Thursday, September 22, 2011


Unfortunately, you sometimes have to nudge prosecutors by making it personal...
"Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said on Tuesday that her office would be inquiring into long-standing complaints about fraudulent purchases that leverage Apple's popular online music store. Coakley was herself a victim of identity theft in recent months, telling the audience that her stolen credit card information was used to make fraudulent iTunes purchases. When asked (by a Threatpost reporter) about whether such fraud constitutes a reportable event under the Bay State's strict data breach notification law, 201 CMR 17, Coakley said that her office would be looking into that question and demanding answers from Cupertino, which has steadfastly refused to respond to media requests regarding user reports about fraudulent iTunes purchases, and which has not reported the breaches to Massachusetts regulators."


A warning for the US?
Centralized, electronic medical records are touted as a means of increasing efficiency and patient safety. The "centralizing" and "turning electronic" phases, though, have some very rough edges. An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the Guardian about one such digitization project in the UK:
"An ambitious multibillion pound programme to create a computerised patient record system across the entire NHS is being scrapped, ministers have decided. The £12.7bn National Programme for IT is being ended after years of delays, technical difficulties, contractual disputes and rising costs."


Not what I expected.
Evaluating the Use of Public Surveillance Cameras for Crime Control and Prevention
September 21, 2011 22:04 Source: The Urban Institute
From the abstract:
This report summarizes the results of an evaluation of public surveillance systems in Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., examining how systems in each of these jurisdictions were selected and implemented and assessing the degree to which they achieved their intended crime prevention impact. The study also explored whether surveillance cameras displaced crime or yielded a diffusion of benefits to areas just beyond the cameras reach, and included a cost-benefit analysis component in two of the three study sites. Findings indicate that in places where cameras were sufficiently concentrated and routinely monitored by trained staff, the impact on crime was significant and cost-beneficial, with no evidence of crime displacement.


Yet another indication that the HP BoD has too much access to wacky weed? Does this suggest they will keep the PC business?
HP Looks Set To Fire CEO Léo Apotheker. Now What?
… Early reports that HP’s board was meeting to oust Apotheker and potentially replace him with ex-eBay head (and California gubernatorial candidate) Meg Whitman began filtering out through press leaks yesterday morning. The New York Times had the fullest account of the board’s reported deliberations, citing unnamed insiders “not authorized by the board to speak publicly.”


For my Criminal Justice geeks...
"When it comes to a physical crime scene and the resulting forensics, investigators can ascertain that a crime took place and gather the necessary evidence. When it comes to digital crime, the evidence is often at the byte level, deep in the magnetics of digital media, initially invisible from the human eye. That is just one of the challenges of digital forensics, where it is easy to destroy crucial evidence, and often difficult to preserve correctly."


This one is for my fellow teachers. We'll need to integrate social networking into our Business curriculum...
Platlas: The world's first social-platform atlas
On the eve of F8, Facebook's annual developer conference, the world's busiest social network is expected to undergo its most radical change yet.
Facebook, now 7 years old, appears on the verge of becoming a full-on consumer brand powerhouse--where entire industries like publishing, film, and television will live and conduct commerce at an unprecedented rate and scale, industry watchers say. As Facebook grows and evolves, it's also becoming a more complex platform to understand and navigate. That's why Platlas, the world's first social-networking "atlas" was created.
"Facebook is an absolute must-have for every brand," Germano told CNET in a pre-F8 interview. "It's becoming the only way for brands to have communications with online users." Germano and his company seem to be in a good position to know having designed the very first brand experiences on Facebook's platform in 2007.
Germano's team plans to continuously track and update any and all changes to the Facebook platform. After F8, expect to visit Platlas and see how Facebook's social ecosystem has been modified.
In coming months be on the lookout for other social platforms to go through the Platlas process. There will be similar graphical social guides for Twitter, Foursquare, and Gowalla and eventually every social network.


Perhaps a short lecture in Ethical Hacking?
War with computer hackers hits the road
… The menu of future electronic features currently being studied by automakers--everything from Internet-based data and entertainment to car-to-car safety communications--has a dark shadow. Any one of them is a potential open window to computer hackers, says Georg Doll, senior director of automotive solutions at Wind River, the automotive software arm of Intel.
… Researchers at the University of California in San Diego and the University of Washington agree. The team published a paper in August warning that there are plenty of chinks in the automobile's armor.
Among their realistic scenarios:
-- A virus enters the vehicle though a downloaded piece of music and interferes with controls.
-- A hacker attacks the car using the same wireless frequency as its remote keyless entry.
-- Hackers reach into vehicle control units by long-range broadcast, using the auto's global positioning system as a receiver.

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