Saturday, December 10, 2011


This is unlikely to stop another “Arab Spring,” iPhones are too easy to use.
"Hot on the heels of recently passed legislation further restricting Freedom of Assembly, the National Front-led Malaysian Government is now working to make the registration of all tech workers mandatory, making it an offence punishable by a stiff fine and jail for anyone to plan, deploy, service and maintain any computing system without a license. A leaked draft of the legislation has ignited a backlash among the IT community, which fear the law, when passed, will be devastating to the tech industry in Malaysia."


So bring in the headsman and do it all at once!
"The Transportation Security Administration is getting a lot of negative attention, much of it from the U.S. government itself. A recent congressional report blasted the TSA for being incompetent and ineffective (PDF). A bill to force the TSA to reduce its screening of active duty U.S. military members and their families was approved unanimously by the House of Representatives. After a TSA employee was arrested for sexually assaulting a woman while in uniform, a bill has been introduced to prevent TSA agents from wearing police-style uniforms and badges or using the title 'officer.' The bill's sponsor calls these practices 'an insult to real cops.' The FBI is getting involved by changing its definition of rape [Rape is a federal crime? Bob] in a way that might expose the TSA's 'enhanced pat-down' screeners to prosecution. Lastly, public support for the TSA's use of X-ray body scanners drops dramatically when people realize there is a cancer risk."


Simple answer. RIAA runs the anti-piracy division of the Justice Department and they don't need no stinking constitution!
Senator Wants Answers from DHS Over Domain Name Seizures
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) said Friday he would demand answers from the Department of Homeland Security about its domain seizure program known as Operation in Our Sites after it was revealed that the government kept a hip-hop music review site’s name for a year without affording the owner a chance to challenge the seizure.
Wyden also wants to know why there was no court record of the case, other than the initial seizure filing a year ago.


Cue the theme from Mission Impossible...
6 Holiday Gifts That Are Perfect For The Amateur Spy


Hey! Look what 'whats-his-name' is proposing! Project for my Ethical Hackers: De-anonymize his medical record (if it is on the database)
By Dissent, December 9, 2011
Earlier this week the Government announced proposals (40-page / 2.1MB PDF) to change the NHS Constitution so that information stored about patients would be automatically shared with life sciences researchers via a new anonymised database unless patients elect for their details not to be included.
While welcomed by the life sciences industry as a boost to research, the proposals raised concerns about the use of patient data.
[...]
“Let me be clear, this does not threaten privacy, it doesn’t mean anyone can look at your health records, but it does mean using anonymous data to make new medical breakthroughs,” Cameron said in a speech detailing the Government’s plans, according to a report by the BBC.
Mr. Cameron may firmly believe that, but studies on re-identifying supposedly “anonymized” data make it clear that data are often not as “anonymized” as one might think or home when the data are combined with other data often readily available in public databases.
The article also quotes Paul Ohm, who has been instrumental of increasing awareness about the risks of relying on “anonymization:”
Academic Paul Ohm, Associate Professor at University of Colorado Law School, told Out-Law.com in 2009 that research had shown that it is possible to use anonymised data to identify individuals. He said at the time that misplaced trust in anonymisation had been enshrined in privacy legislation.
“Virtually every privacy law allows you to escape the strictures and requirements of the privacy law completely once you’ve anonymised your data,” he said. “Every policy maker who has ever encountered a privacy law, and that’s in every country on earth, will need to re-examine the core assumptions they made when they wrote that law.”
Ohm said at the time that, in some fields of research such as health, it would be possible to open up much more data than is currently permitted as long as access to the information was controlled.
“We can’t trust technology any more but at the same time we don’t want to keep this information from researchers. So my solution is that we shift our trust from the technology to the people,” he said. “We write down the rules of trust among health researchers … [we say] you can get my data but only on a need to know basis,” he said.
Read more on Out-Law.com
Part of determining trustworthiness of a research clearly needs to be assessing their security and privacy protections, as the researcher may be professionally trustworthy, but if they outsource their database security to another party, well….


Interesting article...
The Future of Context: Mobile Reading from Google to Flipboard to FLUD
Reading is changing. And arguably, even more than e-readers, tablets, or “readers’ tablets,” smartphones are changing it.


Gee, I got them all right. Perhaps the school board member was a math-phobic?
New submitter newslash.formatb points to this Washington Post blog post, which
"discusses the National Assessment of Educational Progress test (specifically, the math part). One of the school board members took it and was unable to answer any of the 60 math questions, though he guessed correctly on 10 of them. He then goes on to claim that the math isn't relevant to many people. P.S. — if you want to feel like Einstein, check out some sample questions."
Maybe this is mostly about the kind of life skills that are sufficient to succeed in management.


Tools & Techniques
Quick Screen Share is a simple yet effective online web service that helps you instantly share screen activity with friends without having to download any software or extra add-ons. To get started, visit the site and check the “Your Screen” or “Their Screen” option; then enter your name to start the process. Note that you must have Java to make use of this service.
Once this is done, you will be given a URL you can send to the person who’d like to share the screen with you.


Anyone know where I can get a used Steinway? Yes, Mr. Bach, there's an app for that.
Etude is a must-have iPad application for all those users who want to learn piano using different digital tools.
Once installed, all you have to do is find the song which you want to learn and it will show you all the keys which you should press at each moment.
In case of pros, they can carry all their collections in one device rather than carrying piles of papers and books.


Gosh, I feel smarter already!
2 Ways To Easily Download TED Videos To Your Desktop


So they're not growling at me?
'Vocal Fry' Creeping Into U.S. Speech
A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry. Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low notes and add style. Now, a new study of young women in New York state shows that the same guttural vibration—once considered a speech disorder—has become a language fad.
Vocal fry, or glottalization, is a low, staccato vibration during speech, produced by a slow fluttering of the vocal chords (listen here).

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