An interesting
“Worst Practice”
Curb
your enthusiasm!
November 24, 2012 by admin
Maybe one of the mantras of data
protection should be “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” In 2009, Yankees
fans enthusiastically threw
papers out of the window during the team’s World Series
celebratory parade through the Canyon of Heroes. The unshredded
papers included files from A.L. Sarroff, Goldman Sachs, and the Bronx
Supreme Court, as well as medical test reports, some with identifying
information and Social Security numbers.
Now WPIX11
reports that some of the confetti thrown by people in the Macy’s
Thanksgiving Day Parade had not been sufficiently
shredded so as to prevent reconstruction and
identification:
That information
included social security numbers and banking information for police
employees, some of whom are undercover officers.
[...]
“There are phone
numbers, addresses, more social security numbers, license plate
numbers and then we find all these incident reports from police.”
One confetti strip
indicates that it’s from an arrest record, and other strips offer
more detail.
A closer look
shows that the documents are from the Nassau County Police
Department.
[...]
Most significant,
the confetti strips identified Nassau County detectives by name.
Some of them are apparently undercover. Their social security
numbers, dates of birth and other highly sensitive personal
information was also printed on the confetti strips
Read more on WPIX11
or watch their news video:
An indication
that you have no counter-arguement? (It's not that they're right,
it's that you're either a bigot or completely inarticulate.)
"The past week's violence in
Gaza has rekindled
calls for Twitter to shutter the accounts of U.S.-labeled terror
groups such as Hamas. Seven House Republicans asked the FBI in
September to demand
that Twitter take down the accounts of U.S.-designated terrorist
groups, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Somalia's al Shabaab. The
letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller was spearheaded by Rep. Ted Poe
(R-Texas), who said Wednesday that the recent events vindicated
the request.
[“Now we can justify things that were previously unjustifyable?”
Bob] 'Allowing foreign terrorist organizations
like Hamas to operate on Twitter is enabling the enemy,' [Poe said]
'Failure to block access arms them with the ability to freely
spread their violent propaganda and mobilize in their War on
Israel.'"
Much more money
than I thought.
November 25, 2012
The
State of Human Trafficking in California 2012
- "Human trafficking is an estimated $32 billion-a-year global industry. After drug trafficking, human trafficking is the world’s second most profitable criminal enterprise, a status it shares with illegal arms trafficking. Like drug and arms trafficking, the United States is one of the top destination countries for trafficking in persons. California – a populous border state with
a significant immigrant population and the world’s ninth largest economy – is one of the nation’s top four destination states for trafficking human beings...72% of human trafficking victims whose country of origin was identified by California’s task forces are American. The public perception is that human trafficking victims are from other countries, but data from California’s task forces indicate that the vast majority are Americans."
(Related)
Flourishing
Sex Sites a Boon to Police
… The online sex trade is
flourishing despite nationwide campaigns and pressure from government
leaders. Two years after public and legal pressure prompted
Craigslist.org, the San Francisco-based online classifieds service,
to scrap its “erotic services” section, visitors and revenue have
soared on other classified websites, according to the Advanced
Interactive Media Group, a consulting firm for the classified
advertising market.
… Challenging the sites legally has
proven difficult. Legal experts said the websites are protected by
the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which states that website
owners are exempt from responsibility for the content of their users.
Who pays those
fees? A large percentage is probably the media. Where does the
money go? Clearly not into training journalists to answer my
questions.
November 24, 2012
Pacer
federal court record fees exceed system costs
Shane
Shifflett and Jennifer Gollan: "The federal government has
collected millions from the online Public Access to Court Electronic
Records system, or PACER –
nearly five times what it cost to run the system. Between fiscal
years 2006 and 2010, the government collected an average of $77
million a year from PACER fees, according to the most recent federal
figures available."
Sounds increasingly like they did not
make or sell illegal copies but provided a service infringers used.
Could this happen to Google or Amazon?
Dotcom:
We've hit the jackpot
A fresh legal bid to throw out the case
against Kim Dotcom in the United States is being made after claims of
an FBI double-cross.
Evidence has emerged showing the
Department of Homeland Security served a search warrant on Mr
Dotcom's file-sharing company Megaupload in 2010 which he claims
forced it to preserve pirated movies found in an unrelated piracy
investigation.
The 39 files were identified during an
investigation into the NinjaVideo website, which had used
Megaupload's cloud storage to store pirated movies.
When the FBI applied to seize the
Megaupload site in 2012, it said the company had failed to delete
pirated content and cited the earlier search warrant against the
continued existence of 36 of the same 39 files.
… The FBI application to seize the
sites said the "Mega Conspiracy" members were told by
"criminal search warrant" in June 2010 "that 39
infringing copies of copyrighted motion pictures were present on
their leased servers". The application was approved to allow
the seizure of the domain names.
However, the application to seize the
domain names, made on January 13, 2012, did not state the earlier
search warrant was not issued against Megaupload.
… The 39 files were not only used
by NinjaVideo, according to the FBI affidavit. The Megaupload system
identified files which were already on the system and kept only one
copy of each. Unique weblinks were produced for each user providing
multiple paths to the same file. The FBI indictment cited an email
by Mr Dotcom's co-accused Mathias Ortman in which he said more than
2000 users had uploaded the 39 files. [I would ask,
How many of those 2,000 were just making backups of videos they had
purchased? What percentage of copyright-thief users would make the
entire group criminals? Bob]
Ah ha! That's
why they don't ask questions. I've been teaching robots!
"Advances in an artificial
intelligence technology that can recognize patterns offer the
possibility of machines that perform human activities like seeing,
listening and thinking. ... But what is new in recent months is the
growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called
artificial neural networks or just 'neural nets' for their
resemblance to the neural connections in the brain. 'There has been
a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,' said
Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did
pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories.
'The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is
very rare indeed.' Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely
aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. ... But recent
achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts.
In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with
the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won
the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to
help find molecules that might lead to new drugs. From a data set
describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they
used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most
likely to be an effective drug agent."
I require my Math students to search
for alternative tutorials, calculators and definitions. This might
help them.
Saturday, November 24, 2012
10
Google Search Tips All Students Can Use
I'm often asked for recommendations on
how to help students use Google more effectively. This morning I sat
down and thought about the recommendations that I make most
frequently when I am asked. I wrote up my list and put it into PDF
form for you to download and print if you like.
No comments:
Post a Comment