Blame the machine! It should have known what you should have done and not allowed you to do what you did! (See why top management wants to eliminate all employees?)
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20071004071042801
Mass. accidentally sends out disks with personal information
Thursday, October 04 2007 @ 07:10 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches
State regulators inadvertently distributed disks containing personal data, including Social Security numbers, of 450,000 licensed professionals in the state.
The problem occurred when the state began using new software to distribute the names and addresses of professionals licensed by the Division of Professional Licensure and the Division of Health Professions Licensure.
... The new software, which the state began using on Sept. 11, failed to delete the Social Security numbers of those on the lists -- including engineers, nursing home administrators, certified public accountants and other professionals -- when transferring the information to disks.
When a staff member discovered the error, officials said they immediately contacted all those who had been sent the disks, requesting the disks not be used and be returned immediately.
Of the 28 disks mailed out, all but two have been recovered.
Source - Boston Globe
Soon the ads will say such encouraging things as, “Hey! Old fart! Wanna buy some Depends?”
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20071003133806523
Camera sums up your life for marketers
Wednesday, October 03 2007 @ 01:38 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Businesses & Privacy
Here's something for you privacy advocates: a security camera that determines your age, gender and, possibly one day, your social class.
It's called FieldAnalyst and it's from NEC. The system homes in on faces of people who pass by the video camera. It then rapidly compares the image against samples in a database. It then spits out what it believes is your approximate age is and your gender.
Source - C|net (blog)
Accidental my foot! “Dis vas a varnung to Aaanold! Act more Republican, or else!”
http://techdirt.com/articles/20071004/010003.shtml
Feds Accidentally Turn Off California Gov't Websites
from the sorry-about-that dept
Every once in a while you hear stories of companies having problems with their domain names, often because someone forgot to re-register the domain name or possibly because of a routing problem. However, you don't really expect that to happen to a government website. However, after a California county agency had its gov't website hacked, the feds back in Washington DC accidentally turned off all of the ca.gov domain, causing quite a bit of confusion among California state gov't employees. It gets even better. Apparently, it happened around noon Pacific Time which is 3pm back on the east coast. Yet, as the article notes: "Unfortunately that was about 3 in the afternoon and folks back East were already going home, so it took us some time to get hold of the right people in the General Service Administration to get this address reinstated." Sure, I can understand time zone differences... but 3pm isn't exactly quitting time. Must be great to be a government employee, huh? Shut down an entire state government's email and web domains without realizing it... and head out the door by 3pm.
Will this be as big as I think?
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2191625,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594
Court Rules Against Target in Web Site Accessibility Lawsuits
By Evan Schuman, Ziff Davis Internet October 3, 2007
A judge rules that the retailer needs to stand trial for having a Web site that is insufficiently accessible.
When a federal court judge issued rulings Oct. 2 that the $60 billion retailer Target needed to stand trial on charges that its Web site is not sufficiently accessible to visually-impaired shoppers, it sent a strong signal to much of the e-commerce space.
Oh Margaret Thatcher, what hast thou wrought...
Schools must warn of Gore climate film bias
Last updated at 17:36pm on 3rd October 2007
Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth has been called unfit for schools because it is politically biased and contains serious scientific inaccuracies and 'sentimental mush'.
Schools will have to issue a warning before they show pupils Al Gore's controversial film about global warming, a judge indicated yesterday.
The move follows a High Court action by a father who accused the Government of 'brainwashing' children with propaganda by showing it in the classroom.
Stewart Dimmock said the former U.S. Vice-President's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, is unfit for schools because it is politically biased and contains serious scientific inaccuracies and 'sentimental mush'.
Dribs and drabs from the RIAA trial...
Woman brings computer to piracy case
Associated Press October 4, 2007
... Before Thomas' demonstration, Doug Jacobson, an expert testifying for the record companies, said songs on one of Thomas' computer drives were copied at a pace so fast it suggested piracy. Many appeared just 15 seconds apart, which Jacobson said was faster than if she'd copied CDs she owned onto the computer.
But each song Thomas copied in court, over the objection of record company lawyer Richard Gabriel, took less than 10 seconds to land on the computer.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071002-music-industry-exec-p2p-litigation-is-a-money-pit.html
RIAA anti-P2P campaign a real money pit, according to testimony
By Eric Bangeman | Published: October 02, 2007 - 11:40PM CT
Duluth, Minnesota — During an occasionally testy cross examination, a Sony executive said what many observers have suspected for a long time. The RIAA's four-year-old lawsuit campaign is costing the music industry millions of dollars and is a big money-loser for the record labels.
Another wise and just court?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20071003/002803.shtml
Court Slaps Down Software And Business Model Patents
from the a-sense-of-sanity-returning-to-patents? dept
It seems like barely a week goes by without another good story of the courts reigning in the worst abuses of the patent system. While patent reform issues languish in Congress, the courts are doing an excellent job correcting a lot of patent abuses. Just as the Supreme Court is looking at yet another patent case, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) seems to be putting some limits on business model and software patents. This is somewhat amusing, as it was a CAFC decision about a decade ago in the State Street case that opened the floodgates to business model patents. Prior to that, it was widely believed that you couldn't patent "business methods," but the ruling at CAFC said that wasn't true at all. The real travesty of the situation was that the guy who wrote the decision had been a former patent attorney who had written the last major update to patent law -- with almost no Congressional oversight. In other words, one patent attorney almost singlehandedly changed a large part of patent law without Congress even realizing it. However, with the Supreme Court smacking down CAFC patent decisions left and right, it appears that the folks at CAFC are now recognizing that perhaps it needs to bring a little sanity back to the patent system. A little over a month ago, that meant raising the bar for "willful infringement," and now it means raising the bar for business model and software patents.
This case involved a guy who was trying to patent the concept of "mandatory arbitration involving legal documents." The USPTO denied the patent. After a failed appeal, the guy went to court, and CAFC is also saying that his concept does not deserve patent protection, with this being the key quote: "The routine addition of modern electronics to an otherwise unpatentable invention typically creates a prima facie case of obviousness." In other words, simply taking a common process and automating it on a computer should be considered obvious -- and thus, not patentable. This doesn't rule out business model or software patents by any means -- but it at least suggests that the courts are beginning to recognize that the patent system has gone out of control. The court also specifically addresses its own earlier State Street decision, suggesting that people had been misinterpreting it to mean any business model was patentable -- when the USPTO and the courts should still be applying the same tests to see if the business models are patentable. It then notes that a business model on its own shouldn't be patentable unless it's tied to some sort of product, and then states: "It is thus clear that the present statute does not allow patents to be issued on particular business systems -- such as a particular type of arbitration -- that depend entirely on the use of mental processes."
All in all, this is a very good decision that could take us even closer to stomping out innovation-destroying software or business model patents completely.
If you wanted to test a machine's functions, wouldn't you want the actual machine? (Sounds like a test designed by people who didn't want to actually exert themselves.)
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/gao-calls-to-te.html
GAO Wants to Test Controversial Florida Voting Machines
By Kim Zetter EmailOctober 02, 2007 | 6:47:35 PM
The Government Accountability Office, which has been looking into what happened to about 18,000 votes in a controversial Florida election, released a preliminary report today saying it can't exclude the possibility that voting machines were responsible for the undervotes in that race.
... The report, published here provides details about how the GAO has conducted its investigation so far, including the documents and software it has examined.
... Florida election officials conducted tests on the machines after the election, including a source code review, and concluded there was nothing wrong with the machines. But the testers only tested 5 machines out of nearly 1,500 that were used in the 2006 election. They tested an additional 5 machines that were never used in the election. The GAO, not surprisingly, concluded that this was insufficient.
The testers also didn't do hands-on testing of the machines. Instead they used automated scripts to simulate voting on the machine, which failed to address the issue of touch problems with the screens. The scripts they used were also insufficient in that they tested only a small number of voting scenarios. Some critics have suggested that something about the pattern in which voters cast votes on the machine triggered a bug in the machine that caused it to not record votes cast for Jennings.
It's unclear if any of those problems caused the undervotes. But it is clear, at least to the GAO, that there haven't been sufficient tests to rule out problems with the machines.
I couldn't find any basic algebra videos...
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/016166.html
October 03, 2007
UC Berkeley Releases Entire Course Lectures Free on YouTube
Press release – "Further expanding public access to its intellectual riches through the most popular Web destinations, the University of California, Berkeley, announced today (Wednesday, Oct. 3) that it is making entire course lectures and special events available, free of charge, on YouTube. UC Berkeley is the first university to make videos of full courses available through YouTube. Visitors to the site at youtube.com/ucberkeley can view more than 300 hours of videotaped courses and events. Topics range from bioengineering, to peace and conflict studies, to "Physics for Future Presidents," the title of a popular campus course. Building on its initial offerings, UC Berkeley will continue to expand the catalog of videos available on YouTube."
Unethical? I don't think so, in fact I like this. Do your research, make your trade, then tell everyone what your found out. Perfectly legal, right? (Targeting all those “too good to be true” companies should have been obvious to any investor.)
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/mf_sharesleuth
Owner Mark Cuban Trades Stocks on Sharesleuth's Advance Info
By Patricia B. Gray Email 09.25.07 | 2:00 AM
... "The company was not on our radar because they were such a small producer," says Lynn Hicks, business editor of the Des Moines Register, the closest major newspaper to the Xethanol plant. "It's a New York company that happened to have a small plant in Iowa, which we didn't think was worth digging into based on our readers' interests."
So Carey did it for them. A former business reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he spent months probing deep into the archives of federal and state agencies. He traveled to Hopkinton, Iowa, to take snapshots of one of Xethanol's plants, and to Delaware and Washington, DC, where he pored over corporate filings and regulatory documents.
On August 7, 2006, Carey posted his findings on his Web site, Sharesleuth.com. Frankly, his report does not make for scintillating reading. The writing is cornhusk-dry. (Sample: "He said in an SEC filing that the shares were contributed through a settlement among the shareholders of Xeminex.") The design is rudimentary, a long strip of black text against a stark white background, broken up only by the occasional photo. And at 6,000 words (more than twice the length of this article), the piece could tax the attention span of even the most dedicated stock watcher.
But the exposé torpedoed Xethanol. On the day Carey posted it, online financial message boards lit up with links to the story, and by the next day the company's stock had dropped 14 percent. Three months later, share prices had fallen from $6.91 to $2.90, erasing some $100 million in shareholder value. Lawyers pounced, filing no less than eight class-action shareholder lawsuits in federal courts against the company. Louis Bernstein, Xethanol's CEO during those turbulent months in the fall of 2006, says he spent most of his time managing the fallout from Sharesleuth. "I was constantly defending the company to shareholders, brokers, and analysts," he says. "For three months, it took up most of my day." (Bernstein resigned in November 2006, and current executives at the company declined to be interviewed.)
Since the Xethanol takedown, Sharesleuth has become required reading for a small but influential cadre of securities analysts, stockbrokers, money managers, and journalists. In the week after posting a scoop, Carey says, the site typically draws upwards of 40,000 unique viewers a day. "Sharesleuth provides some of the checks and balances that are missing in the market these days," explains Yolanda Holtzee, a money manager in Seattle who says she follows the site. "Companies can — and do — hire promoters to boost their stocks all the time, but there are fewer and fewer journalists and regulators who dig deep to find out if these companies are delivering on all their promises."
But don't expect reporters to thank Carey. In old media circles, Sharesleuth is considered just as compromised as the companies it covers. The beef: Sharesleuth is funded by Mark Cuban, the infamous Broadcast.com founder and Dallas Mavericks owner. Cuban finances the site by shorting the stocks of the companies Carey investigates in his stories. And Cuban trades before Carey publishes. (Short sellers are betting a stock will fall; they borrow the stock from a broker and sell it, with the promise to buy the stock later — hopefully, at a lower price — and return it to the broker.) Carey and Cuban disclose the financing technique on the site, but that hasn't stemmed the criticism. On his blog, The New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin dubbed the strategy "about as basic an ethical violation as there can be, whether that stake is disclosed or not." Blogger Gary Weiss, a former BusinessWeek reporter, accuses Cuban of "soiling investigative journalism to line his pockets." Fred Brown, vice chair of the ethics committee of the Society of Professional Journalists, a trade group, warns that "Mr. Cuban is eating the fruit of the poison tree."
Completely unrelated? An amusing look at the legal arguments. (Might make a fun student paper...)
http://www.news.com/2010-1030_3-6210023.html?part=rss&tag=2038-12_3-0&subj=news
From Watergate to videogate
By Eric J. Sinrod Story last modified Wed Sep 26 04:00:03 PDT 2007
You may have read about the recent controversy involving the New England Patriots after a team official was caught videotaping opposing team defensive signals.
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