Interesting questions...
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=20259
(follow-up) TX Comptroller’s breach: few sign up for credit monitoring
Barry Harrell has a follow-up on the Texas Comptroller’s breach that affected 3.5 million Texans.
I was interested to read that 100,000 people signed up for the offered credit protection monitoring, which is less than 3% of those offered it – at a cost to the state of $600,480. The state had originally offered those affected a discounted rate for credit monitoring services, but following public protest and media attention, changed the offer to free services.
That only a minority of people take advantage of offers to sign up for free credit monitoring is not new, but it’s somewhat mind-boggling to me that less than 3% of people informed that their information was available on the web for over a year took advantage of the offer. Is it that people are too lazy or disorganized to sign up, or that they don’t really believe they could be at risk, or what?
If studies show that consumers are concerned about ID theft or fraud but consumers don’t avail themselves of offered protections or free services, some might argue that federal law should be revised to allow the entities to enroll those affected in such services on their behalf. Readers may remember how Experian sued Lifelock to block them from placing fraud alerts as agents of the individuals. There was talk at the time of how the Fair Credit Reporting Act might at some point be revisited, but nothing ever happened.
I do not believe that breached entities should be able to sign individuals up for services they neither request nor want, and I realize that some might argue that the state wasted $600,000 for services that were not really needed since there has been no evidence of fraud (at least not yet).
But where do we go from here? Should we be encouraging people to sign up for such services when they are offered? If so, what do we need to do in terms of public awareness and education?
As I thought, there is a better way to track browsers...
"Microsoft embarrassed itself last week when it got caught using 'zombie cookies' — a form of tracking cookies that users can't delete, as they come back to life after you've 'killed' them. Microsoft says it'll stop the 'aberrant' practice. But Woody Leonhard says you ain't seen nothing yet. It turns out HTML5 offers a technical mechanism to give zombie cookies a new lease on life — and the Web browsers' private-browsing features can't stop them."
Lack of access increases piracy, therefore access should decrease piracy, right? “I want it NOW!”
Delay On Hulu Availability More Than Doubles Piracy Of Fox Shows
A week ago, Fox changed its licensing rules so that non-paying users of Hulu would be unable to watch new episodes of their shows until eight days after their air date. Put on your analyst hat and think about what effect this might have on, say, piracy of those shows. Did you determine that it would increase piracy? Congratulations, you are a better judge of consequences than Fox. Because piracy of Fox shows went up by a huge amount during this last week.
Actually, it’s likely that Fox anticipated this increase in piracy and simply considered it worth the trade-off. With worse options for free users, more will watch the live broadcast, they suppose, and ad prices go up with these increased projections. Query: if these people could watch it on live TV, why would they be watching it on Hulu in the first place?
Defining the legal environment of the Cloud.
Amazon, Dropbox, Google and You Win in Cloud-Music Copyright Decision
The disk drives powering Dropbox, Amazon’s Cloud Drive, and Google Music likely issued a small sigh of relief Monday, after a federal court judge found that the MP3tunes cloud music service didn’t violate copyright laws when it used only a single copy of a MP3 on its servers, rather than storing 50 copies for 50 users.
For Amazon and Google’s nascent cloud music services, the decision clears the way for them to make it easier and faster for customers to use their music services; gives them legal cover to reduce the amount of disk space needed per user; makes it less likely that new customers of their music services will bust through their ISPs data caps when signing up; and clears the way for the companies to let users add songs found on webpages and through search to their lockers with a single-click — all without either being sued by record labels for doing so.
Monday’s decision centers on MP3tunes, a cloud-based online music locker service, that allows a customer to upload the music from their hard drives to a “locker” on the web, where they can play back the songs from any connected device.
What happens when justifications like “We gotta do something!” wears off?
http://web.docuticker.com/go/docubase/64918
Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security
August 22, 2011 21:27 Source: U.S. Naval Postgraduate School
From the Homeland Security Affairs Journal abstract: By Mueller, John and Mark G. Stewart.
The cumulative increase in expenditures on U.S. domestic homeland security over the decade since 9/11 exceeds one trillion dollars. It is clearly time to examine these massive expenditures applying risk assessment and cost-benefit approaches that have been standard for decades. Thus far, officials do not seem to have done so and have engaged in various forms of probability neglect by focusing on worst case scenarios; adding, rather than multiplying, the probabilities; assessing relative, rather than absolute, risk; and inflating terrorist capacities and the importance of potential terrorist targets. We find that enhanced expenditures have been excessive. [What a surprise! Bob]
+ Direct link to full text of the article (PDF; 479 KB)
+ The article is also available in HTML and other formats.
For my Geeks. Be “Green” – re-purpose the HP Tablet.
Hack Your TouchPad to Run Android, Win a Prize
After HP announced it would discontinue production of its TouchPad tablet last week, it looked like early HP tablet adopters spent $500 on a dud. If you’re an enterprising software hacker, however, there could be an opportunity to make your money back — and then some.
A hardware-modification web site is offering a $1,500 cash bounty for the first person to successfully port a full version of the Android operating system over to HP’s TouchPad.
Hacknmod.com offers a tiered bounty system for would-be TouchPad hackers: Just getting Android to run on the TouchPad without taking full advantage of the tablet’s hardware will win you a cool $450. But the more you’re able to integrate the system software into the device, the more cash you’ll earn. Get the Wi-Fi, multitouch capability, audio and camera up and running, and you’ll add another $1,050 to the pot.
(Related)
Microsoft Pursues WebOS Devs, Offers Free Phones
"Taking advantage of Hewlett-Packard's departure from the tablet and smartphone market, Microsoft has offered webOS developers free phones, tools and training to create apps for Windows Phone 7. Brandon Watson, Microsoft's senior director of Windows Phone 7 development, made the offer on Twitter on Friday, and has been fielding queries ever since. 'To Any Published WebOS Devs: We'll give you what you need to be successful on #WindowsPhone, incl. free phones, dev tools, and training, etc.,' Watson said a day after HP's announcement. Before Friday was out, Watson said he had received more than 500 emails from interested developers, and later, that the count was closing in on 600."
Free is good! But imagine what $1 per student (paid to the Instructor, of course) would do to increase the number of free classes available...
More Stanford Computing Courses Go Free
"Following on the recent Slashdot item on the availability of a free Stanford AI course there is news that two other Stanford Computer Science courses are also joining in this 'bold experiment in distributed education' in which students not only have access to lecture videos and other course materials but will actively participate by submitting assignments and getting regular feedback on their progress. The subjects are Machine Learning with Andrew Ng and Database with Jennifer Widom. This open approach looks as if it might be a success with well over 100,000 prospective students signing up to the AI course alone."
Useful and free.
Pixtick.com - Create And Share Screenshots
Coupling a cool service with a slick interface, Pixtick makes it incredibly easy for people who need to share screenshots to get the job done with speed and precision. You see, users of Pixtick are enabled to share images that can be annotated and edited as much as it is needed, and all these editions and annotations can be handled from within the application. And not only does Pixtick run on the browser, the service is actually completely free.
The world, she is a changing...
http://www.knewton.com/digital-education/
The State of Digital Education Infographic
No comments:
Post a Comment