July 04, 2006

Very interesting article. Be sure to read the comments! (I'm following this because I got one of the VA's “Oops” letters.)

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/03/1841237&from=rss

Forensic Analysis of the Stolen VA Database

Posted by timothy on Monday July 03, @03:10PM from the overconfidence-perhaps dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As you have probably heard, the FBI has recovered the stolen Veteran's Administration laptop. The FBI even said "A preliminary review of the equipment by computer forensic teams determined that the database remains intact and has not been accessed since it was stolen." This article looks at what the FBI forensic lab is doing to determine the sensitive information hasn't been accessed and how the thieves might have covered their tracks — thereby rendering the forensic results useless."

Note: One way to copy the data without writing to the hard drive is to remove it from the laptop and use forensic copy tools. That seems to be what happened here. Again, the comments question the ability to tell if data was copied.

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/07/what_happened_t.html

VA laptop sold from back of a truck

Posted: Monday, July 3 at 01:04 pm CT by Bob Sullivan

We have a few more details on what happened to the nation’s most famous runaway laptop computer during those mysterious two months it was missing, courtesy of NBC’s Pete Williams. We’re talking about the computer and hard drive that were stolen from a Department of Veterans Affairs employee in May, an incident that made headlines because the hardware contained private information on 26.5 million veterans and current GIs. Last week, VA chief Jim Nicholson announced in dramatic fashion that the prodigal computer had been found, but details about the return were sparse.

NBC’s Williams has been able to fill in some of the blanks after talking to law enforcement officials investigating the incident.

Both the laptop and hard drive ended up for sale at a black market just north of Washington D.C., near a subway station outside the Beltway near Wheaton. We’re talking about the kind of market that is literally run out of the back of a truck, one official said. Fortunately, a buyer purchased both components at this black market, keeping the missing hardware together.

The male buyer, who has not been publicly identified, later spotted fliers posted at a nearby supermarket seeking the return of the equipment. After matching the serial numbers on the flier with those on the equipment, the buyer decided to turn in the equipment. No doubt, a posted $50,000 reward helped encourage that decision.

He had a friend in the U.S. Park Police who brokered the exchange with the FBI, Williams was told.

At that point, the FBI ran forensics tests on the equipment and concluded the sensitive data – such as veterans’ Social Security numbers -- had not been accessed. (Read more details about those tests here). Knowing more about the secret life of the disappearing hardware should make veterans a little more comfortable that their personal information was not compromised during the incident.

But not all questions have been answered yet. The obvious missing puzzle piece is this: How did the hardware get from the VA employee’s home in Aspen Hill, Md., to the back of a truck in Wheaton, about 4 miles away? And what happened during the trip?

How are you going to make users upgrade to Vista? Use every tool you have!

http://www.techzonez.com/comments.php?shownews=18587

Microsoft to End Support Of Old Windows Versions

Posted by Reverend on 03 Jul 2006 - 20:15 GMT

Techzonez More than 70 million Windows users will no longer be eligible for software security updates under a Microsoft Corp. policy to take effect July 11, hastening the demise of several older versions of the computer operating system.

Microsoft will end support for Windows 98, Windows 98 Special Edition (SE) and Windows Millennium Edition (ME). That means users of those versions will no longer have the protection of software fixes issued by Microsoft, potentially leaving them exposed to attack when hackers exploit previously unknown flaws in the operating systems.

Microsoft had planned to stop supporting the older versions in January 2004, but it extended support to give customers and businesses more time to upgrade to newer versions of Windows.

At the end of 2005, licensed installations of Windows 98 and Windows ME made up more than 13 percent of Microsoft's user base, according to Al Gillen, an analyst with IDC, a Framingham, Mass., market-research firm. IDC estimates that about 48 million computers were still running licensed versions of Windows 98 at the end of last year, and 25 million were running Windows ME.

Gillen said he expects machines running Windows 98 and ME to account for just 6 percent of all Windows installations by the end of this year, and that the loss of security patches for those operating systems will probably not be a major concern for users.

Full story: Washington Post

http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/03/1414228&from=rss

The Information Revolution

Posted by samzenpus on Monday July 03, @03:49PM from the will-not-be-televised dept.

Aeonite writes "The Information Revolution subtitled, The Not-For-Dummies Guide to the History, Technology and Use of the World Wide Web, is the second in a trilogy by J.R. Okin. The first book, The Internet Revolution, covering the Internet in general and the third, The Technology Revolution being a guide to The Impact, Perils and Promise of the Internet. I have not read either of those two books, but I believe that each can be read independently, and this review should be viewed in that light." Read the rest of Aeonite's review.

A brief reading of the tea leaves. Sell your Apple stock?

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/03/1934251&from=rss

Nerds Switching from Apple to Ubuntu?

Posted by timothy on Monday July 03, @05:28PM from the different-bell-curve-entirely dept. OS X Operating Systems Debian Linux

Mindpicnic writes "The recent switch of two lifelong Mac nerds to Ubuntu hasn't escaped Tim O'Reilly's radar. He cites Jason Kottke: 'If I were Apple, I'd be worried about this. Two lifelong Mac fans are switching away from Macs to PCs running Ubuntu Linux: first it was Mark Pilgrim and now Cory Doctorow. Nerds are a small [but very noticeable Bob] demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal mine with stuff like this.'"

They were merely hard to find and remove before, now they're gonna relocate themselves.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/03/217251&from=rss

Networked Landmines Work Together

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday July 03, @07:04PM from the red-rover-red-rover dept. Robotics Science

crazedpilot writes "New landmines will soon communicate via a radio network, and move from place to place in order to be most effective." Termed the "self-healing minefield", the individual mines are capable of detecting an enemy breach and then moving to seal the gap.

http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_07.php#004785

July 03, 2006

EFF Backs Court in Protecting Phone Call Privacy

Investigators Need a Warrant to Get Call Content

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) filed an amicus brief last Friday arguing that the government needs a warrant to collect the content of a telephone call, even if that content came from digits dialed on a phone keypad.

A federal magistrate judge in Texas asked EFF to file the brief in response to requests from government investigators to use a pen register or trap and trace device to collect all information entered using the buttons on a telephone (including, for example, bank account numbers or prescription refill requests). A "pen/trap" order must meet a lower standard of judicial review than a typical phone-tapping warrant, because only telephone numbers dialed from a certain phone -- not the content of the phone call itself -- are normally collected.

In their brief, EFF and CDT ask the judge to continue denying the orders and argue that the government's request cannot be granted without violating federal wiretap law and the Fourth Amendment.

"After the phone call has been connected, the pen/trap device's job is over," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. "The numbers that you enter through the keypad to fill a prescription or join a meeting are just like the words or passcodes you say when there's no keypad option. They cannot be retrieved without meeting stringent probable cause requirements."

Until Magistrate Judge Smith asked for the brief, these pen/trap requests were unknown to the public. The judge previously asked EFF to respond to the government's secret requests to track cell phone locations without a warrant based on probable cause. Judge Smith as well as several other magistrates around the country have now held that the government cannot track cell phone locations unless it can show probable cause and a judge finds good reason to believe that criminal activity is afoot.

"Just as in the cell tracking cases, the government has tried to hide its baseless arguments from public scrutiny," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "We commend Judge Smith for taking these issues seriously and allowing EFF to offer a response to the government's contrived reasoning."

For the amicus brief: http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/Pen_Trap/EFF-and-CDT-Amicus.pdf

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/12/youtube_owns_derivative_works/

YouTube owns YourStuff

By Andrew Orlowski (andrew.orlowski@theregister.co.uk) Published Monday 12th June 2006 16:13 GMT

Never trust a hippy - John Lydon

The latest attempt to rebrand the web, "Web 2.0" has been evangelized as a platform for sharing - but it's increasingly looking like a platform tilted steeply in one direction.

Millions may be about to discover what singer Billy Bragg found out recently - that "community" hosting web sites can do as they please with creative material you submit.

In its Terms & Conditions (http://youtube.com/t/terms), the wildly popular video sharing site YouTube emphasizes that "you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions".

There's quite a large "BUT...", however. Not only does YouTube retain the right to create derivative works, but so do the users, and so too, does YouTube's successor company. Since YouTube has all the hallmarks of a very shortlived business - it's burned through $11.5m of venture investment (Sequoia Capital is the fall guy here) and has no revenue channels - this is more pertinent than may appear.

The license that you grant YouTube is worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable. The simplest way to terminate it is by withdrawing your video. But even this is problematic, as OpenTV's Nathan Freitas wrote recently (http://openvision.tv/blog/?p=48):

"It is good to know that if you delete a video from YouTube, then the rights you have granted them terminate. However, once they have distributed your video 'in any media format and through any media channel', that’s a little hard to take back, right?"

And if YouTube went titsup tomorrow, its successor YouTubeTwo would sit on a large library of irrevocable content.

For now, as Nathan noticed, YouTube regards its rights grab as something of a joke:

As we've noted with this wave of web juvenilia, it's considered "Web 2.0" to take things like rights, and uptime flippantly. See Flakey Flickr goes down. Again (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/flakey_flickr_fckd_again/).

Judging from a handful of sporadic blog posts, the issue has been troubling a few users for a while. But with the mainstream press (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/24/nytimes_two_point_nought/) still treating the handful of web hopefuls as if they represent the new Enlightenment, it has failed to catch much wider attention.

What is cheaper than free?

http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6090476.html?part=rss&tag=6090476&subj=news

YouTube challenger offers to pay for video

By Greg Sandoval Story last modified Mon Jul 03 18:15:43 PDT 2006

A new video-sharing site is offering videographers a share of the advertising dollars that their movies generate, at a time when most video-sharing sites are just trying to eke out a profit.

This is one way to introduce new products...

http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/51512.html

Toshiba to Sell HD DVD Players Below Cost

Jiji Press 07/03/06 7:53 AM PT

Samsung Electronics of South Korea brought the first Blu-ray player to market last week. Sony, Matsushita Electric Industrial and other companies plan to begin selling their Blu-ray players this fall.

...this is another. Which one works? (And is the Apple iPod an exception?

http://digg.com/tech_news/Sony_s_15-year_Streak_of_Losing_Media_Formats_and_Devices

Sony's 15-year Streak of Losing Media Formats and Devices

sirnicholai submitted by sirnicholai 9 hours 48 minutes ago (via http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2006/07/sony.html )

Blu-Ray isn't the first, all 8 media formats Sony has introduced in the last 15 years have failed to become used in the technology industry, and the last format the introduced that was widely accepted was the 3.5" Floppy. All the others, from the Mini-Disk to the UMD, have not caught on, due to being proprietary and expensive. Sound familiar?

Even the summary is interesting.

http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003460.shtml

How the Danes share files

Claus Pedersen has completed research on the pattern of filesharing in Denmark. His conclusions are (1) the decline in record sales in Denmark is explained by many factors, and (2) the decline that there is is finansed almost in full by the wealthiest artists. What’s particularly interesting about the study is that it uses data from the Nordic Copyright Bureau, which has a monopoly status in Denmark. That means the data are not estimates of sales declines, but actual sales. (Nordic records 99% of the market).

A summary of the paper was translated by Marie Elisabeth Pade Andersen. You can read it here. Claus now looking for support to get the full paper translated. If you’ve got an idea, email him at this address.

Free is good.

http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003458.shtml

CCd book: having fun with Google

Phillipp Lenssen has written “55 Ways to Have Fun with Google”. The book is available for sale in book stores, and downloadable for free under a CC license.

Slooowly we will introduce useful and beneficial technology, then we slip in an “Off Switch” and 'click' Social Security no longer runs a deficit!

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1984274,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

Report: Digital Health Coming to Grandma's House

By M.L. Baker, Ziff Davis Internet June 30, 2006

Elderly patients living at home will receive fewer nursing visits, and make fewer visits to the hospital. That's according to a white paper released this month by Parks Associates, which concludes that "technological advances are making over the home health industry."

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/011685.html

July 03, 2006

Chronology of Data Breaches Reported Since the ChoicePoint Incident

From the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, A Chronology of Data Breaches Reported Since the ChoicePoint Incident, updated June 30, 2006. Breaches reported in June 2006 include the Nebraska Treasurer's Office and the Minnesota Dept. of Revenue.

This is easily answered...

http://digg.com/tech_news/What_U.S._broadband_problem_2

What U.S. broadband problem?

freeworldonline submitted by freeworldonline 20 hours 7 minutes ago (via http://news.com.com/2010-1034_3-6090408.html?part=rss&tag=6090408&subj=news )

"Tenth is 10 spots too low," President Bush declared in 2004, referring to the share of Americans with high-speed Internet connections compared with citizens of other countries. Today, the U.S. doesn't even make the top 10.

...We're still fighting the last war (or maybe the one before that)

http://www.digitalworldtokyo.com/2006/07/more_internet_users_mobile_tha.php

Tue Jul 4, 2006

More Internet users mobile than wired in Japan

The number of Internet users in Japan accessing from cellphones exceeded those using it from personal computers in 2005, according to a government report published Tuesday.

One of the minor drawbacks of free speech.

http://digg.com/politics/Right-Wing_Blog_Asks_Readers_to_Hunt_Down_Info_About_NYT_Editors_Kids

Right-Wing Blog Asks Readers to "Hunt Down" Info About NYT Editors' Kids

Uzd4ce submitted by Uzd4ce 12 hours 16 minutes ago (via http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/7/2/204419/0670 )

"Go hunt them down and do America a favor. Get their photo, street address, where their kids go to school, anything you can dig up, and send it to the link above. This is your chance to be famous - grab for the golden ring."

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Letter_Charges_Illegal_forced_sale_of_MS_Windows%2C_EC_Says_Not_Likely

Letter Charges Illegal forced sale of MS Windows, EC Says Not Likely

schestowitz submitted by schestowitz 12 hours 12 minutes ago (via http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/64267/index.html )

This is a letter of complaint sent to the European Commission regarding the situation in Belgium, which unfortunately applies to all EU countries, which forces almost all consumers to buy MS Windows despite regulation prohibiting illegal forced and linked selling practices. The EC's response follows the complaint letter.

[From the article:

I understand that Microsoft's licensing agreements with PC manufacturers encourage (through the grant of rebates) the pre-installation of operating systems on PCs. However, this does not have to be a Microsoft operating system. The Commission is not aware of any obligation either contractual or financial, obliging the PC OEMs to sell their PCs with Windows operating systems in particular.

Security Tools & Techniques

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,19677843-29277,00.html

Computers 'glued' to protect data

From: AAP July 04, 2006

SOME companies are taking drastic action - including supergluing computer connections - in a bid to stop data theft.

A rise in the level of corporate data theft has spurred some companies to take measures to stop rogue employees sneaking corporate data out of the workplace on memory sticks, iPods and mobile phones, The Australian Financial Review reported.

Rising data theft has prompted a number of companies to ban portable storage devices - such as the ubiquitous memory stick - that can be plugged into computers to download files from one machine and transfer to another.

Memory sticks can cost less than $100 and are easily concealable, while iPods and most mobile phones can also store data.

"We have heard of at least one case where a company took steps to disable USB ports on their PCs with superglue,'' SurfControl Australia's managing director, Charles Heunemann, said.

Breach or theft of confidential information accounted for the highest portion of financial losses in the past year at an average of $2 million per company, the AusCert 2006 Australian Computer Crime and Security Survey found.