http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081018144339191
Privacy Guide for Small Businesses: The Basics
Saturday, October 18 2008 @ 02:43 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews
This booklet is an easy-to-use guide prepared by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada as a first step for businesses that wish to improve their privacy practices and avoid investigations. The tips here will help you build capacity in-house to handle issues and complaints as they arise.
Source - Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Oh what a wicked web we weave when first we practice politics... Strangely enough, this came up yesterday in a conversation with a young man from Oklahoma.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081017/0124482566.shtml
Why Is Andrew Cuomo Pushing ISPs To Use Spyware On Everyone's Internet Traffic?
from the political-ambitions-over-common-sense dept
We've already covered NY AG Andrew Cuomo's ridiculous crusade to get ISPs to censor content in a misguided attempt to stop child porn. Obviously, stopping child porn is a good goal, but Cuomo's approach actually makes the problem worse and sets a dangerous precedent. First, rather than actually tackling the root of the problem, Cuomo simply demanded that ISPs block any site that he and a group he supports consider to be child porn. Of course, they have no legal requirement to block them (section 230 of the CDA was written to make it clear that ISPs are not at all liable here), but Cuomo got around that by promising to shame publicly any ISP that didn't implement his plan. This is the lowest of the low of political tricks, and it would simply be lying. An ISP may be quite committed to stomping out child porn, and could recognize that Cuomo's tactics actually make the problem worse, by not targeting the actual pornographers -- and Cuomo would still publicly splash their names across the news as not wanting to stop child porn.
In fact, a recent look at the details of Cuomo's highly publicized campaign found that Cuomo clearly exaggerated the extent of the problem for political benefit, forcing ISPs to block all of Usenet, despite 99.9997% of the 3.7 billion available Usenet articles being perfectly legitimate content. But that's not stopping Cuomo. In fact, he's going even further.
He's been sending ISPs a presentation from a company called Brilliant Digital that's offering a "deep packet inspection" system that could scan every file sent across an ISP's network and try to determine if it was child porn. Yes, Cuomo is suggesting that ISPs spy on every single file sent over their network now, 4th Amendment be damned. Brilliant Digital even claims that its system can trick users into sending files unencrypted, so even those who send encrypted traffic could be spied upon. Cuomo claims that he's not endorsing the product, but just thought ISPs would be interested in looking into it. Yet, given his heavy handed tactics earlier in this effort, it's pretty clear what message he's sending.
But why Brilliant Digital? If the name sounds familiar, it's because the company has an extremely sketchy past that has been touched on before. It was, effectively, one of the first surreptitious "adware" installs, back in the day, when it tried to secretly distribute a "legit" P2P file sharing system that would sit on top of the popular Kazaa and give you the option of paying for songs rather than just straight file sharing them. The software was downloaded and secretly installed on one million computers, before it was revealed.
This is the company our politicians want spying on every packet sent across the internet?
Not only that, but Brilliant Digital is also (of course) rather aggressive on the patent front, suing Streamcast for daring to make use of a hash system for trying to identify music tracks being shared over a P2P network. So we have an Australian spyware company that wants to scan every bit of traffic and identify it (even if it's encrypted), and it's being pushed by a US politician who has a history of trying to publicly shame companies into doing his bidding, even if it involves lying about them. And, the whole damn thing almost certainly violates the 4th Amendment.
Last week, we wrote about Paul Ohm's suggestion that we should create a stronger privacy law that outlawed deep packet inspection, as that would pretty much stop any attempt to break net neutrality without requiring special net neutrality laws. It's worth noting that such a law would also have the added benefit of making it doubly clear to Cuomo that such a program is quite illegal.
Remember, this is a culture that has no problem sharing a bath...
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081018145431110
Japan's Sense of Privacy Squashes Social Networking
Saturday, October 18 2008 @ 02:54 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews
... The early promises of a new, open social frontier, akin to the identity-centric world of Facebook and MySpace in the U.S., have been replaced by a realm where people stay safely within their circles of friends and few reveal themselves to strangers.
"There is the sense that, 'My face just isn't that interesting, or I'm not attractive — there is nothing special about me to show people,"' says Tetsuya Shibui, a writer who has long followed the Internet in Japan.
Indeed, the Japanese virtual world has turned out just like the real one.
Source - FOX News
Talks about a screw-up! 1) Never change the votes while the voter is still in the voting booth. 2) All the changed votes were supposed to go to Ron Paul!
http://wvgazette.com/News/200810170676
October 18, 2008
Some early W.Va. voters angry over switched votes
Jackson County touch-screens switched votes, 3 residents say
By Paul J. Nyden Staff writer
At least three early voters in Jackson County had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win.
Virginia Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the county clerk's office in Ripley kept switching their votes from Democratic to Republican candidates.
... When she reported the problem, she said, the poll worker in charge "responded that everything was all right. It was just that the screen was sensitive and I was touching the screen too hard. She instructed me to use only my fingernail." [At least they got the “Blame the voter” part right. Bob]
Even after she began using her fingernail, Matheney said, the problem persisted.
... Jackson County Clerk Jeff Waybright said, "After we got a call from the Secretary of State's Office, we recalibrated the machine. We had already voted over 400 people with no problems." [Translation: They got away with it 400 times. Bob]
It's not just the privacy policies that can change without notice...
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/19/017209&from=rss
Yahoo Changes User Profiles, To Massive Outrage
Posted by kdawson on Sunday October 19, @12:20AM from the why'd-you-go-and-do-that dept. Yahoo! Social Networks
Wiseleo writes
"Yahoo decided to massively screw up their entire userbase by changing all user profiles to blank. No warning, no automated way to get data back, and other unwanted changes. The blog has such choice quotes as 'We know this has been a rough transition for some of you and, and are committed to helping you use, understand, and (hopefully) enjoy your new profile,' and, 'We also know lots of you worked hard on your old profiles and want your data. If you feel like you're missing data, we've saved a copy of your old profile (and alias) and our Customer Care team can retrieve this information. You won't, however, be able to revert back to your old profile format, but you will be able to get any data that you think is missing. To do this, please go here to contact Customer Care.' There were 850 comments posted, all negative, on the first day. There are hundreds more today. There is even more outrage on the Yahoo Messenger blog."
Perhaps Al Qaeda has internal factions or (gasp) enemies?
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/18/2057221&from=rss
Al-Qaeda Web Sites Go Offline
Posted by kdawson on Saturday October 18, @05:52PM from the i-hack-you dept. Security The Internet The Military
thefickler writes
"Four out of the five Al-Qaeda online forums have disappeared. The terrorist group used these forums to relay messages to its supporters. The four that have gone missing seem to have taken a hit back on September 10, the day before the annual video marking the 9/11 attacks was due to be disseminated. No one knows who is responsible for the sites' disappearance."
Good news, bad news?
http://torrentfreak.com/stanford-university-embraces-bittorrent-081018/
Stanford University Embraces BitTorrent
Written by Ernesto on October 18, 2008
While some universities restrict the use of BitTorrent clients, others embrace the popular flilesharing protocol and use it to spread knowledge. Stanford University is one of the few to realize that BitTorrent does not equal piracy. They use BitTorrent to give away some of their engineering courses, with some success.
Always wanted to learn more about Robotics, Linear Dynamical Systems or Programming Paradigms? Now you can, for free, thanks to Stanford Engineering’s online courses.
... While Stanford recognizes the benefits of BitTorrent, it is also cracking down on students who use it to download copyrighted material. Students who get caught for the first time have to pay a $100 fine, the second offense costs $500, and those who get caught three times will have to pay $1000 to regain access to the university network.
For my Stats and Excel classes
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/019586.html
October 18, 2008
Statistical Sites on the World Wide Web
Links to statistics and information from more than 70 agencies in the U.S. Federal Government.
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