http://www.databreaches.net/?p=2407
Comcast passwords leaked onto the Web
March 16, 2009 by admin Filed under: Business Sector, Exposure, U.S.
Elinor Mills reports:
Thousands of user names and passwords for Comcast customers was removed from document sharing Web site Scribd on Monday, two months after it was posted there.
Scribd removed the list of more than 8,000 passwords and user names after being contacted by Brad Stone at The New York Times. Stone wrote that he was contacted by a Comcast customer who happened across the list after doing a search on his own e-mail address on search engine Pipl.
Read more on Cnet. Comcast’s reply is included as an update to the NY Times entry.
[From the article:
Mr. Andreyo was reading a recent article in PC World entitled “People Search Engines: They Know Your Dark Secrets… And Tell Anyone,” when he was inspired to find out what information about him was online. He searched for his own e-mail address on the search engine Pipl.
… “We have no reason to believe this came from Comcast. It looks like a phishing or related type of scheme,” said Jennifer Khoury, a Comcast spokeswoman. (Asked about this possibility earlier today, Mr. Andreyo said that he doubted he was ever the victim of a phishing scheme.)
Ms. Khoury said that Comcast was freezing the e-mail accounts of the customers on the list and contacting them to educate them about using safe passwords.
Suggests they don't know where their data is...
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=2405
Stolen computer at UT contains personal information of students, faculty
March 16, 2009 by admin Filed under: Breach Reports, Education Sector, Theft, U.S.
A computer stolen from the University of Toledo contained personal information for about 24,000 students and 450 faculty during the 2007-08 and 2008-09 academic years, the university announced Monday.
[...]
The computer was password protected and many of the files were specifically encrypted or individually password protected, he said.
The personal data was saved on the computer itself and not on the university’s network, which officials are encouraging staff to do.
Read more in the Toledo Blade.
[From the article:
Next month UT will launch a data loss prevention system that will allow staff to search the network for personal information on campus computers and move it to more secure locations on the network.
What defines “sophisticated?” What shouldn't I recommend to my students?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20090317053212499
Anonymity and Privacy Should Not Add Up to Prison Time
Tuesday, March 17 2009 @ 05:32 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today urged the United States Sentencing Commission to reject modifications to federal sentencing guidelines that would require extra prison time for people who use technology that hides one's identity or location.
Under current rules, a criminal defendant can get additional time added to a prison sentence if he used "sophisticated means" to commit the offense. In its testimony before the commission, EFF will argue that sentencing courts should not assume that using proxies -- technologies that can anonymize users or mask their location -- is a mark of sophistication. In fact, proxies are widely employed by corporate IT departments and public libraries and, like many computer applications, can be used with little or no knowledge on the part of the user.
Source - EFF
Related? Double Secret Probation! Ignorance of the secret law is no excuse!
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/17/1228224&from=rss
Wikileaks Pages Added To Australian Internet Blacklist
Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 17, @09:41AM from the paging-dr-streisand-dr-streisand dept. Censorship The Internet
cpudney writes
"The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has added several Wikileaks pages to its controversial blacklist. The blacklisted pages contain Denmark's list of banned websites. Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine as the hosts of the popular Australian broadband forum, Whirlpool, discovered last week when they published a forum post that linked to an anti-abortion web-site recently added to ACMA's blacklist. The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian government's proposed mandatory ISP-level Internet censorship legislation. Wikileaks' response to notification of the blacklisting states: 'The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.'"
So Australians aren't allowed to see what it is that the Danes aren't allowed to see?
What to do with the Twitter Addicted?
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/16/200213&from=rss
Juror Tweets Could Create Mistrial
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday March 16, @06:18PM from the cell-jammers-being-installed-next-week dept. Social Networks The Courts
nandemoari writes
"Russell Wright and his construction company, Stoam Holdings, recently lost a $12 million dollar lawsuit brought by investors. But lawyers for the firm have complained that juror Johnathan Powell's Twitter comments broke rules when discussing the civil case with the public. The arguments in this dispute center on two points. Powell insists (and the evidence appears to back him up) that he did not make any pertinent updates until after the verdict was given; if that's the case, the objection would presumably be thrown out. If Powell did post updates during the trial, the judge must decide whether he was actively discussing the case. Powell says he only posted messages and did not read any replies.[He also did not inhale... Bob] Intriguingly, the lawyers for Stoam Holding are not arguing so much that other people directly influenced Powell's judgment, rather that he might have felt a need to agree to a spectacular verdict to impress the people reading his posts."
Related? Another technological “downside”
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10197908-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
Police Blotter: Facebook photo convicts school aide of drinking charge
by Declan McCullagh March 17, 2009 4:30 AM PDT
What: Facebook photograph shows part-time teaching aide at Ohio high school with three cheerleaders holding Smirnoff bottles.
When: The Court of Appeals of Ohio, Twelfth District, rules on February 9.
Outcome: Conviction for allowing minors to possess alcohol upheld.
What happened, according to court documents and other sources:
Most people are merely embarrassed by photos a friend tosses onto Facebook. Mary Ellen Hause went to jail because of them.
Hause, who worked as a part-time teaching aide at Springboro High School, near Dayton, Ohio, was photographed in her basement posing with three cheerleaders holding Smirnoff bottles. The cheerleaders were friends with her son.
That photo, of course, ended up on Facebook. And Springboro High School Resource Officer Sgt. Don Wilson, who regularly poked around students' Facebook accounts, discovered it and turned it over to the local police.
Background for the news debate.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/020839.html
March 16, 2009
State of the News Media 2009
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism: "The State of the News Media 2009 is the sixth edition of our annual report on the health and status of American journalism. Our goals are to take stock of the revolution occurring in how Americans get information and provide a resource for citizens, journalists and researchers to make their own assessments. To do so we gather in one place as much data as possible about all the major sectors of journalism, identify trends, mark key indicators, note areas for further inquiry."
[The first “Major Trend” (follows) sort of sums things up for me... Bob]
The growing public debate over how to finance the news industry may well be focusing on the wrong remedies while other ideas go largely unexplored.
For my Data Mining/Data Analysis students. If you ain't mainstream (Democrat or Republican) you is a terrorist! Facts is facts, but interpreting them requires a bit of common sense. I doubt anyone seeing a Libertarian bumper sticker would shoot first and as questions later.
http://www.kansascity.com/news/breaking_news/story/1086524.html
Missouri report on militias, terrorists draws criticism
The Associated Press
COLUMBIA, Mo. A new document meant to help Missouri law enforcement agencies identify militia members or domestic terrorists has drawn criticism for some of the warning signs mentioned.
The Feb. 20 report called "The Modern Militia Movement" mentions such red flags as political bumper stickers for third-party candidates, such as U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, who ran for president last year; talk of conspiracy theories, such as the plan for a superhighway linking Canada to Mexico; and possession of subversive literature.
… Lt. John Hotz of the Missouri State Highway Patrol said the report comes from publicly available, trend data on militias. It was compiled by the Missouri Information Analysis Center, a "fusion center" in Jefferson City that combines resources from the federal Department of Homeland Security and other agencies.
[Thumbnails of report pages here: http://www.infowars.com/secret-state-police-report-ron-paul-bob-barr-chuck-baldwin-libertarians-are-terrorists/
Chemistry is logical, government agencies are not.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/16/2139211&from=rss
Rocket Hobbyists Prevail Over Feds In Court Case
Posted by kdawson on Monday March 16, @07:01PM from the up-up-and-away dept. Space The Courts
Ellis D. Tripp writes
"DC District Court judge Reggie Walton has finally ruled in the 9-year old court case pitting the model rocketry community against the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The ruling is a 'slam dunk' for the rocketry community, stating that the BATFE ignored scientific evidence and overstepped its bounds by classifying ammonium perchlorate composite propellant (APCP) as an 'explosive.' Effective immediately, the BATFE has no legal jurisdiction over hobby rocket motors, and a federal Low Explosives User's Permit will no longer be needed in order to purchase APCP motors. The full text of the Judge's decision is reproduced at the link."
Once again I wasn't even nominated. Smart guys those SXSWers...
http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2009/03/bloggies-tk-tk.html
SXSW: Pioneer Woman Nabs Top Honors at 2009 Bloggies
By Lewis Wallace March 16, 2009 3:11:00 PM
[List of categories and nominees: http://2009.bloggies.com/
AH HA! At last I have found the tool my students use to generate their papers!
http://singlefunction.com/blindtextgenerator/
BlindTextGenerator
BlindTextGenerator is a handy tool that helps you create dummy text, for all your layout needs.
Oh goodie. Now I can turn my computer into a phone. (Or I could write a short program to send SMS messages to everyone I know..)
http://singlefunction.com/freesmstextorg/
FreeSMSText.org
FreeSMSText.org allows you to send free sms text messages to almost anyone in the world. You just have to know their phone number and their cell phone provider.
This is scary. Next we'll have New York mounting lasers for pigeons! ...then J-walkers! ...then investment bankers!
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/16/1339217&from=rss
New Laser System Targets Mosquitoes
Posted by samzenpus on Monday March 16, @02:37PM from the excessive-force dept.
An anonymous reader writes
"In the Cold War the so-called 'Star Wars defense system' proposed using lasers to destroy incoming Soviet missiles. In a 2007 brainstorming session aimed at combating malaria, Dr. Lowell Wood, the architect of that system, proposed modifying his original idea to kill mosquitoes. The cover of today's Wall Street Journal contains an article that highlights this initiative as well as a few others, like using a giant flashlight to disrupt mosquitoes' vision and using the insects to vaccinate, in the war against malaria. The system is intelligent enough to avoid noncombatants like humans and butterflies and can even tell the difference between females, the blood-drinkers, and males. My favorite quote: 'We'd be delighted if we destabilize the human-mosquito balance of power.'"
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