A very small (relatively) breach that
normally wouldn't get posted except for the time between the breach
and someone noticing the breach. (If the breach predates disclosure
laws, do they still have to report it?)
Vol
State: Personal information found vulnerable for 14,000 students,
faculty
April 30, 2012 by admin
About 14,000
students, former students and faculty at Volunteer State Community
College in Gallatin had personal information placed on a web server
that was not secure.
The files placed
on the web included names and Social Security numbers, but university
officials say there is no evidence that any of that
information has been accessed [“We don't keep logs...” Bob]
or used inappropriately. No credit card or financial information was
included in the files.
Bruce Scism,
interim president, said the university is notifying the affected
students and faculty members as a precaution.
Read more on The
Tennessean.
The college’s press release notes
that the files had
been accessible since 2008 and that “it’s
possible that this data could have been accessed by unauthorized
individuals on the web.”
Related: VSCC
Press Release
Are we still allowing this? What
happened to Best Practice contracts that required vendors to remove
any such “security holes?”
Equipment
Maker Caught Installing Backdoor Vows to Fix Following Public
Pressure
After ignoring a serious security
vulnerability in its product for at least a year, a Canadian company
that makes equipment and software for critical industrial control
systems announced quietly on Friday that it would eliminate a
backdoor login account in its flagship operating system, following
public disclosure and pressure.
RuggedCom, which was purchased recently
by German-conglomerate Siemens, said in the next few weeks it would
be releasing new versions of its RuggedCom firmware in order to
remove the backdoor account in critical components used in power
grids, railway and traffic control systems, as well as military
systems.
Interesting article, but until everyone
can carry the electronic equivalent of a Colt .45, I don't think it's
wise.
'Stand
Your Cyberground' Law: A Novel Proposal for Digital Security
Management: “Were too backlogged to
worry about Security! You can ignore an applicant's Taliban past
because we need him to secure our airports!”
TSA
delays background checks for new hires
In a move that could affect security at
airports around the nation, the Transportation Security
Administration confirmed Wednesday it had such a backlog of
background security checks, airport employers were allowed to hire
any employee needed.
TSA officials said the background
checks are delayed, but they are processing them as fast as they
can.
TSA also will complete background
checks on accepted applicants at a later date.
It's hard to remain anonymous...
“Engineer
Doe” of Google StreetView payload data privacy breach unmasked
May 1, 2012 by Dissent
Steve Lohr and David Streitfeld of the
New York Times put
a name to “Engineer Doe” in the FCC investigation of the
Google Street View investigation. “Doe” was the engineer who we
now know wrote code to intentionally scoop up payload data
from unsecured Wi-Fi networks. According to the less-redacted
version of the FCC’s report (voluntarily released by Google
after EPIC filed under FOI to obtain it), Doe did inform others of
what he was doing, but Google claims that management did not read his
communications.
A state investigator who spoke with the
NYT identified the engineer as Marius Milner. Google had reportedly
given his name to state investigators in December 2010.
The release of the report has raised
new questions about Google’s public claims that this was all
“accidental.” It has also raised questions as to why the FCC did
not disclose to the public that they had found evidence of
intentional data collection. In an OpEd yesterday, Chris Soghoian
called
on Congress to investigate the FCC for its failure to really
inform the public of its findings.
Resources...
Resource:
Librarians for Privacy
May 1, 2012 by Dissent
Jay Stanley of the ACLU writes:
The American
Library Association has created an excellent public education
resource on the privacy issues facing our society – a web site
called privacyrevolution.org.
The best way to share knowledge? Does
this work the same in the US?
April 30, 2012
Briefing
Paper on Embedding Creative Commons Licences into Digital Resources
Briefing
Paper on Embedding Creative Commons Licences into Digital Resources
- Naomi Korn, Strategic Content Alliance IPR Consultant, March 2011
- "Creative Commons licences (also referred to as CC licences) can facilitate the copying, reuse, distribution, and in some cases, the modification of the original owner’s creative work without needing to get permission each time from the rights holder. There are a number of different types of these licences. Across the UK’s public sector, CC licences are increasingly used to provide access to cultural heritage and teaching, learning and research outputs. Creative Commons licensed resources are also helpful for public sector bodies who wish to use third party resources which place the least restrictive licensing terms on the user. This short briefing paper accompanies further information on CC licences produced by the Strategic Content Alliance, available here demonstrates how the terms of CC licences can be embedded into a variety of resources, such as PowerPoint, images, Word docs, elearning resources, podcasts and other audio visual resources." {via Robin Good]
This could be amusing. How much value
would a phone bring to Amazon? Would Skype cut the cost of their 800
number? (They do have one.)
Is
a Smartphone in Amazon’s Hardware Future?
Amazon is killing it. Its tablet
is selling like Android-powered hotcakes and recent financial
filings show that its bank
account just keeps on growing. The retailer-turned-hardware
vendor is on a roll, which begs the question: What will Amazon’s
hardware division do next?
For answers, we might look to Facebook,
which along with Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft, has the
potential to own an entire “stack” — in other words, a
walled-off ecosystem in which consumers use a single company’s
hardware, operating system and storefront to search online, buy apps
and purchase digital media and even physical products.
Last week, yet another rumor surfaced
that Facebook is getting closer to releasing its own
branded smartphone, an obvious attempt at owning a stack
component (hardware) that’s currently missing from its line-up. So
is it any more outlandish to think that Amazon, too, would enter the
smartphone game? After all, it’s already selling the world’s most
successful Android tablet in the Kindle Fire.
“A smartphone would be a logical next
step for Amazon,” ABI
Research Analyst Aapo Markkanen told Wired via email.
… The Kindle Fire does a fine job
of goosing digital download sales, but it’s not the device
consumers carry all the time. ... So imagine, instead, a truly
mobile hardware device that would provide dead-simple hooks into the
Amazon buying experience, 24-7.
Kulture!
… I need to introduce you to AIBQ,
otherwise known as the Comic
Books Archive.
You’re going to want to head straight
to the Catalog
page and you’ll quickly see just how vast the collection is,
currently with over 900 comics available for
download.
… Clicking on an issue that is
available will bring up a prompt to download a CBR file. Save that
file to wherever you’d like. Now, we need a quality comic reader.
That’s where ComicRack
comes in.
… Oh and don’t forget to check
out our free comics manual, Bam!
Your Guide To Cool Online Comic Books by Lachlan Roy, which
also features other comic sources and comic software.
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