Tuesday, February 14, 2012


I suspect many companies will find they have been helping the competition...
Nortel hacked for years but failed to protect itself, report says
Citing an internal investigation by former Nortel systems security adviser Brian Shields, the Journal (subscription required) found that hackers apparently based in China carried on a decade-long campaign of stealing technical papers, R&D reports, employee e-mails, and other sensitive documents from the network company.
By grabbing just seven passwords from top Nortel execs back in 2000, the hackers managed to gain access to the company's network and remotely control personal computers by flooding them with spyware.


“We'll delete them long enough for them to check and assume we've deleted them permanently.”
Abine Files FTC Complaint Against BeenVerified For Not Keeping Deleted Profiles Deleted and Misusing Opt-Out Info
February 13, 2012 by Dissent
From the press release:
Abine, Inc., a leader in online privacy solutions for consumers announced today that is has filed a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaint against BeenVerified.com, one of the largest background check websites and data brokers. Abine has found that consumers who stated their preference to be removed using BeenVerified’s own opt-out system in fact showed up again in its online databases. Abine’s DeleteMe service, which is now fully available at Abine.com, provides consumers with a service to ensure their personal info stays off online databases. In the process of delivering this service, Abine verified these findings and sent them to the FTC.
For consumers to remove their information from BeenVerified, they must email BeenVerified their name (as shown on the site), age, current and previous addresses, and listed relatives. Abine’s subscription service, DeleteMe, sends this email on behalf of consumers to ensure their information is deleted and stays unavailable. In the process of delivering its DeleteMe service, Abine found that although BeenVerified temporarily deleted the consumer’s personal information from its database, they later republished it and sometimes included the updated information provided in the opt-out.
Abine estimates that there are more than 180 websites like BeenVerified, and most have different deletion procedures. These websites sell consumers’ personal information for employee background checks, marketing and advertising, personal uses (such as looking up an ex-spouse’s whereabouts), targeted advertising, and credit reporting, among other uses. Once this information is available, it can lead to identity theft, lost job opportunities, and physical safety threats, making it imperative that consumers have the ability to remove their own data if they choose to do so.
“Similar to the Do Not Call Registry, consumers should have the ability to request their personal information, like address, phone number, email address and more, be unlisted online, and they should be able to trust that their request is respected and fulfilled,” said Bill Kerrigan, CEO of Abine. “Our FTC complaint was filed on behalf of all consumers because we believe that they deserve control over their personal information online.”
BeenVerified states that it obtains its information from various government sources, including birth certificates, marriage licenses, divorce proceedings, child support orders, voter registrations, census questionnaires, credit cards, default student loans, corporate filings, lawsuits, mortgages, liens, other real estate transactions, criminal court records, speeding tickets, and immigration documents. It also sends people, referred to as “court runners,” to obtain information directly from courthouses.
“Approximately 40% of online searches are people-related searches,” said Kerrigan. “Data brokers have an immense amount of information on each of us and there need to be tools that give power back to consumers.”
Abine’s tools are designed to do just that. Specifically DeleteMe, currently available at Abine.com, deletes customers’ personal information from many of the largest people search websites that list it, including BeenVerified. The service then monitors the information online to ensure that it doesn’t return, and compiles the information found online in custom reports sent to customers every three months.
With recent funding from leading venture capital firms Atlas Ventures and General Catalyst Partners and an experienced executive team from the fields of online security and privacy, Abine is putting the most high-powered, yet consumer friendly, technology in the hands of consumers. Abine expects the number of consumers using privacy tools to better control the sharing of their personal information to increase by more than 100% in 2012.

(Related)
A Grave New Threat to Free Speech From Europe
February 13, 2012 by Dissent
Jeffrey Rosen writes:
At the end of January, Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, announced a sweeping new privacy right: the “right to be forgotten.” The proposed right would require companies like Facebook and Google to remove information that people post about themselves and later regret—even if that information has already been widely distributed. The right is designed to address a real and urgent problem in the digital age: It’s very hard to escape your past on the Internet now that every photo, status update, and tweet lives forever in the digital cloud. But the right to be forgotten takes a dangerously broad approach to solving the problem. In fact, it represents the biggest threat to Internet free speech in our time.
Read more on The New Republic.
[From the article:
In a widely cited blog post last March, Peter Fleischer, chief privacy counsel of Google, noted that the right to be forgotten, as discussed in Europe, can apply in three situations, each of which proposes progressively greater threats to free speech. The regulations that the European Commission proposed in January are troubling because they extend to all three.
The first category is the narrowest: “If I post something online, do I have the right to delete it again?”
… But the right to delete data becomes far more controversial when it involves the second category: “If I post something, and someone else copies it and re-posts it on their own site, do I have the right to delete it?”
… But the most serious concerns about free expression are raised by the third category of takedown requests: things other people post about us. The proposed European regulation treats takedown requests for truthful information posted by others identically to takedown requests for photos I’ve posted myself that have then been copied by others: Both are included in the definition of personal data as “any information relating” to me, regardless of its source. I can demand takedown, and the burden, once again, is on the social networking site or search engine to prove that it falls within the journalistic, artistic, or literary exception. This could transform Google, Yahoo, and other hosts of third party content into censors-in-chief for the European Union, rather than neutral platforms.


Does TSA have any incentive to install equipment like this? Banning liquids is cheap, testing them costs money.
"Besides having to remove our shoes, the volume limitations regarding liquids and gels in carry-on baggage has become a major hassle in the world of post 9-11 airport security. Hopefully, however, we may soon be able to once again bring our big bottles of water and tubes of toothpaste aboard airliners in our overnight bags. Britain's Cobalt Light Systems has developed a scanner called the INSIGHT100, that uses laser light to assess the liquid contents of containers, even if those containers are opaque."


Just like TSA only local? Back in ye olde days, anal probing was only done on UFOs.
NYC: Stop-and-Frisks Hit Record in 2011
February 14, 2012 by Dissent
Sean Gardiner reports:
New York City police officers stopped and questioned 684,330 people last year, a record number since the department started producing yearly tallies of the tactic.
The total marked a 14% increase over 2010, according to statistics viewed by The Wall Street Journal on Monday.
Read more on Wall Street Journal. The report/stats do not indicate whether the increase was across the board throughout the year or is in any way related to the Occupy movement.


Lawyers is nutz! “You can block this attempt to breach your anonymity but only if you give up your anonymity.”
The Curious Case of the D.C. District’s Anonymity Orders
February 13, 2012 by Dissent
Courts have generally been reluctant to allow parties to file anonymously – even when it might seem reasonable to us to allow them to do. As a recent example: the actress who tried to anonymously sue IMDB and Amazon for “outing” her real age was told she could either file non-anonymously or drop her suit.
When “Does” are being sued, you’d think – or hope – that the court would allow them to move to quash subpoenas anonymously to protect their anonymity – at least in the early stages. And that’s how one case started out. But D.C. District Court magistrate John M. Facciola apparently had second thoughts and issued an order saying that if defendants wanted to move to quash, they’d have to do so under their names, which would be available in the public docket.
Citizen Media Law Project has more on the case, Hard Drive Production v. DOES 1-1,495.
Did I ever mention how much I detest Third Party Doctrine and why Congress really really really needs to recognize the privacy interests of those who provide subscriber information to sites and ISPs?


So if we stream our seminars do we get rich or just famous?
BitTorrent Live: Cheap, Real-Time P2P Video Streaming That Will Kill TV
Television is going the way of the dinosaur, and the deadly comet is called BitTorrent Live. Today, Bram Cohen, the author of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer sharing protocol, demoed his latest creation at the SF MusicTech Summit.
BitTorrent Live lets any content owner or publisher stream video to millions of people at good quality and with just a few seconds of latency…for free or cheap.
… Essentially, people love what they see on television, but want it accessible from the web.
The shift to online streaming has been stalled, though, because of the cost of set up, bandwidth, and servers compared to television infrastructure like cable wires and satellites that are already bought and paid for.
With BitTorrent Live, soon it won’t just be The White House and the Super Bowl streaming their content.
This disruptive P2P tech could blow the doors of streaming open to publishers of any scale.
BitTorrent Live sidesteps the infrastructure cost by having viewers stream the content to each other like they’d torrent a download instead of pulling video from a central source
… An SDK to work with the proprietary protocol is in the works.BitTorrent is now asking content publishers to contact them at live-studio@bittorrent.com to help test their tech. Cohen says he’s already been approached by TV studios who want BitTorrent Live to bring their shows online cheaply.


Work on your home computer, from anywhere... Without an Internet connection!
It would appear Dropbox is building a pretty wide ecosystem around its service and the latest today is an integration with WorldDesk. Who are they? Well they provide desktop virtualisation software, and they’ve just launched a beta cloud-based desktop delivery platform leveraging Dropbox.
Right now WorldDesk lets you access your “desktop” (whatever that is these days) from any device,allowing access to your applications and personalised desktop from your physical machine. Using WorldDesk, you could use a simple USB drive, or access your desktop from a smartphone, for instance.


Online bookstore browsing with your browser?
… By default the display shows Amazon’s list of bestsellers. The book titles are displayed without any rankings or numbers against a reader-friendly white background. You can switch from Amazon’s bestsellers to the New York Times bestsellers list anytime.
Clicking on a book title takes you to its Bookflavor page. Here you can read the book’s synopsis along with its reviews. The book reviews are fetched from Amazon as well as GoodReads. The Amazon purchasing link for each book can also be found on this page.
Similar tool: Zoomii,


One possible future of education?
MIT opens registration today for the first of its online courses offered as part of its new MITx initiative. The university announced MITx late last year as the next step not just in informal online learning but in alternative certification. Registration for MITx is free and open to anyone, and for this first "prototype" class, there is no additional charge to receive the certification upon successful completion of the class. [This is both the challenge and the money making opportunity for online education Bob]

(Related) I'll taste-test and certify your beer...


How cool is this?
… One of the most useful ways that ifttt is leveraged is in finding free deals, discounts, and sales. Let me share a few of my favorite tech-related recipes that deal in saving you more money online.

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