http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=8196
Class Riled Up at Classmates.com
March 9, 2010 by Dissent
June Williams reports:
To compete with Facebook, Classmates.com is abandoning the privacy protections it promised its clients, according to a class action in Federal Court. The class claims the new policy “will expose the personal information of Classmates users to millions of persons who are unknown to both the users and to Classmates,” exposing Classmates customers to “unwarranted intrusions, harassment and other harms.”
On Jan. 30, Classmates sent this notice to its customers:
“To make it easier for old friends-including you!-to reunite, we’re coming up with ways to let more people use Classmates from around the Internet without having to visit Classmates.com.
“To do that, we’re about to start making your public Classmates content available to people using a variety of sites and devices, including Facebook and the iPhone. This content can include your name, photos, community affiliations, and more.
Read more on Courthouse News. A copy of the complaint can be found here.
Local impact – We are being Balkanized!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10465658-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
More states propose Internet sales taxes
by Declan McCullagh March 8, 2010 2:00 PM PST
Jeremy Bray received an e-mail message this morning with an unwelcome surprise: Amazon.com told him it had canceled its affiliate program, which provides small payments for referring customers, for everyone in the state of Colorado.
The reason? A state law, which Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter signed last week, slaps onerous new restrictions on large out-of-state sellers like Amazon, which said it has no choice but to end its marketing program in response.
… Update 7:40 p.m.: The Denver Post has posted a comment from Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat who signed the bill into law last week: "Amazon has taken a disappointing - and completely unjustified - step of ending its relationship with associates. While Amazon is blaming a new state law for its action, the fact is that Amazon is simply trying to avoid compliance with Colorado law and is unfairly punishing Colorado businesses in the process." [“Avoidance” is not “evasion,” Governor. Bob]
Another case of “If you're innocent, you have nothing to hide?”
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/023692.html
March 08, 2010
Treasury Said to Oppose Federal GAO Audit
Ryan Grim: "The Treasury Department is vigorously opposed to a House-passed measure that would open the Federal Reserve to an audit by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a senior Treasury official said Monday. Instead, the official said, the Treasury prefers a substitute offered by Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.), and would like to see it enacted as part of the Senate bill. The Watt measure, however, while claiming to increase transparency, actually puts new restrictions on the GAO's ability to perform an audit."
Worth a read by your Security manager?
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/023695.html
March 08, 2010
M-Trends Report at U.S. Department of Defense: Cyber Crime Conference
News release: "MANDIANT, the information security industry’s leading provider of incident response and computer forensics services and solutions, today announced formal distribution of its inaugural M-Trends report at the U.S. Department of Defense: Cyber Crime Conference 2010 in St. Louis. M-Trends spans seven years of lessons learned on the front lines of intrusion investigations for the U.S. government, defense industrial base and commercial organizations. The 29-page report details malware capabilities and techniques and other highly complex and sophisticated attack schemes used by the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) across a breadth of organizations. Content presented in M-Trends has been derived by MANDIANT from unclassified environments and sanitized to protect victim identity and data."
… To download a copy of M-Trends, please visit http://www.mandiant.com/products/services/m-trends
The future of electronic health records must pass travel the same learning curve as any other application. Let's hope they learn faster and cheaper than earlier adopters.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27083_3-10465657-247.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Computer reminders help physicians less than hoped
A systematic review of 28 clinical trials, which appears today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, finds that computer reminders to physicians regarding prescriptions yield smaller improvements than expected.
Does e-voting favor the Republicans?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/ess-sued-in-antitrust-cas/
Feds Move to Break Voting-Machine Monopoly
Most interesting. What can these countries do to “counter” US generosity?
US Eases Internet Export Rules To Iran, Sudan, Cuba
Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 08, @03:23PM
coondoggie writes
"Looking to facilitate what it calls free speech rights in countries that don't look favorably at such liberties, the US government today said it would ease the regulations around exporting Internet-based applications to Iran, Sudan and Cuba. Specifically, the Treasury Department said it would add general licenses (PDF) authorizing the exportation of free, personal, Internet-based communications services – such as instant messaging, chat and email, and social networking – to those three countries. The amendments also allow the exportation of related software to Iran and Sudan, the department said in a release (the US Commerce Department controls software exports with Cuba). Until now all such exports would have broken federal laws.
(Related)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100307/wr_nm/us_internet_survey
Four in five believe Web access a fundamental right
Sun Mar 7, 4:07 pm ET
LONDON (Reuters) – Four in five adults believe access to the Internet is a fundamental right -- with those feelings particularly strong in South Korea and China -- and half believe it should never be regulated, according to a global survey.
A poll of 27,000 adults in 26 countries for the BBC World Service showed 78 percent of Internet users believed the Web gave them greater freedom, while nine in 10 said it was a good place to learn.
India is betting on cellphones to connect to their citizens for education (and government) Worth a few minutes to listen...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/digital_giants/8551904.stm
Digital Giants: Sam Pitroda
Page last updated at 15:45 GMT, Monday, 8 March 2010
What will be the next big thing online? And how will it change our lives? In the Digital Giants series, the digital world's top thinkers share their visions of the future with the BBC.
Sam Pitroda, adviser to the PM of India delivers his views on cell phone voting and how the paradigm of the classroom will change in the future.
Digital Giants is part of SuperPower , a season of programmes on TV, radio and online exploring the extraordinary power of the internet.
SEE ALSO
Digital Giants: Ge Wang(03.27)
Digital Giants: Joe Rospars(03.05)
For my students.
http://mashable.com/2010/03/08/google-public-data-explorer/
New Google Tool Visualizes Public Data in Animated Charts
Google has just launched Google Public Data Explorer. The new Google Labs tool offers a visual way to look at and analyze large public data sets on a variety of popular search topics.
The tool is specifically designed for avid data crunchers like students, journalists, policy makers, and could be seen as Google’sGoogle prettified approach to a user-driven computational search engine (think Wolfram Alpha). Public Data Explorer is its own dedicated utility that expands and improves upon existing functionality added to the search experience last year.
This one's for me, but I'll share it with my students.
http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/bartab-make-firefox-faster
BarTab: Makes Firefox Faster With Better Tab Management
Opening multiple tabs in Firefox can eat up a lot of memory, and may sometimes cause your browser to crash.
… To manage this, you can install BarTab, a Firefox add-on that can make firefox faster by loading only the active tab while keeping the others unloaded in the background. This effectively prevents Firefox from eating your system resources.
… Check out BarTab @ www.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651
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