What
stopped them? A sudden outbreak of logic? I doubt it was the
privacy complaints they received.
David Kravets reports:
Following
complaints from privacy groups, California lawmakers on Friday
suspended legislation to embed radio-frequency identification chips,
or RFIDs, in its driver’s licenses and state identification cards.
The
legislation, S.B.
397, was put on hold by the state Assembly Appropriations
Committee, despite it having been approved by the California Senate,
where it likely will be re-introduced in the coming months.
Read more on Threat
Level.
[From
the article:
Michigan, New York,
Vermont and Washington have already begun embedding drivers licenses
with the tiny transceivers, and linking them to a national database —
complete with head shots — controlled by the Department of Homeland
Security. The enhanced cards can be used to re-enter the U.S. at a
land border without a passport.
Is
this the first “NSA's search is unconstitutional” defense?
AP reports:
A
federal judge in a Chicago terrorism case has undone a key ruling
saying the government needn’t divulge whether its investigation
relied on expanded phone and Internet surveillance programs.
Adel
Daoud denies trying to ignite what he thought was a bomb in Chicago.
But if agents used the programs, he says they violated protections
against unreasonable searches.
Read more on Chicago
Sun-Times.
[From
the article:
Prosecutors argued they
won’t use evidence derived directly from
expanded surveillance at the 19-year-old’s trial, so aren’t
required to disclose if they relied on the programs.
Judge Sharon Johnson
Coleman sided with prosecutors last week. But this weekend, she took
the rare step of vacating her ruling when the defense complained it
was premature.
By doing so, she
reopens the matter to further debate.
(Related) At least,
grab the manuals...
Web
Resource Documents Latest Firestorm over NSA
“Recent press
disclosures about National Security Agency (NSA) electronic
surveillance activities — relying on documents provided by Edward
Snowden — have sparked one of the most significant controversies in
the history of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Today, the
nongovernmental National
Security Archive at The George Washington University
posts a compilation of over 125 documents — a Web resource — to
provide context and specifics about the episode. The Snowden leaks
have generated broad public debate over issues of security, privacy,
and legality inherent in the NSA’s surveillance of communications
by American citizens. Furthermore, news coverage has explored the
story on many levels, from the previously unknown scope of the NSA’s
programs, to public and congressional reactions, to Snowden’s
personal saga, including his attempts to evade U.S. authorities and
avoid extradition to the United States. Today’s posting covers the
full range of these topics, featuring documents from the White House,
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the
NSA itself, among other sources. The
records include:
- White House and ODNI efforts to explain, justify, and defend the programs
- Correspondence between outside critics and executive branch officials
- Fact sheets and white papers distributed (and sometimes later withdrawn) by the government
- Key laws and court decisions (both Supreme Court and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court)
- Documents on the Total Information Awareness (later Terrorist Information Awareness, or TIA) program, an earlier proposal for massive data collection
- Manuals on how to exploit the Internet for intelligence.”
Nothing
really new.
Kashmir Hill has a
disturbing follow-up to a report she did about how someone easily
hacked into a baby monitor and said lewd things
that the baby and homeowner could hear.
Shodan
crawls the Internet looking for devices, many of which are programmed
to answer. It has found cars, fetal heart monitors, office building
heating-control systems, water treatment facilities, power plant
controls, traffic lights and glucose meters. A search for the type
of baby monitor used by the Gilberts reveals that more than 40,000
other people are using the IP cam–and may be sitting ducks for
creepy hackers.
“Google
crawls for websites. I crawl for devices,” says John Matherly, the
tall, goateed 29-year-old who released Shodan in 2009. He named it
after the villainous sentient computer in the videogame System Shock.
“It’s a reference other hackers and nerds will understand.”
Read more on Forbes.
And yes, Shodan
actually has a privacy
policy. But only, it seems, for those using
their search engine. Not for those whose devices might be exposed as
sitting targets.
(Related)
No massive fine, but they promise to be good in the future.
This
translates into a request to stop making money on user information.
Vindu Goel reports:
A
coalition of six major consumer privacy groups has asked the Federal
Trade Commission to block coming changes to Facebook’s privacy
policies that they say would make it easier for the social network to
use personal data about its users, including children under 18, in
advertising on the site.
In
a
letter sent to the agency late Wednesday, the
coalition said Facebook’s changes, scheduled to go into effect
later this week, violate a 2011
order and settlement with the F.T.C. over user
privacy.
“Facebook
users who reasonably believed that their images and content would not
be used for commercial purposes without their consent will now find
their pictures showing up on the pages of their friends endorsing the
products of Facebook’s advertisers,” the letter says.
“Remarkably, their images could even be used by Facebook to endorse
products that the user does not like or even use.”
Read more on NY
Times.
(Related)
Dilbert explains why you need to be careful online...
Pew
says, Many believe Privacy is impossible?
Anonymity,
Privacy, and Security Online
A
new survey finds that most internet users would like to be anonymous
online, but many think it is not possible to be completely anonymous
online.
Read
Full Report
Once
again, Stanford Law follows the lead of the Privacy Foundation.
The Stanford Law Review
Online has just published a Symposium of articles entitled Privacy
and Big Data. Here are the contents:
- Privacy and Big Data by Jules Polonetsky & Omer Tene
- It’s Not Privacy, and It’s Not Fair by Cynthia Dwork & Deirdre K. Mulligan
- Three Paradoxes of Big Data by Neil M. Richards & Jonathan H. King
- Buying and Selling Privacy by Joseph W. Jerome
- Big Data and Its Exclusions by Jonas Lerman
- Prediction, Preemption, Presumption by Ian Kerr & Jessica Earle
- Relational Big Data by Karen E.C. Levy
- Big Data in Small Hands by Woodrow Hartzog & Evan Selinger
- Privacy Substitutes by Jonathan Mayer & Arvind Narayanan
- Consumer Subject Review Boards by Ryan Calo
- Public vs. Nonpublic Data by Yianni Lagos & Jules Polonetsky
via Concurring
Opinions
A scholarly Blog post.
Just like all of mine...
Ari Waldman is
guest-blogging on Concurring Opinions. By way of introduction, he
writes:
…
My research is on the law and sociology of privacy and the
Internet, but I am particularly concerned with the injustices and
inequalities that arise in unregulated digital spaces. This was the
animator of my previous work on bullying and cyberharassment of LGBT
youth. This month, I would like to speak more broadly about how
sociologists (I am completely my Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia U)
talk about privacy and, by the end of the month, persuasively argue
that we — lawyers, legal scholars, sociologists, psychologists,
economists, philosophers and other social scientists and theories —
are, for the most part, thinking about privacy too
narrowly, too one-dimensionally, too pre-Internet to
adequately protect private interests, whatever they may be.
Read more on Concurring
Opinions.
If I had gone for a
PhD, my dissertation would have addressed “change.” It's a topic
that truly fascinates me.
The
More Things Change, the More Our Objections to Change Stay the Same
One of the very first
articles in the very first issue of Fast Company, a magazine
I started 20 years ago with Alan Webber, is a smart and entertaining
list compiled by E.F. Borisch, product manager at a long-established
outfit called Milwaukee Gear Company. Borisch's article was titled,
"50
Reasons Why We Cannot Change," and it offered a
clever and entertaining collection of objections to and worries about
the hard work of making real progress. Reason #1: "We've never
done it before." Reason #4: "We tried it before."
Reason #13: "Our competitors are not doing it." Reason
#17: "Sales says it can't be done." Reason #18: "The
service department won't like it." Reason #45: "We're
doing all right as it is." Reason #50: "It's impossible."
Now here's the punch
line: E.F. Borisch compiled his list back in 1959, and
published it in an obscure journal called Product Engineering.
What we found so amazing about the list when we reprinted it in 1993
— and what remains just as amazing 20 years later — is that most
leaders in most organizations face precisely the same set of worries
and pushbacks today.
Eventually, for all of
my students. This is where we are headed. (and this is an OLD idea)
Should
Higher Education Be Free?
… How long can a
business model succeed that forces students to accumulate $200,000 or
more in debt and cannot guarantee jobs — even years after
graduation? We need transformational innovations to stop this train
wreck.
… According to
Rafael Reif, MIT's president, who spoke at the Davos
conference this past January, there are three major buckets that
make up the total annual expense (about $50,000) of attending a
top-notch university such as MIT: student life, classroom
instruction, and projects and lab activities.
There is a significant
opportunity to help reduce the lecture portion of expenses using
technology innovations.
According
to the American Institute of Physics (PDF), as of 2010, there are
about 9,400 physics teachers teaching undergraduates every September
in the United States. Are all of these great teachers? No. If
we had 10 of the very best teach physics online and employed the
other 9,390 as mentors, would most students get a better quality of
education? Wouldn't that lead to lower per unit cost per
class?
For my creative
students
– is the perfect
online video tool, that allows you to easily make animation videos
for your product demo, presentations, teaching lessons, or
just to have some fun. It has never been so intuitive to create an
online video. With Wideo anyone can make cool videos. Personalize
your Wideo by using your own images, logos, pictures and sounds.
Publish or unpublish your wideos to make them public or private.
(Related) In case that
got your creative juices flowing... (and it's free)
Start
Creating Games In No Time With Unity3D Free
… There are plenty
of free
game development tools out there and many of them are super easy
to use. However, for the longest time, game development tools
suffered from one huge problem: limitations. When you code a game
from scratch, you have absolute freedom to do whatever you want.
When you use a creation tool, you’re limited to what that tool can
do. That issue, however, is quickly becoming a moot point thanks to
Unity3D.
… But Unity3D is
more than just a codebase – it’s a full-featured environment
complete with hundreds of tools that aid in rapid game development.
… Lots of
Tutorials. Because Unity3D is so popular, there are plenty
of resources out there for helping you get started. The official
website has a few
basic guides. After that, you can explore user-created tutorial
series such as Unity
Cookie, UnityScript Basics, GamerToGameDeveloper,
and more.
For
the rest of my students... If this ever includes source code it
could be very useful.
–
Download abandonwares (games which have been abandoned by its
developer), from 1980 to 2002. Find the sensations of your elders,
Nostalgia, Discovery, Emotion, Curiosity, you’re a player or a
collector, all the old history of video games will be at your
fingertips. On My abandonware you can download all the old video
games from 1980 to 2002 for free.
Infographic
and translation guide.
All
The Text Message Acronyms You Ever Wanted To Know
Resources as well as
grants.
4
Resources For Finding STEM Grants For Your School
This
is cute.
NFL
2013-2014 season salaries by team and position – interactive
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