The Sargent Schultz Syndrome?

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081014053725405

WA: Student information leak under investigation

Tuesday, October 14 2008 @ 05:37 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews

From the this-wasn't-an-intranet? dept.:

Officials at Olympic College are investigating how confidential student information was leaked and made available online for nearly a year. Currently, four Web sites designed to supplement courses taught at OC have been discovered to have been indexed by popular search engines like Google, violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

...."This was supposedly an intranet, that when you set your permissions the only people that are supposed to get to the site are people that are logged into the network and have the permissions to get to that site." said Bilodeau. "Thinking that we had to close it off to the whole world was beyond what I even understood. I thought it was only people here at Olympic College that had accounts."

Source - The Olympian

I think we have another “Disclosure by Dribble” here.

http://breachblog.com/2008/10/13/sky.aspx?ref=rss

BSkyB pensioner data on stolen Deloitte & Touche laptop

Posted by Evan Francen at 10/13/2008 1:03 PM

... Breach Description:
"Details have emerged of a theft of a laptop containing pension details of BSkyB staff and other firms. The theft, involving an employee from the accountancy firm Deloitte, occurred last month."

Related...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081014055445541

Voda in data bungle (Deloitte update)

Tuesday, October 14 2008 @ 05:54 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews

Vodafone has lost data, including the dates of birth and national insurance numbers of thousands of employees, after a laptop containing pension data was stolen.

The laptop was stolen from external auditor Deloitte during a recent statutory pension scheme audit and also contained employee’s surnames and initials, employee number and grade, as well as pensionable salary, earnings and contribution information.... The laptop contained details of all Vodafone UK staff with pensions as well as scheme holders from BSkyB, Network Rail and Railway Pensions.

“The laptop was protected by a number of security measures, including start up password, operating system user ID / password authentication and encryption."

Source - Mobile News

It would be interesting to see how many stolen Identities passed through this site.

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081013180518562

Cybercrime Supersite 'DarkMarket' Was FBI Sting, Documents Confirm

Monday, October 13 2008 @ 06:05 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews

DarkMarket.ws, an online watering hole for thousands of identify thieves, hackers and credit card swindlers, has been secretly run by an FBI cybercrime agent for the last two years, until its voluntary shutdown earlier this month, according to documents unearthed by a German radio network. DS

Source - Threat Level

[From the article:

The FBI almost certainly closed DarkMarket in preparation for a global wave of arrests that will unfold in the next month or so. The site was likely shuttered to avoid an Agatha Christie scenario in which a diminishing pool of cybercrooks are free to speculate about why they're disappearing one-by-one like the hapless dinner guests in Ten Little Indians.

...and maybe we'll toss in a Political Enemy every now and again.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10064738-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

New laws track child predators online

Posted by Stephanie Condon October 13, 2008 2:26 PM PDT

Child predators will be easier to track online because of two new laws President Bush signed Monday.

The Protect Our Children Act--which includes provisions introduced by Sens. Joe Biden (D-Del.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), and John McCain, (R-Ariz.)--sets requirements for Internet companies to report incidences of child pornography. It also authorizes more than $320 million for the Justice Department over the next five years for, among other things, the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

The president on Monday also signed the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act, which requires a sex offender to provide the National Sex Offender Registry with all of his Internet identifiers, such as e-mail addresses.

While the KIDS Act does not permit sex offenders' Internet identifiers to be made public, it does require the attorney general to share the information with social-networking Web sites, so the sites can [Not required? Bob] compare the identifying information with that of their respective users. The bill was sponsored by Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) in the Senate and Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) in the House.

Interesting argument...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081014053238963

German court says IP addresses in server logs are not personal data

Tuesday, October 14 2008 @ 05:32 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews

A German court has ruled that website operators are allowed to store the internet protocol (IP) addresses of their visitors without violating data protection legislation. Without additional information, IP addresses do not count as personal data, it said.

Source - Out-Law.com

The RIAA lobby strikes again?

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/13/2336226&from=rss

President Signs Law Creating Copyright Czar

Posted by kdawson on Monday October 13, @08:07PM from the ip-con dept. Government

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes

"President Bush has signed the EIPRA (AKA the PRO-IP Act) and created a cabinet-level post of 'Copyright Czar,' on par with the current 'Drug Czar,' in spite of prior misgivings about the bill. They did at least get rid of provisions that would have had the DOJ take over the RIAA's unpopular litigation campaign. Still, the final legislation (PDF) creates new classes of felony criminal copyright infringement, adds civil forfeiture provisions that incorporate by reference parts of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, and directs the Copyright Czar to lobby foreign governments to adopt stronger IP laws. At this point, our best hope would appear to be to hope that someone sensible like Laurence Lessig or William Patry gets appointed."

A handout for our next Ethics seminar?

http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/14/0120221&from=rss

Microsoft's Ethical Guidelines

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 14, @05:30AM from the oxy-meet-moron dept. Microsoft It's funny. Laugh.

hankwang writes

"Did you know that Microsoft has ethical guidelines? It's good to know that 'Microsoft did not make any payments to foreign government officials' while lobbying for OOXML, and that 'Microsoft conducts its business in compliance with laws designed to promote fair competition' every time they suppressed competitors. In their Corporate Citizenship section, they discuss how the customer-focused approach creates products that work well with those of competitors and open-source solutions. So all the reverse-engineering by Samba and OpenOffice.org developers wasn't really necessary."

Laptops are passe..

http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/13/1815229&from=rss

University Tries "One iPhone Per Student"

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday October 13, @03:27PM from the enrollment-and-dropout-numbers-to-spike dept.

alphadogg writes to tell us that one freshman class has a little more than usual to be excited about. When students at Abilene Christian University showed up for their first days of class they were greeted with the choice of either a new iPhone 3g or an iPod Touch plus a package of custom web apps to use on them.

"The hardware is part of the Texas university's pilot mobile learning project, which has been gestating for over a year. About 650 first-year students chose the iPhone, and about 300 the iPod Touch, which is a very similar device but without the 3G radio (both devices incorporate an 802.11g Wi-Fi adapter). ACU pays for the hardware, student (or their parents) select and pay for their monthly AT&T service plan."

Related

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10065031-71.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

Scientists say 1 in 10 iPod users could go deaf

Posted by Chris Matyszczyk October 13, 2008 7:20 PM PDT

Repeating my Redundant Reiteration...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10064951-62.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

Open source enables value-based business models

Posted by Dave Rosenberg October 13, 2008 5:10 PM PDT

Open source is a development and distribution strategy that software developers use to get their products into the hands of users. It's not a business model.

The business model is found in the additional value that developers (which are often vendors) put on top of the software in the form of support, additional features, etc. These provide revenue opportunities, which in turn creates a business

Global Warming! Global Warming! SUV use is down on the sun...

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/14/0038230&from=rss

The Quietest Sun

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 14, @02:51AM from the storms-a-comin' dept.

Orbity sends in a Boston Globe report on the unusual calm on the surface of the sun. The photos, many taken in more active solar times, are excellent — see the sequence from last year of a coronal mass ejection carrying away the tail of a comet.

"The Sun is now in the quietest phase of its 11-year activity cycle, the solar minimum — in fact, it has been unusually quiet this year — with over 200 days so far with no observed sunspots. The solar wind has also dropped to its lowest levels in 50 years. Scientists are unsure of the significance of this unusual calm..."

As if to be contrary, New Scientist mentions that the number of sunspots seem to be increasing.

Global Warming! Global Warming! Produce more CO2!

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/13/205213&from=rss

CO2 To Fuel, Closing the "Carbon Loop"

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday October 13, @05:47PM from the squeeze-as-much-as-you-can dept. Science Technology

leprasmurf writes

"Inhabitat has posted an article detailing a recent announcement of a process to turn CO2 into fuel. The process, which used to be considered too energy inefficient, uses a multi-step, low pressure, and low temperature biocatalyst to break the CO2 into 'basic hydrocarbon building blocks.'"