Huh! Lookie what showed up on Pogo Was Right.

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081108113159493

Book: Privacy Law in a Nutshell

Saturday, November 08 2008 @ 11:31 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews

A reader just dropped me a note to inform me of a new book, Privacy Law in a Nutshell. by John T. Soma and Stephen D. Rynerson. You can see the table of contents and additional info on the book on Amazon.com. I just ordered a copy [Sales have doubled! Bob] and look forward to reading it.

Statistics and a trend?

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/019759.html

November 08, 2008

Identity Theft Resource Center 2008 Breach List

News release: "The total number of breaches in on the Identity Theft Resource Center’s 2008 breach list surpassed the final total of 446 reported in 2007, more than 4 months before the end of 2008. As of 9:30 a.m. August 22nd, the number of confirmed data breaches in 2008 stood at 449. The actual number of breaches is most likely higher, due to under-reporting and the fact that some of the breaches reported, which affect multiple businesses, are listed as single events. In the last few months, two subcontractors became examples of these “multiple” events. In one case, the customers and/or employees of at least 20 entities were affected by a breach that the ITRC reported as a single breach event."

Perhaps if we tie it to the Second Amendment as the “or else?”

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081108114051476

Article: The End of Privacy

Saturday, November 08 2008 @ 11:40 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews

Jed Rubenfeld has an article in the Oct. 13 issue of the Stanford Law Review on the Fourth Amendment Here's an excerpt from the introduction [pdf] of this article about the Fourth Amendment:

In this Article, I will argue that Fourth Amendment law should stop trying to protect privacy. The Fourth Amendment does not guarantee a right of privacy. It guarantees—if its actual words mean anything—a right of security.14

Despite privacy’s triumph, the right “to be secure” that the Fourth Amendment actually protects has never died. It still flickers in the case law and scholarship,15 even if without much doctrinal function and even if unsatisfactorily defined.16 By revitalizing the right to be secure, Fourth Amendment law can vindicate its text, recapture its paradigm cases, and find the anchor it requires to stand firm against executive abuse.

Source - The End of Privacy

Lack of insurance trumps a Green Card?

http://digg.com/health/When_Sick_Legal_Immigrants_Without_Insurance_Get_Deported

When Sick, Legal Immigrants Without Insurance Get Deported

nytimes.com — Torres was comatose and connected to a ventilator. He was also a legal immigrant whose family lives and works in Arizona. But he was uninsured. So the hospital disregarded the strenuous objections of his grief-stricken parents and sent Mr. Torres on a four-hour journey over the California border into Mexicali.

[From the article:

Whether these patients receive sustained care in this country or are privately deported by a hospital depends on what emergency room they initially visit.

There is only limited federal financing for these fragile patients, and no governmental oversight of what happens to them.

Because spying on your employees is all the rage!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10084938-83.html

Forensic tool detects pornography in the workplace

Posted by Marc Weber Tobias November 8, 2008 2:47 PM PST

... On Sunday, Orem, Utah-based forensic-software maker Paraben plans to introduce a unique piece of enterprise software developed to detect and analyze images on workplace networks and computers for suspect content. The system looks for a number of sophisticated parameters and grades images at three levels, based upon their correlation with criteria that have been programmed into the system.

... Schroeder told me that the program cannot discriminate between child and adult pornography, [so it probably does not use the hash from “known” porn images. I wonder how accurate the algorithm is? Bob] but it is extremely effective at rapidly identifying suspect images, [So you will need to hire a “Chief Porn Reviewer” -- I want to see that job description! Bob] either online or offline.

[Is it just my perverted little mind, or is their 'logo' rather suggestive? See for yourself. http://www.paraben.com/ Bob]

Attention Android Users: Never type the word reboot...................

http://digg.com/gadgets/Android_Bug_Reboots_Phone_Every_Time_You_Type_Reboot

Android Bug Reboots Phone Every Time You Type Reboot

gizmodo.com — The latest big bug discovered in Android has to be one of the craziest that's shipped with a phone. Basically, Android invisibly interprets every word as a command and executes it with "superuser privileges." If you open up your keyboard and type r-e-b-o-o-t, your G1 will, yep, reboot.

Not the first time Canada has done this. During World War II, they send a boat across the top of the country to “show the flag.” (The boat is in a museam in Vancouver)

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/09/0827205&from=rss

Canadians Plan Robot Sub Missions To Aid Claim For Arctic

Posted by timothy on Sunday November 09, @06:50AM from the salute-the-underwater-robots-all-you-want dept.

jbpisio writes with a link to this blog-post summary that the Canadian government has commissioned a pair of unmanned subs to explore the geology of two underwater Arctic mountain ranges; the subs' mission will be to provide evidence supporting Canada's claim to huge swaths of potentially petroleum-rich seabed areas. According to the linked article, "The submersibles, scheduled to be launched in 2010, would be sent on a series of 400-kilometre missions north and west of Ellesmere Island, Canada's northernmost land mass and the country's gateway to the open Arctic Ocean - the scene of an international power struggle over undersea territory and petroleum resources believed to be worth trillions of dollars." At least five countries (besides Canada, these are the US, Russia, Denmark and Norway) would like a slice of those trillions.

Related. Showing the flag in space.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/08/1632226&from=rss

Chandrayaan Enters Lunar Orbit

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday November 08, @12:17PM from the fly-me-to-the-moon dept. Moon Space Science

William Robinson writes

"After an 18-day journey, Chandrayaan-1, the moon mission of India, has entered Lunar orbit. The maneuver was described as crucial and critical by scientists, who pointed out that at least 30 per cent of similar moon missions had failed at this juncture, resulting in spacecraft lost to outer space. The lunar orbit insertion placed Chandrayaan-1 in an elliptical orbit with its nearest point 400 to 500 kilometers away from the moon, and the farthest, 7,500 kilometers. By November 15, the spacecraft is expected to be orbiting the moon at a distance of 100 kilometers and sending back data and images (the camera was tested with shots looking back at Earth). The Chandrayaan-1 is also scheduled to send a probe to the moon's surface."

Yesterday your data was in Seattle. Today it is in Oregon. Tomorrow... Who knows. Would someone please explain (write a legal paper?) what “unspecified location” means when it comes to contracts and other old fashioned legal concepts?

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/08/2341210&from=rss

Amazon's Cloud Data Center to Follow Google to Oregon

Posted by timothy on Saturday November 08, @07:26PM from the pretty-state dept. Data Storage The Internet

1sockchuck writes

"All your online data doesn't really live in a big, fluffy cloud. It resides in servers and data centers. That's why Amazon.com is quietly building a large data center complex in Oregon along the Columbia River, not far from Google's secret data lair in The Dalles. Amazon Web Services started as a way to monetize excess data center capacity for its retail operation, but has grown to the point where it requires dedicated infrastructure. Amazon recently said that its S3 cloud storage service is hosting 29 billion objects."

Will the Networks be able to extract enough revenue from their online viewers to allow them to survive?

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/019760.html

November 08, 2008

Online Viewers at TV Network Web Sites Increase an Average of 155 Percent in September 2008

News release: "Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company, today announced that all four television networks enjoyed month-over-month growth in online video viewers in September, coinciding with the season premieres of many popular and new television shows. NBC.com had the largest increase in video viewers, growing 312 percent month-over-month, followed by FOX Broadcasting and ABC.com, with 165 percent and 105 percent growth, respectively."

Towards digital librarianship... (I think)

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/019757.html

November 08, 2008

Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web

Hull D, Pettifer SR, Kell DB 2008 Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web. PLoS Computational Biology 4(10): e1000204 doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204 [Gerry McKiernan]

• "Many scientists now manage the bulk of their bibliographic information electronically, thereby organizing their publications and citation material from digital libraries. However, a library has been described as “thought in cold storage,” and unfortunately many digital libraries can be cold, impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places. In this Review, we discuss the current chilly state of digital libraries for the computational biologist, including PubMed, IEEE Xplore, the ACM digital library, ISI Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Citeseer, arXiv, DBLP, and Google Scholar. We illustrate the current process of using these libraries with a typical workflow, and highlight problems with managing data and metadata using URIs. We then examine a range of new applications such as Zotero, Mendeley, Mekentosj Papers, MyNCBI, CiteULike, Connotea, and HubMed that exploit the Web to make these digital libraries more personal, sociable, integrated, and accessible places. We conclude with how these applications may begin to help achieve a digital defrost, and discuss some of the issues that will help or hinder this in terms of making libraries on the Web warmer places in the future, becoming resources that are considerably more useful to both humans and machines."

For my Website (and Excel) students

http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/charts-hohli-com-online-charts-builder

Charts.Hohli.com - Online Charts Builder

http://charts.hohli.com

As its name aptly puts it, this web-based resource will provide you with the wherewithal to add charts to your site. These come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and you can choose the one that will fit your website best.

... There is also a whole set of optional parameters to choose from, such as the chart background that you want to be displayed alongside the chart fill itself.