http://www.databreaches.net/?p=8635
KS: Wichita Student Private Information Online
December 1, 2009 by admin Filed under Breach Incidents, Education Sector, Exposure, U.S.
Deb Farris reports:
Many Wichita parents are angry after learning their children’s names, ages, addresses and phone numbers are listed on an internet web site.
[...]
We tracked it down to the Wichita school district. The website is used to make maps and give directions. A spokesperson for the district says in the fall the Instructional Support Center made the list and the maps so teachers and staff could go door to door welcoming the students back. But the CEO of Community Walk says the district forgot to set the program to private, thus making all the information public.
Community Walk is working closely with the Wichita School District to get the names removed from the site. USD 259 says it didn’t put the names on the site publicly intentionally, and it is doing everything it can to correct the problem.
If your child’s name is on the site, the school district wants you to inform your child’s principal to get it removed.
Read more on KAKE.com
Why should parents have to inform the principal? Since the district is already aware of the problem, they should have secured the file and contacted Google to initiate any emergency cache removal procedures, if necessary.
Privacy, re-thunk?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=5901
Facebook changes privacy settings
December 2, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Featured Headlines, Internet
The following is part of an open letter posted by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg yesterday:
Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.
Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.
However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.
The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.
We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.
Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. [Users will need a much more detailed guide and some incentive, since they haven't paid much attention to Privacy so far. Bob] You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.
We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.
(Related) Why Mom and Dad might want to review those Privacy Settings?
Thousands of NY Sex Offenders Booted From Facebook, MySpace
By Eliot Van Buskirk December 1, 2009 11:27 am
Facebook and MySpace have terminated the accounts of 3,533 convicted sex offenders in the state of New York after they submitted their account information to the state under 2008’s Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP) law, the New York Daily News reports.
The law requires the state’s 30,000 convicted sex offenders to file their home, e-mail and social networking addresses with the state. Out of that pool, only about 27 percent revealed e-mail addresses or social-networking usernames to authorities, and only 10 percent divulged a Facebook or MySpace username.
… The e-STOP system only works if criminals volunteer their social networking identities, as they are required to do within 10 days of creating a new account under penalty of new felony charges. Proponents of the law have declared it a success.
A guide for future Computer Security dissertations?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=5870
8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight
December 1, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Featured Headlines, Internet, Surveillance, U.S.
Chris Soghoian blogs:
Disclaimer: The information presented here has been gathered and analyzed in my capacity as a graduate student at Indiana University. This data was gathered and analyzed on my own time, without using federal government resources. This data, and the analysis I draw from it will be a major component of my PhD dissertation, and as such, I am releasing it in order to receive constructive criticism on my theories from other experts in the field. The opinions I express in my analysis are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Trade Commission, any individual Commissioner, or any other individual or organization with which I am affiliated.
All of the mp3 audio recordings & pdf FOIA scans included on this page can be found in this .zip file (100Mb). Please mirror! [OK, Chris, now mirrored here-- Dissent]. […]
Executive Summary
Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.
The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.
It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies’ extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics — since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004. [...]
Read Chris’s fascinating and troubling findings and analyses on his blog. The “Follow the Money” section is particularly intriguing, but the bottom line seems to be that we don’t know what we don’t know because they’re not telling us everything they should tell us and they’re not required to tell us everything we’d want to know to have an informed policy discussion on surveillance.
(Related)
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/wiretap-prices/
Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, ‘Confuse’ Consumers
By Kim Zetter December 1, 2009 3:30 pm
(Related) Update
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=5894
Blog post on 8 million law enforcement requests causes online furor
December 2, 2009 by Dissent
We need articles like this from the B-schools, not lawyers. (It takes a smart lawyer to recognize this.)
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=5899
11 Reasons Why Privacy Helps the Bottom Line
December 2, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Businesses
Lawyer David Bender writes:
In dire economic times such as these, companies are scouring their internal functionalities seeking ways to run “leaner and meaner.” Operations and personnel that do not ostensibly contribute to profit are at risk. And nowhere are employees more vulnerable than in New York City, the nation’s center for financial services, an industry particularly devastated.
Because the influence of privacy on profit is not immediately apparent, managers searching for excisable fat will doubtless be attracted to the privacy function, concluding that it makes no contribution to the bottom line. But although many view privacy solely as a legal concept, it often provides important commercial benefits. Where privacy does indeed contribute to profit, chopping away at privacy will be counterproductive, slicing off meat and bone, rather than fat. If management is not educated to this fact, the privacy function will be at unnecessary risk.
There are 11 reasons why privacy may benefit the bottom line, which should be raised with management.
Read more on Law.com.
Newspapers seem to win little here.
Google May Limit Free News Access
Posted by kdawson on Wednesday December 02, @05:21AM from the bend-like-a-willow dept.
You know how, if you want to read a paywalled newspaper article, you can just paste its title into Google News and get a free pass? Those days may be coming to an end. Reader Captian Spazzz writes: "It looks like Google may be bowing to pressure from folks like News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch. What I don't understand is what prevents the websites themselves from enforcing some limit. Why make Google do it?" (Danny Sullivan explains how they could do that.)
"Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google, the company has announced. The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages. Publishers will join a First Click Free programme that will prevent web surfers from having unrestricted access. Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages."
Does this sound familiar?
SarBox Lawsuit Could Rewrite IT Compliance Rules
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 01, @03:45PM from the sluice-gate-to-security-spending dept.
dasButcher notes that the Supreme Court will hear arguments next week brought by a Nevada accounting firm that asserts the oversight board for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is unconstitutional. If the plaintiffs are successful, it could force Congress to rewrite or abandon the law used by many companies to validate tech investments for security and compliance.
"Many auditing firms have used [Sarbanes-Oxley Section] 404 as a lever for imposing stringent security technology requirements on publicly traded companies regulated by SOX and their business partners. SOX security compliance has proven effective for vendors and solution providers, as it forces regulated enterprises to spend billions of dollars on technology that, many times, doesn’t prevent security incidents but does make them compliant with the law."
Some Pirates are Capitalists. This does not mean that all Capitalists are Pirates! What a business model!
Somali Pirates Open Up a "Stock Exchange"
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 01, @11:29PM from the send-in-the-sba dept.
reginaldo writes to clue us that pirates in Somalia have opened up a cooperative in Haradheere, where investors can pay money or guns to help their favorite pirate crew for a share of the piracy profits.
"'Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 "maritime companies" and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking,' Mohammed [a wealthy former pirate who took a Reuters reporter to the facility] said. ... Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel. 'I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation,' she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony. 'I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the "company."'"
Oh shock! What the users have been telling us is true! Hard to believe that AT&T used to BE the phone industry.
http://gizmodo.com/5416389/att-comes-in-last-in-consumer-reports-study-that-surprises-no-one
AT&T Comes in Last in Consumer Reports Study That Surprises No One
Here's some news anyone with an iPhone could have told you: AT&T delivers crappy service that its customers hate. But this news comes from a reputable source, Consumer Reports, instead of the usual whiny friends.
Yes, in 19 of the 26 cities surveyed, AT&T was ranked dead last in every category. Verizon was ranked the best, followed by T-Mobile, then Sprint and then, of course, bringing up the rear is our friend AT&T. You can compare their results to the results of our own nationwide 3G test here.
Now we know what happened to all that medical marijuana!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/us/02denver.html
Attention All ETs, Denver May Be the Place for You
By KIRK JOHNSON Published: December 1, 2009
DENVER — Oh, the tangled protocols of interplanetary contact. What should human beings do when aliens from other worlds happen by the neighborhood?
It is a subject about which Denver might gain a decided advantage over less-far-thinking rival cities if enough people vote yes next year on a ballot proposal to create an Extraterrestrial Commission.
The city’s clerk and recorder said in a letter released Tuesday that backers of an ET Commission had gathered enough signatures to guarantee a spot for their idea on the ballot in a statewide primary on Aug. 10.
For the Swiss Army folder
http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/manuals-search-engine-software-manuals/
Manuals-Search-Engine: Download Free Tech & Software Manuals Online
Download free tech & software manuals online. Currently indexes over 900.000 free manuals. Search and browse manuals on a tag cloud. Download and save manuals as PDFs.
Check out Manuals-Search-Engine @ www.manuals-search-engine.com
For my Disaster Recovery class.. Honest!
Destroy All Zombies 3 – The Encore. An Awesome Flash Game
Dec. 2nd, 2009 By Karl L. Gechlik
… You can go to this URL to play the zombie game online. Once the loading finishes you can click the Skip this ad button in the lower right hand corner and you are on your way to becoming a zombie slayer. But you should go through the tutorial.
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