Do we have enough to interest the Class
Action lawyers?
"About 200 customers of the
Central Maine Power Company recently noticed something odd after the
utility installed smart meters in their homes: household
electronics including wireless devices stopped working, or behaved
erratically. Many Smart Meters broadcast in the 2.4GHz frequency
range. Unfortunately, so do many of the consumer gadgets we take for
granted these days including routers, electric garage doors, fire
alarms, clocks, electric pet fences, answering machines, and baby
monitors--even medial devices. [“To
save power in peak usage times, we may turn off your pacemaker...”
Bob] The electromagnetic congestion in the home
is in some ways similar to the growing electronic congestion in
hospitals as they acquire more and more electronic monitors all
operating within a few feet of each other. Medical
equipment has been known to shut down or give erroneous results when
positioned close to another piece of equipment.
Such interference is not new, just getting worse--rapidly."
Back in the “old days,” police
would “change channels” or tell officers to “phone home”
(that should be easier today when everyone has a cell phone) Is
encryption more for protecting the police from us 'second class'
citizens or a real concern that terrorists/criminals will use that
information to elude them?
"Police departments around the
country are moving to shield
their radio communications from the public as cheap,
user-friendly technology has made it easy for anyone to use handheld
devices to keep tabs on officers responding to crimes and although
law enforcement officials say they want to keep criminals from using
officers' internal chatter to evade them, journalists and
neighborhood watchdogs say open communications ensures that the
public receives information as quickly as possible that can be vital
to their safety. 'Whereas listeners used to be tied to stationary
scanners, new technology has allowed people — and especially
criminals — to listen to police communications on a smartphone from
anywhere,' says DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier who says that a group of
burglars
who police believe were following radio communications on their
smartphones pulled off more than a dozen crimes before ultimately
being arrested. But encryption also makes
it harder for neighboring jurisdictions to communicate in times of
emergency. 'The 9/11 commission concluded
America's number
one vulnerability during the attacks was the lack of interoperability
communications,' writes Vernon Herron, 'I spoke to several first
responders who were concerned that their efforts to respond and
assist at the Pentagon after the attacks were hampered by the lack of
interoperability with neighboring jurisdictions.'"
For the Computer Forensics students...
Police
procedures leaked for getting into Facebook, other accounts
Confidential guidelines telling police
how to access Facebook, Microsoft, Blizzard, and AOL user accounts
have appeared online this week.
The files, known colloquially as law
enforcement guidelines, typically tell police what types of user data
are stored, how long they're retained, and what procedures to use to
gain access to them.
Here are some highlights [and
links Bob] from each company's policies:
Blizzard:
Logs of Internet Protocol addresses are kept "indefinitely,"
according to the company behind World of Warcraft. Sent mail is not
retained. Deleted mail messages are not retained.
Facebook:
An earlier
version of the company's manual from 2008 said that "IP log
data is generally retained for 90 days." That statement is
missing from the newly-released 2010 version, indicating that
Facebook now may store data longer (a company spokesman did not
respond to that question).
Microsoft/MSN:
Hotmail IP logs are kept for 60 days. MSN TV's Web site logs are kept
for 13 days. No logs are kept for conversations taking place through
MSN chat rooms and MSN instant messenger. The leaked document is from
April 2005, though, and may be out of date.
AOL:
IP logs for the AIM and ICQ messaging services are stored for up to
90 days. Customer logs are kept for 6 months. All AOL e-mail,
including from portals such as AOL.ca, AOL.fr, and AOL.mx, is stored
in its Northern Virginia data center.
Apparently, “not where he was
supposed to be” is insufficient.
NY
court upholds GPS tracker on worker’s personal car
November 23, 2011 by Dissent
Associated Press reports:
A midlevel New
York court on Wednesday upheld the state use of a tracking device on
an employee’s private car to investigate whether he was skipping
work and falsifying time sheets.
The Appellate
Division panel split over whether that secret Global Positioning
System tracking in 2008 violated Michael Cunningham’s
constitutional privacy rights.
The three-judge
majority said the state Labor Department, where Cunningham was
director of staff and organizational development for 20 years, had
reasonable grounds to start the GPS tracking because Cunningham was
disciplined previously for false time records and
officials suspected it was continuing. They also concluded that
using the device for a month, in an investigation conducted by the
Office of Inspector General, was reasonable.
“A search
conducted by a public employer investigating work-related misconduct
of one of its employees is judged by the standard of reasonableness
under all the circumstances, both as to the inception and scope of
the intrusion,” Justice John Lahtinen wrote. The labor department
“clearly had a responsibility to curtail the suspected ongoing
abuse of work time not only to preserve its integrity, but also to
protect taxpayers’ monies.”
Lahtinen noted
that traditional methods like tailing Cunningham failed, and he was
suspected of using his personal car during working hours for some of
the suspected abuse. “He could hardly have been surprised to be
under investigation,” he wrote.
Justices Robert
Rose and John Egan Jr. agreed.
Two judges
dissented, saying the GPS use was warranted at first, but tracking
the family car for a month was too broad and intrusive to be
reasonable.
Read more on WSJ.
It’s interesting that one aspect of the dissent
was the length of the surveillance. A similar concern was
raised in U.S. v. Jones, a case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court
this month. A decision on that case is not expected until later next
year.
One of the other key aspects of this
case is that placing a GPS device on an employee’s
personal car resulted in surveillance of family members, 24 hours per
day. What privacy rights do they have to be free from
such surveillance? If the U.S. DOJ is to be believed, the government
can put a GPS on any car at any time without a warrant, but what
about a state agency that is investigating a civil matter?
It will be interesting to see what
happens with this case on appeal.
I thought my classes were big when I
filled the room...
"Stanford University is
offering the online world more of its undergraduate
level CS courses. These free courses consist of You Tube videos
with computer-marked quizzes and programming assignments. The ball
had been started rolling by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig's free
online version of their Stanford
AI class, for which they hoped to reach an
audience in the order of a hundred thousand, a
target which they seem to have achieved. As well as the previously
announced Machine
learning course you can now sign up to any of: Computer Science
101, Software as a Service, Human-Computer Interaction, Natural
Language Processing, Game Theory, Probabilistic Graphical Models,
Cryptography and Design and Analysis of Algorithms. Almost a
complete computer science course and they are adding more.
Introductory videos and details are available from each courses
website."
(Related) What kind of “book” do
you need to teach classes on the Internet?
"Most of today's electronic
textbooks are re-purposed versions of print books. Nature has
published an e-text that departs from the traditional book format and
business model. Their Introduction to Biology e-text was created
from the ground up and consists of 196
modules rather than a sequential book and the student gets a lifetime
subscription for $49. Nature will continuously update the e-text
as the science and pedagogy evolve."
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