If I could see it was a bad deal, why didn't they?
Target and
MasterCard just scrapped a $19 million deal to settle data breach
claims
A $19 million deal between Target and MasterCard
to settle lawsuits stemming from the retailer's massive pre-Christmas
2013 data breach has been scrapped, because
it failed to get enough support from the affected banks and credit
unions.
… Lawyers for banks that had sued Target over
breach-related losses called the settlement an attempt by Target to
"extinguish pending legal claims for pennies-on-the-dollar."
… Target shares rose 2 cents to $79.41 in
afternoon trading, while MasterCard shares rose 8 cents to $92.98.
How do you tell vandals from terrorists? Wait for
another attack? More likely, wait for someone to claim
responsibility in the name of ISIS. I've never heard of an
inflatable dam but apparently they have been around for at least 40
years.
Vandals
damage dam, nearly 50 million gallons of water pours into Bay
The loss of 49 million gallons of water began
sometime Thursday morning, when an
inflatable dam on Alameda Creek was destroyed. Alameda
County Water District, which maintains the dam, reported it to police
at 11:30 a.m.
… Police said the felony vandalism was an
intentional act, but as of Friday afternoon had no suspects and were
not exactly sure how it was
damaged.
Because of its age, the district was already
working to replace the dam, officials said. It was built
in 1971 and is one of two dams ACWD controls.
Let's hope this is not the last word.
The Justice Department on Friday released
guidelines that
would explicitly bar the agency from using drones solely to monitor
activity protected by the First Amendment, like peaceful protests.
… The Justice Department said it would adhere
to constitutional principles that requires law enforcement to obtain
a warrant when conducting surveillance or other activity in which
people have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." Law
enforcement would also be barred from using
drones to engage in discrimination. [Someone
will have to explain how you can use a drone to discriminate. Bob]..
The guidance builds off a presidential
memorandum released in February that outlined general
privacy and civil rights principles related to drones, and required
all federal agencies to adopt their own procedures on how to collect
and use information collected from domestic drones.
… The agency would be forced to keep logs of
the purpose and number of flights, including those in which other
agencies like the Homeland Security Department conducted the flight.
… In a footnote, the Justice Department noted
that the guidelines are not legally enforceable and are "intended
only to improve the internal management" at the agency.
[The
guidelines:
http://thehill.com/sites/default/files/dojdronememo.pdf
Is this really a big problem?
Eric L. Sussman, Daniel L. Schwartz, and James M.
Leva of Day Pitney LLP writes:
On May 19, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed into law Public Act No. 15-6, titled “An Act Concerning Employee Online Privacy” (the act). The act applies to both employees and job applicants and prohibits employers from requiring or requesting employees or applicants to (1) provide the employer with a user name, password, or other means to access the employee’s or applicant’s personal online account (such as e-mail, social media and retail-based Internet websites); (2) authenticate or access a personal online account in the presence of the employer’s representative; or (3) invite, or accept an invitation from, the employer to join a group affiliated with any personal online account. The act is effective October 1.
Read more on Day
Pitney LLP.
(Related) This is a real problem. Would the
Connecticut law have protected this student? If there is a privacy
violation and the school claims they own all the pictures, can the
students sue the school?
Michael Archambault reports:
Imagine assembling a portfolio of over 4,000 photographs and then being forced to make it disappear or face life-altering consequences; that’s the situation sophomore Anthony Mazur is currently facing at Flower Mound High School in his Texas hometown. After discovering the love of sports photography, the Lewisville Independent School District is now claiming that Anthony’s photographs are theirs and that he has no right to use them.
And there’s not just a copyright issue, but a
privacy issue in there, too.
Read more on PetaPixel.
[From
the article:
The real question is whether or not Anthony Mazur
has a case on his hands. In his support stands Title
17 of the United States Copyright Law, which denotes that the
“Copyright in a work protected under this title vests initially in
the author or authors of the work”; in the case of photography, the
individual who presses the shutter is the ‘author’.
In addition, the District’s
Board Policy Manual explicitly states “a student shall retain
all rights to work created as part of the instruction or using
District technology resources.”
Would it be worth Russia's while to block access
to a few dissidents? Perhaps it's not a few?
Maria Tsvetkova and Eric Auchard report:
Russia’s media watchdog has written to Google, Twitter and Facebook warning them against violating Russian Internet laws and a spokesman said on Thursday they risk being blocked if they do not comply with the rules.
… because of the encryption technology used by the three firms, Russia had no way of blocking specific websites and so could only bring down particular content it deemed in violation of law by blocking access to their whole services.
To comply with the law, the three firms must hand over data on Russian bloggers with more than 3,000 readers per day, and take down websites that Roskomnadzor sees as containing calls for “unsanctioned protests and unrest”, Ampelonsky said.
Read more on Reuters.
Interesting. I note they have still not convinced
a jury and the article does not say what else they might have used
for leverage to get a guilty plea. Why is this so hard?
… Prosecutors say the case marks the first
time federal authorities have successfully convicted someone who ran
a website for the purpose of facilitating prostitution.
Eric Omuro pleaded guilty in December to one count
of using a facility of interstate commerce with the intent to connect
prostitutes and johns. He was sentenced to 13 months in prison.
He admitted
to operating myredbook.com, where prostitutes advertised and
clients could search for services available in their area.
… How to combat the sex trade online has been
a vexing question for law enforcement officials. Online classified ad
sites have drawn particular attention.
Last October, two women who said they were victims
of sex trafficking while juveniles sued
classifieds site backpage.com and said that the site had
permitted them to be advertised online as prostitutes.
(Related) Perhaps this is why prosecution is so
hard?
And so it begins…
RT reports:
The men behind the screen names “Eaglesfan_6969” and “Verywilling2011” are looking for sex, and they’re doing it from government-provided email accounts, according to data pilfered from a hacked dating website.
A trove of personal information pertaining to paid account holders of AdultFriendFinder, a website that touts itself as letting users “Find a fuck buddy for online sex,” has surfaced, and its contents suggest employees of local and federal agencies, including law enforcement, the Navy and the Federal Aviation Administration have used their government-provided email addresses to search for partners.
Read more on RT.
A few questions arise: Could Hillary's people have
erred the other way too? But then, she destroyed all the emails she
didn't printout for the State Department, so we'll never know. (But
then is a 4% error rate that significant?)
… The National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA) classified 1,246 of those emails as personal
communications, CNN
reported Thursday.
For my Data Management students.
Data
Professionals Not Going Away, at Least Not Soon
Software vendors continue to create data analysis
tools for the average business user, eliminating some of the complex
or tedious processes, but businesses shouldn’t expect technology to
bring about game-changing insight, experts say.
"Does software make anyone a great musician?"
asks Greta Roberts, CEO and co-founder of Talent
Analytics, a company focused on an analytic approach to
predicting pre-hire employee performance.
… Alex Langshur, co-founder and senior partner
of Cardinal
Path, which helps companies make the most of their digital assets
by "instrumenting" their data from various sources such as
point-of-sale, website, mobile apps, social, email and more,
describes three roles among data professionals:
- Data collection, a very technical and challenging task at which many organizations fail. "If you get it wrong, every other piece of the chain falls apart," he said.
- Data management, which includes skills traditionally associated with database professionals. Chances are the person performing it is familiar with Hadoop or NoSQL and can assemble data sets to really extract value from them.
- Data analysis: Data analysts are able to look at the data and understand what it means in order to derive insight from it. That takes a curious mind married to the ability to use a specific tool, along with some statistical experience and knowledge. An analyst uses tools like R or SAS and/or visualization tools like Tableau or Spotfire.
… Roberts, whose company researched the
characteristics
of data professionals, said preparing the data is where the bulk
of time is spent. The research grouped data tasks into four roles:
data preparation, programming, manager and generalist. The
generalist role is disappearing as more people specialize, she said.
… While machines will ultimately take over
some of the data analysis work that humans have traditionally done,
human insight will remain critical to decision-making, said Jack
Phillips, CEO of the International
Institute for Analytics.
A tool for my Business Intelligence students.
Silk Offers
Great Tools for Creating Data Visualizations
Silk
is a free tool that I first tried a couple of years ago when it was
primarily a digital portfolio and simple web page creation tool.
Since then it has evolved to include some fantastic tools for
creating and sharing data visualizations.
To create a visualization on Silk
you can upload data in a spreadsheet, manually enter data, or use one
of data sets that Silk provides in their gallery. Once you've
uploaded data or selected it you can use it to create fourteen
different visualizations. To create a different visualization of the
same data set simply choose a different visualization style from the
Silk menu.
… Silk
visualizations can be made public or kept private. If you keep your
visualizations private you can still share them directly to other
Silk members by inviting them to your project. Public visualizations
can be embedded into blog posts as I have done below.
For my students' amusement.
Free Gift
Cards, Games & Design Tools: 5 Sites with Great Giveaways
It's that time of the week!
Hack
Education Weekly News
Bernie Sanders for President. “Sanders
introduced legislation that calls for the federal government to dole
out $47 billion per year to states that agree to eliminate
undergraduate tuition and fees at their public colleges and
universities,” reports
Inside Higher Ed. “Bernie Sanders’s plan to have Wall Street
pay for your college tuition, explained” via
Vox’s Libby Nelson. (More from Nelson on Sanders here.)
… Via
the BBC: “Students at Oxford University are voting on whether
or not they should continue being forced to wear special clothes to
sit their exams. At the moment, students and examiners have to wear a
gown over an outfit known as ‘sub fusc.’ The compulsory clothing
includes a dark suit, black shoes, a plain white shirt or blouse with
a bow tie, long tie or ribbon.”
… The
New York Times reports that “Hackers from China infiltrated the
computer systems of Pennsylvania State University’s College of
Engineering, gaining usernames and passwords in what investigators
described as a sophisticated cyberattack that lasted more than two
years.”
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