http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20090105175536874
2008 Data Breach Total Soars - ITRC Reports 47% Increase over 2007
Monday, January 05 2009 @ 05:55 PM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
The Identity Theft Resource Center (”ITRC”) issued its end of year press release today. Not surprisingly, the number of breaches reported in 2008 was up significantly from 2007, with their counter hitting 656 U.S. breaches for the year, an increase of 47% over last year’s total of 446 breaches in their database.
[...]
Whereas ITRC’s analysis might lead to the conclusion that the financial section is the most proactive sector because they represent less than 12% of all breaches, inspection of the raw frequency data suggests a somewhat different picture: reported breaches increased over 250% from 2007 to 2008. That trend indicates that security in the financial sector is not keeping pace with previous threats and new threats to data security.
In interpreting ITRC’s data, then, and in addition to all of the cautions and qualifiers they appropriately include, we also need to keep other factors in mind, not the least of which is that when Massachusetts analyzed its breach reports for the first 10 months after its law went into effect, 75% of the reported breaches were from the financial sector, a statistic that does not seem to “fit” with what ITRC found based on published media reports or those reports available on a few states attorney general web sites.
Source - Chronicles of Dissent (commentary and analysis)
If you are doing things that are illegal, immoral (fattening gets a pass) the anti-virus guys will attack you!
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20090106073852215
Sophos versus police spyware in “legal hacking” debate
Tuesday, January 06 2009 @ 07:38 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
In a rather disturbing development it is being reported in the British press that police have been given the power to hack into computers without a court warrant.
[...]
One thing I can promise you though: If Sophos encounters any malware written by the police, we won’t turn a blind eye. We will add detection for it.
And if you think about it, we don’t have any other sensible choice.
For anti-virus vendors to know which spyware Trojan horse to ignore, the British police would need to provide us with a sample of their code. For security reasons, it seems unlikely that this would happen. As a result, how will we (and other security vendors) know which code is written by the cops and which originates from traditional hackers? After all, it’s not likely to say Copyright (c) New Scotland Yard is it?
In order to properly protect customers, Sophos continues to protect against all the malicious code that we see. ..... And if that puts us at loggerheads with our friends in the police, so be it.
Source - Sophos
Would anyone in congress receive/respond to a twit offering them a cabinet post? (Oh, wait! A twit is a message, not a person!)
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=251
Twitter Gets Hacked, Badly
January 5th, 2009 by admin
Michael Arrington reports:
Phishing attacks, which hit Twitter over the weekend, are a sign a service has arrived [My contention is that every new technology will be tested by evil-doers to see where the vulnerabilities are. It's inevitable! Bob] (Facebook has the same problem). But someone hacking into Twitter’s internal admin tools and compromising 33 high profile accounts, including President Elect Barack Obama, has Twitter users freaking out about what to do.
Here is Twitter’s official explanation: Read more on Washington Post
If you use these technologies, you'll never get a real job. If you don't, employers assume you can't/won't use technology! All that's left is (gasp) politics!
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=2009010510053137
MySpace Medical
Monday, January 05 2009 @ 10:05 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
For adults, browsing MySpace.com can be a secret window onto how teenagers sculpt their public personas. Teens, one of the most wired groups in America, use the social-networking site to create profiles where they share clips of their favorite songs, post pictures or vent about a bad day.
But MySpace, which now boasts 200 million profiles, is not all fun and games. Findings from a new pair of studies by Megan Moreno, a physician specializing in adolescent medicine, and her colleagues at Seattle Children's Hospital reveal that more than half of the 500 teen profiles they looked at during two and a half months in 2007, read more like cautionary tales, chock full of high-risk behaviors from sexual conquests to binge drinking and drug use. While the prevalence of racy MySpace pages created by teens may not be news, Moreno's studies are the first to systematically catalog the sexual and substance-abuse content of teens' profiles, and to look at the results of an online health intervention. Her results, on a small scale, support the idea that these profiles are an untapped resource for physicians and mental-health professionals. By harnessing this technology as a monitoring tool, physicians, parents and counselors may effectively tag along with teens for some of their social interactions and when appropriate, contact teens at risk.
Source - Newsweek
FUN! This reopens my debate (polite discussion) with Dead Dan Vigil. I still want my attorney to READ EVERYTHING. If the attorney then decides something should not be used, I will accept that judgment. But I can't accept a guess based on what you think might be in the document.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/020237.html
January 05, 2009
New on LLRX: Metadata - What Is It and What Are My Ethical Duties?
Metadata - What Is It and What Are My Ethical Duties?: Jim Calloway explains why every lawyer needs to understand a few basic things about metadata. He contends that the legal ethics implications of metadata “mining” are no longer just of interest to the lawyers processing electronic discovery, or the ethics mavens.
All laws should be like this, but only I should make the accusations. (No doubt, several lawmakers will find themselves accused...)
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F06%2F0351202&from=rss
NZ File-Sharers, Remixers Guilty Upon Accusation
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 06, @02:33AM from the how-laws-are-made dept. The Internet Government
An anonymous reader writes
"Next month, New Zealand is scheduled to implement Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act. The controversial act provides 'Guilt Upon Accusation,' which means that if a file-sharer is simply accused of copyright infringement he/she will be punished with summary Internet disconnection. Unlike most laws, this one has no appeal process and no punishment for false accusation, because they were removed after public consultation. The ISPs are up in arms and now artists are taking a stand for fair copyright."
Employees are scum. We should run our companies without them.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F05%2F2137202&from=rss
Employees the Next (Continuing) Big Security Risk?
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 05, @05:30PM from the not-if-you-treat-them-right dept. Security IT
surely_you_cant_be_serious writes
"A nationwide survey finds that most companies consider their systems vulnerable to attack. Historically, crime rates increase during recessions — and some believe that cybercrime may well follow suit, especially given massive layoffs and the dim prospects many laid-off employees face in finding a new job. 'One thing companies can start doing is monitoring their networks on an ongoing basis so that they understand the normal pattern of data flow and usage, Brill said. [Failure to do this is equivalent to building a trans-continental railroad system and not know where your trains are or if other trains are using your rails! Bob] In many cases, companies may not have the internal capability to do this, but outsourcing options are available. Kroll Ontrack, for instance, will be rolling out a 24/7 monitoring service for its global clients manned from a US location by professionals in early 2009.'"
Youse don't take it all at once, youse first form a commission consisting of da heads of da five families!
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F05%2F2038251&from=rss
A Hacker's Audacious Plan To Rule the Underground
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 05, @04:47PM from the ambition-can-carry-you-just-so-far dept. Security The Internet
An anonymous reader writes
"Wired has the inside story of Max Butler, a former white hat hacker who joined the underground following a jail stint for hacking the Pentagon. His most ambitious hack was a hostile takeover of the major underground carding boards where stolen credit card and identity data are bought and sold. The attack made his own site, CardersMarket, the largest crime forum in the world, with 6,000 users. But it also made the feds determined to catch him, since one of the sites he hacked, DarkMarket.ws, was secretly a sting operation run by the FBI." [Technical term: Oops! Bob]
Movement toward my model for music (and other information) where you make it available and users buy by the drink?
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F06%2F0013245&from=rss
Amazon S3 Adds Option To Make Data Accessors Pay
Posted by kdawson on Monday January 05, @07:17PM from the by-the-byte dept. Software The Internet
CWmike writes
"Amazon.com has rolled out a new option for its Simple Storage Service (S3) that lets data owners shift the cost of accessing their information to users. Until now, individuals or businesses with information stored on S3 had to pay data-transfer costs to Amazon when others made use of the information. Amazon said the new Requester Pays option relieves data providers of that burden, leaving them to pay only the basic storage fees for the cloud computing service. The bigger question with the cloud is, who really pays? Mark Everett Hall argues that IT workers do."
Perhaps this is true wherever people congregate, explaining both soccer hooligans and congress!
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F06%2F042202&from=rss
How the City Hurts Your Brain
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 06, @05:24AM from the but-not-paris dept. Science
Hugh Pickens writes
"The city has always been an engine of intellectual life and the 'concentration of social interactions' is largely responsible for urban creativity and innovation. But now scientists are finding that being in an urban environment impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory and suffers from reduced self-control. 'The mind is a limited machine,' says psychologist Marc Berman. 'And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.' Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy city street. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to redirect our attention constantly so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. Natural settings don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. A study at the University of Michigan found memory performance and attention spans improved by 20 percent after people spent an hour interacting with nature. 'It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan,' says Berman. 'They needed to put a park there.'"
Something for my Stat students
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/020232.html
January 05, 2009
Statistical Abstract of the United States 2009
U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2009 (128th Edition) - Washington, DC, 2008
"The Statistical Abstract of the United States is the standard summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States. It is also designed to serve as a guide to other statistical publications and sources. The latter function is served by the introductory text to each section, the source note appearing below each table, and Appendix I, which comprises the Guide to Sources of Statistics, the Guide to State Statistical Abstracts, and the Guide to Foreign Statistical Abstracts."
Something for my students
http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/cramberry-net-studying-made-easy
Cramberry.net - Studying Made Easy
A new web-based application, Cramberry is there to make life easier for students and those who have a memory like a sieve and always tend to neglect pivotal dates such as birthdays and the like.
Cramberry revolves around sets of flashcards that contain the information which the user intends to memorize or remember, and each card has a front and a back which will let you gauge your knowledge.
Once you have created a full set of cards, these will be randomly displayed, and your memory will be put to the test as you try and remember the back of each card that is displayed by clicking on the relevant button.
This process is actually a dynamic one, as Cramberry keeps track of the cards you know and helps you to overcome your shortcomings by learning the ones you have trouble with.
This solution is also wholly inexpensive, and if the abovementioned sounds good to you it is always possible to see if it delivers the goods or not by creating a free account and giving it a spin.
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