http://www.databreaches.net/?p=8819
Ca: Alberta health board cleared in records breach
December 10, 2009 by admin Filed under Commentaries and Analyses, Financial Sector, Non-U.S., Of Note
Because we don’t have a privacy commissioner who actually — gasp — investigates breaches and issues findings, and all we have is HHS which doesn’t publish its findings and leaves us generally in the dark, this report out of Canada is especially interesting.
The Alberta privacy commissioner’s office has found that the province’s health board had reasonable security measures in place when a virus targeted a computer network in July, potentially affecting the personal health information of thousands of people.
“AHS [Alberta Health Services] had an anti-malware system, firewalls and an intrusion detection system in place. In my opinion, these are reasonable controls to protect health information against malware,” report author Brian Hamilton writes.
“I noted some areas for improvement … but it is important to understand the HIA [Health Information Act] holds custodians to a standard of reasonableness, not perfection.”
The virus was a Trojan horse program known as “Coreflood.” It targeted Alberta Health Services’ Edmonton computer network and captured information from some clients’ Netcare electronic health records and transmitted them to a external server.
[...]
Read more from CBC News.
I wonder why?
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=8825
Court Rejects Request to Consolidate TJX Hacker Cases
December 11, 2009 by admin Filed under Hack, Of Note
Kim Zetter of Threat Level reports that:
A federal judge in Massachusetts has rejected a request from U.S. attorneys to consolidate a New Jersey case against Albert Gonzalez, who has admitted hacking more than 120 million credit card numbers from Heartland Payment Systems, with two other cases against him in Massachusetts.
[...]
The case was transferred to Massachusetts on Tuesday, but Judge Patti Saris rejected the consolidation request. This means that the New Jersey case will stay in Massachusetts, but Gonzalez will be sentenced in that case separately by a different federal judge, District Judge Douglas Woodlock. Judge Saris indicated that she would be willing to delay her sentencing hearing in the Massachusetts and New York cases to coordinate with sentencing in the New Jersey case if Judge Woodlock requests it.
More here. I suspect a number of us who have been following this case are surprised by the judge’s refusal to consolidate the cases.
More on the Google and Facebook kerfuffles.
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/why-facebook-and-google-hate-privacy-657232
Why Facebook and Google hate privacy
The more you share, the more data can be mined
By Gary Marshall Thursday at 12:36 GMT
For my stats class. You could make a case that people who go with the default don't understand computers and by extension don't understand computer security.
Are Microsoft Users More Gullible When It Comes To Online Advertising?
by Erick Schonfeld on December 10, 2009
… Earlier this week, we noted that people coming to Websites from Bing are about 75 percent more likely to click on an ad than those coming from Google.
Following that post, Chitika ran some analysis on browsers and operating systems, and it found that users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer are about 40 percent more likely to click on an ad than Firefox users, about 50 percent more likely than Apple Safari users, and 80 percent more likely than Google Chrome users. The numbers are based on Chitika data from 134 million across 80,000 sites.
“We have no idea how to secure our data, let's pass a law that makes it look like someone else is to blame!”
Lawmakers Want to Bar Sites From Posting Sensitive Government Docs
By Kim Zetter December 10, 2009 2:10 pm
If you were going to compete in any industry, you would need to research your competitor's business models looking for vulnerabilities. Note that some of the ISPs mentioned here can offer all services for the price Qwest charges for each service, proving that your costs are much lower if you skip the copper wire landlines? Perhaps the next generation will start ISPs rather than kool-aid stands.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/the-coolest-isp-in-the-world.ars
How to be the world's greatest ISP
We're not always aware of it here in the USA, but there are many ISPs out there in the world who do things quite differently than what we're used to. Some of these ISPs ideas are even really good. Ars surveys the global ISP landscape and paints a picture of what a dream ISP might look like.
By Rudolf van der Berg | Last updated 2 days ago
… It seems that almost all of them offer the exact same thing; Internet access and telephony, often combined with television and some generic services like e-mail and space for a website. Some ISPs can offer hundreds of different combinations by varying speeds, prices, and content packages, but it's essentially the same "triple play" offer.
… It's surprising (and refreshing), then, to find a quite different business model like plus simple operated by French ISPs. French broadband providers like Free.fr, Numericable, and SFR have just one offer. It costs €30/$45, and for that you get everything:
Cable and DSL internet at 20-30Mbps (and DOCSIS3 or fiber at 100Mbps in some towns)
Free telephony to 100 nations (mostly to fixed lines; calling mobiles costs more)
HDTV with a HD-DVR
(Some ISPs like Numericable and France Telecom/Orange have offers for €20 for Internet + telephony, or Internet + TV, but the majority of customers choose a €30 pack.)
This isn’t all you get. More is included, like free access to WiFi hotspots, music jukeboxes, computer games, your own personal television channel for live TV, etc. We'll touch upon these innovations in more depth below.
[The article includes this little aside that seems to toss cold water on AT&T's “We need limits” arguments. Bob]
But what good is bandwidth if you're stuck with a download (or upload cap) so you can’t actually use it? The OECD once published a table (PDF) with burnrates, which showed that in countries like Australia, customers could actually burn through their purchased amount of bytes in under a minute. Interestingly enough, the countries that have high bandwidth networks available don’t have heavy caps. For instance, NTT in Japan has a 900GB upload limit but no download limit.
… User generated content has been all the rage on the 'Net in recent years, but there seems to be only one ISP who has truly embraced user-generated content. The often mentioned Free.fr enables its users to become their own broadcasters. A user can attach any analogue video feed (like a simple camcorder) to the DVR and have it converted into an IP-TV feed that is broadcasted live over its IP-TV platform. This has sparked quite some controversy, as people could literally broadcast anything. But it has also added new meaning to YouTube’s slogan of "Broadcast Yourself," because now people can do so live and on TV.
For the Forensic folder
Find Your Phone's IMEI Number
I can't help it, I'm addicted to lists.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/022991.html
December 10, 2009
Guardain UK: The 100 essential websites of 2009
"Here we go again … our latest list of the 100 best websites sees short attention spans, the rise of Twitter, more browser wars and celebrity gossip sites setting the news agenda."
For my students (and certain professors I know) This is how I get 150 articles a day.
How To Consume News Media
… What you need is a healthy dose of RSS.
Now this is interesting.
"Universal Jigsaw Puzzle" Hits Stores In Japan
Posted by timothy on Thursday December 10, @06:02PM from the fools-the-eye dept.
Riktov writes
"I came across this at a Tokyo toy store last week, and it's one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. Jigazo Puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle, but you can make anything with it. It has just 300 pieces which are all just varying shades of a single color, though a few have gradations across the piece; i.e., each piece is a generic pixel. Out of the box, you can make Mona Lisa, JFK, etc, arranging it according to symbols printed on the reverse side. But here's the amazing thing: take a photo (for example, of yourself) with a cell-phone, e-mail it to the company, and they will send you back a pattern that will recreate that photo. This article is in Japanese, but as they say, a few pictures are worth a million words. And 300 pixels are worth an infinite number of pictures."
No comments:
Post a Comment