http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/85021742.html
Rare ban in laptop lawsuit
… The district contends that the Robbinses failed to pay a required $55 insurance fee, and that, therefore, Blake was barred from taking home a laptop. The school has a pool of "loaners" for students who have not paid the fee or are waiting for a new laptop.
… Haltzman said after the hearing that he knew of no problem with fees or permissions. The lawyer said that Robbins' school laptop had broken and that he took a replacement home "every single day" for a month - with no one at school objecting or reporting it missing.
… The order says Robbins will turn over the laptop to a technician who will make a mirror image of its hard drive. The teen is to get a replacement laptop - as soon as school officials receive any unpaid insurance fees.
(Related) Some are scrambling to remove the software used in PA.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/85315227.html?viewAll=y
Many schools won't issue Web-cam laptops
It's 6AM, do you know where your data are?
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=10264
“It is an understatement to say that BlueCross regrets this data breach.”
February 27, 2010 by admin
The breach disclosure notification provided by BCBS of Tennessee to the Maryland Attorney’s General Office has just been made available online. The detailed letter about the theft of 57 hard drives from a Chattanooga facility, dated December 16, 2009, provides additional insight into the mammoth chore BCBS faced trying to determine what data were on the drives in stored audio and video files and whom to notify when no electronic solution could be found. The company retained Kroll OnTrack to assist in data recovery and investigation and reports that through the first week of December, between Kroll and BCBS, there were
500 full-time and 300 part-time workers reviewing both the audio and video files and performing data entry. The full-time employees worked on two different shifts six days a week. To date, all 300,000 video files have been reviewed and are being processed and deduplicated for member identification and notification, and approximately 550,000 audio files have been reviewed and are being processed. The third and final set of audio data is currently being reviewed by over 400 full-time Kroll staff….
BlueCross BlueShield’s General Counsel Bill Young notes in the detailed letter:
It is an understatement to say that BlueCross regrets this data breach.
No doubt.
A sample notification letter to affected individuals is also appended to the notification to Maryland.
Cross-posted from PHIprivacy.net
There are lots of these, so I'll just post the links...
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=10258
4 more healthcare breaches from 2009
February 27, 2010 by admin
Maryland has updated its web site to provide breach notifications that it has received since its last update. The newly posted notifications are for the period ending December 31, 2009. Some of the breaches described in the notifications were reported in the media at the time, but I spotted a number of previously unknown breaches from the healthcare sector or reports that either update us or provide additional information that may be of interest.
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=10269
And yet 2 more breaches
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=10212
21 more business sector breaches from 2009
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=10207
19 more financial sector breaches from 2009
Why does this not leave me with a warm and fuzzy feeling? Because apparently they can't tell the Internet from the companies that use it.
US Gov't. Ending Its Hands-Off-the-Internet Stance
Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 28, @08:17AM
Taco Cowboy writes in with a report from The Register about a US policy shift away from keeping hands off the Internet.
"According to Assistant Secretary Larry Strickling, Obama's top official at the Department of Commerce, the US government's policy of leaving the Internet alone is over. Instead, an 'Internet Policy 3.0' approach will see policy discussions between government agencies, foreign governments, and key Internet constituencies, with those discussions covering issues such as privacy, child protection, cybersecurity, copyright protection, and Internet governance."
Here is the presentation in which Strickling enunciated these changes.
[From the article:
It’s also a general engine for economic and social innovation.
… If you’re a content owner, you want to be allowed take action against users that infringe your copyright.
… If you are a network owner, you may be against Net Neutrality rules, but that does not mean there are not any rules, it just means the network owners get to create their own rules about whether and when to discriminate. [Now there's a policy bought and paid for! Bob]
… If content providers do not trust that their content will be protected, they will threaten to stop putting it online. [So? Let them! I'll buy similar content from companies that choose to survive. Bob]
Perspective
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=8048
Collection and Use of Location Information for Commercial Purposes
February 28, 2010 by Dissent
The House of Representatives Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection and the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet held a joint hearing titled, “The Collection and Use of Location Information for Commercial Purposes,” on Wednesday, February 24. The hearing examined privacy and other issues related to the commercial collection, use, and sharing of location-based information.
Here are copies of the written testimony submitted, from the Subcommittee’s web site (all pdf):
Testimony of Lorrie Cranor. Cranor is Associate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University
Testimony of Mike Altschul. Altschul is Senior Vice President and General Counsel, CTIA – The Wireless Association
Testimony of John B. Morris. Morris is General Counsel, Center for Democracy and Technology
Testimony of Anne Collier. Collier is Co-Director, ConnectSafely.org
Testimony of Jerry King. King is Chief Operating Officer, uLocate Communications, Inc..
Testimony of Tony Bernard. Bernard is Vice President and General Manager, Useful Networks
Toward ubiquitous surveillance. What happens when my car is paid off? Can I buy access to this database if I'm a professional car thief? ...stalker? ...terrorist?
Repo Men Using New Technology To Track Cars
Posted by kdawson on Saturday February 27, @06:02PM
kamapuaa writes
"The NY Times has an article about how real-time license plate scanning is changing the car repo business. MVTRAC is one of several companies providing technology to track car license plates automatically, in order to populate private databases. This new tech is used by car repo companies to help banks or other lenders repossess cars; by police to find stolen cars or to locate ticket scofflaws; or really for whatever application MVTRAC and its competitors feel like pursuing, as the new-found industry lacks any kind of government oversight."
How do these companies justify attacking the (perceived) competition? Granted it is far cheaper than developing a superior product, but don't all large firms live in glass houses?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10460829-265.html
Microsoft takes off gloves against Google
by Tom Krazit February 26, 2010 3:12 PM PST
Microsoft left little doubt Friday that it was one of the companies leading the charge against Google worldwide.
In a blog post entitled "Competition Authorities and Search," Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner said part of the motivation for Microsoft and Yahoo's search deal was "we are concerned about Google business practices that tend to lock in publishers and advertisers and make it harder for Microsoft to gain search volume." The post comes at the end of a week in which European authorities asked Google to explain its search algorithms after complaints from competitors--one of which is owned by Microsoft.
(Related)
http://mashable.com/2010/02/26/html5-flash-poll/
February 26, 2010 Ben Parr Comments
HTML5 Knocks Out Adobe Flash in Reader Vote
A few weeks ago, tensions between Adobe and Apple rose to all-time highs after Apple prominently left Flash off of the iPad. A lashing by Steve Jobs, calling Adobe lazy and Flash buggy didn’t help matters at all.
This will effectively kill WiFi access in libraries and coffee shops. Schools will have to lock down (and administer) their access. Won't the UK eventually get tired of their government making their life more difficult because big contributers 9Who can't figure out how to compete in the Digital Age) ask them to?
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,40057470,00.htm?tag=mncol;txt
Open Wi-Fi 'outlawed' in Digital Economy Bill
David Meyer ZDNet UK Published: 26 Feb 2010 16:48 GMT
The government will not exempt universities, libraries and small businesses providing open Wi-Fi services from its Digital Economy Bill copyright crackdown, according to official advice released earlier this week.
This would leave many organisations open to the same penalties for copyright infringement as individual subscribers, potentially including disconnection from the internet, leading legal experts to say it will become impossible for small businesses and the like to offer Wi-Fi access.
(Related) Governments have a history of “enforcing” law without considering the possibility of innocence.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/02/27/2040251
US Government Poisoned Alcohol During Prohibition
Posted by kdawson on Saturday February 27, @07:53PM
Hugh Pickens writes
"Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum has an article in Slate about the US government's mostly forgotten policy in the 1920s and 1930s of poisoning industrial alcohols manufactured in the US to scare people into giving up illicit drinking during Prohibition. Known as the 'chemist's war of Prohibition,' the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, killed at least 10,000 people between 1926 and 1933. The story begins with ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919, which banned sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the US. By the mid-1920s, when the government saw that its 'noble experiment' was in danger of failing, it decided that the problem was that readily available methyl (industrial) alcohol — itself a poison — didn't taste nasty enough. The government put its chemists to work designing ever more unpalatable toxins — adding such chemicals as kerosene, brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor to stop the poisoning program. But an official sense of higher purpose kept it in place, while lawmakers opposed to the plan were accused of being in cahoots with criminals and bootleggers. [Sound familiar? Bob] The chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, one of the poisoning program's most outspoken opponents, liked to call it 'our national experiment in extermination.'"
Slums is good? Doesn't that contradict earlier wisdom? Can we really learn “Best Practices” here (and if so, who would want to emulate them?)
How Slums Can Save the Planet
Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 28, @05:20AM
Standing Bear writes
"One billion people live in squatter cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. Stewart Brand writes in Prospect Magazine about what squatter cities can teach us about future urban living. ' The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents,' writes Brand. 'Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density — 1M people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai — and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.' Brand adds that in most slums recycling is literally a way of life e.g. the Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 rag-pickers. 'Of course, fast-growing cities are far from an unmitigated good. They concentrate crime, pollution, disease, and injustice as much as business, innovation, education, and entertainment,' says Brand. Still, as architect Peter Calthorpe wrote in 1985: 'The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.'"
Reader Kanel adds this note of perspective:
"Kevin Kelly is another guy who wrote about slums in a very positive light, though he was more interested in self-organisation and why cities are cool, I think. Kelly also reports on the strange trend for slum tourism. What we're seeing here is that the 'slums' have become a vehicle for people to bring out their own ideas about cities, humans, and the universe at large. I have a feeling that we're not really going to learn a lot about slums if we study them through these guys."
Which part of asymmetric warfare don't you understand?
Defending Against Drones
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday February 27, @09:13AM
theodp writes
"The US has not had to truly think about its air defense since the Cold War. But as America embraces the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, Newsweek says it's time to consider how our greatest new weapon may come back to bite us. Smaller UAVs' cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles. And while Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, at $3 million apiece such protection carries a steep price tag, especially if we have to deal with $500 DIY drones." [While it's unlikely that a $500 drone could do 9/11 levels of damage, it could sprinkle chemicals or biologicals over gatherings of people. Bob]
Another area of worrisome science. How do we rid this topic of its political baggage?
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/023620.html
February 27, 2010
Climate change panels establishes independent committee to review IPCC Procedures
Lead in to this headline as follows:
The Nation: The Attack on Climate-Change Science
New York Times Op-Ed - Al Gore: We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change.
See also related news from the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change: "The IPCC has started work on the preparation of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). We are currently looking for experts who can act as authors:
(Related) After blindly following, now we are blindly rejecting. Equally dumb.
Unfriendly Climate Greets Gore At Apple Meeting
Posted by kdawson on Saturday February 27, @11:35PM
theodp writes
"Apple's shareholder meeting this week took on a Jerry Springer vibe, with harsh comments about Al Gore, former VP and Apple board member, setting the tone. Several stockholders took turns either bashing or praising Gore's high-profile views on climate change. Apple shareholder Shelton Ehrlich urged against Gore's re-election to the board, claiming that Gore 'has become a laughingstock. The glaciers have not melted. If [the] advice he gives to Apple is as faulty as his views on the environment then he doesn't need to be re-elected.' Hey, at least he moved a few copies of Keynote, Shelton. Shareholders introduced proposals regarding Apple's environmental impact — one asking Apple to commit publicly to greenhouse gas reduction goals and to publish a formal sustainability report; another proposing that Apple's board establish a sustainability committee. These proposals were rejected by shareholders. However, preliminary voting results indicated that Gore was re-elected to Apple's Board."
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