companies) by encouraging investment in innovation. This will benefit the EU's growth and competitiveness which is delivered through the single market. Consumers will benefit from wider and easier access to information and cultural content, for example online music. The strategy deals with many issues to ensure IPR are covered comprehensively - from the patent a business needs to protect an invention to tackling the misuse of such inventions via a proposal also adopted today which will strengthen action on counterfeiting and piracy. Among the first deliverables of this IPR overall strategy are today's proposals for an easier licensing system for so-called "orphan works" that will allow many cultural works to be accessible online, and for a new regulation to reinforce customs actions in fighting trade of IPR infringing goods."

(Related) Another opinion?

Patch For The Witcher 2 Removes DRM Shortly After Release

"A little over a week after its release, The Witcher 2 is getting its first patch, and with it all versions of the game will now be DRM free. 'Our approach to countering piracy is to incorporate superior value in the legal version,' explained development director Adam Badowski. 'This means it has to be superior in every respect: less troublesome to use and install, with full support, and with access to additional content and services. So, we felt keeping the DRM would mainly hurt our legitimate users. This is completely in line with what we said before the release of The Witcher 2. We felt DRM was necessary to prevent the game being pirated and leaked before release.'"

Not hard to imagine NASA in the Cloud...

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/027379.html

May 30, 2011

NASA First Federal Agency to Launch Platform Using Slideshare

Federal Computer Week: "NASA is the first federal agency to venture into creating an aggregation network on the SlideShare Web platform, officials announced May 16. The NASA Universe network that started May 16 on SlideShare provides links to the agency’s videos, slide presentations and other documents shared from SlideShare channels sponsored by NASA headquarters and its 10 field centers. NASA Universe takes advantage of the new aggregation network technology, which SlideShare recently established and currently customizes for a handful of clients, including NASA, IBM and Dell. The SlideShare networks automatically and continuously aggregate content from many channels. NASA headquarters and the field centers each has its own channel on the site feeding documents into NASA Universe."

How could I not pass this valuable tool on to my students?

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/027376.html

May 29, 2011

GovSpeak A Guide to Government Acronyms & Abbreviations

GovSpeak - A Guide to Government Acronyms & Abbreviations: "This guide lists acronyms and abbreviations commonly used by the United States federal government. Each acronym is defined and links to the home page (or best alternative) of the identified department, agency, office, program or publication. While Appendix A of the U.S. Government Manual provided the foundation of GovSpeak, this expanded list includes hundreds of acronyms not included in that publication; most have been discovered by manual reviews of department websites. Links are checked and updated monthly."

If it's not important for me to socialize with you, I won't. I can only tolerate so many Twits...

Human Brain Places Limit On Twitter Friends

"Back in early '90s, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar began studying human social groups, measuring the number of people an individual can maintain regular contact with, and came up with 150 — a number that appears to be constant throughout human history — from the size of neolithic villages to military units to 20th century contact books. But in the last decade, social networking technology has had a profound influence on the way people connect, vastly increasing the ease with which we can communicate with and follow others, so it's not uncommon for tweeters to follow and be followed by thousands of others. Now Bruno Goncalves has studied the network of links created by three million Twitter users over four years. After counting tweets that are mutual and regular as signifying a significant social bond, he found that when people start tweeting, their number of friends increases to a saturation point until they become overwhelmed. Beyond that saturation point, the conversations with less important contacts start to become less frequent and the tweeters begin to concentrate on the people they have the strongest links with. So what is the saturation point? The answer is between 100 and 200, just as Dunbar predicts. 'This finding suggests that even though modern social networks help us to log all the people with whom we meet and interact,' says Goncalves, 'they are unable to overcome the biological and physical constraints that limit stable social relations (PDF).'"

An interesting research tool: A system like Google Trends but in reverse...

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/027378.html

May 30, 2011

Google: Find searches that correlate with real-world data

Official Google Blog - Mining patterns in search data with Google Correlate: "...[Using] Google Correlate, which we’re launching today on Google Labs...you can upload your own data series and see a list of search terms whose popularity best corresponds with that real world trend. In the example below, we uploaded official flu activity data from the U.S. CDC over the last several years and found that people search for terms like [cold or flu] in a similar pattern to actual flu rates. Finding out these correlated terms is how we built Google Flu Trends.

• We encourage you to read our white paper describing the methodology behind Google Correlate