...but everyone assumes they read the mail.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20045263-93.html
Google accuses China of meddling with Gmail
Google is accusing the Chinese government of interfering with the operations of the company's popular Gmail service.
Gmail customers in China have complained during the past month of experiencing problems with the e-mail service, including difficulty sending e-mails and marking them as unread, in addition to other issues, according to a story first reported by The Guardian newspaper.
"There is no issue on our side; we have checked extensively," a Google spokesperson told CNET. "This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail."
The revelation follows a March 11 Google on Security blog post in which Google said it had "noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target." That post referred to a critical Windows MHTML vulnerability that Microsoft revealed in January that allowed hackers and other third parties that exploit the vulnerability to gain access to a user's information.
I reported this more than a week ago, but it bears repeating. “Citizens have only the rights we pretend they have.”
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=21803
Power to strip search passengers claimed by Feds
March 20, 2011 by Dissent
Bob Barr writes:
In a breathtaking statement delivered in an official court proceeding, the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims authority to strip search every airline passenger; and to begin such a practice without even soliciting comment from the public.
This outrageous statement recently was delivered to the American people by a DHS lawyer in arguments before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is considering a challenge to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) nude body scanner devices.
Read more in the Barr Code.
For those who don't yet understand the fundamentals...
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=21815
New Privacy Law Reference Book: Privacy Law Fundamentals
March 21, 2011 by Dissent
Seen on Concurring Opinions, this announcement by Daniel Solove:
Professor Paul Schwartz (Berkeley School of Law) and I recently published a new book, PRIVACY LAW FUNDAMENTALS. This book is a distilled guide to the essential elements of U.S. data privacy law. In an easily-digestible format, the book covers core concepts, key laws, and leading cases.
The book explains the major provisions of all of the major privacy statutes, regulations, cases, including state privacy laws and FTC enforcement actions. It provides numerous charts and tables summarizing the privacy statutes (i.e. statutes with private rights of action, preemption, and liquidated damages, among other things). Topics covered include: the media, domestic law enforcement, national security, government records, health and genetic data, financial information, consumer data and business records, government access to private sector records, data security law, school privacy, employment privacy, and international privacy law.
This book provides an concise yet comprehensive overview of the field of privacy law for those who do not want to labor through lengthy treatises. Paul and I worked hard to keep it under 200 pages — our goal was to include a lot of information yet do so as succinctly as possible. PRIVACY LAW FUNDAMENTALS is written for those who want a handy reference, a bird’s eye view of the field, or a primer for courses in privacy law.
We wrote this book to be a useful reference for practitioners — ideally, a book they’d keep at the corner of their desks or in their briefcases.
We also think it can serve as a useful study aid for students taking privacy law courses.
You can check it out here, where you can download the table of contents.
It sounds like something that could also be a useful primer or resource for those of us who are not lawyers
Beware of lawyers with vast plans and half-vast understanding of the law.
Righthaven Copyright Lawsuit Backfires
"Steve Green reports in the Las Vegas that US District Judge James Mahan has ruled that the Center for Intercultural Organizing, an Oregon nonprofit, did not infringe on copyrights when it posted an entire Las Vegas Review-Journal story on its website without authorization and that there was no harm to the market for the story. Mahan stressed that his ruling hinged largely on the CIO's nonprofit status and said the copyright lawsuit would be dismissed because the nonprofit used it in an educational way, didn't try to use the story to raise money, and because the story in question was primarily factual as opposed to being creative. 'The market (served by the CIO) is not the R-J's market,' says Mahan. This is the second fair use defeat for Righthaven and is significant since it involved an entire story post rather than a partial story post. Green says that Righthaven's strategy of suing 250 web site and demanding $150,000 in damages plus forfeiture of the web site's domain name has clearly backfired and now Righthaven, the self-appointed protector of the newspaper industry, has left the newspaper industry with less copyright protection than if they never filed their lawsuits at all."
For my Ethical Hackers. Remember, when accessing highly questionable sites, use the ID of a reputable Law Professor (names and complete dossiers available for a modest fee)
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-user-database-compromised-and-exploited-again-110320/
Pirate Bay User Database Compromised and Exploited, Again
Last summer a group of Argentinian hackers gained access to The Pirate Bay’s admin panel through a security breach. At the time, the hackers stated that they didn’t want to exploit the vulnerability, and merely wanted to show that the system was vulnerable.
The Pirate Bay team informed TorrentFreak that they were doing all they could to patch the vulnerability, and later said that the site was fully secure again. Two month later, however, it became apparent that The Pirate Bay backend had been exploited, this time by spammers.
Because it is easier to create a program (spend taxpayer money) that to fix the one that isn't doing the job (or even bother to see if such a program already exists).
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11474r.pdf
List of Selected Federal Programs That Have Similar or Overlapping Objectives, Provide Similar Services, or Are Fragmented Across Government Missions, GAO-11-474R, March 18, 2011
… Enclosure II contains over 100 surface transportation programs identified by the Department of Transportation.
For my Data Mining and Data Analysis students. It might be fun to match what a country claims to export to reports of imports in another country.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/026800.html
March 20, 2011
Open Data Search: finding useful datasets, worldwide
[The following post is from Friedrich Lindenberg, who is a developer at the Open Knowledge Foundation working on CKAN, PublicData.eu and Open Spending.]
"Recently, there has hardly been a week in which there hasn’t been an announcement of a new local, regional or national open data initiative – including ever more extensive catalogues of data that is being opened up (CKAN alone now runs in 20 or more places). While this is great news for those of us interested in re-using the data, it also means it becomes increasingly hard to keep a good overview of what kind of data are available for which places. To get a better overview we’ve now started a meta search engine for open data, opendatasearch.org. opendatasearch.org is a global version of the prototype publicdata.eu site we announced in January: it’s an aggregator for datasets, providing a simple and unified search interface to all of the catalogues contained."
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