I can see we're already looking forward to the 2012 election...

http://www.databreaches.net/?p=20295

Maine voter registration system breached

August 24, 2011 by admin

Kevin Miller reports:

The Maine Secretary of State’s Office said Wednesday it is investigating a potential security breach in the computer system that contains records on Maine’s registered voters.

The state was notified [i.e. They hadn't noticed... Bob] Wednesday afternoon by the cybersecurity monitoring arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that Maine’s Central Voter Registration system had been compromised. The breach was detected as part of a regular security check. [By DHS? Bob]

Maine Secretary of State Charlie Summers said a computer in an undisclosed town office apparently had been infected by malicious software — commonly known as malware — that may have then infected the centralized data system.

“I am in the process of assessing what, if any, information has been compromised,” Summers said in a statement released Wednesday afternoon. “I have taken immediate action to shut this computer down and disable the username and password assigned to the town clerk.”

The Central Voter Registration system, or CVR, contains personal information on registered voters including names, addresses, dates of birth and, in some cases, driver’s license numbers. The system does not contain Social Security numbers, Summers said in an interview Wednesday.

Read more on Bangor Daily News.

[From the article:

Summers said they strongly suspect that some information was accessed, however.

“We just don’t know how much or the size” of the breach, he said.

(Related?)

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20096824-1/ispeech-app-puts-your-words-in-obamas-mouth/

iSpeech app puts your words in Obama's mouth

Text-to-speech company iSpeech has released a pair of smartphone apps that tap the actual voices of President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush to allow you to convert any text into audio that's a dead ringer for the president or former president.

Revenue at any cost?

NYC Mayor Wants Traffic Camera On Every Corner

"New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made it clear that he wants to see more traffic light cameras in the Big Apple, saying that he'd have the devices on every street corner if possible. According to The New York Daily News, the city brought in $52 million in fines generated by red light cameras last year alone. Bloomberg doesn't just want a jump in the number of cameras, however. He also wants to publish the names of those who blow through the stop lights in local papers to help shame wrongdoers into changing their ways. What's more, the mayor wants to look into the possibility of adding speed cameras to the mix. Big brother is coming to NYC."

More fodder in the “What should we tell them and when” debate...

http://www.databreaches.net/?p=20286

Illinois Amends Breach Notice Law to Specify Notice Content, Cooperation

August 24, 2011 by admin

Brendon Tavelli writes:

On August 22, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed House Bill 3025 into law. In doing so, he aligned Illinois with a small group of states responding to increased concern about privacy and information security by retooling their existing information security breach notification frameworks. HB3025, in particular, amends the state’s breach notification law to specify both the types of information that should be provided to notice recipients and the breach notice obligations of service providers that maintain or store, but don’t own or license, personal information about Illinois residents.

Read more on Proskauer’s Privacy Law Blog.

If I’m reading the “shall not” provisions of the law correctly (and I may not be), it appears that the entities are not allowed to reveal to those affected how many Illinois residents were affected by the breach. Why prohibit them from revealing that? Or am I reading the law incorrectly?

Interesting. I'll need to increase the number of times I tell my students to “Google it!” (and perhaps explain more about HOW to Google it.)

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/028115.html

August 24, 2011

Commentary: Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance

Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance by Maria Popova.

• "Over the past few years, the fledgling field of the digital humanities has made significant strides with a number of ambitious digitization projects bringing online rare cultural artifacts — manuscripts, canvases, celluloid, marginalia — that used to rot away in institutional archives. But while these efforts, both government-subsidized and privately initiated, may have made a wealth of information accessible, it’s an entirely different story to ask how many people these materials have reached — how many people have actually gained access to them — and it’s one that harks back to the shifting relationship between scarcity and value... Historically, the two main types of obstacles to information discovery have been barriers of awareness, which encompass all the information we can’t access because we simply don’t know about its existence in the first place, and barriers of accessibility, which refer to the information we do know is out there but remains outside of our practical, infrastructural or legal reach. What the digital convergence has done is solve the latter, by bringing much previously inaccessible information into the public domain, made the former worse in the process, by increasing the net amount of information available to us and thus creating a wealth of information we can’t humanly be aware of due to our cognitive and temporal limitations, and added a third barrier — a barrier of motivation."

(Related)

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/028114.html

August 24, 2011

The 1000 most-visited sites on the web - according to Google

Google Doubleclick Ad Planner - "You can see a list of the largest 1000 sites worldwide, based on Unique Visitors (users), as measured by Ad Planner. This list is updated monthly as new Ad Planner datasets are released. The list defines sites as top-level domains. For each site on the list, you'll be able to see: The site category; Unique Visitors (users); Page Views; Whether the site has ads."