They are supposed to come to your site and destroy the documents under your supervision. Both parties have to screw up for this to happen. (And how mobile are you if you drive from Seattle to Dallas?)
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070712203511684
Seattle loan documents scattered across Dallas
Thursday, July 12 2007 @ 08:35 PM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches
BELLEVUE, Wash. - Along a busy street in Dallas, Texas a mobile shredding truck recently lost some of its load.
Among the scattered materials were unshredded, easy-to-read loan documents that could be traced back to the Seattle and Bellevue areas.
Source - KING5.com
Another interesting business decision?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070712203643710
AU: Alert for Visa card security
Thursday, July 12 2007 @ 08:36 PM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches
HUNDREDS of Tasmanian Visa card holders have been told to cut up their cards after a security breach in Sweden.
Computer tapes containing card holders' details nationwide were among items in a car stolen from a Swedish data processing company in May.
Many Australian financial institutions are affected, but only some are notifying customers.
Source - news.com.au
This is only fair... Isn't it?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070712/101538.shtml
Sony BMG Hits Rootkit Providers With Lawsuit
from the misapportioned-blame dept
Sony BMG settled both the class-action lawsuit against it and with the FTC, after it distributed rootkits that opened up security holes on consumers' PCs in the copy protection it used on its CDs. Now the company's filed a suit of its own against Amergence, formerly known as SunnComm, and its MediaMax unit, which supplied one of the pieces of copy-protection software in question. The lawsuit alleges Amergence/SunnComm supplied Sony BMG with faulty software -- which, all things considered, seems true. But the bigger issue here is that Sony BMG is implying that none of this mess is its fault, when it's the one that felt the need to implement the DRM in the first place. As we've pointed out plenty of times, DRM doesn't stop piracy, it just annoys legitimate customers. The SunnComm and XCP copy-protection that Sony BMG implemented on its CDs didn't stop piracy, and it wouldn't have, even if it hadn't been "faulty", as the suit alleges. It created a huge PR mess for the company, and it's cost them a fair bit of money to clean things up. Getting $12 million from Amergence won't change the fact that deciding to put the DRM on its CDs was a bonehead move that never would have delivered any real benefits.
Oops is not a legal term.
Spam filter costs lawyers their day in court
Attempt to keep porn out of the workplace caused law firm to miss important notice
By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service July 12, 2007
The trouble at Franklin D. Azar & Associates began with pornographic spam.
Last May, the Aurora, Colo., law firm was being bombarded with offensive messages, and enough of it was seeping through the company's spam filters that employees complained to management. IT administrator Kevin Rea was told to do something.
What happened next, as detailed in federal court filings, shows how the fight against spammers can backfire. Spammers have been using increasingly sophisticated techniques to evade filters, so that over the past few years and despite predictions to the contrary, unsolicited e-mail continues to plague businesses worldwide.
On the morning of May 21, Rea dialed up the spam settings on the Barracuda Spam Firewall 200 used by Azar & Associates to block unwanted mail. The changes made it harder for spam to land on the desktops of company employees, but they also had one unforeseen consequence: The Barracuda Networks appliance began blocking e-mail from the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, including a notice advising company lawyers of a May 30 hearing in a civil lawsuit.
Azar & Associates lawyers blew their court date, and this week, the judge overseeing the matter ordered the company to pay attorney fees and expenses incurred by the lawyers who showed up representing the other side of the case. Rea did not return a call seeking comment on the matter.
... "You can be notified other ways, but by and large the business of law is carried on electronically, at least in the federal courts," Carelli said.
Putting the federal courts, which use the uscourts.gov domain, on a "whitelist" of approved senders is one way to avoid problems receiving e-mail.
In fact, the Colorado federal court judge in the Azar & Associates case criticized the law firm for not whitelisting his court's domain name. [Judges got tech chops! Bob] "It would have been a very simple task to whitelist the... [domain] to insure that such e-mails within this domain would always be received."
The judge's order will probably end up costing Azar & Associates several thousand dollars, said Venkat Balasubramani, principal of Balasubramani Law, who has blogged about the issue.
... He avoids whitelists because they must be manually maintained, and there is the possibility for human error. But Fenwick & West IT staff uses several mail filtering systems, each considered to have a low frequency of error, and they've also programmed their filters to allow more spam than other businesses because of concern over this issue.
Perhaps a local group of religious fanatics? Shouldn't DHS get involved?
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_6336193
Threats by religious group spark probe at CU-Boulder
By The Denver Post Article Last Updated: 07/10/2007 03:09:28 AM MDT
University of Colorado police are investigating a series of threatening messages and documents e-mailed to and slipped under the door of evolutionary biology labs on the Boulder campus.
The messages included the name of a religious-themed group and addressed the debate between evolution and creationism, CU police Cmdr. Brad Wiesley said. Wiesley would not identify the group named because police are still investigating.
Why don't you just say, “Because we don't want to...”
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070712102206878
UK: Experian rejects ID theft notification proposal
Thursday, July 12 2007 @ 10:22 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches
Credit rating giant Experian has rejected the notion of automatically informing UK citizens when their ID details may have been hijacked.
Experian’s hardline stance came at a conference on “Big Brother Britain” in London today, where a number of speakers said that more severe penalties and obligations should be imposed on companies to ensure data individuals' privacy concerns are taken seriously.
.... [Gillian Key-Vice, Experience’s director of regulatory affairs] said that while she recognised why people might “think it’s a good idea”, such a scheme could cause “unnecessary concern” amongst individuals where a breach has already been “managed”.
Source - The Register
Don't confuse me with facts!
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070712-research-optimal-copyright-term-is-14-years.html
Researcher: Optimal copyright term is 14 years
By Nate Anderson | Published: July 12, 2007 - 01:36PM CT
It's easy enough to find out how long copyrights last, but much harder to decide how long they should last—but that didn't stop Cambridge University PhD candidate Rufus Pollock from using economics formulas to answer the question. In a newly-released paper, Pollock pegs the "optimal level for copyright" at only 14 years.
Pollock's work is based on the promise that the optimal level of copyright drops as the costs of producing creative work go down. As it has grown simpler to print books, record music, and edit films using new digital tools, the production and reproduction costs for creative work in have dropped substantially, but actual copyright law has only increased.
According to Pollock's calculations (and his paper [PDF] is full of calculations), this is exactly the opposite result that one would expect from a rational copyright system. Of course, there's no guarantee that copyright law has anything to do with rationality; as Pollock puts it, "the level of protection is not usually determined by a benevolent and rational policy-maker but rather by lobbying." The predictable result has been a steady increase in the period of copyright protection during the twentieth century.
... Pollock has been an advocate for restricted copyright terms and stronger public domain for years; we earlier spotlighted a brief essay of his on the "Value of the Public Domain" that is well worth a read.
An insignificant (but amusing) first.
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9743930-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
First YouTube video cited in court opinion
Posted by Declan McCullagh July 12, 2007 10:52 PM PDT
Terence Evans this week became the first judge in the United States to cite a YouTube video in a written opinion.
... As background, Evans included a description of what baseball fans remember as Brett's famous Pine Tar Incident in a 1983 game against the New York Yankees over whether the bat was legal to be used. Brett's home run was nullified by an umpire, the Yankees won, but on appeal to the American League his team got a second try and eventually beat the Yankees 5-4.
Evans wrote: "Baseball, like our legal system, has appellate review...It ended after 12 minutes when Royals' closer Dan Quisenberry shut the door on the Yankees in their half of the ninth to seal the win. The whole colorful episode is preserved, in all its glory, on YouTube, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Cu1WXylkto (last visited June 6, 2007). See also Retrosheet Boxscore, Kansas City Royals 5, New York Yankees 4, at http://ww w.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1983/B07240NYA1983.htm (last visited June 6, 2007)."
The YouTube video, by the way, has been taken down since the court visited it last week. A note on the site says: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by MLB Advanced Media." (A search of a legal database on Thursday turned up some cases mentioning YouTube and copyright decisions involving the company, but no published opinions citing a specific YouTube.com video.)
... Evans, by the way, has a habit of writing amusing opinions. Another included this footnote: "The trial transcript quotes Ms. Hayden as saying Murphy called her a snitch bitch 'hoe.' A 'hoe,' of course, is a tool used for weeding and gardening. We think the court reporter, unfamiliar with rap music (perhaps thankfully so), misunderstood Hayden's response. We have taken the liberty of changing 'hoe' to 'ho,' a staple of rap music vernacular as, for example, when Ludacris raps 'You doin' ho activities with ho tendencies."
Good technology, bad technology
http://www.marshfieldnewsherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070712/MNH/70712108/1980
Discovery of body highlights growing use of cell phone technology
Associated Press July 12, 2007
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The use of cell phone tracking to find a body believed to be that of a missing college student in rural Wisconsin highlights an increasingly important law enforcement tool.
... “The average citizen is not aware that they are carrying a location-tracking device in their pocket,” said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that works to preserve privacy rights.
Without providing specifics, Madison police say cell phone technology is what prompted authorities to search a 3-square mile rural area 10 miles south of Madison on Monday where they discovered the body of Kelly Nolan, 22.
The technology allowed investigators to track Nolan’s movements after she vanished early June 23 after a night out in downtown Madison. Police Chief Noble Wray said numerous other locations, most of them in the city, were also searched. Police won’t say whether they recovered her phone at the scene.
... When they are turned on, cell phones constantly emit locator signals called pings so their companies know to which towers to route phone calls, Bankston said.
Investigators can obtain logs from wireless companies containing such data to track people’s movements, he said. In urban settings with many towers, the location can be narrowed down greatly — to within blocks. In more rural settings with fewer towers, a more general location can be established.
Most new phones also contain Global Positioning System chips that communicate with satellites, allowing authorities to pinpoint a precise location of the handset. The chips are one way companies can comply with federal rules designed to give emergency dispatchers more information on the location of cell phone callers.
... He said the technology is appropriately used to find missing people or in emergency situations but that federal authorities may be secretly expanding its use to track many other citizens.
“Do you have control over whether someone knows about where you are? It appears, in the current technological landscape, the answer is no,” he said. “If you carry a cell phone, it’s possible that somebody may monitor your location without your knowledge or consent.”
Sure to be a real page-turner...
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/015437.html
July 12, 2007
IT Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Tool-kit: Planning for the Next Disaster
"A product of [National Association of State Chief Information Officers] NASCIO's Disaster Recovery Working Group, this tool-kit is designed to assist state CIOs and their staff in IT disaster recovery and business continuity planning. It is an updated and expanded version of business continuity and disaster preparedness checklists utilized for a brainstorming exercise at the “CIO-CLC Business Continuity/ Disaster Recovery Forum” at NASCIO’s 2006 Midyear Conference."
The “e-” equivalent (e-quivalent?) of looking in windows.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201001050
Ohio Man Gets 25 Years For Hacking Into Webcams, Recording Minors
A U.S. Attorney calls the Dayton man, who also distributed some of the recordings, a 'high-tech video voyeur.'
By Sharon Gaudin InformationWeek July 12, 2007 12:40 PM
An Ohio man was sentenced to 25 years in prison for hacking into minors' Webcams and secretly watching and recording them in their homes.
Mark Wayne Miller, 47, of Dayton, had pled guilty in January 2006 to one count of computer intrusion, as well as to one count of sexual exploitation of children relating to his successful efforts to persuade under-age girls to engage in sexually explicit conduct for him in front of their Webcams. At the time of his arrest, Miller was on probation with the state of Ohio and was a registered sex offender.
The FBI reported that Miller confirmed in court that he developed sexual relationships with minor-aged girls over the Internet, usually in online chat rooms. Tricking the girls with a fictitious name and a photo of an unknown young male, Miller said he used the "chats" to persuade the girls to engage in sexually explicit conduct in front of active Webcams.
In other cases, he hacked into the girls' computers to secretly intercept, watch, and record live Webcam footage of them. He distributed some of the recorded Webcam footage to others.
"Miller was a high-tech video voyeur," said U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio Gregory G. Lockhart in a statement. "He would 'phish' for the minors' passwords to a popular Internet portal, then secretly gain access to the minors' Webcam sessions."
The FBI reported that Miller's scheme was exposed when one of the girls sent a love letter to the fictitious boy Miller had made up, but she sent it to Miller's former workplace. His former employer read the letter and then found "additional evidence relating to child pornography while cleaning out Miller's work area." The employer then contacted some of the minors, and then contacted local law enforcement. After that, the FBI was called into the case.
Report from the GPL “License War”
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/13/011209&from=rss
Jeremy Allison Talks Samba and GPLv3
Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday July 12, @10:03PM from the early-adopters dept.
GNU is Not Unix Software Windows Linux
dmarti writes "The software that enables Linux to act as a Windows file and print server is adopting the Free Software Foundation's new license. What will be the impact on users, distributors, and appliance vendors? Samba maintainer Jeremy Allison answers, in a podcast interview."
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