I could not believe it!
(and I was right)
Healthcare.gov
chief resigns amid Web site glitches
… Apparently,
Trenkle's resignation isn't directly a result of the bungled Web
site, but rather a management restructuring within the department,
according to information sent to CNET by CMS.
If the headline
involves the NSA tapping thousands of phones, we go nuts. Millions
of lost records? No big deal.
This morning, an
excited tweeter urged people to nominate Adobe’s breach to the
Guiness Book of World Records because it reportedly involved 150
million user names and hashed passwords.
I responded that there
was already a breach on the books involving 150 million – the
Shanghai Roadway D&B Marketing Services Co. Ltd breach, so at
150M, the Adobe breach wouldn’t be the biggest/first.
Then I noticed that
DataLossDB.org currently lists the Adobe breach as 130,000,000 and
not 150,000,000.
Twenty million here….
twenty million there. When we get into such
staggering numbers, are we losing our sense of the importance of
every individual’s data?
In the meantime, I’m
trying to determine if anyone’s analyzed the data dump to see how
many unique records were actually in there.
Dilbert illustrates one
of the reasons employees like BYOD
Privacy tools
FREE
EBOOK: DOWNLOAD Really Private Browsing, An Official User’s Guide
To Tor
… Tor is designed
to be, more or less, impenetrable to any attacker without a
completely implausible amount of computing power.
DOWNLOAD
Really Private Browsing: An Official User’s Guide To Tor
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No password required. Read online now, download PDF, EPUB or Kindle version for later.
“It's not creepy,
it's a valuable service.” Caller ID plus MugShots
Google
to display Google+ photos of your callers
… Google
engineering director Attila Bodis announced in a Google+ post late
Tuesday that the photo feature is part of the new Caller ID found in
the latest flavor of Android.
Once the feature launches in early 2014, Android
users will be able to see who's calling them, and vice versa.
Well intentioned, no
doubt. Any reason not to mention it?
Philip Janquart
reports:
Kaiser
intentionally performed HIV tests on thousands of health plan members
without their consent, alleges a class action complaint filed in
Clark County Superior Court.
Lead
plaintiff Mary E. Benton claims Kaiser instituted a new protocol in
April 2013 that required members between 50 and 65 to receive Human
Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) screening as part of their routine care.
Read more on Courthouse
News.
[From
the article:
R. Travis Jameson,
attorney for the plaintiff, told Courthouse News that discovery has
yet to be conducted and that he could only speculate on why Kaiser
implemented its policy, but that letters issued to his clients
indicate the policy was introduced in conjunction with the U.S.
Preventative Services Task Force (PSTF).
According to its
website, the PSTF is an independent panel of non-federal experts in
prevention and evidence-based medicine comprised of a collection of
physicians, nurses and health behavior specialists. The group, in
part, makes "recommendations that are relevant to implementing
the Affordable Care Act," or Obamacare.
"The task force's
claim is that through the [Centers for Disease Control], they want to
identify people who may be HIV positive, but are unaware.
The French Courts don't
really care how difficult(impossible) it is to implement their
ruling. Google is not French, therefore Google is 'le dog dodo.'
Since Google controls their search algorithm, it should be possible
to flag most searches for these images and return a “you
should read this” article containing the facts and the Court's
warning: “Don't mess with us or we'll lock you in the Bastille.
Not surprisingly if
you’ve been following Max
Mosley’s fight to remove embarrassing photos of a private sex
party from Google search results, he has gotten a French
court to order Google to filter results so those images don’t show
up in its results worldwide. Google says it will appeal the
ruling as requiring it to set up a “censorship machine.”
The pictures, taken
without Mosley’s knowledge or consent, were published in the
now-defunct News of the World in 2008. Mr. Mosley
subsequently won a defamation suit against the paper for their
story characterizing the party as Nazi-themed.
Read more in the New
York Times and on Reuters.
So if
on January 1, an army of bots uploads re-named pics to a gadzillion
sites that allow Google to index their pages, Google will be
responsible for paying 1,000 euros per image found in their results.
[Got that Google haters? Bob]
That doesn’t strike me as fair, even though Google already has its
own image-matching search engine and would presumably be able to run
the nine pictures in question against images it might index.
But do we want
France’s decisions to be worldwide and to
impact what we can see or read here? My first reaction would be
“Hell, NO!” but perhaps we should think about about what we might
want if
we were in Mr. Mosley’s shoes, as I suggested back in 2011.
If our dogs can be this
capable, why can Congress (collectively) reach the same level?
Research
– canine companion is capable of reaching toddler-level cognition
and language acquisition
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on November 6, 2013
TIME – article
by John W. Pilley: “When people ask me how smart my dog is, I
say that she has about the intelligence of a toddler. Chaser is a
9-year-old border collie who knows 1,000 words, but any dog is
potentially capable of reaching toddler-level cognition and
development, including learning the basic elements of language.
Thanks to her language learning, Chaser has been called “the most
scientifically important dog in over a century” by Duke University
animal-intelligence researcher Brian Hare. Language learning is an
interesting test of animal intelligence because it requires
unconsciously grasping a series of concepts in much the same way that
children do as they advance from wordless babbling to complete
sentences. For me, the most crucial common characteristic of dogs
and toddlers is that they both learn best through play. I made games
and other playful interactions with Chaser the basis of an ongoing
conversation, speaking to her throughout the day in simple words and
phrases just as I would to a toddler. Our language games revolved
around finding, chasing, fetching and herding her toys — behaviors
that released her instinctive drives as a border collie.
Instinct-based play gave the toys value in Chaser’s mind, and that
in turn gave value to the words — proper nouns and common nouns,
verbs and even prepositions, adverbs and adjectives — I spoke to
her in connection with the toys.”
Perspective
Blockbuster
throws in the towel
Blockbuster has
admitted defeat in the DVD-rental business.
Parent company Dish
announced Wednesday that it will shut
down all remaining company-owned Blockbuster stores
in the United States by early January 2014. The closure will affect
around 300 remaining retail outlets as well as the company's
distribution centers.
The Blockbuster By Mail
service will be cut off in mid-December. Only franchised and
licensed stores in the US and abroad will keep their doors open.
Perspective (and an
interesting chart.)
Android’s
adoption rate is unprecedented in tech history
… With 1 billion
activations in just five years, Android has been adopted by more
people at a faster rate than any other technology in recent history,
including iOS, Facebook or Symbian. Technology Review’s
chart follows below.
Proof that technology
ruins everything... (but it does explain ‘the scream’ by edvard
munch)
art
x smart adds 21st technology onto famous masterpieces
I know
several people who should be cartoons... (Android App)
– is the
first camera in the world interpreting pictures into cartoons.
Download MomentCam and let it surprise you. Every time you try, you
meet another self, with humor, charm or just a life in your dream.
Come to have fun with MomentCam, it will make your life different.
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