http://www.americanbanker.com/btn_article.html?id=20090224Y62W5L2P
Heartland's Lonely Quest For Reform
Bank Technology News | March 2009 By Rebecca Sausner
Heartland Payment Systems CEO Robert Carr has likened his company's massive data breach to the Tylenol moment when product contamination led to an overhaul in packaging safety. It's likely Carr has had a few Tylenol moments himself in the past couple of months as he dealt with perhaps the largest data breach ever, though the actual number of cards compromised is undisclosed.
Now Carr is using his standing in the industry - he founded Heartland and enjoys healthy respect among processors - to call for industry-wide reform of payments technology and information sharing about exploits to prevent criminals from successfully deploying the same hack on multiple targets. Lots of industry players agree with his stance, but there's been scant input thus far from the industry's most influential parties: including titans such as MasterCard, Discover and Visa, which are mostly mum on the subject.
… The creation of an exploit clearinghouse that would make specific, but perhaps confidential information about security breaches available to the industry has legal and inertia challenges. It was only a day or two after the Heartland breach was announced before the first class action lawsuit was announced; if done in a totally transparent way, coming clean with exactly how they were compromised in a timely fashion could be detrimental to the company's legal defense.
But offering the insight in an anonymous fashion to a confidential clearinghouse organization could get around many of the legal issues, if only someone would step up to lead the initiative, and pay for it.
Guidelines! Perhaps they will help.
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20090302142522694
MD: Appeals court refuses to unmask anonymous donut shop critics
Monday, March 02 2009 @ 02:25 PM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
A Maryland Appeals Court has overturned a lower ruling that would have unveiled the identity of three anonymous Internet commenters due to a technicality in the discovery process. Still, the judges offer advice on how trial courts should handle the situation in the future by respecting the First Amendment rights of the posters in question.
Source - Ars Technica
[From the article:
In the future, lower courts should require plaintiffs to notify anonymous posters that they are the subject of a subpoena; a posting on the message board should suffice for that. The plaintiff should not only give the posters time to file and serve opposition to whatever action is being taken, he or she should also be required to provide evidence of exact statements made by each poster. "[I]f all else is satisfied, balance the anonymous poster’s First Amendment right of free speech against the strength of the prima facie case of defamation presented by the plaintiff," reads the order.
How scared were we? (and was it real fear or political fear?) No doubt this will be well chewed over...
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20090303051011393
Obama unseals Bush-era wiretap memos
Tuesday, March 03 2009 @ 05:10 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
The Bush administration secretly concluded after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that it had the authority to wiretap the Internet and telephone calls with virtually no limitations, restrict free speech, and use the U.S. military domestically against suspected terrorists.
Those legal opinions came in a series of memorandums written by U.S. Department of Justice lawyers, including deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo, which were disclosed by the Obama administration on Monday.
Source - Cnet
“Hello, We're your elected twits. We like this technology because 1) It's cool, 2) It gets our name in the news for being technologically sophisticated (and cool), 3) We can employ our children to actually use the technology since we don't know how.”
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/020728.html
March 02, 2009
House Committees Take the Lead on Using Social Media to Ensure Transparency
News release: "House Committees on Science and Technology, Education and Labor, Transportation and Infrastructure, and the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming are the first four Congressional Committees to join Twitter. These Committees use Twitter as a new tool to reach their audience and ensure transparency between the government and the public."
House Committee on Science and Technology
SciTechCmte (Twitter) - http://twitter.com/SciTechCmteHouse Committee on Education and Labor
edlabordems (Twitter) - http://twitter.com/edlabordemsHouse Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure
HouseTransInf (Twitter) - http://twitter.com/HouseTransInfHouse Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming
MarkeyMemo (Twitter) - http://twitter.com/MarkeyMemo
Shouldn't we be able to take this and create a computer program to do our estimation for us? If we make it open source, it would be a powerful “Congressman, you are lying again.” type of tool. (or would that be redundant?)
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/020725.html
March 02, 2009
GAO Issues First-of-Its-Kind Cost Estimating Guide
“How Much Will This Program Really Cost?” GAO Issues First-of-Its-Kind Cost Estimating Guide to Answer Such Questions, March 2, 2009
"Developed with input from industry experts as well as federal officials, the 436-page Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide lays out a multi-step process for developing high-quality, trustworthy cost estimates; explains how to manage program costs once a contract has been awarded; and presents 48 case studies, drawn from GAO published audits, that illustrate typical pitfalls and successes in cost estimating. The guide stresses both sound cost estimating and earned value management (EVM), a project management tool that compares completed work to expected outcomes, in setting realistic program baselines and managing risk. In future audits, GAO plans to use the Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide to assess the accuracy of agencies’ cost estimates and determine whether programs are on schedule. The guide can be found here."
It looks like someone is capturing all the RIAA cases. Lots of links to documents. Too much to read at one go, so I'll have to defer judgment. But, this seems to excite the technorati so I'll probably take a long look... (Clearly, if this became common practice it could get expensive quick!)
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/03/0110242&from=rss
Judge Orders Record Company Execs To Duluth
Posted by kdawson on Monday March 02, @11:42PM from the get-your-butts-up-here dept. The Courts
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes
"Lest there be any doubt that District Judge Michael J. Davis, presiding over the Duluth, Minnesota, case, Capitol Records v. Thomas, really does 'get it' about the toxic effect the RIAA, its lead henchman Matthew Oppenheim, and their lawyers have had on the judicial process, all such doubt should be removed by the order he just entered (PDF). It removes control of the decision-making process from the RIAA, Oppenheim, and the lawyers. In the order Judge Davis spells out, in the clearest possible terms so that there can be no misunderstanding, that at the extraordinary 2-day settlement conference he has scheduled for later this month, each record company plaintiff is ordered to produce an 'officer' of the corporation, or a 'managing agent' of the corporation, who has corporate, decision-making, 'power.' The judge makes it clear that no one who has 'settlement authority' with any limits or range attached to it will be acceptable. This means that 'RIAA hitman' Matthew Oppenheim will not be able to control the settlement process as he has been permitted by the Courts to do in the past."
A research aggregator? Might be a fun challenge to my students!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10186187-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
Ensembli demos simple, useful RSS aggregator
by Rafe Needleman March 2, 2009 6:44 PM PST
The RSS reader Ensembli is not a product for me, says CEO Michael Wheatley. It's certainly not a product for RSS junkies like Robert Scoble. People who use RSS feeds professionally, to stay on top of news and spot emerging issues they may not have been aware of, need feed readers that show them everything that happens in the news sources they know about. (Personally, I use Netvibes as a dashboard.) What Ensembli does is track the topics you tell it you're interested in. It then watches what you click on and fetches stories based both on those implied interests and what you've said you want to see.
Related Another type of aggregator.
http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/feedweaver-net-rss-feeds-made-elastic
Feedweaver.net - RSS Feeds Made Elastic
Feedweaver is a web-based tool that performs a simple yet interesting operation: combining multiple RSS feeds into one, and letting you save time that can be employed elsewhere. For example, you can combine feeds from music review sites (such as Wilson & Alroy’s Record Reviews) and official band sites in order to get the scoop on what is being released, and access some reviews in the same place.
This customization process can take into consideration different keyword filters, and in the abovementioned case you could filter out genres that you don’t like, and prioritize the ones that mean the most to you.
In addition to that, you can easily share your feeds with your friends by giving them the URL of the combined feeds. They don’t even need to login either – the feeds are available to every person who knows the actual address.
By way of conclusion, Feedweaver is a practical service that will enable anybody to have better control over his preferred web-based content. It is a wholly-free service, too, and that is always a nice thing.
For my website class
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/03/0152241&from=rss
Open Source Usability — Joomla! Vs. WordPress
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 03, @05:20AM from the apples-and-orange-trees dept. Programming Technology
An anonymous reader writes
"PlayingWithWire profiles two open source tools for Web development, comparing Joomla! and WordPress through the lens of usability. The article has apparently upset a few people at the Joomla! forum, but it does bring up a good point. Many open source projects are developed by engineers for engineers — should they focus more on usability? PlayingWithWire makes a bold analogy: 'If Joomla! is Linux, then WordPress is Mac OS X. WordPress might offer only 90% of the features of Joomla!, but in most cases WordPress is both easier to use and faster to get up and running.'"
The article repeatedly stresses that blogging platform WordPress and CMS harness Joomla! occupy different levels of the content hierarchy. How fair is it to twit Joomla! on usability?
Perhaps I could list my favorite Math tutorial videos here?
http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/youtubereloaded-com-embedding-youtube-videos
YouTubeReloaded.com - Embedding YouTube Videos
http://www.youtubereloaded.com/
A free YouTube playlist generator that goes by the name of YouTubeReloader is available for those who are looking into a concise way to spruce up their sites and/or blogs. You can access it by following the link provided below, and use it without the need of registering beforehand or disclosing information of any kind.
There are three playlist types on offer: “Search based”, “Predefined feeds”, and a “Custom playlist”. The playlist itself can be modified in a plethora of ways. For example, you can choose from three different skins as well as choosing the size of the player itself and stretching the video as you see fit.
For its part, you can set down play options such as autostart and shuffle, and once everything is in place you can preview the results and have the code generated instantly. You can then paste it at will all over your sites, and see if your traffic figures go up accordingly or whether you will have to dream up something else in order to stand out from the throng.
Potentially interesting tool.
http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/nibipedia-com-learning-together-through-the-web
Nibipedia.com - Learning Together Through The Web
Nibipedia is an online community that revolves around educational videos that cover different topics. These videos can be readily searched and accessed from the main page, and they are also grouped under categories and tags such as “World Civics”, “Science” and “Internet & Computers”.
When you watch any of the featured videos, you are also provided with the full Wikipedia article as regards that topic, and further links that will take you to related videos and articles.
Nibipedeia is still being put together, but you can already access the featured videos from the main page and have a good idea of the dynamics of the site. Very soon Nibipedia will allow visitors to create profiles and interact with each other. In practice, this would mean that people will be able to connect with those interested in the very same topics. Still, the site is quite interesting as it stands, and if you are either an educator or someone who is looking for some enlightenment a visit to Nibipedia is a good start.
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