Friday, October 28, 2011


Print your own “You can trust me!” certification. What more could a crook want?
EFF Data Shows Four CAs Compromised Since June
The EFF, through the use of its SSL Observatory, has taken a look at the data from certificate revocation lists for SSL certificates in recent months, and found that there were four separate CAs compromised in the last four months.
… Again, each of these incidents could have broken the security of any HTTPS website," Peter Eckersley of the EFF wrote in an analysis of the data.


A really small percentage of a really big number – does that translate across the Internet?
Facebook Sees 600,000 Compromised Logins Per Day
New figures from Facebook reveal how often the social networking site’s users are hacked. In the blog post announcing the forthcoming “Trusted Friends” feature, Facebook also an included infographic detailing Facebook’s security measures. One figure in particular jumped out at security researchers: every day, “only .06%” of Facebook’s 1 billion logins are compromised. Or, to put it another way, 600,000 logins per day are compromised.


Unfortunately, I think this is the most likely reaction when the police (or anyone identifiable) denies any protest group what they want. You can see how it would make a cop nervous.
Hackers target Oakland police after Occupy protest
Contact information, schedules, badge numbers, and other information about Oakland Police Department officers was posted to a public Pastebin page. Meanwhile, the department's Web site also was down temporarily this morning, according to SC Magazine.
… "A protester who did two tours in Iraq is in critical condition with fractured skull and brain injury after a cop shot him in the head with a "non-lethal" weapon," the Pastebin statement said. "A crowd of protesters were deliberately hit with a flashbang while rendering first aid to an injured protester."
"I'm offering a $1,000 reward, no questions asked, for the name of the officer who threw a flashbang at the injured Iraqi vet," the statement added


One of the downsides of being an early adopter.
Possible Dolphin Browser security and privacy issues found
October 28, 2011 by Dissent
Michael Crider writes:
Dolphin Browser HD is one of the most popular 3rd-party browsers in the Android Market, and with good reason. But an issue with version 6 and the current version 7 have raised the eyebrows of some users over at the ever-inventive XDA-Developers forum. According to forum poster “Fnorder”, the new Webzine feature records every link, search and visited page and sends them to a remote server. If true, the breach of Dolphin users’ privacy is very disturbing indeed.
Read more on Android Community.


The problem with having a very smart data aggregation and analysis tool is you don't want to wait for permission (Opt In) to start using it.
Is Klout Using Our Family to Violate Our Privacy?
October 27, 2011 by Dissent
Okay, this is disturbing. Danny Brown explains how even if you don’t authorize Klout to create a profile on you, Klout may be doing exactly that and linking it to your Facebook profile if you have one. And not only that, it’s doing this to kids:
He isn’t on Twitter, and he’s not super active on Facebook. He hasn’t given Klout permission to access his account, and he has his Facebook privacy settings at private. Just like Megan advises.
And yet here he is on Klout, with a profile and score of 38. However, that’s not the issue. The bigger issue is this. As you can see from the image (which I’ve blurred to protect his identity), you can clearly see that his Facebook icon is a live one (i.e., not shaded out), which means people can visit his Klout profile and be taken to his very private Facebook profile by clicking the Facebook icon.
So, a private Facebook profile with no access allowed to Klout is now on their system and, worse still, allowing any public visitor to Klout to be taken directly to Tonia’s son’s private Facebook account?
Doesn’t something smell incredibly rotten here?
Read more on B2C.
I hope Klout responds to the allegations.


I can see why they dropped the subsidy for phones (1870's technology), but why choose broadband as a replacement? (Because the phone companies want it?)
IDG reports that "The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has voted to overhaul a decades-old system of telephone subsidies in rural areas, with the funding refocused on broadband deployment. The FCC's vote Thursday would transition the Universal Service Fund's (USF's) high-cost program, now subsidizing voice service, to a new Connect America Fund focused on broadband deployment to areas that don't yet have service. The FCC will cap the broadband fund at $4.5 billion a year, the current budget of the USF high-cost program, funded by a tax on telephone bills." That cap, says Reuters, is "the first budget constraint ever imposed on the program."


Since I'm still trying to sort this out, I need more articles like this one.
Pointer: Cell Phone Data and Expectations of Privacy
October 28, 2011 by Dissent
FourthAmendment.com points us to an article by Peter A. Crusco in the New York Law Journal that provides a nice synopsis of Supreme Court and other cases on cell phone data – including location information – and the Fourth Amendment. You can read it on Law.com.


Sometimes (often?) it is difficult to grasp the obvious.
Apple Gets in Bed With Business by Playing Hard to Get
… Today, the Forrester research firm — which just three years ago was telling corporate IT to steer clear of those pesky Macs — published a report saying that companies that want to succeed need to go ahead and show the Mac a little love.
… Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt sees Forrester’s about-face as a Hell-freezing-over kind of moment, but in an interview, Johnson says that his company’s advice has changed because the enterprise has evolved. Today, corporate workers are often running clunky old Windows XP desktops, and they’re getting frustrated. And many of them are buying shiny new Macs and iPads and bringing them into work to get stuff done.
That desire to get things done is pretty much what drove MS-DOS and then Windows users to start sneaking PCs into the enterprise about 30 years ago, he adds. “When end users and employees are making technology choices and bringing things into the office, it signals a sea change in IT.”

(Related) ...but a completely different strategy.
Google+ Embraces Big Business Via Google Apps
Google + — the web giant’s fledgling social network — is now available to businesses, universities, and schools using Google Apps.
When Mountain View first unveiled its Facebook rival in late June, those with Google accounts tied to the Google Apps suite — a collection of online office applications — were not permitted on the social network. Now, they are — if their administrator activates the service within their particular organization. Once the admin switch is flipped, individual users can sign up at google.com/+.
Google+ is also available to any organization that has chosen to automatically enable any new service pushed onto the suite.
… According to a Google blog post, Google Apps users will have access to all the same Google+ tools as ordinary users, but they’ll also have the option of sharing content with their entire organization — even if they haven’t added individual colleagues to their Google+ “circles.”


The times are changing, even for stuck-in-the-mud lawyer types...
October 27, 2011
New on LLRX.com: Law Periodical Publishing Practices and Trends
Law Periodical Publishing Practices and Trends - Law librarian, criminal defense attorney and prolific author Ken Strutin brings into focus how electronic access to scholarly information is impacting library collection policies as well as professional publication formats, and as a result, how a new legal research environment is developing. Ken's article provides a selected collection of resources about the law review publishing process, emerging trends in the information cycle, and practical guides for developing an article and getting it to press.
[From the article:
Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship (2009) ...calls for all law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication
Scholarship Advice for New Law Professors in the Electronic Age, 16 Widener L.J. 947 (2007) ...The substance and length of what law professors write, the formats in which they do so, and the fora in which they publish are evolving.
… Professors who have been writing for years may find some useful nuggets about citation practices regarding blogs, the impact of recent law review limits on article length, electronic methods of browsing journals and articles in other disciplines, access to government documents, and posting on open-access archives."

(Related) Does this also apply to legal writing?
October 27, 2011
UK is a world-leader in science and research according to new report from BIS
"The International Comparative Performance of the UK Research Base 2011 report was compiled by Elsevier and published by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. It shows that UK research attracts more citations per pound spent in overall research and development than any other country. It has also found that the UK research base is highly mobile, internationally competitive and diverse... The UK also has more articles per researcher, more citations per researcher, and more usage per article authored than researchers in US, China, Japan and Germany."

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)