What does this suggest? A few out-of-control employees? Management that doesn't notice? This would seem to be an extremely risky thing to do... or am I wrong?

http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9759184-7.html

AT&T admits it censored other bands

Posted by Marguerite Reardon August 13, 2007 3:44 PM PDT

It looks like Pearl Jam isn't the only band that has had its politically charged comments bleeped from concerts streamed from AT&T's Blue Room Web site.

AT&T issued a statement on Friday admitting that this kind of thing has happened before. And the company once again apologized.

... Exactly how many performances have been edited is unknown. AT&T hasn't specified. Nor has it said what exactly it's doing to ensure that this won't happen again.

... AT&T originally said that it only edits Blue Room Webcasts for profanity since the site is available to all age groups. But a group calling itself the Future of Music Coalition, counted 20 instances of curse words being used during the Pearl Jam Webcast that were not censored by the content monitor.

"It's clear AT&T has not made a mistake. They or the companies they've hired to monitor Webcasts have engaged in a clear and consistent pattern of silencing free speech," Jenny Toomey, executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, said in a statement.

... And to be honest, I can't see any business-related reason for doing such a thing. [Me too, neither. Bob]

Resources for e-law experts?

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/015714.html

August 13, 2007

ABA Launches New Consumer E-Commerce Site

"Safeselling.org offers a resource for business people launching ecommerce enterprises and for businesses venturing into online sales. First-time entrepreneurs and established small to medium-sized business expanding their horizons should find helpful information on this site about selling goods and services online...Safeselling.org is a companion to safeshopping.org, an earlier project of the Cyberspace Law Committee of the American Bar Association’s Section of Business Law, which answers questions for consumers about shopping on the web."

Another suggestion that a true military attack would be lots (orders of magnitude?) worse...

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/stonias-lesson-.html

Estonia's lesson for "cyberwar" fighters: Learn digital crowd control

By John Borland EmailAugust 10, 2007 | 8:44:05 AM Categories: CCC, Cybarmageddon!

Three months after May's "information warfare" attacks on Estonia, computer security experts continue to scrutinize the event for clues to the future of digital conflicts.

Israeli security expert Gadi Evron, who helped the Estonians with their response, argued here at Chaos Communication Camp, following similar speeches at other recent gatherings, that the attacks were far more akin to a "cyber-riot" than to actual warfare.

The May events followed the Estonian decision to dismantle and move a symbolically significant Russian war memorial in their capital city of Tallinn (Estonia was an unwilling part of the USSR from the end of World War II to the Soviet dissolution). Riots of the local Russian-speaking population resulted, and calls for retaliation quickly spread to Russian blogs.

Many of the early attacks that subsequently overwhelmed Estonia's Web servers, banks, and government email systems were rudimentary, with instructions widely posted on these blogs telling people how to send manual pings to the country's servers. But more sophisticated tools soon were used, with botnets flooding Estonian addresses with traffic anywhere from 100 to 1000 times ordinary levels.

The Estonians, and much of the world press, initially characterized this as the first true information war. Fingers were pointed towards the Russian government, largely on the basis of IP addresses (probably spoofed) traced to government facilities. For their part, Russian officials hotly denied any involvement.

Evron doesn't downplay the seriousness of the situation – it effectively hamstrung facilities for days in a country far more deeply reliant on Internet infrastructure than is the United States. But he points to the way activity and action spread through the blog community as evidence that this was something very different than a conventional military operation.

"Fighting is not necessarily warfare," he says. "The whole idea of the blogosphere, of online mob psychology, is taking psychological warfare and putting it on the offensive."

Defenders against this kind of attack, which spreads meme-like through an easily inflamed, but not necessarily coordinated online community, need to think more in terms of policing metaphors than military, he says. Crowds without centers need to be controlled and subdued, rather than attacked. Damage must be mitigated, with a focus on defense rather than offense.

So who was ultimately behind the attacks? Evron says portions of the attacks looked suspiciously like there was some central coordination happening; but it's as yet impossible to trace anything back to the government.

More important is the lesson that in future events, cyber-conflicts may best resemble guerrilla battles, or even spontaneous riots, in which the general opponents are known, but the immediate attackers are not.

As for Americans still trying to adapt to asymmetric warfare tactics in Iraq, these lessons may take time to sink in. But it seems certain that Estonia will remain a case study for years to come.

Perhaps we need more annotation (that was irony, except in New Jersey)

http://techdirt.com/articles/20070813/100307.shtml

Inadvertent Online Resumes Continue To Cause Some Problems

from the broken-off dept

It's pretty common for people to do Google background checks on prospective employees (or potential dates) these days, so it's a little surprising to see people still put all sorts of information that could harm their job prospects online. A substitute judge in Las Vegas lost his position last week, after some people noticed that his MySpace profile listed his personal interests as, among other things, "Breaking my foot off in a prosecutor's ass ... and improving my ability to break my foot off in a prosecutor's ass." A local district attorney alleged that this displayed a bias against prosecutors, and asked that the judge be recused from his criminal cases, but court administrators went a step further and decided not to use his services any more. The judge, or now ex-judge, says that, basically, he was trying to be funny, and that the overstatement on his page was obvious. That may be the case, but given his position -- and his political ambitions -- it's hard to imagine that he couldn't foresee any problems from putting the comments up online.

Interesting report title. These suggestions will likely be resisted.

http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1397,2170461,00.asp

Zen IT for Demanding Employees

August 13, 2007 By Deborah Perelman, eWEEK

What do mainframes and networks have in common? Centralized control, and these command and control structures have long assured IT professionals that the technology game is played on their terms.

Yet, in the age of the consumerization of technology, the effectiveness of centralized IT control has slipped. In fact, a report released by the Yankee Group Research Aug. 6, a Boston connectivity research firm, found that 50 percent of employees felt that their personal technology is more advanced than workplace technology.

Furthermore, "Zen and the Art of Rogue Employee Management" argues, banning employees from using consumer technology at work creates an endless game of whack-a-mole; and the only way to win is to manage both the technology and the insistent employee.

Consumerization of technology is one of the five things—including content, client, connectivity and collaboration—that the Yankee Group argues will be a nightmare for IT departments, as they create maintenance and support problems that easily overwhelm resources. IT can fight this tooth and nail, or it can concede and adopt a Zen-like approach which will give control to users through a cooperative care model, reduce IT's burden, and improve internal customer satisfaction.

... "As ubiquitous connectivity takes hold, consumers are driving more innovation and technology trends in the enterprise," said Holbrook.

Perhaps I could combine this with a research project in my Statistics class?

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/13/2151255&from=rss

Google's $10 Local Search Play

Posted by kdawson on Monday August 13, @09:23PM from the cheap-feet-on-the-street dept. Google

thefickler writes "Google has come come up with a novel way to boost the information it has about local businesses. As part of its Business Referral Representative program, Google is offering individuals up to $10 to visit local businesses and tell them about Google Maps and Google AdWords, collect information (such as hours of operation and types of payment accepted), and take digital photos of the business. Reaction to the program has been mixed."