It's easy to intimidate
the guilty and when it comes to taxes, we all think we're guilty.
IRS
monitor: $1 million phone scam 'largest ever'
… The impostor
claims to be an Internal Revenue Service representative and tells
"intended victims they owe taxes and must pay using a pre-paid
debit card or wire transfer," an IRS inspector general office
said.
"The scammers
threaten those who refuse to pay with arrest, deportation or loss of
a business or driver's license."
The IRS
has received more than 20,000 reports about the scam.
...Tax-related phone
scams are among the "dirty
dozen" fraud techniques the IRS warned about earlier this
tax season. It also warned of phishing emails, preparer fraud and
claims a preparer can offer "free money."
It had to be convincing
enough that the judge agreed, didn't it?
Perhaps one of the
stupidest things a prosecutor trying to defend criminal prosecution
under CFAA can say is to admit that they have no understanding of
what the alleged “hacker” did that made his conduct a hack or
violation of CFAA.
But that’s pretty
much what happened in a Philadelphia courtroom yesterday during
Weev’s appeal of his conviction. Mike Masnick of TechDirt
has some good coverage of it:
We’ve
been covering the ridiculous DOJ case [No
bias here! Bob] against Andrew
“weev” Auernheimer for quite some time. If you don’t
recall, Auernheimer and a partner found a really blatant security
hole on AT&T’s servers that allowed them to very easily find
out the email addresses of iPad owners. There was no breaking in to
anything. The issue was that AT&T left this all exposed. But,
with a very dangerous reading of the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act) and a bunch of folks who don’t understand basic technology,
weev was sentenced
to 3.5 years in jail (and has been kept in solitary confinement
for much of his stay so far). Part of the case is
complicated by the fact that weev is kind of a world class jerk
— who took great thrill in being an extreme online troll, getting a
thrill out of making others miserable. But, that point should have
no standing in whether or not exposing a security hole by basically
entering a URL that AT&T failed to secure, becomes a criminal
activity.
Throughout
the case, it’s been clear that the DOJ was trying to make
up an interpretation of the law that had no basis in the actual
technology world. And it became abundantly clear at a hearing before
the appeals court concerning weev’s case, that the DOJ really has
no idea what weev did. They’re just sure it’s bad because
it involves computers and stuff. Seriously, as reported by Vice:
“He
had to decrypt and decode, and do all of these things I don’t even
understand,” Assistant US Attorney Glenn Moramarco argued.
Read more on TechDirt.
MSFT owns the
computers, they provide the Hotmail service, they suspect a breach –
is there a limit to what they can investigate?
I reported the criminal
complaint about ex-Microsoft employee Alex Kibkalo over on
DataBreaches.net,
but one aspect of the case has raised privacy concerns – that
Microsoft searched the contents of his Hotmail account for evidence
that he was providing trade secrets to a blogger who had been leaking
information about Windows. There was no indication that they had
obtained a subpoena to do so, either. Peter Bright reports:
The
blogger contacted the third party using a Hotmail account. After
confirming that the source leak was, indeed, authentic, Microsoft’s
Trustworthy Computer Investigations (TWCI) team investigated the
Hotmail account in an attempt to identify the blogger and his source.
In doing so, they discovered e-mails from Kibkalo. Further digging
revealed that Kibkalo created a virtual machine on Microsoft’s
corporate network which he used to upload stolen information to
SkyDrive.
[...]
The
Microsoft investigation raises a potentially alarming privacy issue.
The complaint says that TWCI asked Microsoft’s Office of Legal
Compliance prior to reviewing the contents of the Hotmail inbox and
that OLC authorized the request. The terms
of service that cover the company’s online services do indicate
that Microsoft reserves the right to access communications to protect
the company’s rights and property and to turn over content to
comply with valid legal requests.
Read more on Ars
Technica, where they obtained a statement from Microsoft
explaining what happened and why. I doubt all privacy advocates will
find their explanation satisfactory.
(Related) Fortunately,
the Justice Dept isn't bothered by such things...
A
federal judge has admonished the Justice Department for repeatedly
requesting overly broad searches of people’s email accounts, a
practice that he called “repugnant” to the Constitution.
The
unusually sharp rebuke by Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola came last
week in a kickback investigation involving a defense contractor. The
case highlights the broad authority the government believes it has in
searching email accounts, a power that gives the Justice
Department potential access to a trove of personal information about
anyone it investigates, even in routine criminal cases.
“The
government continues to submit overly broad warrants and makes no
effort to balance the law enforcement interest against the obvious
expectation of privacy email account holders have in their
communications,” Judge Facciola wrote. employee is suing the
pharmacy chain over its controversial health-screening program.
Read more on New
York Times.
Can we look forward to
similar “concern” for those with government health insurance?
“It's for your own good!”
Hunter Stuart reports:
A
CVS employee is suing the pharmacy chain over its controversial
health-screening program.
CVS
cashier Roberta Watterson claims
the company made her disclose personal information, including her
weight and level of sexual activity, threatening to charge her $600 a
year if she refused.
CVS’
so-called “wellness review,” first
reported last year, is a fairly extreme example of a trend of
companies looking to cut health-care costs by pushing employees into
wellness programs.
Critics
claim such programs let employers meddle in workers’ lives,
unfairly penalize those who have difficulty meeting certain health
targets and may put employee privacy at risk.
Read more on Huffington
Post.
Well, this is what
happens when you threaten to comment on the Emperor's New Clothes in
the digital age.
Turkey
bans Twitter — and Twitter explodes
… “We now have a
court order,” declared Erdogan, who’s ensnared
in a scandal inflamed by social media over recordings that
purportedly reveal corruption in his administration. “We’ll
eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community
says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish
Republic.”
There’s no arguing:
it has been witnessed.
After Turkey’s
Twitter was apparently disabled, the hashtag
#TwitterisblockedinTurkey went supernova, though Twitter
is still
accessible via the site’s SMS service, which allows Turks to
text in a tweet.
(Related)
Pew
– Emerging and Developing Nations Want Freedom on the Internet
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on March 20, 2014
“There is widespread
opposition to internet censorship in emerging and developing nations.
Majorities in 22 of 24 countries surveyed say it is important that
people have access to the internet without government censorship. In
12 nations, at least seven-in-ten hold this view. Support
for internet freedom is especially strong in countries where a large
percentage of the population is online. And, in most of
the countries polled, young people are particularly likely to
consider internet freedom a priority. These are among the main
findings of a Pew
Research Center survey conducted among 21,847 people in 24
emerging and developing economies from March 3, 2013 to May 1, 2013.
All interviews were conducted face-to-face.”
Gee, a monopoly acting
like a monopoly. What a surprise! Haven't I been ranting against
“natural monopolies” in cable and Internet? (Yes, you have Bob)
Netflix
blasts Internet providers: 'Consumers deserve better'
… "Some big
ISPs are extracting a toll because they can -- they effectively
control access to millions of consumers and are willing to sacrifice
the interests of their own customers to press Netflix and others to
pay," Hastings wrote.
… The issue flared
up earlier this year following news that Netflix streaming speeds for
customers of ISPs including Verizon and Comcast were slowing, as
these firms attempted to extract a fee from Netflix in exchange for
connecting directly to their networks and resolving the issue.
Netflix announced an
agreement with Comcast last month in which it will indeed pay for a
connection, and has been in talks with Verizon as well. But Hastings
said the company was engaging in these talks "reluctantly."
"If this kind of
leverage is effective against Netflix, which is pretty large, imagine
the plight of smaller services today and in the future,"
Hastings wrote.
More properly, an
obfuscation report.
According to Kevin
Bankston, Comcast has become the first cable ISP to issue a
transparency report. You can read it here
(pdf). It’s obvious that the section on NSL is still pretty
useless when you contrast it to the specificity of their report on
criminal and emergency requests, but that’s the fault of the
government for not allowing companies to be more specific.
Just a brief follow-up
on New Jersey's over-protectionist laws. Something for all
industries to think about.
For all my students.
Please. (I'll highlight a couple tricks)
Real
Excel power users know these 11 tricks
There are two kinds of
Microsoft
Excel users in the world: Those who make neat little tables, and
those who amaze their colleagues with sophisticated charts, data
analysis, and seemingly magical formula and macro tricks.
"If"
formulas
IF and IFERROR are the
two most useful IF formulas in Excel. The IF formula lets you use
conditional formulas that calculate one way when a certain thing is
true, and another way when false. For example, you can identify
students who scored 80 points or higher by having the cell report
“Pass” if the score in column C is above 80, and “Fail” if
it’s 79 or below.
Flash
Fill
Easily the best
new feature in Excel 2013, Flash Fill solves one of the most
frustrating problems of Excel: pulling needed pieces of
information from a concatenated cell. When you’re working in a
column with names in “Last, First” format, for example, you
historically had to either type everything out manually or create an
often-complicated workaround.
In Excel 2013, you can
now just type the first name of the first person in a field
immediately next to the one you’re working on, click on Home >
Fill > Flash Fill, and Excel will automagically extract the
first name from the remaining people in your table. [Now
there is no excuse for sorting students by first name! Bob]
Quick
analysis
Excel 2013’s new
Quick Analysis tool minimizes the time needed to create charts based
on simple data sets. Once you have your data selected, an icon
appears in the bottom right hand corner that, when clicked, brings up
the Quick Analysis menu.
This menu provides
tools like Formatting, Charts, Totals,
Tables and Sparklines. Hovering your mouse over
each one generates a live preview.
Another one for my
niece, the Guitar Goddess
– it is very
important if you want to play the guitar that all the strings are
tuned properly. Otherwise “Highway To Hell” really WILL sound
like hell. FreeTuner is a site, powered on HTML5, which enables you
to tune your guitar via your microphone.
No comments:
Post a Comment