Looks like fast police work or poor coverup by the hacker...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080711164054171

Police arrest Texas man in Cal identity theft case

Friday, July 11 2008 @ 04:40 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews

A man has been charged in Texas in an identity theft case that affected more than 1,100 students at the University of California, Irvine, authorities said Friday.

...Authorities allege Thomas breached computer security at the Dallas office of UnitedHealthcare's department of student resources while he worked there in December 2007.

Source - Houston Chronicle

[From the article:

... Authorities allege Thomas breached computer security at the Dallas office of UnitedHealthcare's department of student resources while he worked there in December 2007.

... The thefts came to light in March, after students began telling police that someone was filing fraudulent tax returns and collecting the refunds using their private information.

University computer experts were unable to find a breach in their system and federal and local officials ultimately determined all the students were enrolled in the university's insurance program for graduate students, which was administered by UnitedHealthcare.

The public is easily manipulated by the “Don't you agree torturing kittens is bad” type of article.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080711/0218421649.shtml

Technology Moral Panics: But Think Of The Children!

from the everyone-panic dept

Recently I wrote about a dreadful article in USA Today hyping up the "oh-no-think-of-the-children problem" of predators using console games to seek out kids. This followed similarly bogus news articles hyping up the threats of predators on social networks. Yet, all the "panic" raised by those articles has politicians practically shoving each other aside to introduce legislation against those social networks, or just various Attorneys General threatening those social networks without any evidence that there's a significant problem, other than a few totally hyped up news articles.

It turns out that a PhD Candidate at NYU, Alice Marwick has recently published a paper discussing exactly this type of "moral panic," focusing on the situation in 1996 in which Time Magazine famously published a scare mongering article about porn online, now known as the Rimm Report. Sean Garret, who pointed me to Marwick's paper has a good analysis of the Rimm Report's ripple effects as well (as does Adam Thierer). Basically, the report, which claimed that 83.5% of images online were porn was based on ridiculously faulty premises and research. It was almost entirely wrong.

[More...]

Look what I found on the SlashDot site. I'm not sure it's true, but it is amusing. (Is that defamation or breach of privacy?)

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/11/158215&from=rss

Mother Sues After Bebo Story Hits Press

Posted by kdawson on Friday July 11, @11:51AM from the what-was-once-private dept.

slick_shoes notes a story out of England: a woman named Amanda Hudson is suing six national newspapers for defamation and breach of privacy after they ran stories based on her 15-year-old daughter's exaggerated claims about her party, published on her Bebo site. The party was held at the family's £4m villa in Spain, and the daughter's account claimed that jewelery had been stolen and furniture and a television set thrown into the swimming pool; in addition there were claims of sex and drug use. The mother says that this was all falsehood and exaggeration. A number of newspapers picked up claims and photos from Bebo and ran them nationally. From the article:

"The case is expected to have far-reaching consequences for third parties who use or publish information from social networking sites. Lawyers say it could place a duty on all second-hand users to establish the truth of everything they want to republish from such sites." [Not gonna happen. Bob]

Interesting discussion starter for governments.

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/018780.html

July 11, 2008

Web 2.0: The Future of Collaborative Government

"Today’s tech-savvy world demands tech-savvy government. Increasingly connected citizens and stakeholders are asking governments to deliver services more rapidly and efficiently. Yet the public service bureaucracies that form the governmental backbone often take a conservative approach to adopting the latest Internet-based technologies to accelerate service delivery. On June 3, 2008, Deloitte and the National Academy of Public Administration convened a group of government leaders, subject matter experts and forward thinkers to develop a road map to help the next administration navigate the work force and organization changes that need to occur to move to a more collaborative model of government." [Note: links to related documents are here]

• Download the complete report, Change your world or the world will change you: The future of collaborative government and Web 2.0.

Niche business: (mostly) free data gathered wholesale, marketed retail.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/amazing-new-trade-data/

Amazing New Trade Data

By Justin Wolfers June 27, 2008, 10:48 am

The latest: importgenius.com, the brainchild of brothers Ryan and David Petersen, with Michael Kanko. They exploit customs reporting obligations and Freedom of Information requests to organize and publish — in real-time — the contents of every shipping container entering the United States.

Insightful (because it agrees with me) review.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/11/iphone-3g-review/

iPhone 3G review

by Ryan Block, posted Jul 11th 2008 at 2:45PM

... The wireless industry is a notoriously tough nut to crack, and it's become pretty clear that the first iPhone wasn't about total domination so much as priming the market and making a good first impression with some very dissatisfied cellphone users. With the iPhone 3G, though, Apple's playing for keeps. Not only is this iPhone's Exchange enterprise support aiming straight for the heart of the business market, but the long-awaited 3rd party application support and App Store means it's no longer just a device, but a viable computing platform. And its 3G network compatibility finally makes the iPhone welcome the world over, especially after Cupertino decided to ditch its non-traditional carrier partnerships in favor of dropping the handset price dramatically.