Wednesday, December 06, 2006

If I was a terrorist and wanted to terrorize, what better way than to target the families of deployed National Guard units?

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20061205214647719

Computer Stolen from 130th Airlift Wing in Charleston

Tuesday, December 05 2006 @ 09:46 PM CST - Contributed by: PrivacyNews - Fed. Govt.

A laptop computer with personal information about every member of West Virginia's Army National Guard 130th Airlift Wing in Charleston recently was stolen. The government-owned laptop computer was stolen from a member of the unit while he was attending an offical training course. Maj. Todd Harrell said the computer's hard drive contains personal information, including Social Security numbers, names and birth dates of everyone in the 130th Airlift Wing.

Source - The State Journal



http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20061205114254891

Personal info disappears from college

Tuesday, December 05 2006 @ 11:42 AM CST - Contributed by: lyger - Minors & Students

Someone made off with a print-out of personal information about Nassau Community College's entire student body, more than 21,000 students, prompting the college to offer to pay for credit monitoring services for students for one year.

Source - Newsday.com

[From the article: Reginald Tuggle, college spokesman, said the list went missing last Tuesday. Tuggle said an administrative assistant in the college's Student Activities Office, who was authorized to use the list, was cross-checking the names of individuals involved in various student activities against the master list of students registered at the college. [...and this is done manually? Bob]



http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/FA09E9ED4578DAD48625723C001830CF?OpenDocument

Bank data stolen out of exec’s vehicle

By Michael D. Sorkin ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH Wednesday, Dec. 06 2006

Banks like to advertise how careful they are with customer information. Premier Bank is no exception. Its executives recall just one time when they left account data in a parked vehicle.

That was the evening of Nov. 16. Dozens of employees were gathered at the Chase Park Plaza hotel to watch as Premier became the first bank to receive a Missouri Chamber of Commerce Award as one of the state's fastest growing businesses.

With the bankers inside celebrating, a thief was outside working. One of the vehicles broken into that night in the hotel garage was a GMC truck owned by Premier's vice president and chief financial officer.

Taken from the truck was a bound, blue book about the size of a laptop computer. It contained paper reports with the names and account numbers of 1,800 customers who had opened Premier accounts in October.

... "I guess you could debate whether we should have had" the information in the truck, Anderson said. "Obviously, we have changed our procedure; none of the reports will be out of the bank now."

The thief also stole a $250,000 non-negotiable bank certificate, $400 in cash and a black leather jacket valued at $250, according to St. Louis police.

... After the break-in, the bank's security consultant hired a private investigator to search trash bins for the stolen records. [Good one! If recovered, it would save a lot of time and effort! Bob]

... ONeill questioned why the bank would take information about his account out of the office.

Anderson says the bankers had planned to use the papers at a meeting the next morning to discuss new accounts.



http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=2006120509531926

Files with personal information found buried in Converse park

Tuesday, December 05 2006 @ 09:53 AM CST - Contributed by: PrivacyNews - State/Local Govt.

... Last week a contracting crew hired to do flood control work at the Converse North Park stumbled upon bundled-up piles of buried treasure, if you want to steal someone's identity. "Drivers license (numbers). Social Security (numbers). Lot of photographs. All the information you'd ever want if you were going to do any kind of fraud," said David Meyer, who is part of the crew that discovered the files.

"It's been exposed for about a week," Meyer said.

Converse City Manager Sam Hughes did not want to go on camera but says the city never envisioned that all those files, which were buried in 1998, would ever be accidentally dug up. [Obviously. Probably never thought at all – ever. Bob] Also found buried in the park were police reports, traffic tickets and even ironically a ticket for littering.

Source - MySA.com



Does this change MySpace's legal status from a simple conduit (like an ISP) to a moderator? Won't they become liable for anything they miss? Can they limit this check to sex offenders and ignore stalkers, identity thieves, etc.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2006/12/myspace_to_purg.html

27 B Stroke 6

by Ryan Singel and Kevin Poulsen Tuesday, 5 December 2006

MySpace to Purge Sex Offenders

MySpace announced today it will begin searching its 100 million-plus user list for people listed in a national database of sex offenders.

Why didn't I think of that!

Just kidding. Obviously, this is a response to my story from October. If you missed it, I used a Perl script to screen-scrape the Department of Justice's National Sex Offender Registry and run all the names and ZIP codes through MySpace's search engine, verifying 744 matches from half the search results. One convicted child molester was actively courting new victims, and was arrested.

Now MySpace is going to do its own searching, in partnership with a background-check company called Sentinel Tech Holding Corp.

From the press release:

"We are committed to keeping sex offenders off MySpace," said MySpace's Chief Security Officer, Hemanshu Nigam. "Sentinel Safe will allow us to aggregate all publicly available sex offender databases into a real-time searchable form, making it easy to cross-reference and remove known registered sex offenders from the MySpace community. The creation of this first-of-its-kind real-time searchable database technology is a significant step to keep our members as safe as possible."

The whole first-of-its-kind, never-been-done-before, thank-God-the-technology-finally-exists thread runs throughout the press release. The language seems calculated to let MySpace escape responsibility for failing to police the sex offenders on its site prior to October, despite the availability of a free online registry demonstrably useful for exactly that purpose.

That said, Sentinel's database promises to be far more powerful than the DOJ registry I used. As described, it'll contain detailed information, including height, weight, eye and hair color, and the complete offense history of each offender -- all completely searchable. It'll be like a Google for sex offenders.

That leaves just one real disappointment in this announcement: How MySpace plans to use the data. With all that information at its disposal, and a "24-hour-a-day dedicated staff" using it, MySpace could seriously enhance its policing. Instead, the company is taking a sophisticated database and wielding it as a blunt instrument, simply banning everyone on the list from registering or keeping a MySpace account, regardless of who they are or what they did.

This is bad because, obviously, banning sex offenders won't keep them off MySpace: it'll just give them a reason to lie about their name or location, even if they aren't up to no good. (My survey found hundreds of past offenders, many with old or minor convictions, whose profiles reflected a seemingly normal life.) Now sex offenders who want to stay on MySpace will all be using false information from the start.

MySpace is essentially refusing an opportunity to detect and imprison active repeat offenders, by moving the entire superset of ex-offenders into the shadows. Does the convicted pedophile have lots of teenagers on his friendslist? MySpace won't know, because he'll be under same veil of anonymity as the flashers and peeping toms.

We know there are some ex-sex offenders who attempt to recidivate from accounts opened under their real names. If you believe they will now stay off MySpace, then the company's policy is good for safety. But if you think they'll simply start spelling their name a little different or lying about their ZIP code, then MySpace has lost the chance to take them off the streets.

MySpace is taking the easy way out. It may be good PR to be able to say that you don't allow past sex offenders of any stripe on your website, but the company should keep its eye on the ball: the goal isn't to keep a former flasher from blogging about his cat, it's to keep current pedophiles from pursuing children. MySpace could tell the difference, if it wanted to. A smart policing effort would use the sex offender database as one of many data points in keeping the site safe. Sometimes zero-tolerance is really tolerance.



To stop technology you must understand it. To understand it you must study it. To study it is forbidden. Oops!

http://techdirt.com/articles/20061205/162816.shtml

Iran's Solution To The YouTube Question: Just Block It

from the much-easier dept

Rather than just worry about the content available on YouTube like some others, it appears that Iran has decided to just block the entire site outright. Of course, you have to wonder how effective such a block really is. After all, this is the same country where broadband service providers apparently have no worries about ignoring the government's ban on broadband (which would seem like it might make YouTube less than useful anyway). However, with hundreds of competing sites, and more popping up every day, it seems that the Iranians who want to view the next viral video, will just move on to some other site.



http://digg.com/tech_news/Mum_s_the_Word_on_NSA_Spying

Mum's the Word on NSA Spying

chrisek submitted by chrisek 15 hours 8 minutes ago (via http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2006/12/privacy.html )

Under questioning, the White House's new privacy oversight board admits its knows how many Americans were targeted by a controversial surveillance program. But it won't share the data and won't say if it recommends the data be shared. In 27B Stroke 6.



This would seem to be overreaction (assuming adequate security in the first place...)

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/16169679.htm

Hackers attack U.S. Naval War College's computer network

Posted on Tue, Dec. 05, 2006

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - Hackers attacked the computer network at the Naval War College in Newport, taking down the school's network for more than two weeks, including some e-mail services and the college's Web site.

The Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command in Norfolk, Va., detected the intrusion around Nov. 16 and took the system offline, spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Doug Gabos said. He said the unclassified network was used by students.

Military spokesmen would not give an estimate on when the school's Web site, www.nwc.navy.mil, will be back up. [Not back up yet! Bob]

The Naval War College bills itself as the Navy's leading center of strategic thought and national security policy.

Investigators were trying to determine the extent of the intrusion, Gabos said. They planned to upgrade firewalls and make other unspecified improvements.

Once that is complete, the network will be restored,'' Gabos said.



http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005035.php

miniLinks for 2006-12-05

December 05, 2006



http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/06/0134211&from=rss

Why the Novell / MS Deal Is Very Bad

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 05, @11:35PM from the laying-it-out dept. Novell Microsoft The Courts Linux

jamienk writes "PJ from Groklaw has taken the time to really explain the big picture of the Novell/MS deal and how it all fits into the SCO case and the strategy some have employed to attack Free Software. If you thought PJ was becoming too shrill before, or if you haven't understood what the big deal is with Novell's agreement, it's really worth a read."

From the article: "This is Groklaw's 2,838th article. We now have 10,545 members, who have worked very hard to disprove SCO's scurrilous claims, and we did. We succeeded, beyond my hopes when we started. But here's the sad part. As victory is in sight, Novell signs a patent agreement with Microsoft..."



http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-6141162.html

Microsoft releasing book search in beta

By Candace Lombardi Story last modified Wed Dec 06 06:45:32 PST 2006

Microsoft is releasing Live Search Books, its competitor to Google Book Search, in beta on Wednesday.

The book search engine performs keyword searches for books that have been scanned as part of Microsoft's book scanning project, in the same way that Windows Live Search searches the Internet, said Danielle Tiedt, the general manager of Live Search Selection for Microsoft.

... Live Search Books' "Search inside a book" feature also allows users to search the full texts of scanned books. Microsoft has restricted the beta release of Live Search Books to only include noncopyright books scanned from the collections of the British Library, the University of California and the University of Toronto.

... Microsoft's new tool is similar in nature to Google Book Search in that it also allows full texts of public domain works to be viewed, searched or printed. Like Google, Microsoft has chosen to use PDF files for the full text downloads of books.

... Microsoft also plans to announce on Wednesday the addition of medical content to its Windows Live Academic Search, an engine that searches full texts of journals in conjunction with institutions' subscriptions to them. The addition of medicine as a category will "practically quadruple" the amount of available searchable content, according to Tiedt.



http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CHESS_MAN_VS_MACHINE?SITE=VALYD&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Chess Champion Loses Match to Computer

Dec 5, 6:24 PM EST

BONN, Germany (AP) -- World chess champion Vladimir Kramnik lost the sixth and decisive game against computer program Deep Fritz on Tuesday, ceding a hard-fought Man vs. Machine match 4-2.

The Russian takes $500,000 - half of what he would have received if he had won against Deep Fritz, a commercially available chess program that runs on a powerful personal computer.

Kramnik said he was "a bit disappointed" and expressed hope that a rematch could be arranged in a year or two. "With more time to prepare, I still have a chance."



http://www.techzonez.com/comments.php?shownews=19918

Adobe Reader 8.0.0

Posted by Reverend on 05 Dec 2006 - 23:10 GMT

Adobe Reader 8 includes new document viewing options, advanced collaboration, increased time-saving ways to work with PDF files, and other new features to help you more securely and consistently communicate and collaborate using PDF files.

Download: Adobe Reader 8.0.0 (XP SP2/Vista)

View: Adobe Reader Homepage

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