Friday, March 30, 2012


Possible this breach could set a new record? Stand by for news...
MasterCard, VISA Warn of Processor Breach
March 30, 2012 by admin
Brian Krebs reports:
VISA and MasterCard are alerting banks across the country about a recent major breach at a U.S.-based credit card processor. Sources in the financial sector are calling the breach “massive,” and say it may involve more than 10 million compromised card numbers. [If so, the record is safe Bob]
Read more on KrebsonSecurity. As always, Brian is all over this story and has gotten some leads from sources and interviews:
Sources at two different major financial institutions said the transactions that most of the cards they analyzed seem to have in common are that they were used in parking garages in and around the New York City area.
Ever since Heartland’s breach, numerous breach reports in the media have (erroneously) mentioned a payment processor. This time, it sounds like we really do have another processor breach. Brian reports that “PSCU — a provider of online financial services to credit unions — said it alerted 482 credit unions that appear to have had cards impacted by the breach.”
ELGA , a credit union in Michigan, was one of the credit unions that received notification, although it’s not clear whether they were notified by PSCU or by VISA or MasterCard; 450 of their members were reportedly affected.


The missing information will eventually come out. Why are they holding it back? It makes them look either ignorant or secretive – or both.
By Dissent, March 29, 2012
Steven Harmon reports:
In a puzzling breach of security, computer storage devices containing identification information of 800,000 Californians using the state’s child support services have gone missing.
The Department of Child Support Service reported on Thursday the data devices were lost March 12 en route to California from the Colorado facilities of IBM, one of the contractors in charge of the storage devices.
Read more on Mercury News.
1. What happened?
… The devices were in transit from IBM’s facility in Colorado to California. Upon arrival, several devices were missing.
2. When did it happen?
We were notified on March 12th that the storage devices were missing. It was confirmed on March 20th that the devices contained personal information.
Okay, but you didn’t answer your own question: WHEN did it happen? And while we’re at it, what transit system was being used to transport the devices? – Dissent


Win friends and influence people... NOT!
Shouldn’t they be hearing this from you instead of me?
March 29, 2012 by admin
As if we needed another reason to disclose breaches in a timely fashion:
Some nuclear workers are really upset that the Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs didn’t inform them of the Impairment Resources breach. It seems that they first learned about it from a recent post on this blog.
Yeah, that’s no way to find out your data were stolen months earlier.


Will Homeland Security be in charge of voting security? A TSA agent at every polling place?
DHS: Cybersecurity plays into online voting
As the 2012 presidential election revs up, 33 states now permit some form of Internet ballot casting. However, a senior cybersecurity adviser at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned today that online voting programs make the country's election process vulnerable to cyberattacks. [Actually, no. It's crappy security that makes it vulnerable. Bob]
… "Because we vote by secret ballot there is no way to confirm that a digital ballot cast over the Internet is received as it was sent, making detection difficult if not impossible." [Horsefeathers! Bob]

...but how do you get your name off the “Harass this uppity second class citizen” list?
Judge: Bradley Manning supporter can sue government over border search
David Maurice House, an MIT researcher, was granted the right to pursue a case against the government on Wednesday after a federal judge denied the government’s motion to dismiss.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit in May 2011 on House’s behalf, charging that he had been targeted solely for his lawful association with the Bradley Manning Support Network.
… “Despite the government’s broad assertions that it can take and search any laptop, diary or smartphone without any reasonable suspicion, the court said the government cannot use that power to target political speech.”
US customs agents met and briefly detained House as he deplaned at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in November 2010. The agents searched House’s bags, then took him to a detention room and questioned him for 90 minutes about his relationship to Manning (the former Army intelligence analyst currently facing a court martial for leaking classified documents to the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks). [Why would TSA even know about this? Is there that much background on every traveler? Bob] The agents confiscated a laptop computer, a thumb drive, and a digital camera from House and reportedly demanded, but did not receive, his encryption keys.
DHS held onto House’s equipment for 49 days and returned it only after the ACLU sent a strongly worded letter.


Perhaps this is how you get on some of those government lists?
The Perils of Social Reading
March 30, 2012 by Dissent
Back in January, Neil Richards had commented on attempts to amend the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), suggesting that allowing “seamless” sharing could be cutting back on important privacy protections that we should not weaken. Neil’s argument didn’t convince me that we shouldn’t allow those who want to share, to share, and I posed some questions to him.
I am pleased to point readers to Neil’s fuller article on this topic, which will be published in the Georgetown Law Journal, “The Perils of Social Reading.” Here’s the abstract:
Our law currently treats records of our reading habits under two contradictory rules – rules mandating confidentiality, and rules permitting disclosure. Recently, the rise of the social Internet has created more of these records and more pressures on when and how they should be shared. Companies like Facebook, in collaboration with many newspapers, have ushered in the era of “social reading,” in which what we read may be “frictionlessly shared” with our friends and acquaintances. Disclosure and sharing are on the rise.
This Article sounds a cautionary note about social reading and frictionless sharing. Social reading can be good, but the ways in which we set up the defaults for sharing matter a great deal. Our reader records implicate our intellectual privacy – the protection of reading from surveillance and interference so that we can read freely, widely, and without inhibition. I argue that the choices we make about how to share have real consequences, and that “frictionless sharing” is not frictionless, nor it is really sharing. Although sharing is important, the sharing of our reading habits is special. Such sharing should be conscious and only occur after meaningful notice.
The stakes in this debate are immense. We are quite literally rewiring the public and private spheres for a new century. Choices we make now about the boundaries between our individual and social selves, between consumers and companies, between citizens and the state, will have unforeseeable ramifications for the societies our children and grandchildren inherit. We should make choices that preserve our intellectual privacy, not destroy it. This Article suggests practical ways to do just that.
You can download the full article from SSRN.


I try to avoid using words like “Philosophy” in my classes, it tends to frighten the students...
The Philosopher Whose Fingerprints Are All Over the FTC's New Approach to Privacy
… The standard explanation for privacy freakouts is that people get upset because they've "lost control" of data about themselves or there is simply too much data available. Nissenbaum argues that the real problem "is the inappropriateness of the flow of information due to the mediation of technology." In her scheme, there are senders and receivers of messages, who communicate different types of information with very specific expectations of how it will be used. Privacy violations occur not when too much data accumulates or people can't direct it, but when one of the receivers or transmission principles change. The key academic term is "context-relative informational norms." Bust a norm and people get upset.


The Google Feature-du-jour. Also see the “Play” link on the Google Home page.
Google Would Like Your Thoughts on This Gluten-Free Brownie Mix
Google has rolled out a new feature: Consumer Surveys, a scheme that takes a series of marketer-to-consumer surveys and puts them to work on the sites of media publications. The new feature is the official version of the "surveywall" that Nieman Lab's Justin Ellis reported on when he came across an experimental version of it back in October. It's "basically a substitute for a paywall," Consumer Surveys product manager Paul McDonald says.
… Google pays publishers for hosting the surveys (the equivalent of a $15 CPM); marketers, in turn, pay Google for the demographic-targetable data the publisher-hosted surveys provide; and users, in turn -- provided they don't find the pop-up microsurveys too annoying to complete -- get an alternate way of accessing publisher content that they might otherwise be made to pay for.


I capture lots of videos for my classes. I'm always looking at new tools...
Web Video Fetcher is an online tool that allows users to convert any audio or video URL from YouTube, Myspace, Google, Facebook or any other site into much more common formats such as Mp3, Mp4, FLV in a few simple clicks.
The very first thing you should do is find the video/audio which you want to convert and save in your computer. Once you find it, just copy the link and paste it into the text-box provided and click the “Search” icon. The website will automatically figure out the format of the audio/video and provide you with the options to download the video/audio in the common file formats.
List of suported websites: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://webvideofetcher.com/docs/webvideofetcher_com_supportedsites.pdf

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