For those of you who are concentrating all your security resources on laptops...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070901075155612

Hopkins reports theft of data

Saturday, September 01 2007 @ 07:51 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

A desktop computer containing the personal information of 5,783 patients was stolen from Johns Hopkins Hospital in mid-July, and the hospital waited more than five weeks to inform the patients or their families of the theft.

The computer, taken from an "administrative work area" in a building on Johns Hopkins' main campus the night of July 15, contained patients' names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, medical histories and other personal information, according to Hopkins officials. Another computer and a projector were also stolen.

[“Like, we seen dese guys like leaving wid a like shoppin' cart fulla like computers and tings, but we was like 'so what?' Know wat I mean?” Bob]

Source - Baltimore Sun

[From the article:

In the latest incident, recordings from video surveillance cameras led authorities to issue criminal summonses for a Hopkins employee and an employee of an on-site vendor, Hopkins spokesman Gary Stephenson said yesterday when contacted by The Sun. He didn't identify the two workers.

Officials said the computer, which was attached to a desk with a steel cable, was password-protected, but the data it contained were not encrypted or password-protected.

... The hospital filed a report with police two weeks after the theft but waited until Aug. 24 to begin sending letters to patients to inform them that their personal information was missing.

Stephenson said Hopkins did not make a public announcement and delayed contacting patients in part because public disclosure "might have sabotaged the effort" [“We thought that the thieves might not have known they stole our computers...” Bob] to recover the computer. He said it also took time to reconstruct the list of patients in the missing database, [“We had no idea what was on that computer...” Bob] prepare notification letters and arrange help for anyone affected.

“This should help everyone understand our security policy”

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070901175952198

(follow-up) Man Who Reported Data Theft Claims Wrongful Termination by Providence Health

Saturday, September 01 2007 @ 05:59 PM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

The man whose car theft led to the biggest data breach in Oregon history is suing Providence Health System for wrongful termination.

In a lawsuit filed Aug. 28 in Multnomah County Circuit Court, Steven Shields claims the health-care giant fired him because he reported the theft to the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office.

Source - wweek.com

A social web site for stalkers? Or has the availability of surveillance tools made us too curious?

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070901075012622

At Rapleaf, your personals are public

Saturday, September 01 2007 @ 07:50 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Internet & Computers

In the cozy Facebook social network, it's easy to have a sense of privacy among friends and business acquaintances.

But sites like Rapleaf will quickly jar you awake: Everything you say or do on a social network could be fair game to sell to marketers.

Rapleaf, based in San Francisco, is building a business on that premise. The privately held start-up, whose investors include Facebook-backer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, runs two consumer Web sites: Rapleaf.com, a people search engine that lets you retrieve the name, age and social-network affiliations of anyone, as long as you have his or her e-mail address; and Upscoop.com, a similar site to discover, en masse, which social networks to which the people in your contact list belong. To use Upscoop, you must first give the site the username and password of your e-mail account [and your SSAN, a blood sample, etc. No privacy concerns here! Bob] at Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL.

Source - C|net

Criminals need to map the human gnome too?

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/08/storm_worm_dwarfs_worlds_top_s_1.html

Storm Worm Dwarfs World's Top Supercomputers

The network of compromised Microsoft Windows computers under the thumb of the criminals who control the Storm Worm has grown so huge that it now has more raw distributed computing power than all of the world's top supercomputers, security experts say.

Estimates on the number of machines infected by Storm range from one million to 10 million, depending upon which security sources you believe. But hardly anyone would argue that many thousands of new PCs are being stricken by the worm each day, largely because the worm authors are continuously changing their tactics to trick people into installing it.

... Lawrence Baldwin, chief forensics officer for myNetWatchman.com and a researcher who closely monitors the spread of the Storm worm, said the sheer power of the Storm network is "scary."

"People aren't respecting the threat this thing represents," Baldwin said. "But when you pit it against the biggest military and government supercomputing resources, they're like a speck on the back of a fly compared to the power that's under the control of this one criminal group."

Baldwin said the raw power of the Storm botnet might be taken more seriously if it were more often used to take out large swaths of the Internet, or in attempting to crack some uber-complex type of encryption key used to secure electronic commerce transactions. "I'm sure there are other types of computationally intensive tasks that could be accomplished with a couple of millions of computers that would help the miscreants."

Merging (Converging) TV into the Internet

http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/59082.html

Turn On the New Tube

By Jake Coyle AP 09/02/07 4:00 AM PT

New sites including Veoh, Joost and Babelgum are going in a different direction than the home-made entertainment that's become YouTube's staple. They're ad-supported and transmit video with peer-to-peer technology, and they seek to move beyond YouTube by improving video quality, attracting professionally produced content and expanding the viewing experience -- in other words, by being more like TV.

If your organization is not driving ideas to implementation, it must be the manager's fault – and CEOs are the top managers of the organization. (The first comment on this article is titled: 97% of Innovators Dissastisfied with CEOs)

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/01/1223233&from=rss

54% of CEOs Dissatisfied With Innovation

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday September 01, @11:22AM from the bang-for-the-buck dept. Businesses The Almighty Buck Technology

athloi writes "Invention is new and clever; innovation is a process that takes knowledge and uses it to get a payback. Invention without a financial return is just an expense. Ideas are really the sexy part of innovation and there's rarely a shortage of them. If you look at the biggest problems around innovation, rarely does a lack of ideas come up as one of the top obstacles; instead, it's things like a risk-averse culture, overly lengthy development times and lack of coordination within the company. Not enough ideas, on the other hand, is an obstacle for only 17 percent. At the end of the day all that creativity and all those ideas have to show on the bottom line. The goal of innovation is to make or save money, and IT should never lose sight of that central fact."

Lots of statistics...

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/08-30-2007/0004654332&EDATE=

New Study Shows Americans' Blogging Behaviour

CHICAGO, Aug. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a recent Synovate/Marketing Daily survey, 8 out of 10 Americans know what a blog is and almost half have visited blogs.

The study, conducted online with 1,000 adults in the US using Synovate eNation from July 30 to August 1, shows that blogging has entered the mainstream.

"Eight percent of Americans currently have their own blog," said Tom Mularz, senior vice president at Synovate. "This is surprising given that a few years ago hardly anyone knew what a blog was."

For more information on Synovate visit http://www.synovate.com.