Friday, February 10, 2012

“Can't be fixed” often translates to “I don't know how to fix it.” What security replaced the VPN? The jeweler should have asked that question.
C.D. Peacock sues IT firm over network breach
February 9, 2012 by admin
Wailin Wong reports:
Chicago jeweler C.D. Peacock has sued a suburban information-technology consulting firm, alleging that the company’s negligence allowed hackers to access confidential customer financial data.
The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in Cook County Circuit Court. According to C.D. Peacock’s complaint, it hired Oak Brook-based BridgePoint Technologies for IT-related services in August 2009. In March 2010, the company found that its virtual private network, designed to give remote users access to a centralized network, was failing to make those connections.
C.D. Peacock said a BridgePoint consultant inspected the network and said the VPN could not be fixed. The consultant told the jeweler to go around the VPN connection, a move that he assured would be safe, according to the lawsuit.
“Circumventing the VPN led almost immediately to a serious security breach,” C.D. Peacock said in its filing.
Read more on WGN Radio


This one could be interesting. What odds is Vegas giving that it settles out of court?
"The Hollywood Reporter reports that members of the iconic disco-era musical group Sister Sledge have filed a major class action lawsuit against Warner Music Group claiming that the music giant's method for calculating digital music purchases as 'sales' rather than 'licenses' has cheated them out of millions of dollars from digital music sales. Songwriters typically make much less money when an album is 'sold' than they do when their music is 'licensed' (the rationale derives from the costs that used to be associated with the physical production of records) but record labels have taken the position that music sold via such digital stores as iTunes should be counted as 'sales' rather than licenses. The difference in revenue can be significant as Sister Sledge claim their record deal promises 25 percent of revenue from licenses but only 5-1/2% to 6-1/2% of net from sales. Eminem's publisher brought a nearly identical claim against Universal Music Group and won an important decision at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2010 when the 9th Circuit ruled that iTunes' contract unambiguously provided that the music was licensed. The lawsuit argued that record companies' arrangements with digital retailers resembled a license more than it did a sale of a CD or record because, among other reasons, the labels furnished the seller with a single master recording that it then duplicated for customers. 'Unlike physical sales, where the record company manufactures each disc and has incremental costs, when they license to iTunes, all they do is turn over one master,' says attorney Richard S. Busch. 'It's only fair that the artist should receive 50 percent of the receipts.'"


Since Megaupload is out of business, it seems clear they were not the ones pirating music/movies/stuff. No doubt that will be part of their defense.
… What was initially thought to be a victory for movie studios and record labels is turning out to be an empty win, however, as Megaupload’s closure has had almost no impact on file-sharing.
Internet consulting firm DeepField Networks analyzed Web traffic from six companies that provide the storage facilities responsible for roughly 80% of all file-sharing traffic. According to the firm, Megaupload’s files accounted for a huge portion of that traffic before a series of raids took the service offline last month; between 30% and 40% of all file-sharing downloads came from Megaupload.
The service moved so much data that global Internet traffic immediately decreased by between 2% and 3% when Megaupload’s services were taken offline on January 18th.
As big as Megaupload was, however, the service’s closure has not had the effect on file-sharing that copyright owners might have hoped. According to DeepField, Web traffic related to file-sharing recovered almost immediately as users simply utilized other services such as Rapidshare and Mediafire.
To compound matters, it looks like Internet Service Providers in the United States will likely take the biggest hit following Megaupload’s closure. ”Instead of terabytes of North America Megaupload traffic going to U.S. servers, most file sharing traffic now comes from Europe over far more expensive transatlantic links,” DeepField noted.


The communication was over the governments system. That isn't the issue. Retaliation for whistle blowing (to Congress) seems to have been their goal all along.
FDA says it monitored workers’ e-mail to investigate potential leak
February 10, 2012 by Dissent
Ellen Nakashima and Lisa Rein report:
The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that it monitored the personal e-mails of employees who had concerns about unsafe medical devices beginning in April 2010 but said it did so to investigate allegations that the employees had leaked confidential information to the public.
The FDA’s statement came in response to a Washington Post article last month that reported that the FDA intercepted and stored the Gmail communications of a group of agency doctors who raised concerns with Congress about the agency approving cancer-screening and other devices despite the doctors’ determinations that the devices were not safe or effective.
Read more on The Washington Post.


Maybe kids are learning...
The majority of adults, 85 percent, in a new study believe that visiting social networks like Facebook are a pleasant way to spend time.
The report was published today by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project.
Among the study’s highlights are these numbers:
  • Only a small sampling of adults said their experience on social networks was unpleasant. Five percent of adults said that people are mostly unkind on Facebook and other social media channels, while five percent said their answer depends on the situation.
  • The remainder of adult social network users said they didn’t know how to answer the question or refused to answer it.


Very fuzzy line between Identity Theft and Medical Identity Theft.
By Dissent, February 9, 2012
Rick Kam, President and CEO, ID Experts and Christine Arevalo, director of healthcare identity management, ID Experts write:
Healthcare fraud is costing American taxpayers up to $234 billion annually, based on estimates from the FBI. It’s no wonder that a stolen medical identity has a $50 street value, according to the World Privacy Forum – whereas a stolen social security number, on the other hand, only sells for $1.
One form of healthcare fraud, known as medical identity theft, has its own staggering statistics: 1.42 million Americans were victims of medical identity theft in 2010, according to a 2011 study on patient data privacy and security by the Ponemon Institute. The report estimates the annual economic impact of medical identity theft to be $30.9 billion.
Read more on Government HealthIT. The authors have chosen some real-life examples to include that remind everyone how much harm medical ID theft can cause.
[From the article:
Medical identity theft occurs when a person uses someone else’s medical record to obtain medical goods or services or to bill for medical goods and services that the patient did not receive. Thieves will also use a person’s social security number to obtain medical services or health insurance.


Did they skip “Just turn it off!”


This is only for my students who have not had their first IPO and have not yet hired a chauffeur...
Prepare for Liftoff With Automotive Cheat Codes
Like videogames, real cars have cheat codes—actions that unlock hidden potential. Some are printed in the owner’s manual; others are meant only for dealers. Many shut down safety features, so we’ll warn you: Don’t try these on public roads unless you think you can cheat death, too.


Beyond the “bragging rights,” this is interesting (to a geek anyway)
February 09, 2012
Top 10 Law School Home Pages of 2011
Top 10 Law School Home Pages of 2011, Roger Skalbeck, Georgetown University Law Center, 2 J.L. (1 J. Legal Metrics) 25-52 (2012)
  • "For the third consecutive year, the website home pages for all ABA-accredited law schools are evaluated and ranked based on objective criteria. For 2011, law school home pages advanced in some areas. For instance, there are now thirteen sites using the HTML5 doctype, up from a single site in 2010. In addition, seventeen schools achieved a perfect score for three tests focused on website accessibility, up from eight in 2010. Nonetheless, there’s enough diversity in coding practices and content to help separate the great from the good. For this year’s survey, twenty-four elements of each home page are assessed across three broad categories: Design Patterns & Metadata; Accessibility & Validation; and Marketing & Communications. Most elements require no special design skills, sophisticated technology or significant expenses. For interpreting these results, the author does not try to decide if any whole is greater or less than the sum of its parts."


How to make money with Free Software...
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/02/nginx-goes-commerical/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29
From Russia With Tech Support: Open Source NGINX Remakes Web Servers
The second most popular web server on the planet no longer comes from Microsoft. It comes from NGINX. And now, the tiny Russian outfit wants to actually make some money from its widely popular open source server software.
This week, the company announced that it’s now officially offering technical support and consulting services to businesses everywhere. In others words, if you sign a three- to twelve-month contract, the company will help you install and configure the NGINX web server — a means of hosting web sites — and when things go wrong, it help with that too.


Khan Academy is so cool, it attracts geeks?
"Craig Silverstein, the first employee hired by Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, will leave the search giant for Khan Academy, an online education portal based in Mountain View, Calif. Silverstein had been with Google shortly after it first launched in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, a friend of both Page and Brin, in September 1998. He had helped Brin and Page develop infrastructure when Google was just a Stanford grad school project, but when he officially joined the company, Silverstein became its technology director. The Khan Academy, where Silverstein is heading next, is a not-for-profit organization that aspires to change the education industry by providing free 'world-class education to anyone anywhere.' Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is an enormous fan of the service, telling CNN that he uses it with his kids."


It's not just for Teachers...
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Earlier today I presented a short webinar about some of my favorite Web 2.0 tools for teachers. The webinar was on behalf of Ed Tech Teacher for whom I facilitate in-person workshops from time to time. This summer I'll be working with them quite a bit. You can see the list of their summer workshops here. A recording of today's webinar will be available here shortly. If you just want to know what tools I shared in the webinar, you can view the slides below.


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