The value of Privacy...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20071020092408968

Peter Swire: Protecting Consumers: Privacy Matters in Antitrust Analysis

Saturday, October 20 2007 @ 09:24 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Businesses & Privacy

As search and online advertising giant Google seeks to merge with online advertising leader DoubleClick, the debate has been greatly confused about how privacy issues fit into antitrust analysis. This testimony draws on my experience both as a professor of antitrust and privacy law. It explains as a general matter how privacy harms are relevant to antitrust analysis.

Source - Center for American Progress

[From the article: In contrast to these three approaches, there is a simpler and more general way to understand the role of privacy in antitrust law. First, privacy harms reduce consumer welfare, which is a principal goal of modern antitrust analysis. Second, privacy harms lead to a reduction in the quality of a good or service, [Now that is interesting! Bob] which is a standard category of harm that results from market power.

Value is as value does?

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20071020090310345

How Much is your Privacy Worth Online? Absolute Poker Says $500.00

Saturday, October 20 2007 @ 09:03 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

Absolute Poker has been wrapped in scandal over the past few weeks as stories of insider fraud, online poker cheating, and security leaks were uncovered. At last however they are trying to make good, the first step was releasing a statement, alerting the public that there was indeed a security leak, that there was an audit in process, and that Absolute Poker intended to fix the problem, which included a cheating employee, and perhaps fixed poker tournaments.

Today, according to several online poker players Absolute Poker representatives began calling people one by one [TJX couldn't do that! Is this the way small data spills should be handled, or MUST small companies do this to survive? Bob] from the original .xls document that was leaked, each person who’s personal information was compromised by the internet poker room was given $500 to play with at Absolute Poker. [This was a lesson learned from TJX! Bob]

Source - Gambling News Review

Related - Online poker cheating blamed on employee
Related - Online Poker Players Expose Alleged Fraud

A not uncommon problem, but access needs to be reviewed even when employees are transferred within the organization... (War Story: A programmer who worked on the Sales Compensation system became a salesman...)

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20071020145303926

CT: Audit criticizes state agency for lax computer security

Saturday, October 20 2007 @ 02:53 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: State/Local Govt.

Several former employees of the state Department of Revenue Services and other agencies still had access to state computer networks after being fired or voluntarily leaving their jobs, according to a new state audit.

The state's Auditors of Public Accounts said in a report Friday that the revenue services agency is among several departments that have failed to consistently cut off computer access when people left their state jobs.

Source - Boston.com

Okay, time for me to call my lawyer and have him start filing the “Silly Patents!” (The comments are uniformly in favor! Looks like crushing SCO made IBM a hero.)

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/20/1031236&from=rss

IBM Seeking 'Patent-Protection-Racket' Patent

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday October 20, @09:09AM from the any-reason-to-bust-kneecaps dept. IBM Patents

theodp writes "Wikipedia defines a protection racket as an extortion scheme whereby a powerful non-governmental organization coerces businesses to pay protection money which allegedly serves to purchase the organization's 'protection' services against various external threats. Compare this to IBM's just-published patent application for 'Extracting Value from a Portfolio of Assets', which describes a process by which 'very large corporations' impress upon smaller businesses that paying for 'the protection of a large defensive patent portfolio' would be 'a prudent business decision' for them to make, 'just like purchasing a fire insurance policy.' Sounds like Fat Tony's been to Law School, eh? Time for IBM to put-their-money-where-their-patent-reform-mouth-is and deep-six this business method patent claim!"

On the other hand...

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/21/063200&from=rss

Viacom Wants Industry Wide Copyright Filter

Posted by Zonk on Sunday October 21, @07:09AM from the putting-a-lid-on-free-speech dept. Businesses Censorship Media The Internet

slashqwerty writes "Unsatisfied with the proprietary copyright filter Google recently unveiled, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has called for an industry standard to filter copyrighted material. Mr. Dauman has the backing of Microsoft, Disney, and Universal. 'They reflect the fact that there ought to be a filtering system in place on the part of technology companies,' he noted. 'Most responsible companies have followed that path. What no one wants is a proprietary system that benefits one company. It is a big drain to a company like ours to have to deal with incompatible systems.' How would an industry standard impact freedom of speech and in particular censorship on the internet? How would it affect small, independent web sites?"

[Here are the “Viacom Principles: http://www.ugcprinciples.com/

Does this suggest that the RIAA (et al) are correct?

http://blogs.ft.com/undercover/2007/10/undercover-ec-1.html

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Undercover Economist column: Did you pay to read this?

Until recently, there were two types of newspaper website: those that made you pay to read many of the articles (The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times) and those that didn’t.

... The New York Times’s retreat from a subscription model is widely portrayed by online commentators as a humiliating and belated acceptance of the inevitable. But Matthew Gentzkow, an economist at the University of Chicago, recently published research that suggests that there has been no expensive mistake. Both the subscription model then, and the advertising model now, were likely to have been reasonable choices. Free online access makes more sense now not because of some fundamental law of online economics, but because the online advertising market has matured.

[The paper: http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/matthew.gentzkow/research/print_online.pdf