Friday, November 04, 2011


It's voluntary, so what portion of your data will they volunteer to share? It's government designed, so which are the delusional bits?
Personal info returned to UK consumers with ‘midata’
November 3, 2011 by Dissent
Mark Brown reports:
Google, Three and MasterCard are among 26 companies that have signed up to a government initiative called “midata“, which is aimed at giving UK citizens access to the personal information kept by corporations.
The take-away mantra is that “data should be released back to consumers,” and organisations will hand over your key information in a portable, electronic format — called “personal data inventories” (PDIs). They’ll be released in 2012.
Read more on Wired.co.uk
Individuals will then be able to use this data to gain insights into their own behaviour, make more informed choices about products and services, and manage their lives more efficiently.
… We see a real opportunity here, but others, including the US and EU, are also showing real interest in the programme and the economic benefits it can deliver. [Government gibberish? What benefits? Bob]
… midata will encourage sustainable economic growth by boosting competition between companies in terms of value and service, and driving innovation.


Another way to search Facebook for job applicant indiscretions?
Mind what you say in Facebook comments, Google will soon be indexing them and serving them up as part of the company’s standard search results. Google’s all-seeing search robots still can’t find comments on private pages within Facebook, but now any time you use a Facebook comment form on a other sites, or a public page within Facebook, those comments will be indexed by Google.
The new indexing plan isn’t just about Facebook comments, but applies to nearly any content that’s previously been accessible only through an HTTP POST request. Google’s goal is to include anything “hiding” behind a form — comment systems like Disqus or Facebook and other JavaScript-based sites and forms.


Could we call this “e-CSI?” Forensics in the digital crime scene...
Solving A Teen Murder By Following A Trail of Digital Evidence
The tragic tale, via Wired, is told through that same evidence by journalist David Kushner. His interviews with law enforcement speak to how important digital evidence has become for investigating crimes involving “digital natives”:


Think about this. Adding bad data to a widely accessible database is dangerous. What happens if a legitimate user relies on it? (I must assume there will be no “This is bogus” flag to prevent that) Also, why is it assumed that they can track bogus data, but can't track real data?
Darpa’s Plan to Trap the Next WikiLeaker: Decoy Documents
Darpa-funded researchers are building a program for “generating and distributing believable misinformation.” The ultimate goal is to plant auto-generated, bogus documents in classified networks and program them to track down intruders’ movements, a military research abstract reveals.
… Fake “classified” documents, when touched, will take a snapshot of the IP address of the intruder and the time it was opened, alerting a systems administrator of the breach.
… The deeper goal is to make hackers and whistleblowers jittery about whether the data they’ve stumbled on is actually real.
With Congress demanding the Defense Department work on eliminating insider threats, feds have been in overdrive trying to prevent another document-dump at the scale of WikiLeaks, even going to the extremes of threatening to prosecute airmen who let their families read the site.


“We don't need no stinking warrant!” (part 946) “The suspect should have known that specific parts of the technology used was not secure and therefore could not reasonable expect his information to remain private.
Feds’ Use of Fake Cell Tower: Did it Constitute a Search?
Federal authorities used a fake Verizon cellphone tower to zero in on a suspect’s wireless card, and say they were perfectly within their rights to do so, even without a warrant.
But the feds don’t seem to want that legal logic challenged in court by the alleged identity thief they nabbed using the spoofing device, known generically as a stingray. So the government is telling a court for the first time that spoofing a legitimate wireless tower in order to conduct surveillance could be considered a search under the Fourth Amendment in this particular case, and that its use was legal, thanks to a court order and warrant that investigators used to get similar location data from Verizon’s own towers.
… According to an affidavit submitted to the court (.pdf) by the chief of the FBI’s Tracking Technology Unit, the stingray is designed to capture only the equivalent of header information — such as the phone or account number assigned to the aircard as well as dialing, routing and address information involved in the communication. As such, the government has maintained that the device is the equivalent of devices designed to capture routing and header data on e-mail and other internet communications, and therefore does not require a search warrant.
… Despite the apparent shift in the government’s argument in this specific case, it still maintains that stingray devices do not violate American’s privacy, since the target doesn’t “have a reasonable expectation of privacy in his general location or in the cell site records he transmitted wirelessly to Verizon.”
The Metropolitan police in London have used similar technology which takes the surveillance a bit further, according to a recent story in the Guardian. The British device can be used to identify all mobile phones in a given area, capture and record the content of calls and remotely disable phones.


Perspective Is Microsoft heading for another antitrust investigation? (Bing is the hard-to-change default search engine in Internet Explorer.) ..
"As Bing gets closer to capturing almost 33% of the market share in the US, Google has again made a large tweak to its algorithms to provide more up-to-the-minute search results. The change affects around 35% of queries and is intended to give users more recent news and stories. For breaking news stories the search engine will now weight more heavily the most recent coverage, and not just those sites that are linked the most, and for general terms the search engine values fresh content more than old. Google is hoping that these recent new changes will provide better search experience and stops users from switching over to Bing, which just recently launched its own GroupOn like site."


My geeks will be interested. (Others will want the “let's fake a moon landing” app)
"The space agency is widely known as a cloud computing success story in the government for its Nebula cloud computing platform. Now NASA will develop an app store for its scientists. The NASA CIO says it's about getting the science job done."


For my geeks and my math students.
9 Equations True Geeks Should (at Least Pretend to) Know


Stay current. Some interesting new words/phrases
Jargon Watch: Pitstops, War-Texting, Data Furnace
War-texting v. Hacking into the software that lets drivers start a car or unlock its doors with a cellphone. The miscreants compromise security by sending unlock or start commands to the onboard computer via SMS — a trick that adds war-texting to a long line of exploits aimed at vulnerable networks, from war-dialing to war-driving.
Data furnace n. A cluster of servers used to warm a home with waste heat. Proposed by Microsoft as an alternative to centralized server farms that need to be air-conditioned, distributed networks of data furnaces would be maintained by cloud service providers who would give you free heating in exchange for a place in your basement.


Interesting. Am I a product of “the last dumb society?”
The Past, Present And Future Of Connectivity: A Must-See Mini Film
Just landed in our inbox: a link to this excellent documentary on connectivity, sponsored by Ericsson and entitled ‘On The Brink’.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)