Nope.
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/continuity/features/article.php/3661476
Data Breaches Keep Piling Up. Does Anyone Care?
February 22, 2007 By Drew Robb
Leaks, spills and hacker attacks — It seems hardly a day goes by without some major data loss incident affecting the IT community.
According to Fred Moore, an analyst at Horizon Information Strategies in Boulder, Colo., more than 54 million identities have been stolen to date and an estimated 19,000 more identities are stolen each day. Companies on average are spending 1,500 hours per incident at a cost of $40,000 to $90,000 per victim, he says.
... For a real eye-opener, take a look at the roster of data loss incidents at www.attrition.org/dataloss. This list gives the specifics of the millions of stolen identities Moore mentions. And the pace of these incidents seems to be accelerating, if the start of this year is any indication. According to Attrition.org, about 2.2 identities were compromised in January 2007. That included more than a million by the Chicago Board of Elections.
... "Data protection has become the most critical piece of most IT strategies," says Moore. "This will make the data security business much larger than the disk and tape industry combined by 2008."
You never know what straw will break the camel's back
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/news/world/16759331.htm
Posted on Thu, Feb. 22, 2007
Britons up in arms over 'Bin Brother'
By Liz Ruskin McClatchy Newspapers
LONDON - The British tolerate millions of surveillance cameras watching their every public move. They agreed to let roadside cameras record their vehicular movements and store the information for two years. But when they discovered that their garbage is being bugged, they howled that Big Brother had gone too far.
Local governments have attached microchips to some 500,000 "wheelie bins," the trashcans that residents wheel to the curb for collection. The aim, they say, is to help monitor collections and boost the national recycling rate, now among the lowest in Europe.
The public has reacted with suspicion and fury.
"Germans Plant Bugs in Our Wheelie Bins," a Daily Mail headline announced in August. Two of the bin manufacturers are German. Newspaper letter writers have taken to calling it "Bin Brother."
A Member of Parliament from London's Croydon neighborhood denounced the chip as "the spy in your bin."
"The Stasi or the KGB could never have dreamed of getting a spying device in every household," said Andrew Pelling, a Conservative, referring to the former East German and Soviet spy agencies.
Small-scale revolts have erupted across the United Kingdom for months, as different localities adopt the technology. Some towns failed to mention the new feature, which is concealed under coin-sized plugs under the rims of their garbage cans.
In the coastal city of Bournemouth, 72-year-old Cyril Baker ripped the chip off his new bin the day he discovered it, then went on national television to show how he did it. Thousands of his neighbors followed his example. "It was a very emotional issue. The whole town was in an uproar," he said.
It's a wonder that the tiny dustbin attachment has provoked such a response in Britain, home of the most monitored people in the Western world. An estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit TV cameras - one for every 14 residents - are trained on British streets and schools, parks and churches. Cameras are planted in phone booths, on vending machines, at gas stations and inside every double-decker bus in London. An Englishman may be captured on cameras 300 times in a typical day, surveillance experts say.
Yet the microchips in the wheelie bins struck a nerve.
"I think people really see this as an intrusion into their personal space," said Bournemouth councilman Nick King, a champion of the anti-chip cause.
Residents also fear that the little bug will nip them in the wallet. The microchips - radio frequency identification transmitters known as RFID tags - can't actually spy on the contents of a bin. They're more like tiny digital nametags, but they hold lots of information and can be scanned from yards away.
In parts of Germany and Belgium, garbage trucks equipped with scales and scanners lift the tagged bins. The bins are weighed as they're emptied, and residents are charged for each pound they send to the landfill.
Bournemouth administrators swear that they intend only to monitor trash trends and return lost bins to their assigned homes. Other cities said they wanted to identify heavy heapers to advise them on better rubbish management.
But residents suspect a plan to levy charges for garbage hauling, and some local officials have acknowledged that's their long-term aim.
The Orwellian aspect has been blown out of proportion, chip supporters say. "People think it's Big Brother watching them, and it's not. It's a system for weighing rubbish," said David Peel, the communications manager for South Norfolk Council, which has a bin chip project under way.
Civil libertarians worry about a day when every object has an embedded RFID tag, and people don't know who's tracking their trash.
Put this technology in the hands of sanitation workers and it won't stop at just weighing the garbage, predicts Chris McDermott, an anti-RFID activist.
"Before you know it, they'll be scanning the actual products, wrappers and other detritus that you throw away inside the bin, as these are also scheduled to be RFID-enabled in the near future," he warns on his Web site, www.notags.co.uk.
Not likely, said Andy Shaw, the business manager of Cambridge Auto-ID Lab, a university research center that's developing new uses for radio frequency tags.
The lab, according to its Web site, is creating a system that will enable computers to identify "any object anywhere in the world instantly." But Shaw thinks, "nobody is going to pay to put readers onto garbage trucks that can read everything. It's just too expensive."
Anyway, Big Brother doesn't have to resort to scanning your garbage to know what you own, not with store loyalty cards and credit cards so abundant, Shaw joked.
As the furor grows over microchips in rubbish barrels, cameras are proliferating.
In Bournemouth, Liberal Democrats battle Conservatives over who's done more to expand camera surveillance. The city, with a population of 164,000, operates more than 75 cameras in the town center. Jim Klegg, Bournemouth's street enforcement manager, announced this month that film footage will be used to help prosecute for littering, "which includes dropping cigarette butts and chewing gum," he said.
How to explain the enthusiasm for a vast and expanding network of cameras? King, the Bournemouth representative, said the experience of being monitored is rather British.
"Inherently, we're quite happy to be watched when we're out and about, because we feel if someone is watching us they can help us," he said. "But there's a line we draw around the home."
Kate Fox, a London anthropologist who studies the English, sees it that way, too.
Surveillance may seem futuristic, but she maintains that it re-creates, in the English mind, the modern equivalent of the pre-industrial hamlet, where neighbors knew one another's business.
"We rather like that sense that we're being looked after," she said. "It makes us feel secure."
Yet when it concerns the home, the English are obsessed with privacy, she said, and microchipping the wheelie bins must seem like a breach of the moat.
"The Englishman's home really is his castle, and I guess our rubbish bin is part of it," she said.
“Screw ye not with the court, lest ye be screwed” (Old e-discovery mantra I just made up)
Court Disapproves Defendant’s “Hide the Ball” Discovery Gamesmanship
A recent case in Ohio illustrates a poor electronic discovery strategy by a defendant employer in a wrongful termination case. May v. Pilot Travel Centers,LLC, 2006 WL 3827511 (S.D. Ohio December 28, 2006). The defense here has seriously annoyed the presiding district court judge, [Always a source of great quotes, if not great law Bob] who, right or wrong, is now convinced that missing electronic records are evidence that the defense has engaged in “hide the ball gamesmanship and deception.”
... After the discovery period ended in nine months, apparently with no discovery disputes, the defendant moved for summary judgment. The plaintiff responded with a motion for sanctions for spoliation, alleging that defendant had destroyed evidence, namely some of the computer records at issue in the case. The defendant employer responded vigorously to the sanctions motion. It moved to strike the affidavit supporting the motion, and to be awarded attorney fees because it alleged the sanctions motion was meritless and filed in bad faith.
Defendant first made a procedural argument, correctly pointing out that there had been no motion to compel, not even a phone call from plaintiff’s counsel. Defendant argued that because of these omissions there was no basis for a sanctions motion. The court disagreed with this procedural argument. Aside from parsing a construction of the local discovery rules involved, the court was strongly influenced by the fact that defendant produced new evidence after the plaintiff filed his motion for sanctions. The court referred to this as a “curiously belated supplementation” and held:
... The Court was also disturbed by defendant’s arguments that some of the documents were not previously produced because they were not specifically requested, pointing out the mandated initial disclosure requirement under Rule 26(a)(1)(B).
The Court was also disturbed by what it called the defendant’s “coy avoidance” of whether it had destroyed computer records as plaintiff alleged. Apparently the defense responded to the spoliation accusations by stating that the “documents might have been lost when defendant converted to a new computer system.” That response did not go over well. The court stated:
If the records exist, then Defendant should know this [Yes! Bob] and must produce them. If the records no longer exist in any form, then Defendant should be able to provide this answer and an explanation as to how and why the records were destroyed-and by whom. To avoid the answer by blaming Plaintiff at this juncture creates an inference of gamesmanship that disturbs this Court.
You must learn patience. (See next article)
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=6553
Federal privacy panel leader resigns, raps standards
Healthcare IT News By Diana Manos, Senior Editor 02/22/07
WASHINGTON – The leader of a federal panel charged with providing privacy recommendations for the national health information network resigned Wednesday, thwarted, he said, in efforts to develop adequate standards.
The resignation comes amid complaints from others about the speed with which standards are being written.
O Boy! I can't wait!
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/02/airline_screeni.html
27B Stroke 6
by Ryan Singel and Kevin Poulsen Thursday, 22 February 2007
Airline Screening Update Delayed Three More Years
A key homeland security official says that a long-delayed change in how airline passengers are checked against watch lists won't come to pass until 2010, two years after the end of the Bush Administration's tenure. Transportation Security Administration chief Kip Hawley told Times reporter Eric Lipton that "after spending a year re-examining Secure Flight, officials had come up with a way to reduce mistakes, protect privacy rights and achieve the reliability needed to screen about two million passengers that fly each day."
But it will cost about $80 million more in the next year and a half to develop the enhanced system, which will then require more than a year of testing, resulting in the estimate that it will be in full use sometime in 2010. Officials would not make public an estimate of how much they expect to spend before the system is complete.
Currently, the TSA gathers a list of suspected terrorists, South American presidents, and unruly passengers and sends it to the airlines, which then check names of passengers against the list. That process has snagged Senators, a Senator's wife, a prominent nun, every David Nelson in the country and more than a handful of government employees with high-level security clearances.
Patently obvious?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070222/133532.shtml
Jury Tells Microsoft To Pay $1.5 Billion To Alcatel-Lucent Over MP3 Patents
from the mp3-tech-to-get-more-expensive dept
Jury trials over patent disputes quite often turn out in favor of the patent holder, so it's no surprise to see that a jury in San Diego hasn't just sided with Alcatel-Lucent in its patent dispute with Microsoft, but also has ordered that Microsoft pay $1.5 billion for supposedly violating patents having to do with MP3 technology. The details of the case are a little bit complex. Back in the late 80s, AT&T's Bell Labs teamed up with the Fraunhofer Institute to develop the MP3 standard. Fraunhofer ended up with a bunch of patents, and most companies that make use of MP3 technology pay Fraunhofer for the privilege. However, AT&T's Bell Labs claimed some patents related to the standard as well. Microsoft, however, claims the company had a patent reissued and backdated to make it look like it came before the Fraunhofer patents and that the two patents in question are invalid. Of course, since then, Bell Labs was spun off to become Lucent, which later merged with Alcatel. Somewhere along the line, Lucent's management realized how much money people were making off these patent things, and decided to make a big splash demanding that everyone using MP3 technology shouldn't just be paying Fraunhofer, but Lucent as well. Lucent went after Microsoft, but if it wins this suit (and the subsequent appeals), you can bet that just about everyone else who uses MP3 technology will be subject to similar claims as well -- perhaps making MP3 technology a lot more expensive. About the only good thing in the ruling is that the award of $1.5 billion is that it's less than the $4.6 billion Alcatel-Lucent has mentioned in the past. Microsoft will obviously appeal, and it will take some time to get this all sorted out -- but it seems like MP3 technology may be getting a bit more expensive thanks to patents. In the meantime, if all of this sounds familiar, perhaps that's because it mirrors the situation with JPEG patents, where companies suddenly showed up well after the standard was popular to claim patent rights.
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