For a second, I thought they were going to strap a GPS ankle bracelet on the kids. Looks like they just can't trust their case workers.

http://www.cbs12.com/news/children-4721120-missing-foster.html?referrer=digg

DCF adding GPS, case workers to track down children

September 14, 2009 5:27 PM

TALLAHASSEE-- Florida is doing a better job of tracking the children in its foster care program.

The percentage of missing children has dropped in half over the past two years from 2.3 percent to a record low of 1.1 percent.

… Currently 257 are missing, according to the Department of Children and Families. DCF Secretary George Sheldon says 90% are runaways and they remain missing for 4 days on average.

… "We are rolling out in the next couple of months mobile units so a picture of every child is taken every 30 days. There's a GPS coordinate date and time and coordinate stamp on the photograph so you know that visit was made at that given point in time and we'll now have automatic alerts that will alert us if a visit hasn't been made," said Sheldon.

Passwords alone are not adequate security. (This is example five billion and seven)

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/09/montgomery_defense/

Intelligence Analyst Says Hacking Charge Doesn’t Compute

By Kevin Poulsen Email Author September 18, 2009 2:10 pm

A Defense Department intelligence analyst hit with a federal computer hacking charge last week says he’s being made a scapegoat for a security slip-up that sent a password in a nationwide terrorism investigation to “tens of thousands” of analysts without the need-to-know.

… According to the government, Montgomery ignored a security warning in the message he saw, and twice logged in to a system used in the terrorism investigation: first on April 9, when he stayed on for two hours, and then on April 14. He’d gotten the password from another classified message to which he also had legitimate access.

Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia charged Montgomery on September 11 with a single felony count of gaining unauthorized access to a protected computer or exceeding authorized access, and obtaining classified information.

“It was an unclassified account,” Montgomery says.

Does this mean the rules don't apply or that neither Commerce nor Treasury want to be bothered? (That means I can give copies to my Canadian students, right?)

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/09/18/234248/Mozilla-Firefox-Not-In-Violation-of-US-Export-Rules?from=rss

Mozilla Firefox Not In Violation of US Export Rules

Posted by Soulskill on Friday September 18, @07:58PM from the no-news-is-good-news dept.

darthcamaro writes

"While the internet may know no borders, the US government does. There are a number of rules that affect software vendors, including encryption export regulations from the US Department of Commerce and export sanctions by the Department of Treasury. But what do you do when your application is open source and freely available to anyone in the world? Do the same the rules apply? It's a question that Mozilla asked the US government about. The answer they received could have profound implications not just for Firefox but for all open source software vendors. 'We really couldn't accept the notion that these government rules could jeopardize the participatory nature of an open source project, so we sought to challenge it,' Harvey Anderson, VP and General Counsel of Mozilla, told InternetNews.com. 'We argued that First Amendment free speech rights would prevail in this scenario. The government took our filing and then we got back a no-violation letter, which is fantastic.'"

In Brazil, the court makes the law?

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/09/19/0156202/Brazilian-Court-Bans-P2P-Software?from=rss

Brazilian Court Bans P2P Software

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday September 19, @12:04AM from the next-up-cars-and-cheeseburgers dept.

Earlier this year, at the behest of an anti-piracy group consisting of the usual suspects from the recording industry, a Brazilian court ruled that a company named Cadare Information Technology must implement a filter on the P2P software they distributed on their website to weed out copyrighted content. Cadare was unable comply with the order because they didn't develop the software; they merely offered it for download. The case went back to court, and a Brazilian judge has now decided to ban distribution of the software because it can be used to assist copyright infringement. "He went on to suggest that any website offering the software alongside advertising (i.e, trying to profit from offering it) would be committing a crime, punishable by between two and four years in jail."