Monday, November 07, 2011


Interesting. An Auditor could have had access to lots of sensitive information. Difficult to tell from the article if “millions” is the right number, but the “company secrets” bit sounds real.
AU: Computershare ‘breach’ a lesson in information larceny
November 7, 2011 by admin
Leonie Woods reports:
The privacy and financial records of millions of shareholders who use Computershare’s global share registry system were placed at risk this year when a Boston employee quit the company, allegedly taking with her thousands of pages of highly sensitive and confidential documents.
The employee resigned in September last year but did not return a work laptop for three weeks. When Computershare retrieved the laptop, the company claimed internal documents and emails had been copied without authorisation to a USB flash drive and later to the employee’s home computer.
What is most disturbing about the case is that the woman was formerly employed in Computershare’s risk management and internal audit department, which is responsible for scrutinising the vulnerabilities of the group’s internal systems.
It is understood forensic technicians employed by Computershare later purged the documents from the home computer and retrieved one of two USB devices in the woman’s possession.
[...]
The US court heard that one of the documents detailed Computershare’s business and operational processes, ”the inherent risks they face, their management risk rating, the likelihood and consequences of risks to those business lines, a documentation of controls that are in place that have been designed to mitigate their risk” and more.
Another document was an internal audit report covering all of Computershare’s US operations which, among other things, ”describes in detail the company’s efforts to maintain and preserve shareholder and institutional privacy and confidentiality” as well as specific audit findings and detailed strategies for resolving issues.
Also Computershare’s lawyers told the US court that the woman copied her emails from the laptop and that these contained ”personally identifiable information of shareholders, including account numbers, names and holdings”.
[From the article:
But a court in Boston has heard Computershare does not know where the original USB device is; the woman told the company she had lost it.


There is a simple solution, but you won't like that either...
The San Francisco Chronicle features an interview with Google's patent counsel, Tim Porter, who argues that "... what many people can agree on is the current system is broken and there are a large number of software patents out there fueling litigation that resulted from a 10- or 15-year period when the issuance of software patents was too lax. Things that seemed obvious made it through the office until 2007, when the Supreme Court finally said that the patent examiners could use common sense. [Note: Not “must” but “could” Bob] Patents were written in a way that was vague and overly broad. (Companies are) trying to claim something that's really an idea (which isn't patentable). There are only so many ways to describe a piston, but software patents are written by lawyers in a language that software engineers don't even understand. They're being used to hinder innovation or skim revenue off the top of a successful product." Porter is speaking in particular about the snarls that have faced (and still face) Android, based on Microsoft patents; he blames some of the mess on a patent regime where "you don't know what patents cover until courts declare that in litigation. What that means is people have to make decisions about whether to fight or whether to reach agreements."


Another Google issue (unless you can name another “Mass Digitizer?”
Legal Issues in Mass Digitization: A Preliminary Analysis and Discussion Document
November 7, 2011 03:21 Source: U.S. Copyright Office
The Copyright Office has published a Preliminary Analysis and Discussion Document that addresses the issues raised by the intersection between copyright law and the mass digitization of books. The purpose of the Analysis is to facilitate further discussions among the affected parties and the public – discussions that may encompass a number of possible approaches, including voluntary initiatives, legislative options, or both. The Analysis also identifies questions to consider in determining an appropriate policy for the mass digitization of books.
+ Link to full report (PDF; 1.95 MB)


While the American Idle watch American Idol searching for talent, “Big Music” is sinking their treasure into more lawyers and lobbyists because they think that will make them more money than new talent.
RIAA lawyer says DMCA may need overhaul
… "I think Congress got it right, [“because we wrote it for them” Bob] but I think the courts are getting it wrong," [“because they are applying logic” Bob] Pariser said during a panel discussion at the NY Entertainment & Technology Law Conference. "I think the courts are interpreting Congress' statute in a manner that is entirely too restrictive of content owners' rights and too open to [Internet] service providers.


Well, that clears it up!
November 06, 2011
Pew - The Generation Gap and the 2012 Election
  • "In the last four national elections, generational differences have mattered more than they have in decades. According to the exit polls, younger people have voted substantially more Democratic than other age groups in each election since 2004, while older voters have cast more ballots for Republican candidates in each election since 2006. The latest national polls suggest this pattern may well continue in 2012. Millennial generation voters are inclined to back Barack Obama for reelection by a wide margin in a matchup against Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who has run the strongest against Obama in many polls. By contrast, Silent generation voters are solidly behind Romney. In between the youngest and the oldest voters are the Baby Boom generation and Generation X. Both groups are less supportive of Obama than they were in 2008 and are now on the fence with respect to a second term for the president."


This uses only the Harvard format, EasyBib supports APA and MLA, BibMe supports MLA, APA, and Chicago.
CiteThisForMe: Quickly Generate Bibliography Based On Harvard Referencing Style
… CiteThisForMe helps you by creating a bibliography/reference and eliminates the need for you to worry about formatting.
Similar tools: Easybib and BibMe.


For my Ethical Hackers & Computer Forensics geeks: Perhaps reverse engineering the source code would allow you to “un-modify” the voice telling you where to drop the ransom money...
Skype Voice Changer: Add Effects To Your Voice In Skype
Skype Voice Changer is a free to use desktop application coded in C# for Windows. It acts as a Skype add-on that adds effects to voices being transmitted through Skype. The app lets you control various aspects of your voice such as the number of voices, the frequency, pitch fudge factor, and looping voices. Providing a variety of effects, the app will enable you to have lots of fun with your Skype contacts.


This could make a great project for my Ethical Hackers! The Comments provide a few tips...
"One cool feature I used on KMail years ago was the ability to generate a spoofed email bounce for any given message I had received, which claimed delivery failed because of an unknown recipient. While this doesn't exactly align with expected behaviour from a mail client, it was a useful way of easily getting off mailing lists (automated, or manually created by freaky acquaintances!). This is something I really miss, so I'm wondering if there are any mail clients for Windows that provide similar functionality?"


I have many students who find Khan Academy very useful. This could make it much more useful.
"Khan Academy announced this morning that it has raised $5 million from the O'Sullivan Foundation (a foundation created by Irish engineer and investor Sean O'Sullivan). The money is earmarked for several initiatives: expanding the Khan Academy faculty, creating a content management system so that others can use the program's learning analytics system, and building an actual brick-and-mortar school, beginning with a summer camp program."
[From the article:
Khan has long kept full control over the “instruction”, or rather the video creation — all the content has been created by him. That changed last month, as I reported here, when Khan Academy struck a partnership with SmartHistory, bringing on that organization’s Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker as art history instructors. The money from the O’Sullivan Foundation will be used in part to expand the Khan Academy further, to at least 5 full-time-equivalent teachers.
… The system will also enable others to tap into some of the tools and analytics that Khan Academy is developing.
Khan Academy intern David Hu offered some great insight this week into what these analytics look like. In a blog post entitled, “How Khan Academy Is Using Machine Learning to Assess Student Mastery,” Hu detailed the efforts underway at Khan Academy to rethink how its model for student proficiency works. Currently, it relies on a “streak” — that is, students must get a certain number of questions right in a row in order to move on. Hu proposes an alternate approach to ascertaining whether or not a student has gained proficiency (defined as a 94% or greater likelihood of correctly answering the next question asked involving that skill) using a logical regression model. Hu hypothesizes that with this new proficiency model, learning outcomes should increase, in part by moving students off of problems that they’re good at more quickly.
… “Teachers don’t scale,” I remember Sal Khan saying to me when I interviewed him last year. What can scale, he argues, is the infrastructure for content delivery. And that means you just need a handful of good lecturers’ record their lessons; the Internet will take care of the rest.
… “The school of the future will not resemble the school of today,” Khan says. “In the past, the assembly-line, lecture-homework-exam model existed because that’s what was possible in the no-tech and low-tech classrooms of their day.” His team now have $5 million to take that lecture-homework-exam model into the high-tech classroom… or something.

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