This may have started
as a Janitor Supply Database and morphed over time.
Navy
database tracks civilians' parking tickets, fender-benders, raising
fears of domestic spying
A parking ticket,
traffic citation or involvement in a minor fender-bender are enough
to get a person's name and other personal information logged into a
massive, obscure federal database run by the U.S. military.
The Law
Enforcement Information Exchange, or LinX, has already amassed
506.3 million law enforcement records ranging from criminal
histories and arrest reports to field information cards filled
out by cops on the beat even when no crime has occurred.
LinX is a national
information-sharing hub for federal, state and local law
enforcement agencies. It is run by the Naval
Criminal Investigative Service, raising concerns among some
military law experts that putting such detailed data about ordinary
citizens in the hands of military officials crosses the line that
generally prohibits the
armed forces from conducting civilian law enforcement operations.
What? Facebook got
Privacy wrong? What a shock!
Facebook
says states shouldn’t regulate online teen privacy. The FTC
disagrees.
The Federal Trade
Commission says that Facebook is misinterpreting a key children's
privacy law, in a move that could weaken the social network's
argument in a California district court suit over teen privacy on the
Web site.
The FTC filed the brief
Thursday night, weighing in on a key point for the case, Batman v.
Facebook (also known as Fraley v. Facebook). In it, the FTC says
Facebook is wrong to say that, because the Children's Online Privacy
and Protection Act (COPPA) only protects the privacy of children
under 12, that the law could be interpreted to keep states from
enforcing their own laws on teen privacy.
Perhaps we should
collect (and comment on) these guides. (registration required)
Benjamin Herold and
Sean Cavanagh write:
District
technology officials worried about protecting students’ sensitive
information, complying with federal and state privacy laws, and
avoiding legal challenges and parent uproar have a new step-by-step
resource for drafting data-privacy policies and contracts with the
private companies handling their information.
“We’ve
had a very rapid adoption of cloud storage and online services. All
of a sudden, they’re here,” said Bob Moore, the founder and chief
consultant of RJM Strategies and an architect of the new report,
released Friday. “Districts have much more responsibility in
managing these issues than they often realize.”
As
a result, Moore said in an interview with Education Week, one major
goal of the new “Protecting Privacy in Connected Learning Toolkit,”
issued by the Consortium for School Networking, is to get district
officials asking tougher questions—and demanding better answers—of
vendors.
Read more on Education
Week.
Download the Protecting
Privacy in Connected Learning toolkit here:
http://cosn.org/protecting-student-privacy-toolkit
Clearly there is a need
for a “Power Shopper” App. Something that factors in your
distance from Walmart, your car's gas millage, the price of gas, etc.
(and then tells you to use my online store.)
Walmart’s
New Online Tool Gives Competitors Prices
The “Every Day Low
Price” king is trying to shake up the world of pricing once again.
Walmart has rolled out
an online tool that compares its prices on 80,000 food and household
products — from canned beans to dishwashing soap — with those of
its competitors. If a lower price is found elsewhere, the discounter
will refund the difference to shoppers in the form of store credit.
The world’s largest
retailer began offering the feature, called “Savings Catcher,” on
its website late last month in seven big markets that include Dallas,
San Diego and Atlanta. The tool compares advertised prices at
retailers with physical stores, and not at online
rivals like Amazon.com that also offer low prices on staples.
For my student geeks.
Facebook
unveils Hack, a faster programming language to power the social
network
At Facebook, the
codebase that runs the social networking site is written in Hack.
The Menlo Park,
Calif.-based social networking titan said it had streamlined PHP,
made it better, and that Hack was now the official language running
the site used by 1.2 billion users.
[Virtual
Machine at: http://hhvm.com/
I suspect recruiting
(male) researchers will be easy. Talking about porn is difficult.
Why
It's Time for the Journal of Porn
Studies
The first issue of Porn
Studies, an academic journal exploring "pornography,
and sexual representations more generally," has debuted.
The mere fact of its
existence, which became public in mid-2013, was occasion for a media
event. But the journal's articles are serious articulations of the
intersection between the concerns of media studies and those of
pornography. Porn Studies is not a joke, though it seems to
provide everyone with some relief to treat it as one.
That's because so many
people look at so much porn: HuffPo noted last year that porn
sites get more visitors than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter
combined. And yet the
majority of Americans say looking at porn is "wrong."
… In the public
sphere, there are very few serious ideas about what porn is or how it
works or what it means to us, beside from the obvious.
Perhaps in the past, it
would have been possible to ignore this situation. But the Internet
turns out to, basically, be a very efficient porn delivery machine.
… The problem,
however, is that there are costs to even talking about
pornography. This is true even in our supposed bastions of
intellectual freedom, as several of the articles make clear. "I
have been told 'You don't want to be 'the porn guy'' and 'you will
have to deal with the content issue of your work,'" writes
Nathaniel Burke in his essay "Positionality and Pornography."
Balloons as low level
communications satellites? 23 minutes
Larry
Page: Where’s Google going next?
I think I caught the
two lawsuits, but Zero Tolerance means Zero Common Sense.
… A New
Jersey student is suing
the Sterling High School District for violating her First
Amendment rights after she was disciplined for a rude tweet
– made after school hours and from off-campus – about her
principal.
… A Pennsylvania
student is suing
his school district after he was suspended for a Facebook
post he made – again, after schools hours and from off-campus.
… Adrionna Harris,
a sixth grader from Virginia Beach, Virginia, was
suspended and recommended for expulsion after she took away a razor
from a schoolmate who was cutting himself and reported the incident
to school officials. Because
zero tolerance.
… The US
Department of Education has released revised “gainful
employment” rules, which monitor for-profit and vocational
programs based on their graduates’ debt levels. More via
The Chronicle of Higher Education. [Neither
Harvard nor Yale need to report how many graduates get to be
President. Bob]
… According
to the BBC, “Up to 60 Shanghai
maths teachers are to be brought to England
to raise standards, in an exchange arranged by the Department
for Education.”
… At the Global
Education and Skills Forum in Dubai, philanthropist Sunny
Varkey announced
a $1 million prize to be awarded to
an outstanding teacher – a “Nobel Prize” for teaching,
if you will.
Dilbert explains
performance reviews in the digital age.
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