Let's hope it isn't another major retailer.
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080623174411435
Data breach at Bay Area bank
Monday, June 23 2008 @ 05:44 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches
Customers of one Bay Area bank should check their bank statements and apply for a new debit card after a data breach last week.
Bank Atlantic confirms they had a data loss, involving their MasterCard debit cards.
Source - My FOX Tampa Bay
[From the article:
A spokesperson says it happened through a local merchant, but at this time, isn't saying which one.
Not enough detail to know what actually happened.
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080623122652260
Former Southeast Employee Found with Computer Data Files
Monday, June 23 2008 @ 12:26 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches
A former Southeast Missouri State University employee has been found with computer data files of personal information of several hundred Southeast students.
According to Southeast, files with the names and Social Security numbers of about 800 Southeast students were found on the former employee's computer files.
The data was discovered by the Office of Information Technology while activity logs were being reviewed. [Apparently a new procedure. Not mentioned in the article. Bob]
Source - KFVS
[From the article:
http://www.kfvs12.com/Global/story.asp?S=8541051
According to the school, a grand jury in Georgia indicted a former worker on three felony counts.
Dr. Dennis Holt with Southeast, tells Heartland News the man worked for Residence Life, and he left Southeast in June of last year. The leak was discovered back in April.
... Holt says the security breach happened before the university upgraded it's computer security system last year, and that the same type of theft won't happen again.
Students were notified of the breach students via a letter on June 19.
Why is this even a story? Perhaps because it follows a number of real data losses and the politicians smell blood?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080623150830276
UK: Ambulance service loses details of nearly million people
Monday, June 23 2008 @ 03:08 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches
A computer disk containing details of nearly a million people who dialled 999 has been lost, an ambulance service has admitted.
The information was supposed to be couriered by TNT from Scotland to Manchester two weeks ago, but never arrived at its destination and a search has failed to find it since.
The disk contained records of 894,629 calls to the Paisley Emergency Medical Dispatch Centre (EMDC), near Glasgow, spanning from February 2006.
It included the names of some patients, addresses of incidents, contact phone numbers and some medical details.
Source - Telegraph
[From the article:
But the Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS) said the disk was encrypted and password protected and its information would be extremely difficult to access.
... The information contained on the disk was to be used in the development of the service's command and control systems. [If they mean the data was to be used to test the system, that is wrong! Live data makes terrible test data – it has already passed all system edits and filters, leaving nothing for the new system to find and react to. Bob]
Technology to the defense! (Clearly a more honest measure that what people say in public)
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/24/1310241&from=rss
Google Trends vs. Community Standards On Obscenity
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 24, @09:47AM from the gotta-worry-about-the-apple-pie-searchers dept. The Courts Censorship United States
circletimessquare writes
"Google Trends is being used in a novel way in a pornography trial in Florida. Under a 1973 Supreme Court ruling, 'contemporary community standards' may be used as a yardstick for judging material as unprotected obscenity. This is a very subjective judgment, and so Lawrence Walters, a defense lawyer for Clinton Raymond McCowen, is using Google Trends to show that, in the privacy of their own homes, more people in Pensacola (the only city in the court's jurisdiction that is large enough to be singled out in the service's data) are interested in 'orgy' than "apple pie'."
Where's the line between merely irritating and criminal? When is notice required? Any opportunity to “opt out?” Perhaps we need a “Do not spoof” law?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=2008062317382219
Researcher: NebuAd forges Google data packets
Monday, June 23 2008 @ 05:38 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Internet & Computers
The man who caught Comcast blocking BitTorrents has now turned his attention to NebuAd, the Phorm-like behavioral ad targeting service that's tracking net surfers from inside multiple American ISPs.
In a new report (PDF) released under the aegis of consumer watchdogs Free Press and Public Knowledge, Robb Topolski accuses NebuAd of more than just nabbing user data on the sly. The freelance networking guru says the ad service is also guilty of forging network packets from third-party sites, including Google and Yahoo!.
Source - The Register
[From the article:
late last month, a WOW! subscriber gave Topolski remote access to a machine on the ISP's network. The PC ran a freshly-installed OS and a freshly-installed browser, and when Topolski pointed the browser at Google, eight non-Google cookies turned up on the system, including one for the domain nebuad.adjuggler.com.
This we knew. But with help from a packet sniffer, Topolski noticed another wrinkle. Some of the network packets coming from Google, he says, weren't actually coming from Google.
Three guesses why politicians jumped on this one...
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/credit-card-fir.html
Credit Card Firm Cut Limits After Massage Parlor Visits, Feds Allege
By Ryan Singel EmailJune 20, 2008 | 3:58:23 PM
Government regulators are suing a sub-prime credit card issuing firm, alleging that the company secretly profiled its customers' transactions and reduced the credit limits of those who used the cards at bars, marriage counselors and tire retread stores.
The Federal Trade Commission filed the complaint against CompuScore in a federal court in Atlanta on June 10, alleging the Visa-card marketing service routinely abused debt collection law, failed to disclose hidden fees, and withheld the credit limits it promised to subprime borrowers.
Most intriguingly, however, the complaint (.pdf) alleges that CompuScore kept track of the kinds of purchases its card holders made, without adequately explaining they were doing so or what kinds of purchases would lead to lower limits.
... The FTC is not suing because it believes the practice is illegal. Instead, the regulators contend that the company wasn't forthright about what it was doing.
Did we really want to irritate the rest of the world, or were we simply not thinking? (The RIAA will have heart failure!)
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080621/1318431471.shtml
Brazil May Follow Antigua In Asking WTO For Permission To Ignore US Copyright And Patents
from the IP-as-international-retaliation dept
It appears that Brazil is considering following the lead of Antigua in asking the WTO for permission to ignore US copyright and patent laws (found via Howard Knopf). This isn't the first time that this has occurred. Three years ago, Brazil had suggested the same solution in response to the same issue: US subsidies to cotton farmers that Brazil feels go against international laws and treaties.
What's really interesting here, though is the ongoing recognition that this is an effective way to retaliate against US efforts to break treaties or laws. With a country like Antigua, which has little else it can do, it might not be that surprising. But seeing a much larger country like Brazil take this approach seriously may lead to it showing up in many more places as well.
Related? See, I'm not the only one who doesn't understand the intricacies of copyright law.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080623/0226311478.shtml
We Can't Quote The AP... But Can Embed Its Videos?
from the left-hand,-meet-the-right-hand dept
The Associated Press is still insisting that bloggers shouldn't be excerpting its articles online without a license -- but apparently no one told the folks pushing AP videos. Jon Ashley wonders about this difference, noting that the AP has its own YouTube Channel, where it appears that the videos all have embedding enabled. This, of course, takes us right back to the question we asked last week concerning whether or not embedding videos can be seen as infringement. In the meantime, since the AP insists it really wants to be a part of the "conversation," can it explain why embedding videos is great, while quoting is not?
Tools & Techniques The photos are public, right?
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/207078/computer-scientists-scour-your-holiday-photos.html
Computer scientists scour your holiday photos
11:49AM, Wednesday 18th June 2008
Hundreds of thousands of images on Flickr are being used to teach a program to determine the geographic location of an image, simply by looking at it.
"Estimating geographic information from an image is an excellent, difficult high-level computer vision problem whose time has come," explains a paper written by James Hays and Alexei Efros of Carnegie Mellon University.
Amusing hack, this time. Imagine what they could have done...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9975758-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
June 23, 2008 5:23 PM PDT
Hacker changes news releases on sheriff's Web site
Posted by Elinor Mills 1 comment
Someone hacked into the Web site for the San Bernardino County sheriff's office in California and changed the wording on several news releases, forcing the agency to shut down the site last week, according to the Daily Bulletin.
Security (and exceptions) in the modern “papers, comrade citizen” era.
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080623151553231
Privacy: What It's Like To Fly With No ID Under The TSA's New Regulations
Monday, June 23 2008 @ 03:15 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Fed. Govt.
David becomes our first reader to fly under the TSA's new ID policy. Formerly, if you refused or were unable to show ID you could still fly — but were required to undergo secondary screening by the TSA. Now they've altered their position slightly— fliers who willingly refuse to show ID are now barred from flying. The new rule went into effect over the weekend, and David says that in order to board the plane after forgetting his driver's license he had to answer questions about his political party affiliation and previous addresses.
Source - The Consumerist blog
Does your organization have control over the “Access Control” process?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080623124519691
Alarming Number of Superusers Lurking Near Sensitive Data
Monday, June 23 2008 @ 12:45 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Other Privacy News
When it comes to having superuser privileges in an IT environment that's host to sensitive information, absolute power can absolutely corrupt, a study shows.
The annual "Trust, Security and Passwords" survey conducted by Newton, Mass.-based IT security consultancy Cyber-Ark Software found that as many as a third of IT administrators said they still had access to the enterprise environment after leaving the job. Moreover, many also came clean about routinely abusing their admin privileges by accessing company systems and snooping through confidential files, databases and documents.
Source - RedmondMag.com
Since I like to collect business models, this strikes me as very interesting. I should have done it myself! (It's not too late to invest...)
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080623/0154541476.shtml
The New Music Business: Enabling Musicians To Take Advantage Of New Business Models
from the nice-to-see dept
It seems that whenever we write about various bands embracing new business models, one of the criticisms raised is this idea that we're somehow expecting musicians to also become businessmen to embrace these new models. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, we've pointed out that this is exactly the space on which record labels should be focused: helping musicians embrace these new business models, helping to handle the business and the technology, while the musicians focus on the music. Unfortunately, most major record labels still haven't figured this out, due to either legacy issues and contracts, an unwillingness to let go of old business models, or simple cluelessness.
Of course, the longer the major labels take to realize that this is where the market is headed, the bigger the opportunities there are for others to come in and fill that "enablement" gap. There are going to be more and more interesting startups entering the space. One that's starting to get some buzz is TopSpin, which just revealed its business late last week. TopSpin got some press a few months back by getting Yahoo Music boss Ian Rogers to join as CEO. We've written about some of Rogers' cogent writings on the music business before.
TopSpin isn't a record label, but it wants to basically enable all sorts of internet-based business models to work for musicians so that they can focus on making music. From the sound of it, that involves plenty of backend infrastructure, as well as front-end components, so that musicians can easily pick and choose custom, scaleable business models for their website with little effort. The company already has a nice headstart (and even some high profile customers). What may be most interesting, however, is to see how the business model opportunities evolve over time, as TopSpin may grow to have the best understanding of what business models really work, depending on what the circumstances are for the band. That could be incredibly powerful data by itself.
Geek stuff...
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/23/1728259&from=rss
Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) Now GPL
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday June 23, @03:51PM from the yet-another-convert dept. Data Storage Linux
melios writes
"In a move that could help boost the scalability of Linux for grids and other advanced 64-bit multiprocessor applications, HP has released its Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) source code to the open source community. Source code, design documentation, and test suites for AdvFS are available on SourceForge."
More geek stuff. What would you like your phone to do for you? (Besides “everything”)
http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/24/1224209&from=rss
Nokia to Acquire and Open Source Symbian
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 24, @08:59AM from the to-fight-an-android-you-must-become-one dept. Businesses Cellphones Communications Operating Systems
zyzko writes
"Nokia has placed an offer on Symbian stock — it currently owns a 48% share and intends to buy the other shareholders out, 91% of the stockholders have already agreed. The press has already labeled this as an countermeasure to fight Android. Nokia has also created Symbian foundation — it might mean more open Symbian."
Symbian is "currently the world's dominant smartphone operating system (206 million phones shipped, 18.5 million in Q1 2008)," writes reader thaig, who points out coverage in the Economic Times. If this deal goes through as expected, the Foundation says that selected components of the Symbian operating system would be made available as open source at launch under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0 , with the rest of the platform following over the next two years.
Old dogs learn new tricks!
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/018638.html
June 23, 2008
New Study Shows Internet Users 50+ Are Rapidly Closing the Digital Divide with Booming Online Activity
News release: "Americans 50+ are increasingly becoming immersed in the Internet and in many ways can be compared to users who are decades younger, according to findings from the Center for the Digital Future released today in conjunction with AARP. The study takes a look at online behaviors of those age 50+ compared to the under 50 demographic... The Internet as news source – Users 50+ go online more frequently to check for news compared to those under 20. Forty-two percent of users 50 and older check the Internet for news daily or several times a day, compared to 18 percent of users under 20."
Related? Probably not, but amusing...
Italian soldiers floored by 77-year-old Japanese woman
By Nick Allen Last Updated: 7:42PM BST 23/06/2008
Italian soldiers are facing the embarrassment of being beaten up daily by a 77-year-old Japanese grandmother.
Martial arts expert Keiko Wakabayshi, nicknamed the "Samurai Granny", has been hired by the country's military to train recruits in hand-to-hand combat.
I gave this one the Yogi Berra test, and it passed, even though he said, “I didn't really say everything I said.”
http://www.killerstartups.com/Search/quotesdaddy-com-over-1-000-000-famous-quotes/
Quotesdaddy.com - Over 1,000,000 Famous Quotes
The next time you feel the need for a bit of inspiration or advice, check out Quotesdaddy.com which has more than 1,000,000 famous searchable quotes in its database. The Quotesdaddy database is very extensive and you can search by entering a term into the search bar or by using the tags function. Along with providing users with this wealth of sometimes funny and sometimes smart quotes, Quotesdaddy also provides a few tools to make the experience even better; You can get your very own Quotesdaddy widget for your site which includes the ability to choose what type of quotes you’d like to display, and you can also easily add a Quotesdaddy quote to the signature line of your Gmail account.
For my web site class. Create your own history book – you standing next to Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Hitler, Indiana Jones...
http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/facedub-com-put-your-face-on-a-new-body/
Facedub.com - Put Your Face on a New Body
Face Dub is a free site that allows you to take a photo of your face and super-impose it on to a new body. The site has lots of templates to choose from which include famous celebrity photos, musclemen, and superheroes. There are a number of editing features available like face targeting that allow you to better size and place your head so that the final photo looks more genuine. Finally, once you’ve made your photo, you can share it will others on Facedub where it might even be included in the “top watched” section. User voting and behavior effects how your photo will be shown, in what order, and under what category. While there are a few other sites that provide a similar service, Facedub is arguably the most robust and user friendly.
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