http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=5412
Police probe breach of NHS smartcard security as e-records launched in London
November 16, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Breaches, Other
Tony Collins reports:
An NHS trust at the forefront of work on the £12.7bn NHS IT scheme has called in police after a breach of smartcard security compromised the confidentiality of hundreds of electronic records.
Patients in Hull have expressed their dismay that an unauthorised NHS employee has accessed their confidential records; and the local primary care trust, NHS Hull, says it is “shocked” at the breach of security by a member of staff who has since left.
[...]
GP Paul Cundy, a former spokesman on GP IT for the British Medical Association, said of the Hull incident: “This confidentiality breach, in one of Connecting for Health’s showcase systems, highlights the inherent dangers of the Summary Care Record and all shared record systems. This is alarming news, but precisely what was predicted.”
Read more on ComputerWeekly.com.
[From the article:
Details of the breach emerged as health officials in London were, in an unrelated event, telling journalists about the start of a roll-out of electronic records across London, as part of the National Programme for IT [NPfIT].
The roll-out is part of plans by the Department of Health to create for 50 million people in England an electronic "summary" medical record on a central database run by BT.
But doctors say that the breach of security at NHS Hull shows that an insider with a smartcard can access confidential electronic records without authorisation, if the person is determined to do so.
They say that this will deepen the scepticism of some doctors that centrally-held medical records will remain confidential under the NPfIT.
… In the security breach, an employee was authorised to use collated and anonymised patient data during the course of the person's day to day work, but was not authorised to access individual patient records.
After the person left, [Another case of managers not looking at the logs? Bob] however, NHS Hull discovered that the person "inappropriately accessed identifiable medical records. The trust says: "A total of 358 patients [registered at] GP practices have been affected by this."
(Related)
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=5410
Real ID program in deep trouble
November 16, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Legislation, Surveillance, U.S.
Jaikumar Vijayan reports:
A decision by lawmakers to slash funding for the unpopular Real ID national driver’s license program has put an already struggling initiative on life support.
The U.S. Senate recently approved a $43 billion budget for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for the federal government’s 2010 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1. The appropriation called for substantial increases in DHS spending in several key technology areas but slashed Real ID funding by 40%, from $100 million to $60 million.
The budget cut suggests that Real ID is going nowhere, said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. But Congress’ hesitation to kill Real ID entirely highlights the touchy political nature of the program, he said.
Read more on Computerworld.
Let's hope they did this to keep others from using this technique. (Yeah, I doubt it too.)
Apple Patents 'Enforceable' Ad Viewing On Devices
Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday November 16, @09:39AM from the touch-the-lizard dept.
Rexdude writes
"Apple has filed a patent that forces users to interact with an ad. FTFA: "Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad — it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.""
How lawyers make money the 'technically legal' way.
http://torrentfreak.com/leaked-documents-reveal-anti-piracy-cash-operation-091115/
Leaked Documents Reveal Anti-Piracy Cash Operation
Written by enigmax on November 15, 2009
In 2007, UK lawyers Davenport Lyons (DL) got into the lucrative business of threatening to sue file-sharers. Their clients used anti-piracy tracking companies to harvest the IP addresses of many thousands of users allegedly sharing video games. This information was used to get court orders which forced ISPs to hand over their details.
DL then wrote to the individuals demanding several hundred pounds to make the threat of a lawsuit disappear. Some paid up, but many did not, and the only cases DL took to court were against those who didn’t defend themselves.
The Cloud as analytic tool. Very fast moves, SPSS was acquired in July and RedPill in September...
IBM Furthers Investment In Business Analytics With Smart Analytics Cloud
by Leena Rao on November 15, 2009
During IBM’s Q3 earnings call a few weeks ago, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge highlighted business analytics as a sector where Big Blue is investing significant amounts of cash. The company recently acquired data analytics company SPSS for $1.2 billion and business analytics firm RedPill. Tonight, IBM is unveiling a new internal analytics product that the company is touting as the “largest private cloud computing environment for business analytics in the world,” which launches internally with more than a petabyte of information. Along with this internal product, IBM will launch a companion product for clients to build upon this cloud-based architecture, called IBM Smart Analytics Cloud.
The Cloud as a hacking tool. Given the ability to run applications free in the Cloud and assuming I run them 24/7 and assuming I distribute my attack over “all iPhones,” how long until I find the ones using default passwords?
The "Hail Mary Cloud" Is Growing
Posted by Soulskill on Sunday November 15, @12:23PM from the like-a-zombie-chia-pet dept.
badger.foo writes
"The Australian rickrolling of jailbroken iPhones only goes to prove that bad passwords are bad for you, Peter Hansteen points out, as he reports on the further exploits of the password-guessing Hail Mary Cloud (which we've discussed in the past). The article contains log data that could indicate that the cloud of distributed, password-guessing hosts is growing. 'With 1767 hosts in the current sample it is likely that we have a cloud of at least several thousand, and most likely no single guessing host in the cloud ever gets around to contacting every host in the target list. The busier your SSH deamon is with normal traffic, the harder it will be to detect the footprint of Hail Mary activity, and likely a lot of this goes undetected.'"
If we copyright education, will anyone get an education? My interest: Who owns what?
Public School Teachers Selling Lesson Plans Online
Posted by kdawson on Monday November 16, @01:46AM from the pin-money dept.
theodp writes
"Thousands of teachers are using websites like Teachers Pay Teachers and We Are Teachers to cash in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare. While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, raising questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms."
Copyright again. A business model that created websites for bands to sell their music might make a buck here...
Copyright Time Bomb Set To Go Off
Posted by kdawson on Monday November 16, @08:06AM from the insult-to-injury dept.
In September we discussed one isolated instance of the heirs of rights-holders filing for copyright termination. Now Wired discusses the general case — many copyrights from 1978 and before could come up for grabs in a few years. Some are already in play.
"At a time when record labels and, to a lesser extent, music publishers, find themselves in the midst of an unprecedented contraction, the last thing they need is to start losing valuable copyrights to '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s music, much of which still sells as well or better than more recently released fare. Nonetheless, the wheels are already in motion. ... The Eagles plan to file grant termination notices by the end of the year.... 'It's going to happen,' said [an industry lawyer]. ' Just think of what the Eagles are doing when they get back their whole catalog. They don't need a record company now... You'll be able to go to Eagles.com (currently under construction) and get all their songs. They're going to do it; it's coming up.' … If the labels' best strategy to avoid losing copyright grants or renegotiating them at an extreme disadvantage is the same one they're suing other companies for using, they're in for quite a bumpy — or, rather, an even bumpier — ride."
Ask yourself this: If Bob deleted this file, would I care? If Bob set his hacker students on your trail, with “A's” awarded for erasing your hard drive, would you care? (See where I'm going with this?)
http://lifehacker.com/5405041/five-best-online-backup-tools
Five Best Online Backup Tools
Local backup is a useful and necessary part of securing your data against catastrophe, but with the advent of broadband and inexpensive online storage, you've got little reason to not back up critical files to the cloud as well.
If you know what you want but don't want to pay for the commercial version, find a free alternative here! Tip: Try several, keep the one that seems easiest to use.
5 Sites To Find Free Alternatives To Popular Software
Nov. 15th, 2009 By Varun Kashyap
… here are some sites that you can use to find alternative software and suggested applications.
You can't make this stuff up. (If Al Gore hasn't “discovered” this, it can't be important.)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/cellphoneuselinkedtobrainchanges
Cell Phone Use Linked to Brain Changes
LiveScience.com Lamont Wood Thu Nov 12, 1:39 pm ET
… The Swedish Research Council announced yesterday that researchers at Sweden's Örebro University can point to a specific biological effect that cell phone use has on the brain. However, they can't decide if the effect is good, bad, or indifferent.
(Related) And once they reach the size of peas we can all be politicians!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20091113/sc_livescience/humansstillevolvingasourbrainsshrink
Humans Still Evolving as Our Brains Shrink
LiveScience.com Charles Q. Choi Special to LiveScience Fri Nov 13, 11:31 am ET
… Surprisingly, based on skull measurements, the human brain appears to have been shrinking over the last 5,000 or so years.
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