http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=3689
“Anonymized” data really isn’t—and here’s why not
September 8, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Other
Nate Anderson writes:
The Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission had a bright idea back in the mid-1990s—it decided to release “anonymized” data on state employees that showed every single hospital visit. The goal was to help researchers, and the state spent time removing all obvious identifiers such as name, address, and Social Security number. But a graduate student in computer science saw a chance to make a point about the limits of anonymization.
Latanya Sweeney requested a copy of the data and went to work on her “reidentification” quest. It didn’t prove difficult.
Read more on Ars Technica
[The full paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006
On the other hand, here is a source of overly-identified personal data. What a hacker target!
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/09/07/234251/What-the-DHS-Knows-About-You?from=rss
What the DHS Knows About You
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 08, @08:13AM from the shirt-size-and-toothbrush-color dept.
Sherri Davidoff writes
"Here's a real copy of an American citizen's DHS Travel Record, retrieved from the US Customs and Border Patrol's Automated Targeting System and obtained through a FOIA/Privacy Act request. The document reveals that the DHS is storing: the traveler's credit card number and expiration; IP addresses used to make Web travel reservations; hotel information and itinerary; full airline itinerary including flight numbers and seat numbers; phone numbers including business, home, and cell; and every frequent flyer and hotel number associated with the traveler, even ones not used for the specific reservation."
Interesting in that this was not supposed to have been politically motivated. (I don't believe that either.) If there were racial/religious/gender questions, would they be allowed to ask those questions? Should “politics” be a protected class? Can there be an 'all Republican' jury of your peers?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=3668
Student accused of accessing Palin’s email can’t screen jury on political views
September 7, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Breaches, Court, U.S.
The Associated Press reports that a federal judge in Knoxville denied a request by lawyers for David C. Kernell to screen potential jurors by questionnaire about their political views and their attitudes about Sarah Palin.
Kernell is on trial after being indicted (pdf) for accessing Palin’s e-mail account. He allegedly figured out the correct answers to her personal security questions by using information about her available on the Web.
Thanks to Brian Honan for this link.
(Related)
Password Hackers Do Big Business With Ex-Lovers
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday September 07, @12:46PM from the time-to-get-sneakier dept.
Hugh Pickens writes
"The Washington Post reports that disgruntled lovers and spouses considering divorce are flocking to services like YourHackerz.com that boast they have little trouble hacking into Web-based e-mail systems like AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Facebook and Hotmail. The services advertise openly, and there doesn't appear to be much anyone can do about it because while federal law prohibits hacking into e-mail, without further illegal activity, it's only a misdemeanor, says Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. 'The feds usually don't have the resources to investigate and prosecute misdemeanors,' [Unless they are aimed at Politicians. Bob] says Kerr. 'And part of the reason is that normally it's hard to know when an account has been compromised, because e-mail snooping doesn't leave a trace.' It's not clear where YourHackerz.com is located, but experts suspect that most password hacking businesses are based overseas."
Did Thomas Jefferson get it wrong? Technology has no effect, does it?
The "Copyright Black Hole" Swallowing Our Culture
Posted by Soulskill on Monday September 07, @02:25PM from the sanity-optional dept.
An anonymous reader writes
"James Boyle, professor at Duke Law School, has a piece in the Financial Times in which he argues that a 'copyright black hole is swallowing our culture.' He explains some of the issues surrounding Google Books, and makes the point that these issues wouldn't exist if we had a sane copyright law. Relatedly, in recent statements to the still-skeptical European Commission, Google has defended their book database by saying that it helps to make the Internet democratic. Others have noted that the database could negatively affect some researchers for whom a book's subject matter isn't always why they read it."
(Related) and highly amusing...
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/09/07/2148227/Copyright-Troubles-For-Sony?from=rss
Copyright Troubles For Sony
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 08, @05:19AM from the billion-here-billion-there dept.
ljaszcza writes
"Daily Tech brings us a story about Sony's run-in with the Mexican police. (Billboard picked up the story as well.) It seems that they raided Sony's offices and seized 6,397 music CDs after a protest from the artist, Alejandro Fernandez. Fernandez had signed a seven-album deal with Sony Music; he completed that commitment and then left for Universal. During the time with Sony, he recorded other songs that did not make it into the agreed-upon seven albums. Sony Music took it upon themselves to collect that material and release it as an eighth album. Fernandez claims that he fulfilled his contract with Sony, and residual material belongs to him. Hmm. Precedent from the Jammie Thomas infringement and distribution case gives us $80K per song. Sony vs. Joel Tenenbaum gives $22.5K per song. So 6,397 CDs at an average of 8 songs/CD is 51,176 infringing songs, with (IMHO) intent to distribute. The damages to Fernandez should be $1,151,460,000 using the Tenenbaum precedent or $4,094,080,000 using the Thomas precedent. Seems very straightforward to me."
As a follow-up to one of yesterday's articles – maybe kids DO hate talking on the phone, even to 911
Trapped kids update Facebook rather than ring police
'Little Joey is stuk in stm drain lolz'
By Patrick Goss Monday at 09:49 BST
Very much in the category of 'you couldn't make this up' comes the news that two girls trapped in a storm drain in South Australia chose to update their Facebook status to get help – rather than ringing the emergency services.
The South Australian Metropolitan Fire Service has expressed worry that the two girls – ages 12 and 10 – chose to turn to social networking rather than ringing triple zero, the Aussie equivalent of 999.
Sometimes you gotta remind yourself that the road from concept to commodity is neither short nor smooth. Thus the Gartner “Hype Cycle” chart.
http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn17705/dn17705-1_671.jpg
Good point. Lots of comments, strangely they all seem to have been typed!
The Case For Mandatory Touch-Typing In High School
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 08, @02:27AM from the quick-brown-fox dept.
Hugh Pickens writes
"With the perspective of forty-plus years since my graduation, I would say the single most useful course I took in high school was a business class in touch-typing that gave me a head start for writing and with computers that I have benefited from my entire life. So it was with particular interest that I read Gordon Rayner's essay in the Telegraph proposing that schools add a mandatory course in touch typing to the cornerstones of education: reading, writing and arithmetic. 'Regardless of the career a child takes up when they leave school, a high percentage of them will use a keyboard in their daily work, and all of them are likely to use a keyboard in their leisure time,' writes Rayner. 'Touch-typing would help every child throughout their lives — so why are our schools so blind to this?'"
[Of course, you can also learn online: http://klavaro.sourceforge.net/
...and you can get this miracle drug without a prescription! (For my Statistics class)
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/09/07/1526234/Placebos-Are-Getting-More-Effective?from=rss
Placebos Are Getting More Effective
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday September 07, @11:58AM from the time-to-start-treating-with-placebos dept.
Wired is reporting that the well-known "placebo effect" seems to be increasing as time goes on. Fewer and fewer medications are actually making it past drug trials since they are unable to show benefits above and beyond a placebo.
"It's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time."
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