Perhaps strategy is not their strong point?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070401080751164
Prison staff wins in case of information breach
Sunday, April 01 2007 @ 08:07 AM CDT - Contributed by: PrivacyNews - Breaches
A U.S. district judge ruled in favor of a group of prison employees who were the victims of a security breach when a file with their personal information -- home addresses, Social Security numbers -- were made accessible to prisoners in a work program.
The court ruling said "prison officials went to great lengths to thwart the plaintiffs' efforts to discover the extent of the security breach" by claiming the file was marked as sensitive and by destroying the folder in question. [Not the best legal strategy? Bob]
According to their lawyer, Doug McSwain, 99 guards and employees of Federal Medical Center on Leestown Road in Lexington filed the lawsuit in 2003. Judge Jennifer B. Coffman ruled Friday that the plaintiffs be paid $1,000 or the amount of damages, and the cost of prosecuting the lawsuit.
Source - Kentucky.com
Were the videos available on the Internet?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070401084801660
Privacy violated: Restroom cameras spied on workers
Sunday, April 01 2007 @ 08:48 AM CDT - Contributed by: PrivacyNews - Workplace Privacy
FAIR LAWN – Employees of a Route 208 office building were shaken Friday after learning that hidden restroom cameras may have been capturing their private moments for at least a year.
One of the workers found the miniature spy cams, which were disguised as smoke detectors, in restrooms shared by the building's tenants, including Maxell, All American Collectibles and the New Jersey State Office of Taxation, said Fair Lawn Police Sgt. Michael Uttel.
Source - NorthJersey.com (Props, Flying Hamster)
No doubt the definitive argument...
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070401080217573
Should national ID cards be required? (opinion)
Sunday, April 01 2007 @ 08:02 AM CDT - Contributed by: PrivacyNews - Fed. Govt.
The Kansas City Star published pro and con op-ed pieces today on the question, "Should national ID cards be required?"
YES - The federal government has the power to mandate identification, which would improve security, and reduce illegal immigration and identity theft. More: Henry Mark Holzer, Brooklyn Law School
NO - Before we become tagged like common criminals, we must be able to take a principled stand against one of the building blocks of modern police states. More: Eric Peters, The Army Times
Next, we plan to track Republicans! (Just until we find a cure.)
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070401121500227
HIV patient names to be tracked in all 50 states by year's end
Sunday, April 01 2007 @ 12:15 PM CDT - Contributed by: Lyger - Medical Privacy
The names of people infected with HIV will be tracked in all 50 states by the end of 2007, marking a victory for federal health officials and a quiet defeat for AIDS advocates who wanted to keep patients' names out of state databases.
Vermont, Maryland and Hawaii, the last states not tracking the names of HIV-positive people, are quickly moving toward adopting names-based surveillance. Eight other states and Washington, D.C., began collecting the names of HIV patients last year, and Massachusetts switched in January.
Source - International Herald Tribune
So who is in charge? (Is this a hole in the DMCA?)
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070323-viacom-dmca-driftnet-whos-driving-this-thing.html
Viacom DMCA driftnet: who’s driving this thing?
By Nate Anderson | Published: March 23, 2007 - 09:27AM CT
The saga of the Stephen Colbert parody video "Falsiness" gets stranger today. After the EFF filed suit against Viacom in federal court for issuing a YouTube takedown notice for a clip that it did not own, Viacom retorted that it had—probably—done no such thing.
In a letter, a copy of which was sent to Ars Technica, Viacom says that it has looked through its records and can find no evidence that it issued a takedown notice for the clip in question. "We maintain careful records of all our takedown notices, so any takedown notice most likely did not come from us," writes Viacom's executive vice president Michael Fricklas.
EFF attorney Jason Schultz tells Ars that the offending clip was pulled from YouTube with the notice that it was "no longer available due to a copyright claim by Viacom International." "So from our perspective, this is what happened until we are shown evidence otherwise," he says.
Late yesterday, the EFF also posted a screenshot from YouTube (PDF) that shows the copyright notice. Unfortunately, it's difficult to tell from the screenshot exactly what clip is referenced, and YouTube is currently displaying the video without problems.
But other evidence comes in the form of an email from copyright enforcement company BayTSP. The company was responding to a complaint about the takedown notice from Brave New Films, which created the video, and it admitted that "there were isolated errors" owing to the "more than 100,000 unauthorized clips that needed to be removed from the site." They also directed follow-up questions to the e-mail address VIACOM@baytsp.com.
Finally, the EFF claims that a YouTube lawyer verbally confirmed that the complaint came from Viacom. To the EFF, the entire episode highlights a serious problem: "with Viacom sending more than 160,000 DMCA takedown notices, it may not even be aware which videos it told YouTube to remove. If that's right, then Viacom will inevitably end up censoring some perfectly legitimate videos—surely, the MoveOn/Brave New Films video is not the only example of a fair use that got caught in Viacom's driftnet."
Viacom, for its part, said in the letter that it had "no problem" with the clip. The company also complained that they had not been contacted directly before the court filing, saying that this would have been "less wasteful of scarce judicial resources."
Given that the EFF is sticking by its original claims, those judicial resources may be needed to decide the case after all.
Consider this in light of the 1984 Obama ad... Perhaps we should collect all political advertising under the XXX extension?
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070402TDY02009.htm
Net election broadcasts may break law
The Yomiuri Shimbun
The postings on the Internet of campaign broadcasts and videos of candidates making street speeches in the Tokyo gubernatorial election, may violate the Public Offices Election Law, local election officials have pointed out.
The law sets rules for disclosing images related to election campaigns, but there are no stipulations covering the unauthorized "broadcasting" of campaign speeches on the Internet.
... Some broadcasts in which candidates made notorious remarks were posted by multiple users after first being aired on March 25. Some were posted with accompanying music or animation. These videos were viewed hundreds of thousands of times by users.
... The problem is that it is difficult to know who such posted images and their reasons for doing so. The officials say it is impossible to determine if the videos are illegal until they can confirm whether certain candidates, or their supporters, posted the material as part of their election campaign.
A tool for your personal library? For e-Discovery?
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/02/0525221&from=rss
Linux and OSS to Aid the Library of Congress
Posted by Zonk on Monday April 02, @04:23AM from the go-little-patriotic-penguin-go dept.
flakeman2 writes with a link to Linux.com article about Linux's new role at the Library of Congress. The national archive of books is looking to begin an ambitious digitization project, aimed at getting some rare and crumbling documents into the public record online. These will include "Civil War and genealogical documents, technical and artistic works concerning photography, scores of books, and the 850 titles written, printed, edited, or published by Benjamin Franklin. According to Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, which developed the digitizing technology, open source software will play an 'absolutely critical' role in getting the job done. The main component is Scribe, a combination of hardware and free software. 'Scribe is a book-scanning system that takes high-quality images of books and then does a set of manipulations, gets them in optical character recognition and compressed, so you can get beautiful, printable versions of the book that are also searchable,' says Kahle."
Tools & Techniques Pushing surveillance to the masses (If everyone does it, it can't be a problem, right?) I can't wait for the “Revise” bit so I can create my own evidence!
tapefailure Record Review Revise
tapefailure lets you record your users' browsing sessions and play them back, just like a tape, as well as view numerous useful statistics about your users.
Ditto?
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=drive_to_discover&id=5173310
New Wrinkle In Face Recognition Technology
Face Matching Index By Richard Hart
Apr. 1 - There is a new wrinkle in face recognition. Homeland Security's interest in the technology is driving spin-offs for business -- and even personal use. Richard Hart reports how banks are using it to identify customers the moment they walk in the door.
... Stephen Russell's company 3VR thinks computers are one answer, at least for faces. Computer vision is commonplace, but face matching is a different story. It can bring a computer to its knees. So Russell devised a way to index faces in much the same way Yahoo or Google indexes words -- as simulated here.
... That means banks, casinos, retailers are sharing faces over the Internet to intercept a fraud suspect the moment he walks in the door.
... Terasnaps is one site that will memorize the faces of your friends and family. Pick two people, and it returns all the pictures in which they appear together.
It even can link you with someone you've never met, by matching photos in which your friends have been together. Degrees of separation that could link you all the way to the White House.
... Of course, privacy advocates find all of this pretty scary. 3VR argues that computer vision makes privacy easier to control, since it can keep a trail of who watched a video and when, unlike the old-fashioned VCR.
Simple solution, simply drop the simple teachers
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=445979&in_page_id=1770
Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims
By LAURA CLARK Last updated at 11:58am on 2nd April 2007
Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Governmentbacked study has revealed.
... There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades - where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem - because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.
No comments:
Post a Comment