I also find it amusing that they cite a
letter from some concerned congressmen as evidence of “an
extremely serious and substantial lapse in security.” Typical
foot-in-mouth politicians...
By Dissent,
March 14, 2012
Bob Brewin reports that a class action
lawsuit against the Department of Defense and SAIC over the TRICARE
breach has been amended after some of the victims discovered
fraudulent charges on their credit cards shortly after the theft.
Read about it on NextGov.
The complaint indicates
the plaintiffs’ belief that the theft was not opportunistic but
targeted.
Frankly, I don’t know how you prove
the card fraud was from this theft unless there were accounts that
were only used with DOD/SAIC. Given the number of breaches every day
– most of which don’t make the media – if you have only a
handful of cases out 5 million people whose data were misused for
card fraud one month to three months later, that doesn’t sound
particularly convincing to me.
What do you think?
In any event, the amended
complaint makes for interesting reading and suggests what
entities should not do before or after.
So, is this an act of war? (Invading
Iran's airwaves with BBC news?)
Cyber-attack
on BBC leads to suspicion of Iran's involvement
A
"sophisticated cyber-attack" on the BBC has been linked to
Iran's efforts to disrupt the BBC Persian Service.
In a speech Director General Mark
Thompson plans to say that the internet attack coincided with efforts
to jam two of the service's satellite feeds into Iran.
He will say: "We regard the
coincidence of these different attacks as self-evidently suspicious."
I like their definition of personal
information. If you can show how it can be used to identify a user,
it's personal!
China’s
New Privacy Regulations Go Into Effect
March 15, 2012 by Dissent
Jun Wei and Roy Zou write:
March 15 marks the
effective date of new privacy regulations issued on December 29, 2011
by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the
People’s Republic of China entitled Several Provisions on
Regulation of the Order of Internet Information Service Market. The
new regulation defines the personal information protection
requirements applicable to Internet Information Service Providers
(“IISPs”).
Read about the new regulations on Hogan
Lovells Chronicle
of Data Protection.
[From the article:
Definition
of "User Personal Information": Under the new
regulation, "user personal information" is defined as the
information relevant to the users that can ascertain
the identity of the users independently or in combination with other
information.
Just one of the joys of ubiquitous
surveillance!
"Cameras at UK petrol stations
will automatically
stop uninsured or untaxed vehicles from being filled with fuel,
under new government plans. Downing Street officials hope the
hi-tech system will crack down on the 1.4 million motorists who drive
without insurance. Automatic number plate
recognition (ANPR) cameras are already fitted in thousands of petrol
station forecourts. Drivers can only fill their
cars with fuel once the camera has captured and logged the vehicle's
number plate. Currently the system is designed to deter motorists
from driving off without paying for petrol. But under the new plans,
the cameras will automatically cross-refererence with the DVLA's huge
database."
Would anyone be allowed to create a
truly secure device? No 'backdoors,' no manufacturer overrides, no
readily bypassed security? Let's get back to the old days, when law
enforcement had to beat your confession out of you...
"Those multi-gesture passcode
locks on Android phones that give users (and their spouses) fits
apparently present quite a challenge for the FBI as well. Frustrated
by a swipe passcode on the seized phone of an alleged gang leader,
FBI
officials have requested a search warrant that would force Google
to 'provide law enforcement with any and all means of gaining access,
including login and password information, password reset, and/or
manufacturer default code ("PUK"), in order to obtain the
complete contents of the memory of cellular telephone.' The request
is part of a case involving an alleged gang leader and human
trafficker named Dante Dears in California. Dears served several
years in prison for his role in founding a gang in California called
PhD, and upon his release he went back to his activities with the
gang, according to the FBI's affidavit."
[From the article:
"[I]t suggests that a warrant
might be enough to get Google to unlock a phone. Presumably, this is
not the first time that the FBI has requested Google unlock a phone,
so one would assume that the FBI would request the right kind of
order. [Big presume Bob] However, we do
not know if Google has complied with the request. Given
that an unlocked smartphone will continue to receive text messages
and new emails (transmitted after the device was first
seized), one could reasonably argue that the
government should have to obtain a wiretap order in order
to unlock the phone," Chris
Soghoian, a privacy advocate and security researcher, wrote in a
blog post on the case.
The FBI special agent who wrote the
affidavit also requested that Dears not be told about the information
request, however the search warrant and affidavit were not sealed.
[Suggesting that a “do not tell” order is merely
habit and not actually required? Bob]
Perspective Will this increase the
velocity of money or allow more careful management of income or have
no real impact?
March 14, 2012
Federal
Reserve survey provides information on mobile financial services
News
release: "One out of five American consumers used their
mobile phone to access their bank account, credit card, or other
financial account in the 12 months ending in January 2012 and an
additional one out of five indicated they would likely use mobile
banking at some point in the future, according to a Federal Reserve
Board survey, Consumers
and Mobile Financial Services, March 2012. The survey's findings
suggest that the use of mobile banking is poised to expand further
over the next year, with usage possibly increasing to one out of
three mobile phone users by 2013. However, the
survey indicates that many consumers remain skeptical of the benefit
of mobile banking and the level of security associated with the
technology. The use of mobile banking is highly
correlated with age, according to the survey results.
People between 18 and 29 account for approximately 44 percent of
mobile banking users, relative to 22 percent of all mobile phone
users. Conversely, people age 60 and over account for only 6 percent
of all mobile banking users, but 24 percent of mobile phone users.
The survey showed a significantly higher level of mobile banking
uptake among African Americans (16 percent) and Hispanics (17
percent), relative to 11 percent and 13 percent of mobile phone
users, respectively."
Perspective. If direct access to news
traditionally carried only by the large metropolitan dailies (not the
small local papers) goes behind the paywall, what opportunities does
that present? News in exchange for personal information? What
business models will arise?
March 14, 2012
Commentary
- The economics of more paywalls for newspapers around the world
Ken
Doctor: "By the end of this year, figure that about 20
percent of the U.S.’s 1,400-plus dailies will be charging for
digital access. Gannett’s February announcement
that it’s going paywall at all its 80 newspapers [except USA Today]
galvanized attention; when the third largest U.S. newspaper site, the
Los Angeles Times, went paid this week, more nodding was seen in
publishers’ suites."
(Related) I wonder how companies
reconcile these studies with their plans to charge for news...
Nielsen:
U.S. Consumers The Most Likely To Pay For Content On A Tablet…
Except When It’s News
… Taking just the use of paid
content on tablets in Q4 2011, Nielsen found that in the U.S., a
majority of tablet owners have already paid for downloaded music,
books and movies, with 62 percent, 58 percent and 51 percent
respectively saying they have already made such purchases. The one
area that really fell down in the U.S. was news, where only 19
percent said they had ever paid to read news on their tablets.
For my Statistics students. I find it
interesting that it took so long to do this! This has implications
for universal health care data. In theory, we can learn a lot about
disease and treatments by examining data from the entire population
rather than an occasional sample.
"An algorithm designed by U.S.
scientists to trawl through a plethora of drug interactions has
yielded thousands
of previously unknown side effects caused by taking drugs in
combination (abstract).
The work provides a way to sort through the hundreds of thousands of
'adverse events' reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
each year. The researchers developed an algorithm that would match
data from each drug-exposed patient to a nonexposed control patient
with the same condition. The approach automatically corrected for
several known sources of bias, including those linked to gender, age
and disease. The team then used this method to compile a database of
1,332 drugs and possible side effects that were not listed on the
labels for those drugs. The algorithm came up with an average of 329
previously unknown adverse events for each drug — far surpassing
the average of 69 side effects listed on most drug labels."
Also for my Statistics students. Would
our education system recognize a potential Mozart or an Einstein and
if so, what would they do with him or her? (Depressing, isn't it?)
Cultivating
Genius in the 21st Century
… Several years ago, statistician
David Banks wrote a short paper on what he called the problem of
excess genius: It turns out that human geniuses aren’t scattered
randomly across time and space. Instead, they tend to arrive in tight
clusters.
… Banks cites the example of Athens
between 440 and 380 BC. He writes that the ancient city was home to
an astonishing number of geniuses, including Plato,
Socrates,
Thucydides,
Herodotus,
Euripides,
Aeschylus, and
Aristophanes.
These thinkers essentially invented Western civilization, and yet
they all lived in the same place at the same time. Or look at
Florence, Italy, between 1440 and 1490. In a mere half century, a
city of fewer than 70,000 people gave rise to a staggering number of
immortal artists, like Michelangelo,
da Vinci,
Ghiberti,
Botticelli,
and Donatello.
Better handouts?
Calameo
is a great way to publish your documents in a manner that makes them
accessible across a wide variety of platforms including the iPad.
… Using Calameo
you can publish your documents in a flip-book or magazine style with
page-turning effects. You can add a background soundtrack to your
document. You can also specify the sounds that viewers hear when
they turn the pages in your documents. Your Calameo documents can be
published and shared using Calameo's HTML5 embed codes (makes your
document iPad compatible). Published documents can be annotated by
content publishers and viewers (that option can be disabled).
It's already free, this just makes it
more useful.
If you assign wiki editing due dates to
your students' wiki projects, Wikispaces
has just launched a new feature just for you. Events is a
Wikispaces feature that allows you to schedule due dates for
Wikispaces
Projects. When you schedule a Wikispaces Event you can specify a
lock time for your project. Once that lock time is reached no one is
able to make any further edits to that page.
Perhaps a better way to show students
how to use online resources?
Last fall I wrote
about SideVibe, a service designed to help you build lesson plans
around web content. At the time that I wrote my review, SideVibe
was offering a "premium" version for $5.99/ month that
allowed teachers and students to converse about the content in closed
feedback loops. Last week I received an email informing me that
SideVibe is no longer charging for that service.
Applications
for Education
SideVibe
could be a helpful tool when teaching students to evaluate the
validity of information found on websites. By using SideVibe you
could take a fake website like DHMO.org
and build an evaluation lesson around it.
No comments:
Post a Comment