What do you suppose prompted this?
Utah
health officials take Data Breach Security Tour on the road
July 20, 2012 by admin
In the wake of its massive data breach,
Utah health officials are doing something I don’t recall ever
seeing before – they’re taking breach support on the road to
reach out to those affected. Kirsten Stewart reports:
Health officials
are touring the state, looking to provide one-on-one help to the
nearly 800,000 Utahns swept up in a state data breach.
The Data
Breach Security Tour, a series of workshops, kicks off July
26 at the Salt Lake County Government Center in Salt Lake City. The
statewide tour will conclude Aug. 22 in St. George.
Read more on The
Salt Lake Tribune where you can also find out when the tour will
be in your area.
Well, it's a start...
U.S.
Admits Surveillance Violated Constitution At Least Once
The head of the U.S. government’s
vast spying apparatus has conceded that recent surveillance efforts
on at least one occasion violated the Constitutional prohibitions on
unlawful search and seizure.
The admission comes in a letter from
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassifying
statements that a top U.S. Senator wished to make public in order to
call attention to the government’s 2008 expansion of its key
surveillance law.
“On at least one occasion,” the
intelligence shop has approved Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to say, the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found that “minimization
procedures” used by the government while it was collecting
intelligence were “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”
Minimization refers to how long the government may retain the
surveillance data it collects. The Fourth Amendment to the
Constitution is supposed to guarantee our rights against unreasonable
searches.
Wyden does not specify how extensive
this “unreasonable” surveillance was; when it occurred; or how
many Americans were affected by it.
In the letter, acquired
by Danger Room (.pdf), Wyden asserts a serious federal sidestep
of a major section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
It's bad enough when politicians claim
to have 'known all along it wouldn't work' but when people who work
in the field have been raising red flags for months (years) with no
action from the politicians or bureaucrats you know the story is
going to keep getting bigger... This isn't a model for the US Health
System, is it?
B.C.
software woes worse than predicted: privacy group
July 21, 2012 by Dissent
Rob Shaw reports:
A privacy watchdog
group that has been sounding alarm bells for years about the B.C.
government’s new computer system says revelations of its serious
failures are far worse than predicted.
Numerous privacy
breaches in the new $182-million Integrated Case Management System,
revealed Thursday, are “far beyond” the worst-case scenario
predicted by the Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, said
executive director Vincent Gogolek.
“There seems to
be so much wrong with the system,” Gogolek said. “We didn’t
see this coming at all.”
Read more on the Times
Colonist.
[From the article:
B.C.'s child watchdog Mary Ellen
Turpel-Lafond said Thursday she was overwhelmed with complaints of
technical problems in the "deeply flawed" computer software
that has led to "several instances" of privacy breaches.
That computer system went live April 1,
linking information on thousands of social assistance and child
welfare clients, including sensitive details on child abuse, foster
care and welfare payments.
Why Congress doesn't Tweet?
"Researchers presenting at
Defcon next week have developed a psychopathy
prediction model for Twitter. It analyzes linguistic tells to
rate users' levels of narcissism, machiavellianism and other
similarities to Patrick Bateman. 'The FBI could use this to flag
potential wrongdoers, but I think it's much more compelling for
psychologists to use to understand large communities of people,' says
Chris Sumner of the Online Privacy Foundation. Some of the Twitter
clues: Curse words. Angry responses to other people, including
swearing and use of the word "hate." Using the word "we."
Using periods. Using filler words such as 'blah' and 'I mean' and
'um.' So, um, yeah."
Yet another tool for the “Swiss Army
Folder”
Snappy is yet another program in the
world of applications that allows users to take screenshots of their
desktop, but unlike thousands of other software that allow such a
thing, Snappy allows users to edit the image and make adjustments
such as editing the brightness, contrast, RGB settings and more.
For my Ethical Hackers: Add this to
your Hacking Tools Guide
Darpa
Funds Hack Machine You’d Never Notice
It may look like a surge protector, but
it’s really a remote access machine that corporations can use to
test security and log into branch offices. Called the Power
Pwn, it’s a stealthier version of the little box that can hack
your network we
wrote about last March.
Hidden inside are Bluetooth and Wi-Fi
adapters, along with a number of hacking and remote access tools that
let security experts prod and poke the network, and even call home to
be remotely controlled via the cellular network.
Is this the right question? Why not
ask, “What would be better than Khan Academy?”
"Even as
name-brand universities like MIT and Harvard rush to put more courses
on the Web, they're vying with an explosion of new online learning
resources like Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, Dabble, Skillshare, and, of
course, Khan Academy. With 3,200 videos on YouTube and 4 million
unique visitors a month, Sal
Khan's increasingly entertaining creation is the competitor that
traditional universities need to beat if they want to have a role
in inspiring the next generation of leaders and thinkers. Lately
Khan's organization has been snapping up some of YouTube's most
creative educational-video producers, including 'Doodling in Math
Class' creator Vi Hart and Smarthistory founders Beth Harris and
Steven Zucker. Universities are investing millions in software for
'massive online open courses' or MOOCs, but unless
they can figure out how to make their material fun as well as
instructive, Khan may have an insurmountable lead."
[Sort of the “Animal House” view of college? “I had Seven
years of fun...” Bob]
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a
related article about the above-mentioned Coursera, and how
they plan to make money off of free courses. A contract the
company signed with the University of Michigan suggests they
aren't quite sure yet.
(Related) The videos and tutorials are
out there, it's a matter of finding and organizing them.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Last night I stumbled upon this
video of David
Breashears presenting at the Cambridge Science Festival. The
video is hosted by MIT
Video which I either had never seen before or had completely
forgotten about (a real possibility after 6500+ blog posts).
MIT
Video is a giant collection of more than 10,000 educational
videos organized into more than 150 channels. The largest channel is
the Open
Courseware channel that contains more than 2,300 lectures from
MIT's open courses.
All of the videos are either MIT
productions or videos approved by editors at MIT Video. Only people
with MIT email addresses are allowed to contribute to the collection.
Some videos are hosted by MIT Video while others are from YouTube.
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