Yesterday one of their subsidiaries had a data spill due to hackers. Is there a bigger problem here?

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/07/2332237&from=rss

Ticketmaster Claims Hacking Over Ticket Resale Site

Posted by Zonk on Sunday October 07, @08:18PM from the watch-out-for-ticket-haxxors dept. Security The Internet Businesses

FlopEJoe writes "Ticketmaster claims that RMG Technologies is providing software to avoid security measures on their website - even to the point of utilizing bots to get large blocks of tickets. RMG says it just 'provides a specialized browser for ticket brokers. ' From the New York Times article: 'The fact that tickets to popular events sell out so quickly -- and that brokers and online resellers obtain them with such velocity -- is clouding the business, many in the music industry say. It is enough, some longtime concertgoers say, to make them long for the days when all they had to do to obtain tickets was camp out overnight.'"

The rest of the faux pas

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20071008025537122

Data “Dysprotection:” breaches reported last week

Monday, October 08 2007 @ 03:29 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

A recap of incidents or privacy breaches reported last week for those who enjoy shaking their head and muttering to themselves with their morning coffee.

Source - Chronicles of Dissent

Protecting our rights?

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20071007134616686

Democrats to Offer New Surveillance Rules

Sunday, October 07 2007 @ 01:46 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Surveillance

House Democrats plan to introduce a bill this week that would let a secret court issue one-year "umbrella" warrants to allow the government to intercept e-mails and phone calls of foreign targets and would not require that surveillance of each person be approved individually.

The bill is likely to resurrect controversy that erupted this summer when Congress, under White House pressure, rushed through a temporary emergency law that expanded the government's authority to conduct foreign surveillance on U.S. soil without a warrant. The Protect America Act, which expires in February, has been criticized as being too broad and lacking effective court oversight.

Source - Washington Post

What's new in the EU (and likely coming our way)

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/016188.html

October 07, 2007

Guide to Finding Proposed Legislation Using EUR-Lex

European Information Association: "See also our guides to using OEIL and PreLex. Produced by the Commission and Parliament respectively, these two sources allow you to monitor the progress of proposed legislation through the various stages leading to adoption (or rejection - not all proposals are adopted). Proposals are generally published by the European Commission. They appear initially as Commission Communications (COMdocs or COMs)...Not all COMdocs are proposals for legislation; some take the form of consultative documents (Green / White papers), others are reports on EU policies."

• See also Finding national implementing measures using N-Lex: "The form of EU legislation known as a 'Directive' sets out the objectives to be achieved, but leaves individual Member States to implement the detailed legislative measures required. The result is that, for every Directive, there is an EU-level text plus x number of national versions - which will invariably differ in detail from the original...N-Lex can be accessed direct at eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex or via the EUR-Lex website."

An example of open source intelligence.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/07/2011251&from=rss

Googlestalking For Covert NSA Research Funding

Posted by Zonk on Sunday October 07, @05:11PM from the because-what-else-are-you-going-to-do dept. United States The Almighty Buck Politics Science

James Hardine writes "Wikileaks is reporting that the CIA has funded covert research on torture techniques, and that the NSA has pushed tens or hundreds of millions into academia through research grants using one particular grant code. Some researchers try to conceal the source of funding, yet commonality in the NSA grant code prefix makes all these attempts transparent. The primary NSA grant-code prefix is 'MDA904'. Googling for this grant code yields 39,000 references although some refer to non-academic contracts (scolar.google.com 2,300). The grants issue from light NSA cover, the "Maryland Procurement Office" or other fronts. From this one can see the broad sweep of academic research interests being driven by the NSA."

The world, she is a changing...

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/10/nonprofit_software

Entrepreneur Aims to Overthrow TV, Not Get Rich

By Bryan Gardiner Email 10.08.07 | 12:00 AM

Most software entrepreneurs' ambition is to sell out for a huge wad of cash, or maybe go public for an even bigger pile. Not so Nicholas Reville: He wants to overthrow the television industry, and he doesn't care if he gets rich. In fact, as executive director and co-founder of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Reville is unlikely to make much money at all.

Reville oversees the PCF's core project: a free, open-source video player called Miro. Formerly known as Democracy Player, Miro is a desktop video application that lets you search and view videos. It uses RSS, BitTorrent and media-player technologies.

But the PCF's ambitions go far beyond making and distributing a popular internet video platform. Ultimately, the foundation's goal is to promote and build an entirely new, open mass medium of online television.

... Lilly notes that the big challenge for Miro will be finding a way to monetize internet video, [Got any ideas? Bob] so the company is eventually less dependent on donations.

Mesmerizing, but is it useful?

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/07/1232245&from=rss

Logfiles Made Interesting with glTail

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday October 07, @10:11AM from the because-you-can dept. Software

Fudgie writes "My boss claimed it was pretty much impossible to create an entertaining way to visualize server traffic [Should “entertaining” be a design criteria? Bob] and events in a short time frame, so of course I had to prove him wrong. A weekend of neglecting my family produced a small ruby program which connects to your servers via SSH, grabs and parses data from Apaches access log and Ruby on Rails production log, and displays your traffic and statistics in real-time using a simple OpenGL interface (tested under Linux and Mac OS/X). It's a bit hard to explain over text, so please have a look at fudgie.org for an example movie, and more information."

[Also see: http://www.visitorville.com/ Bob]