http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=9210
Are Buzz, Facebook and Twitter creating ’social insecurity’?
April 21, 2010 by Dissent
Mike Elgan writes:
An insurance expert told the Britain’s Telegraph newspaper that using location-centric mobile social services like Google Buzz, Twitter , Facebook and Foursquare could raise your home insurance premiums, or even result in the denial of insurance claims.
Wait, what?
A gag Web site launched this week called “Please Rob Me” raised an ugly but obvious truth about location-based mobile social networking: When you tell the public where you are, you’re also telling burglars you’re not at home. The site originally displayed a real-time stream of Twitter and Foursquare posts that might interest criminals.
Twitter has since pulled the plug, apparently, and now all Please Rob Me posts are from Foursquare. Each post begins with the user’s name, followed by “left home and checked in” followed by an exact address of where the person is.
Insurance industry watchers like the one quoted by the Telegraph predict that after customers get burglarized and file claims on stolen property, the insurance companies will probably investigate to see whether the customer broadcast information over social networks in a way that constitutes “negligence.” They could also make “social networker” the homeowners insurance equivalent of “chain smoker” in health insurance — a category of customers who are charged higher premiums.
Read more on ITbusiness.ca
Related: Using Facebook or Twitter ‘could raise your insurance premiums by 10pc’
It's like having an e-Butler...
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/architecture/aria-high-tech-hotel
The High-Tech, Luxury, Surveillance Hotel
… When a guest enters a room, curtains automatically open, music plays, the TV activates and climate controls bring the room to a preset temperature.
If a guest leaves, the lights go out, curtains close, the TV and music shut off, and the temperature reverts to a preset, personalized setting. All room features (including the "Do Not Disturb" sign) can be manipulated with a Control 4 touchscreen room-automation remote control, or directly through the room's HDTV. A forthcoming iPad app will also allow the tablet to double as a room remote.
Since guests register with the Aria's data system, the hotel can store all room setting information indefinitely. If a guest returns a year later, their room can be prepped with the same lighting, entertainment and climate settings as during their previous stay.
“Everything does not mean everything, it just means everything. We couldn't be clearer!”
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20003065-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
North Carolina defends request for Amazon.com customer records
by Declan McCullagh April 21, 2010 11:17 AM PDT
North Carolina's tax collectors said Wednesday that they never demanded personal information such as book titles from Amazon.com, which filed a federal lawsuit against the state this week seeking to keep that information confidential.
"Amazon's complaint is misleading in alleging the department has required detailed information revealing personal consumer preferences, such as book titles," North Carolina Secretary of Revenue, Kenneth Lay, said in a statement.
But CNET has obtained correspondence from the Department of Revenue that calls North Carolina's claim into question.
In a letter to Amazon dated December 1, 2009, Romey McCoy, the Department of Revenue's audit manager, asked for "all information" relating to nearly 50 million purchases that customers in that state had made between 2003 and 2010. McCoy's letter did not exempt the titles of books or Blu-Ray movies, and did not address the privacy implications of the request.
Amazon subsequently turned over limited, anonymous information: the amount of the purchase, the seller, and the postal code it was sent to.
McCoy replied in a second letter on March 19, 2010 saying Amazon had until this Monday to divulge the full records of each transaction or North Carolina "will" take legal action. To punctuate his threat of litigation, McCoy's letter copied two assistant attorneys general from the North Carolina Department of Justice.
Should be worth a read...
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=9235
Article: The Puzzle of Brandeis, Privacy, and Speech
April 22, 2010 by Dissent
Over on Concurring Opinions, Danielle Citron calls our attention to this article by Neil Richards:
The Puzzle of Brandeis, Privacy, and Speech
Neil M. Richards
Washington University School of Law
Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol. 63, 2010
Abstract:
Most courts and scholarship assume that privacy and free speech are always in conflict, even though each of these traditions can be traced back to writings by Louis D. Brandeis – his 1890 Harvard Law Review article “The Right to Privacy” and his 1927 concurrence in Whitney v. California. How can modern notions of privacy and speech be so fundamentally opposed if Brandeis played a major role in crafting both? And how, if at all, did Brandeis recognize or address these tensions? These questions have been neglected by scholars of First Amendment law, privacy, and Brandeis. In this paper, I argue that the puzzle of Brandeis’s views on privacy and speech can be resolved in a surprising and useful way.
My basic claim is that Brandeis came to largely abandon the tort theory of privacy he expounded in “The Right to Privacy.” As a young lawyer, Brandeis conceived of privacy as a tort action protecting emotional injury from newspaper stories that revealed private facts. But Brandeis’s ideas evolved over his life. He soon came to believe strongly in a contrary idea he called “the duty of publicity.” This is the notion that disclosure of most kinds of fraud and wrongdoing are in the public interest; that as he famously put it, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” When Brandeis came to think through First Amendment issues after the First World War, tort privacy could no longer consistently fit into his influential theories of civil liberty.
But while Brandeis changed his mind about tort privacy, what he replaced it with is even more interesting. In his Olmstead dissent and free speech writings, Brandeis identified a second conception of privacy that I call “intellectual privacy.” Brandeis reminds us that the generation of new ideas requires a certain measure of privacy to succeed, and that in this way intellectual privacy and free speech are mutually supportive. I conclude by suggesting some contemporary implications of Brandeis’s rejection of tort privacy and his linkage of intellectual privacy with free speech.
You can download the full article from ssrn.
Double-Secret Probation has been lifted! There are now only 26 Copyrights. I own the rights to the letter “E”
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=9232
Draft of ACTA released
April 22, 2010 by Dissent
The draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was released yesterday, and there’s a lot of buzz because it does not contain a “three-strikes” rule for those who illegally download copyrighted material. Here are some links to some of the coverage and commentary:
Rashmi Rangnath, staff attorney for Public Knowledge, provides an analysis and commentary, here.
Joelle Tessler of the Associated Press focuses on technology companies’ fears that the provisions could open the door to “second liability,” here.
Nate Anderson of Ars Technica has a round-up of reactions from different types of stakeholders, here, while Juliana Gruenwald of the National Journal provides more reactions here.
On NPR, perhaps Canadian law professor Michael Geist said it best:
If you’ve got Europe and the United States and Australia and other countries all claiming that ACTA is fully consistent with their domestic laws, they can’t all be right, or at least they can’t all be right once an agreement is finally concluded. And it seems to me more likely that they’ll all be wrong, that in a sense, everybody is going to have to make some shifts, and everybody is going to face some amount of change on the domestic front.
I'd like to know who the “lawyers representing Google rivals” are, so I can Google them.
Group Calls For Google Antitrust Probe
Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday April 21, @07:21PM
CWmike writes
"Advocacy group Consumer Watchdog called on the DOJ to launch a broad antitrust investigation into Google's search and advertising practices and consider a wide array of penalties, including possibly breaking the company up (PDF). The watchdog, along with a mobile entrepreneur and two lawyers representing Google rivals, called for an investigation focusing on a number of issues, including Google's marriage of search results to advertising and its book search service. '… We think all remedies should be on the table, including, we think, the possible breakup of the Internet giant,' said John Simpson of Consumer Watchdog. Adam Kovacevich, senior manager for global communications and public affairs at Google, discounted the criticisms, saying Consumer Watchdog has been 'relentlessly negative' about Google. The group recently questioned the reasons why Google stopped censoring search results in China, and criticized Google's privacy Dashboard as inadequate, Kovacevich said."
First, do no harm There is a fix out already, but it's complicated...
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/21/mcafee-update--shutting-down-xp-machines/
Botched McAfee update shutting down corporate XP machines worldwide
Now I can truly overload my Statistics students!
UK University Researchers Must Make Data Available
Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 21, @06:14PM
Sara Chan writes
"In a landmark ruling, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office has decided that researchers at a university must make all their data available to the public. The decision follows from a three-year battle by mathematician Douglas J. Keenan, who wants the data to do his own analysis on it. The university researchers have had the data for many years, and have published several papers using the data, but had refused to make the data available. The data in this case pertains to global warming, but the decision is believed to apply to any field: scientists at universities, which are all public in the UK, can now not claim data from publicly-funded research as their private property."
(Related) Little Green Men, here I come!
SETI To Release Data To the Public
Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 21, @04:48PM
log1385 writes
"SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is releasing its collected data to the public. Jill Tarter, director of SETI, says, 'We hope that a global army of open source code developers, students, and other experts in digital signal processing, as well as citizen scientists willing to lend their intelligence to our exploration, will have access to the same technology and join our quest.'"
Graphic If nothing else, the speed graphs are interesting...
http://www.focus.com/images/view/6467/
State of the Internet
Open Source Intelligence
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-websites-find-national-local-newspapers-published-world/
5 Sites to Find Local Newspapers Published Around the World
Have eReaders become a commodity? Looks like.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20003132-1.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Target to begin selling the Kindle
Selling advanced degrees... 'cause “Smarts is good for you!”
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/024085.html
April 21, 2010
Census Bureau Reports Nearly 6 in 10 Advanced Degree Holders Age 25-29 Are Women
News release: "The U.S. Census Bureau reported today more women than men are expected to occupy professions such as doctors, lawyers and college professors as they represent approximately 58 percent of young adults, age 25 to 29, who hold an advanced degree. In addition, among all adults 25 and older, more women than men had high school diplomas and bachelor’s degrees. The tabulations, Educational Attainment in the United States: 2009, showed that among people in the 25-29 age group, 9 percent of women and 6 percent of men held either a master’s, professional (such as law or medical) or doctoral degree. This holds true for white, black and Hispanic women. Among Asian men and women of this age group, there was no statistical difference. The data also demonstrate the extent to which having such a degree pays off: average earnings in 2008 totaled $83,144 for those with an advanced degree, compared with $58,613 for those with a bachelor’s degree only. People whose highest level of attainment was a high school diploma had average earnings of $31,283."
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