Interesting that this was available online for nearly a year before anyone noticed. Perhaps files should contain a message like: “This file has been stolen from Stanford Univ. hospital. There is a reward for notifying us. There is an even bigger reward for helping us to identify the thief.”

Patient Data Posted Online in Major Breach of Privacy

By Dissent, September 8, 2011

Kevin Sack reports:

A medical privacy breach at Stanford University’s hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., led to the public posting of medical records for 20,000 emergency room patients, including names and diagnosis codes, on a commercial Web site for nearly a year, the hospital has confirmed.

Since discovering the breach last month, the hospital has been investigating how a detailed spreadsheet made its way from one of its vendors, a billing contractor identified as Multi-Specialty Collection Services, to a Web site called “Student of Fortune,” which allows students to solicit paid assistance with their school work. Gary Migdol, a spokesman for Stanford Hospital and Clinics, said the spreadsheet first appeared on the site on Sept. 9, 2010, as an attachment to a question about how to convert the data into a bar graph.

[...]

The spreadsheet contained names, diagnosis codes, account numbers, admission and discharge dates, and billing charges for patients seen at Stanford Hospital’s emergency room during a six-month period in 2009, Mr. Migdol said. It did not include Social Security numbers, birthdates, credit-card accounts or other information used to perpetrate identity theft, he said, but the hospital is offering free identity protection services to affected patients.

The breach was discovered by a patient and reported to the hospital on Aug. 22, according to a letter written four days later to affected patients by Diane Meyer, Stanford Hospital’s chief privacy officer.

Read more on The New York Times.

Interesting to note that the letter went out 4 days after they learned of the breach. California law mandates notification within 5 days – something Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital was painfully reminded of when the state fined them for noncompliance with that requirement.

“How dare you call us crooks, “Crooks!”

The best defense is a good offense?

Excellent legal strategy for dealing with “nuisance lawsuits,” but probably unwise when you are guilty.

http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=24479

Paxfire Files $80M Defamation Countersuit Against Web User

September 9, 2011 by Dissent

Wendy Davis reports:

Last month, Web user Betsy Feist alleged in a lawsuit that the company Paxfire and Internet service provider RCN “intercepted, monitored, marketed, and divulged” her search history to a third party.

The claims largely stemmed from a report that RCN and other ISPs were working with Paxfire to divert search traffic by sending some users who queried on brand names directly to marketers’ pages, rather than returning search results for those queries.

Paxfire has now fired back with a $80 million countersuit against Feist.

[....]

In its counterclaim against Feist, the company says she defamed Paxfire with her allegations and also interfered with its business relationships. Paxfire says that it lost several contracts as a result of Feist’s allegations, including deals with LinkShare and the ISP XO Communications.

People typically can’t be sued for defamation based on claims they make in court papers. Paxfire alleges that Feist (or her attorneys and agents) defamed it by making statements about the company to the publication New Scientist and advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Read more on MediaPost.

Wow… talk about potentially chilling effects. This is another lawsuit to watch.

Update: I’ve uploaded a copy of Paxfire’s response to Feist’s complaint and counterclaim (30 pp. pdf). Paxfire is countersuing Feist for $30 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages.

Instead of “killing the Internet” perhaps a simple “Big Brother is watching” message when you connect?

How Killing the Internet Helped Revolutionaries

"In a widely circulated American Political Science Association conference paper, Yale scholar Navid Hassanpour argues that shutting down the internet made things difficult for sustaining a centralized revolutionary movement in Egypt. But, he adds, the shutdown actually encouraged the development of smaller revolutionary uprisings at local levels where the face-to-face interaction between activists was more intense and the mobilization of inactive lukewarm dissidents was easier. In other words, closing down the internet made the revolution more diffuse and more difficult for the authorities to contain."

As long as we're on the subject, reader lecheiron points out news of research into predicting revolutions by feeding millions of news articles into a supercomputer and using word analysis to chart national sentiment. So far it's pretty good at predicting things that have already happened, but we should probably wait until it finds something new before contacting Hari Seldon.

I've been bugging certain friends (you know who you are) that have hundreds of short “How to” guides already put together for students (or fellow teachers), to publish them and make a few bucks. This site seems to make it easy.

HowTo-Guidebook.com - Sell Your Knowledge

There are quite a handful of sites that let people who know how to do something difficult share their knowledge, but not that many of these actually let people generate an income when doing so. And that's where this new resource comes in. HowTo-Guidebook.com allows people to create guides explaining how to do anything tricky that they've mastered, help all those who are stuck and (what's even more interesting) earn money for doing so.

That's made possible because the site features a revenue sharing program that's letting each and every contributor generate a passive income by submitting a guide just once.

http://www.howto-guidebook.com/