A safe type of fraud for the discerning criminal...
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=19587
140,000 children could be identity fraud victims
July 13, 2011 by admin
For most people, the thought of their children being victims of identity fraud is even more chilling than being a victim themselves.
While children are less at risk for identity fraud than adults, when it happens it can be much more devastating because the fraudulent activity can go undetected for years, making it all that much harder to restore the victim’s good name.
A study from ID Analytics found that 140,000 identity frauds are perpetrated on minors each year.
Read more on Help Net Security.
“It's only fair” is probably not admissible in court, but then even the banks won't connect this to Michael's...
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=19599
Iowans report fraud from stolen Michael’s store PINs
July 13, 2011 by admin
Another rash of card fraud as a result of the Michael’s Store breach months ago? It seems that it may be. Adam Belz of the Des Moines Register reports:
Bankers contacted by the Register were not willing to connect any recent debit-card fraud to the Michael’s in Ankeny. So while all customers who used debit cards at the store in the late winter and spring could potentially have compromised debit or credit cards, it’s not clear all bank customers have been notified of the breach.
Kramer said it’s only fair to assume that recent reported debit card fraud in the metro area is connected to the Michael’s in Ankeny. The chain’s other three Iowa locations where the PIN pad was compromised are in Coralville, Davenport and Marion.
“That is the only known fraud that we have seen in this area at this time,” Kramer said.
Read more on the Des Moines Register.
Interesting TED talk.
http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_mackinnon_let_s_take_back_the_internet.html#3176186952593323438
Rebecca MacKinnon: Let's take back the Internet!
Rebecca MacKinnon describes the expanding struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace, and asks: How do we design the next phase of the Internet with accountability and freedom at its core, rather than control? She believes the internet is headed for a "Magna Carta" moment when citizens around the world demand that their governments protect free speech and their right to connection.
“We keep some things from the Colonial days – Big Brother, for instance.”
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=23714
Skype and Google asked to cooperate with India surveillance
July 14, 2011 by Dissent
John Ribeiro reports:
The controversy over India’s demand that it be allowed to monitor online and mobile communications resurfaced again on Wednesday, with an Indian minister telling reporters that the government had asked Skype, Google and several other companies to give it access.
Google said that it had not received any communication on the issue from the government. “Thereby we are unable to comment on it,” a spokeswoman said. Skype was not immediately available for comment.
Read more on Computerworld UK.
My favorite government boondoggle strikes again.
Women Arrested For Refusing TSA Search of Children
"A Tennessee mother was arrested for refusing to allow TSA screening clerks to subject her child to a body scan or patdown. This comes in the wake of a promise by the TSA Administrator to make repeated attempts at non-physical screening of children, after which another video of a child patdown surfaced. This event may signify a tipping point in the public's willingness to tolerate invasive and inappropriate security procedures at airports." [I doubt it Bob]
It is silly to worry about size. Data is increasingly global, so don't think anything larger than a neighborhood is inherently evil. Worry about how the data will be misused. Worry that the FBI is asking anyone who gathers biometric data to share it with them in a classic example of mission creep. Also, I've never liked the argument that having a terrorist in this type of database would “reduce (or prevent) terrorist activities.”
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=23710
The FBI’s Next Generation Identification: Bigger and Faster but Much Worse for Privacy
July 14, 2011 by Dissent
Jennifer Lynch writes:
This week, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and several other organizations released documents from a FOIA lawsuit that expose the concerted efforts of the FBI and DHS to build a massive database of personal and biometric information. This database, called “Next Generation Identification” (NGI), has been in the works for several years now. However, the documents CCR posted show for the first time how FBI has taken advantage of the DHS Secure Communities program and both DHS and the State Department’s civil biometric data collection programs to build out this $1 billion database.
Unlike some government initiatives, NGI has not been a secret program. The FBI brags about it on its website (describing NGI as “bigger, faster, and better”), and both DHS and FBI have, over the past 10+ years, slowly and carefully laid the groundwork for extensive data sharing and database interoperability through publicly-available privacy impact assessments and other records. However, the fact that NGI is not secret does not make it OK. Currently, the FBI and DHS have separate databases (called IAFIS and IDENT, respectively) that each have the capacity to store an extensive amount of information—including names, addresses, social security numbers, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, fingerprints, booking photos, unique identifying numbers, gender, race, and date of birth. Within the last few years, DHS and FBI have made their data easily searchable between the agencies. However, both databases remained independent, and were only “unimodal,” meaning they only had one biometric means of identifying someone—usually a fingerprint.
[...]
So why should we be worried about a program like NGI, which the FBI argues will “reduce terrorist and criminal activities”? Well, the first reason is the sheer size of the database. Both DHS and FBI claim that their current biometrics databases (IDENT and IAFIS, respectively) are each the “largest biometric database in the world.” IAFIS contains 66 million criminal records and 25 million civil records, while IDENT has over 91 million individual fingerprint records.
Read more on EFF.
(Related) Like GPS tracking, which is a substitute for enough police officers to manually track suspects (and persons they suspect might someday be suspects) this technology replaces the need for police officers to memorize mug shots (or irises and fingerprints) but offers nothing truly new.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20079121-17/police-tapping-iphone-for-facial-recognition/
Police tapping iPhone for facial recognition
Some law-enforcement agencies are preparing to deploy a mobile facial-recognition tool, The Wall Street Journal reported today.
According to the Journal, about 40 law-enforcement agencies across the U.S. will be making the handheld product available to their officers in the field as early as September. The device, which has been developed by Massachusetts-based BI2 Technologies, allows officers to take a photo of a person from a distance of five feet or less. That photo is then compared with a database of images of people with criminal records to see if there is a match. The device is also capable of scanning a person's iris.
(Related) Coming from no records at all to a “Big Brother knows everything” database, perhaps they can more easily see the problems?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/world/asia/14identity.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
To Track Militants, U.S. Has System That Never Forgets a Face
… With little notice and only occasional complaints, the American military and local authorities have been engaged in an ambitious effort to record biometric identifying information on a remarkable number of people in Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly men of fighting age.
… In Afghanistan and Iraq, there are some complaints — but rarely on grounds recognizable to Americans as civil liberties issues.
Afghanistan, in particular, is a nation with no legacy of birth certificates, driver’s licenses or social security numbers, and where there is a thriving black market in forged national identity papers. Some Afghans are concerned that in the future the growing biometric database could be abused as a weapon of ethnic, tribal or political retaliation — a census of any particular group’s adversaries. Even Afghan officials who support the program want to take it over themselves, and not have the Americans do it.
Amazing the questions the law has never addressed, let alone answered.
Texas and Taxes: Is a Server a Business Presence?
"Does having a server in a data center give you an official business presence in the state where the data center is located – invoking the requirement to collect state taxes? Not in Texas anymore, thanks to a new bill, which clarified a ruling that would have required hosting companies leasing servers in Texas to collect state sales tax from their customers. That's a big deal, since Texas is home to many of the industry's largest hosting companies — including Rackspace and SoftLayer, who have comments on the issue."
Under the stringent (self-)regulations, members who fail to follow the guidelines must suffer the dreaded “tisk tisk” of shame!
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=23704
Tracking the Trackers: Early Results
July 13, 2011 by Dissent
Jonathan Mayer writes:
Over the past several months researchers at the Stanford Security Labhave been developing a platform for measuring dynamic web content. One of our chief applications is a system for automated enforcement of Do Not Track by detecting the myriad forms of third-party tracking, including cookies, HTML5 storage, fingerprinting, and much more. While the software isn’t quite polished enough for public release, we’re eager to share some unexpected early results on the advertising ecosystem. Please bear in mind that these are preliminary findings from experimental software; our primary aims at this stage are developing the platform and validating the approach to third-party tracking detection. Many thanks to Jovanni Hernandez and Akshay Jagadeesh for their invaluable research assistance.
Some of the surprising early findings:
1. At least two NAI members are taking overt steps to respect Do Not Track.
2. Over half of the NAI members we tested did not remove their tracking cookies after opting out.
3. At least eight NAI members promise to stop tracking after opting out, but nonetheless leave tracking cookies in place.
4. At least ten NAI members go beyond their privacy policies and remove their tracking cookies.
Read more and get the details on CIS.
“That's a really cool scam! Let us collect the money for you.”
Phone Customers Pay $2B Yearly In Bogus Fees
"CNN reports that a one-year study by the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee shows about $2 billion a year in 'mystery fees' show up on the landline phone bills of Americans. Known as cramming, the extra charges include:long distance service, subscriptions for Internet-related services, access to restricted websites, entertainment services with a 900 area code, collect calls, and club memberships. The Commerce Committee's report says phone companies receive a small fee — often just a dollar or two — for allowing charges from third-party vendors to appear on their bills but due to the large number of customers the charges eventually add up. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan told the panel people are unaware their phone numbers can be charged almost like a credit card and her investigations indicate customers are not even getting services in return. 'My office has yet to see a legitimate third-party charge on a bill,' says Madigan, who added most customers don't detect the charges on their bills. Senator Jay Rockefeller says Congress needs to pass legislation to protect customers from unauthorized third-party charges on their phone bills because the telephone industry has failed to prevent the practice. 'It's pretty obvious at this point that voluntary guidelines aren't solving this problem,' says Rockefeller. 'It's time for us to take a new look at this problem and find a way to solve it once and for all.'"
Here's an interesting Net Neutrality argument... Are there Internet based (Cloud based) services that – if terminated without notice, would harm a user? (Think health monitors, smoke alarms, “I've fallen and I can't get up,” baby monitors, etc.)
Comcast Bans Seattle Man From Internet for His Cloudy Ways
The end of the internet comes not with a bang or a procession of four lolcats of the apocalypse, but just with two blinking lights on a modem.
At least that’s how it came for Andre Vrignaud, a 39-year-old gaming consultant in Seattle, when Comcast shut him off from the internet Monday for using too much data.
Vrignaud, it seems, committed the foul of using more than 250 GB of data on Comcast two months in a row, triggering the company’s overage policy that results in a year-long ban from using its services.
“It’s one of those things I never thought would hit me,” Vrignaud said. “They didn’t even call. I just got double blinking lights on my modem.”
“If I’d been foolish enough to depend on something like Skype or some other VOIP service for 911, I would have been hosed,” Vrignaud said, arguing that internet service has become a utility much like water and electricity — services that can’t easily be turned off, due to regulations.
For my traveling geeks...
MaryFi Lets You Share Your Windows 7 Internet Connection Wirelessly
Sometimes we have to share USB internet connection with other devices like tablets or smartphone, especially when we are travelling. In these cases you can use MaryFi. MaryFi is a free tool for Windows 7 which lets you share your internet connection wirelessly with other devices! It utilizes the exact procedure like Wireless adhoc connection feature in Windows 7 and Windows Vista. When the connection is established, other Wi-Fi devices like laptops, smart phones, music players, and gaming systems can also join the Maryfi hotspot exactly like any other Wi-Fi hotspot. You Wi-Fi connection is secured by a password-protected WPA2 Encryption.
Definitely something to share with my “Intro to IT” students Make that, all my students. Even though it's not exactly “Miss Manners”
Thursday, July 14, 2011
eEtiquette - 101 Guidelines for the Digital World
eEtiquette is a simple site that exists for the purpose of sharing electronic etiquette tips. The tips cover everything from email etiquette to social network etiquette to cell phone etiquette. Although the title says there are 101 guidelines there are actually more than 101 guidelines on the site now. Some of the best etiquette guidelines are available on a free poster that you can download from eEtiquette.
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