Interesting non-disclosure. 1 percent
is still almost a million customers.
AT&T
Customers Targeted by Hack Attack, Company Says
November 21, 2011 by admin
A handful of AT&T
customers were targeted Monday by an organized hacking attack that
was ultimately unsuccessful, a company spokesman tells FoxNews.com.
“We recently
detected what could have been an organized attempt to obtain
information on a number of customer accounts,” AT&T spokesman
Mark Siegel told FoxNews.com. “The people in question appear to
have used ‘auto script’ technology to determine whether AT&T
telephone numbers were linked to online AT&T accounts.”
Read more on Fox
News.
[From the article:
Fewer than 1 percent of customers were
targeted, Siegel said, all unsuccessfully.
Oh the horror! My wino-lawyer friends
will be devastated.
Gary
Vaynerchuk’s ‘Wine Library’ Hacked
November 22, 2011 by admin
Alexia Tsotsis reports:
Earlier today
patrons of Wine Library received an email informing them that the
credit card information they had used to sign up to the
WineLibrary.com site may have been compromised in a data breach. The
site is the hub of NYT Best Selling Author Gary Vaynerchuk’s family
business, made famous by his popular and now retired television show
Wine Library.tv.
While the email
doesn’t reveal how many accounts were impacted, the site likely has
hundreds of thousands of users.
The company
reveals that it started investigating a possible breach in October
when they received initial customer complaints, complaints which
increased towards the beginning of November. The company removed all
credit card data from its site on November 11th and last week
confirmed that an IP address originating in China was used in the
attacks.
Read more on TechCrunch.
Kamber
Law strikes again! Way to go Scott! ...and while this is not
likely to actually cost them $250 per victim, it is an interesting
addition to “damages” – an admission that it could cost real
dollars to “repair” the damage they caused...
Metacafe
Offers Consumers Up To $250 To Settle ‘Super Cookie’ Lawsuit
November 21, 2011 by Dissent
Jeff Roberts reports:
Popular video site
Metacafe has joined Quantcast, Interclick and a host of other firms
in settling a lawsuit over its use of Flash “super-cookies” –
tracking tools that regenerate even after internet users clear their
browser. But despite an offer of $250 to compensate the plaintiffs,
no one should hold their breath about getting paid.
In a proposed
settlement filed on Friday in Brooklyn federal court, Metacafe said
it would pay a maximum of $250 to consumers for reasonable expenses
they incurred in trying to remove the cookies.
Read more on PaidContent.org
[From the article:
Metacafe’s decision to pay $250 may
not be what it seems, however. Before anyone who had the cookies
installed on their browser can collect, they must:
submit a request
for reimbursement for any out-of-pocket expenses or costs that they
believe they incurred for a reason attributable to Metacafe that
could not have been remedied by simply removing any HTTP cookie
and/or LSOs associated with Metacafe and using readily available
tools to do so.
(Related)
RockYou
Proposed Settlement Would Leave Decision Standing
November 22, 2011 by admin
Remember the RockYou
breach that was disclosed in December 2009? It still ranks as
one of the 10
biggest breaches of all time in terms of number of records
involved – 32 million users’ login credentials were involved. A
lawsuit
over the breach created a buzz last year when it did
not get dismissed out of hand for lack of standing or failure to
demonstrate unreimbursed financial harm. Now Craig Hoffman reports
that there is a proposed settlement in the case:
The parties in the
Claridge
v. RockYou case submitted a proposed
settlement agreement to the court for approval on November 14,
2011. This case, which was filed shortly after RockYou disclosed a
breach that compromised 32 million log-in credentials, received
national attention in the spring. In April 2011, the California
federal district court declined
to dismiss the plaintiff’s breach of contract and negligence claims
by finding that: “at the present pleading stage, plaintiff
has sufficiently alleged a general basis for harm by alleging that
the breach of his PII has caused him to lose some ascertainable but
unidentified “value” and/or property right inherent in
the PII.” Notwithstanding the court’s skepticism concerning the
plaintiff’s ultimate ability to prove any actual damages, the
court’s recognition of a property right in personal information
sufficient to meet the Article III standing requirement was
immediately advanced by plaintiffs in other similar cases. Indeed,
the RockYou decision and the recent First Circuit decision in
Hannaford
stand out from the seemingly constant stream of decisions dismissing
putative class actions filed against companies who disclose data
breaches.
The terms of the proposed settlement
will undoubtedly raise some eyebrows because the plaintiff only gets
$2,000 while the attorney gets $290,000. But the settlement would
prevent a possible loss if the case goes forward and would allow the
earlier ruling to stand, which might be of help to others in future
cases. You can read more on Data
Privacy Monitor.
TSA insists that their scanners are not
a health risk.
Airport
X-ray scanners bricking Amazon Kindles
If a spate of worrying damage reports
are to be believed, owners of the Amazon Kindle should think twice
before taking their electronic reader with them on a domestic or
international flight.
That’s according to UK newspaper
reports that claim the E Ink display screens aboard Kindle devices
are becoming irreversibly “scrambled” after passing through
airport X-ray scanning equipment.
Looks more like a sanction for “lying
to your employees”
French
Court of Cassation Sanctions Company for Misuse of a Geolocation
Device
November 22, 2011 by Dissent
On November 3,
2011, the Labor Chamber of the French Court of Cassation (the
“Court”) upheld a decision against a company that unlawfully used
a geolocation device to track the company car of one of its salesmen.
Although the company notified the salesman that a geolocation device
would be used to optimize productivity by analyzing the time he spent
on business trips, the device was in fact used to
monitor his working hours, which ultimately led to a pay cut.
Read more about the case and relevant
French law on Hunton & Williams Privacy
and Information Security Law Blog. French employers do not seem
to get cut as much slack as American employers when it comes to
monitoring employees.
No doubt US Copyright trolls will
copyright this story and sue anyone who runs it...
Will
the European Court of Justice stymie attempts to identify Internet
users?
November 22, 2011 by Dissent
TJ McIntyre calls our attention to an
important opinion:
This time last
year I blogged
about Bonnier Audio v. Perfect Communication, the
Swedish case which questioned whether data retained under the Data
Retention Directive could be used in litigation to identify users
accused of infringing copyright. In that case five audiobook
companies brought an action against Perfect Communication, an ISP,
seeking the details of a user who was said to be sharing many popular
audiobooks. The ISP, however, resisted the application and argued
(in essence) that data retained under the Data
Retention Directive could only be used for the purposes of that
Directive and not for unrelated purposes such as civil
litigation. In a preliminary reference, the Swedish court asked the
ECJ the following questions:
* Whether the Data
Retention Directive prevents the application of a national rule based
on the EU IP Rights Enforcement Directive (2004/48/EC), which
provides that an ISP in a civil case can be ordered to provide a
copyright owner or a rights holder with information on which
subscriber holds a specific IP address assigned by the ISP, from
which address the infringement is alleged to have taken place.
* Whether the
answer to the first question is affected by the fact that the state
has not yet implemented the Data Retention Directive, although the
deadline for implementation has passed.
As I said at the
time, this has the potential to be a very important case – one in
which a ruling against the copyright plaintiffs might well force a
revision of the entire approach which Irish and English law takes to
identifying internet users. I am surprised therefore that there
hasn’t yet been much reaction to the Advocate General’s opinion,
issued last Thursday, which comes down largely on the side of the
ISP.
Read more about the opinion on IT
Law in Ireland. With the caution that there is not yet an
official translation of the opinion, the following statement from
para 62 is a blockbuster:
There is
no reason to favor the owners of intellectual property rights by
allowing them to use personal data that have been lawfully obtained
or retained for purposes unrelated to the protection of their rights.
Wow. Could that throw a monkey wrench
into a lot of copyright and IP infringement cases where plaintiffs
want to compel ISPs to disclose user identity information.
Kudos to Perfect Communication for not
just turning over the data and trying to protect the privacy or its
customers’ data.
Perhaps the court will adopt the “Soma
Doctrine” and give the money to those who have proven they
can manage it frugally over time... (Attention Ninth Circuit!
That's the Privacy Foundation at the Sturm College of Law at
the University of Denver)
Circuit
Rejects AOL Privacy Settlement, Citing Random Beneficiaries
November 22, 2011 by Dissent
Ginny LaRoe reports that a proposed
settlement of a lawsuit against AOL over inserting promotional
messages in subscribers’ e-mail footers has hit a snag:
The Ninth Circuit
U.S. Court of Appeals on Monday rejected
a class action settlement that called for AOL Inc. to give $110,000
to random charities, sending a message that courts should be more
careful in doling out money under the cy pres doctrine.
A unanimous panel
said the charities had nothing to do with the plaintiffs’ email
privacy claims and that too much money was being funneled to Los
Angeles groups, despite a class spread out across the country. And
the court expressed skepticism about whether judges or mediators
should make recommendations on how large sums of money get paid out
when the money doesn’t go to the class members.
Read more Law.com
If you reallllly wanted to cut Health
Care costs, why not bring in the best 'cost cutters' in the world to
do it? You can see how much cheaper things would be if you could get
a hip replacement on Isle 9...
Walmart’s
Early Christmas Gift To The HealthTech Community
Startups thrive on discontinuities and
disruption. NPR and Kaiser Health News broke a major story that
Walmart intends to become the largest provider of
primary care in the country.
Occasionally, I do think about what I
do and how to do it better...
Khan's
Biggest Impact: Changing the Economics of Education
… Besides growing the faculty of
the Khan Academy, Khan is planning to open
the system to teachers around the globe who can then use the
Knowledge Map to build their own courses and also have access to the
in-depth analytic tools Khan Academy is providing at the back-end.
But here is the deal: the content must
be put up to Khan Academy’s noncommercial public domain.
Noncommercial.
(Related) ...and I'm not the only one.
"Shareable has an interview
with librarian Lauren Britton Smedley from the Fayetteville Free
Library, which is adding
a Fab Lab to its community offerings. She said, 'I think that
libraries are really centers for knowledge exchange, and a Fab Lab
fits perfectly into something like that. This idea that libraries
are a place where the books live, and you go to find a book, and
that’s all it is, I think is really starting to shift. Libraries
are a place for social transformation. They’re a place that you
can go to get computer access, or access to technology that you can’t
get anywhere else, and access to people. ... At the Fab Lab, the
impetus behind the whole thing was to create a center for knowledge
exchange where we’re not just offering Intro to Word or Intro to
Excel — that we can offer Intro to Computer
Programming, or Digital Fabrication — these
skills that are really important in the STEM fields, and we can push
that information out for free. And how do we do that? By getting
people in the community who know that stuff to come in and share what
they know.'"
Free is good.
Textfree
Users Have Sent And Received 20 Billion Text Messages, Free Of Charge
Turns out you don’t have to charge an
arm and a leg for SMS messages to make money off of texting.
One startup that’s proven this is
Pinger, the company behind the massively popular free texting app
Textfree. Today, the company is
announcing that it’s reached a major milestone: since launching in
March 2009, Textfree users have sent and received a total of 20
billion text messages. For free. And they’re sending and
receiving another 1.5 billion messages every month (they were growing
at 1
billion per month in March of this year).
… Fire up the app for the first
time and you’ll be given a new phone number [Talk
about lock-in! Bob] that people can text the same way
they would any other mobile number. Textfree is available for both
iOS and Android, and it’s particularly popular on
devices like the iPod Touch, which wouldn’t otherwise have full
texting functionality
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