http://www.phiprivacy.net/?p=2975
New York hospital loses data on 130,000 via FedEx
By Dissent, June 30, 2010 6:03 am
Robert McMillan reports:
New York’s Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center is notifying patients that their personal information may have been compromised after seven CDs full of unencrypted data were FedExed by a hospital contractor and then lost in transit.
The CDs were sent by the hospital’s billing processor, Siemens Medical Solutions USA, around March 16, but never arrived at their intended destination. They included sensitive health and personal information including Social Security numbers, addresses, dates of birth, health plan numbers, driver’s license numbers and even descriptions of medical procedures, the hospital said on a note posted to its Web site.
Read more on Computerworld.
Can you say, “Ubiquitous?”
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=11920
ACLU Study Highlights U.S. Surveillance Society
June 29, 2010 by Dissent
David Kravets reports:
Welcome to the surveillance society.
That’s what the American Civil Liberties Union concluded Tuesday with a report chronicling government spying and the detention of groups and individuals “for doing little more than peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights.”
The report, Policing Free Speech: Police Surveillance and Obstruction of First Amendment-Protected Activity (.pdf), surveys news accounts and studies of questionable snooping and arrests in 33 states and the District of Columbia the past decade.
Read more on Threat Level.
Sometimes we make surveillance too easy. Also, for my Ethical Hackers
White Hat Uses Foursquare Privacy Hole to Capture 875K Check-Ins
If you have checked in with Foursquare in San Francisco in the last three weeks, Jesper Andersen probably knows where and when — even if you’ve set your check-ins to be published to friends only.
Andersen, a coder who recently built a service called Avoidr that helps you avoid social network “friends” you don’t really like, figured out that Foursquare had a privacy leak because of how it published user check-ins on web pages for each location.
“How dare you make it easy for our customers to leave!” (Implications for Cloud Computing)
Twitpic Blocks Posterous’ Import Tool; Out Come The Lawyers
Well that didn’t take long. Halfway into their big 15 importers in 15 days campaign, Posterous has managed to make one of their competitors very angry. Twitpic is so angry, in fact, that they’re blocking the service and threatening legal action.
This morning, Posterous introduced their new “Rescue your photos from TwitPic” tool — a one-click way to import your photos from Twitpic over to your Posterous blog. This is the same type of importer Posterous has already made for Ning, Vox, Tumblr and a host of other services
...and us normal people too?
Why Google, Bing, Yahoo Should Fear ACTA
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 29, @01:44PM
"US intellectual property law expert Jonathan Band has warned that Silicon Valley's search engines, hosting companies, and e-commerce giants have much to fear from the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, negotiations for which continued in Switzerland today. The fear for search engines in particular is the erosion of 'fair use' protections and introduction of statutory damages, both of which could lead to more copyright claims from rights holders."
The article links a marked-up ACTA draft (PDF) that Band and a coalition of library organizations and rights groups believe is more balanced. Quoting Band: "Our high-level concern is that ACTA does not reflect the balance in US IP law, [which] contains strong protections and strong exceptions. ACTA exports only the strong protections, but not the strong exceptions."
Using the “Streisand effect,” deliberately or not. What would cause an “automatic” deletion?
Facebook Disabled The Massively Popular Boycott BP Page “In Error”
This morning, there was some ruckus on the Web when Facebook seemingly flat out deleted the Boycott BP page, which has amassed some 734,000 ‘fans’ on the social network so far.
… Following multiple reports on the Web about the mysterious apparent removal of the page and its return, we contacted Facebook to learn what happened exactly. Moments ago, the company provided us with an official statement on the matter, which remains quite vague but at least acknowledges there was no malicious intent involved, let alone a conscious decision by someone at Facebook to shut the page down:
“The admin profile of the Boycott BP Page was disabled by our automated systems therefore removing all the content that had been created by the profile. After a manual review we determined the profile was removed in error and it has now been restored along with the Page.”
Asked what triggered the automated systems to flag said profile in the first place, Facebook declined to go into detail because it fears people knowing about how their systems work will “weaken their effectiveness”.
(Related) Perhaps extreme language and an argumentative stand isn't the best way to win friends and influence people?
ASCAP War On Free Culture Escalates
Posted by kdawson on Wednesday June 30, @08:13AM
"After ASCAP declared war on free culture and Creative Commons responded on the incident, the war of words is escalating. Drew Wilson of ZeroPaid has been following this story closely. The EFF responded to the ASCAP letter, saying 'we don't think that ASCAP characterized EFF and its work accurately. We believe that artists should be compensated for their work, and one proposal we have for that is Voluntary Collective Licensing.' The response from the EFF came with a study and a letter written by one irate ASCAP member who donated to the EFF and to Public Knowledge as a result of the ASCAP letter. Public Knowledge also responded to the letter, saying 'It's obvious that the characterization of Public Knowledge is false. Public Knowledge advocates for balanced copyright and an open Internet the empowers creators and the public. What we oppose are overreaching policies proposed by large corporate copyright holders that punish lawful users of technology and copyrighted works.' Now the National Music Publishers Association has weighed in to support ASCAP, saying that organizations like Public Knowledge and the EFF 'have an extremist radical anti-copyright agenda' according to a transcript of a speech posted on Billboard. Public Knowledge has dismissed those allegations, saying 'anybody who has spent more than 5 minutes on our website or talking to our staff knows that these things are not true.'"
I'm in my local library at least twice a week and probably on their website weekly too.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/024600.html
June 29, 2010
Association of College and Research Libraries - Futures Thinking for Academic Librarians: Higher Education in 2025
Futures Thinking for Academic Librarians: Higher Education in 2025 (June 2010)
"For academic librarians seeking to demonstrate the value of their libraries to their parent institutions, it is important to understand not only the current climate. We must also know what will be valued in the future so that we can begin to take appropriate action now. This document presents 26 possible scenarios based on an implications assessment of current trends, which may have an impact on all types of academic and research libraries over the next 15 years. The scenarios represent themes relating to academic culture, demographics, distance education, funding, globalization, infrastructure/facilities, libraries, political climate, publishing industry, societal values, students/learning, and technology."
[I particularly like these “Futures”:
2. Academic niche networking
5. Breaking the textbook monopoly
A visual summary of online video
http://www.tammycamp.com/2010/06/28/the-state-of-online-video.html
The State of Online Video
For my Ethical Hacking class. Ignorance of the technology is no excuse (but does make our job easier...) NOW will they consider “Security by Default?”
Hack AT&T Voicemail With Android
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 29, @09:15PM
"It is shockingly easy to gain access to an AT&T customer's voicemail using caller ID spoofing techniques. What's worse is that AT&T knows about it. On your Android phone, download one of the two caller ID spoofing programs. Input the number of your target as the destination number and then enter the same number as the spoofed caller ID. Then connect your call. If the target has not added a voicemail password (the default is no password), you will be dropped into a random menu of their voicemail and eventually can drill up or down to get what you want. You can change greetings, erase messages, send voicemails out of the target account, and much more. How many politicians up in arms about Google Wi-Fi sniffing will want to know more about this?"
One of the Statistical tests I think my students must master. Think of it as an “Is this Bull?” test.
Daily Kos Pollster Made Up Numbers
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 29, @03:18PM
jamie found a story up on Daily Kos revealing that the polling firm they had contracted with for 18 months, Research 2000 or R2K, apparently made up or at least manually tweaked its polling results. The blog published a preliminary report by a team of statistics gurus (Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman), and it is an exemplar of clarity and concision. The team reports, "We do not know exactly how the weekly R2K results were created, but we are confident they could not accurately describe random polls." Daily Kos will be filing a lawsuit against its former pollster.
"For the past year and a half, Daily Kos has been featuring weekly poll results from the Research 2000 (R2K) organization. These polls were often praised for their 'transparency,' since they included detailed cross-tabs on sub-populations and a clear description of the random dialing technique. However, on June 6, 2010, FiveThirtyEight.com rated R2K as among the least accurate pollsters in predicting election results. Daily Kos then terminated the relationship. One of us (MG) wondered if odd patterns he had noticed in R2K's reports might be connected with R2K's mediocre track record, prompting our investigation of whether the reports could represent proper random polling. ... This posting is a careful initial report of our findings, not intended to be a full formal analysis but rather to alert people not to rely on R2K's results."
For my students who don't like to read? Now they can listen to my blog on their cellphones while driving to class.
http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/blogradio-converts-rss-to-audio/
BlogRadio: Converts Rss To Audio
… BlogRadio is a great tool that takes your RSS feeds and convert them to audio speech so you can listen to them instead of reading them.
You can choose between an almost natural male or female voice and even listen to the feeds on your smart phone. Moreover, everything is stored in the cloud so you get unlimited storage. This desktop tool works on Windows, Mac as well as Linux. You can control your audio files and even see pictures included in the RSS feeds. The desktop client is automatically updated every time you launch it.
Similar tools: SpokenText
For my website students and my Ethical Hackers
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/choose-browser-open-specific-link-firefox-extension/
How To Open Specific Links With Other Browsers While Using Firefox
… There are ... times where I need to open a link in a new browser window like in Internet Explorer, or if I need to test a website for usability, I might need to test a page in several different browsers.
In the past you would open a link in a new browser window by opening the browser and browsing to the page you need to test or you could fire up a tool like Browsershots that we have previously profiled. But what if you want an easy way to tell Firefox to open that link in a different browser? Well now you can with a Firefox extension called Open With.
You can find the extension here.
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