Interesting. An Auditor could have had
access to lots of sensitive information. Difficult to tell from the
article if “millions” is the right number, but the “company
secrets” bit sounds real.
AU:
Computershare ‘breach’ a lesson in information larceny
November 7, 2011 by admin
Leonie Woods reports:
The privacy and
financial records of millions of shareholders
who use Computershare’s global share registry system were placed at
risk this year when a Boston employee quit the company, allegedly
taking with her thousands of pages of highly sensitive and
confidential documents.
The
employee resigned in September last year but did not return a work
laptop for three weeks. When Computershare retrieved the
laptop, the company
claimed internal documents and emails had been copied without
authorisation to a USB flash drive and later to the employee’s home
computer.
What is most
disturbing about the case is that the woman was formerly employed in
Computershare’s risk management and internal audit department,
which is responsible for scrutinising the vulnerabilities of the
group’s internal systems.
It
is understood forensic technicians employed by Computershare later
purged the documents from the home computer and retrieved one of two
USB devices in the woman’s possession.
[...]
The US court heard
that one of the documents detailed Computershare’s business and
operational processes, ”the inherent risks they face, their
management risk rating, the likelihood and consequences of risks to
those business lines, a documentation of controls that are in place
that have been designed to mitigate their risk” and more.
Another document
was an internal audit report covering all of Computershare’s US
operations which, among other things, ”describes in detail the
company’s efforts to maintain and preserve shareholder and
institutional privacy and confidentiality” as well as specific
audit findings and detailed strategies for resolving issues.
Also
Computershare’s lawyers told the US court that the woman copied her
emails from the laptop and that these contained ”personally
identifiable information of shareholders, including account numbers,
names and holdings”.
Read more on The
Sydney Morning Herald.
[From the article:
But a court in Boston has heard
Computershare does not know where the original USB device is; the
woman told the company she had lost it.
There is a simple solution, but you
won't like that either...
The San Francisco Chronicle features an
interview
with Google's patent counsel, Tim Porter, who argues that "...
what many people can agree on is the current system is broken and
there are a large number of software patents out there fueling
litigation that resulted from a 10- or 15-year period when the
issuance of software patents was too lax. Things that seemed obvious
made it through the office until 2007, when the
Supreme Court finally said that the patent examiners could use common
sense. [Note: Not “must” but “could” Bob]
Patents were written in a way that was vague and overly broad.
(Companies are) trying to claim something that's really an idea
(which isn't patentable). There are only so many ways to describe a
piston, but software patents are written by lawyers
in a language that software engineers don't even understand.
They're being used to hinder innovation or skim revenue off the top
of a successful product." Porter is speaking in particular
about the snarls that have faced (and still face) Android, based on
Microsoft patents; he blames some of the mess on a patent regime
where "you don't know what patents cover until
courts declare that in litigation. What that means is
people have to make decisions about whether to fight or whether to
reach agreements."
Another Google issue (unless you can
name another “Mass Digitizer?”
Legal
Issues in Mass Digitization: A Preliminary Analysis and Discussion
Document
November 7, 2011 03:21 Source: U.S.
Copyright Office
From the publication
web site:
The Copyright
Office has published a Preliminary Analysis and Discussion Document
that addresses the issues raised by the intersection between
copyright law and the mass digitization of books. The purpose of the
Analysis is to facilitate further discussions among the affected
parties and the public – discussions that may encompass a number of
possible approaches, including voluntary initiatives, legislative
options, or both. The Analysis also identifies questions to consider
in determining an appropriate policy for the mass digitization of
books.
+ Link
to full report (PDF; 1.95 MB)
While the American Idle watch American
Idol searching for talent, “Big Music” is sinking their treasure
into more lawyers and lobbyists because they think that will make
them more money than new talent.
RIAA
lawyer says DMCA may need overhaul
… "I think Congress got it
right, [“because we wrote it for them” Bob]
but I think the courts are getting it wrong," [“because
they are applying logic” Bob] Pariser said during a
panel discussion at the NY Entertainment & Technology Law
Conference. "I think the courts are interpreting Congress'
statute in a manner that is entirely too restrictive of content
owners' rights and too open to [Internet] service providers.
Well, that clears it up!
November 06, 2011
Pew
- The Generation Gap and the 2012 Election
- "In the last four national elections, generational differences have mattered more than they have in decades. According to the exit polls, younger people have voted substantially more Democratic than other age groups in each election since 2004, while older voters have cast more ballots for Republican candidates in each election since 2006. The latest national polls suggest this pattern may well continue in 2012. Millennial generation voters are inclined to back Barack Obama for reelection by a wide margin in a matchup against Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who has run the strongest against Obama in many polls. By contrast, Silent generation voters are solidly behind Romney. In between the youngest and the oldest voters are the Baby Boom generation and Generation X. Both groups are less supportive of Obama than they were in 2008 and are now on the fence with respect to a second term for the president."
This uses only the Harvard format,
EasyBib supports APA and MLA, BibMe supports MLA, APA, and Chicago.
CiteThisForMe:
Quickly Generate Bibliography Based On Harvard Referencing Style
… CiteThisForMe helps you by
creating a bibliography/reference and eliminates the need for you to
worry about formatting.
For my Ethical Hackers & Computer
Forensics geeks: Perhaps reverse engineering the source code would
allow you to “un-modify” the voice telling you where to drop the
ransom money...
Skype
Voice Changer: Add Effects To Your Voice In Skype
Skype Voice Changer is a free to use
desktop application coded in C# for Windows. It acts as a Skype
add-on that adds effects to voices being transmitted through Skype.
The app lets you control various aspects of your voice such as the
number of voices, the frequency, pitch fudge factor, and looping
voices. Providing a variety of effects, the app will enable you to
have lots of fun with your Skype contacts.
This could make a great project for my
Ethical Hackers! The Comments provide a few tips...
"One cool feature I used on KMail
years ago was the ability to generate a spoofed email bounce for any
given message I had received, which claimed delivery failed because
of an unknown recipient. While this doesn't exactly align with
expected behaviour from a mail client, it was a
useful way of easily getting off mailing lists (automated,
or manually created by freaky acquaintances!). This is something I
really miss, so I'm wondering if there are any mail clients for
Windows that provide similar functionality?"
I have many students who find Khan
Academy very useful. This could make it much more useful.
"Khan Academy announced this
morning that it has raised
$5 million from the O'Sullivan Foundation (a foundation created
by Irish engineer and investor Sean O'Sullivan). The money is
earmarked for several initiatives: expanding
the Khan Academy faculty, creating a content
management system so that others can use the program's learning
analytics system, and building an actual brick-and-mortar school,
beginning with a summer camp program."
[From the article:
Khan has long kept full control over
the “instruction”, or rather the video creation — all the
content has been created by him. That changed last month, as
I reported here, when Khan Academy struck a partnership with
SmartHistory, bringing on that
organization’s Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker as art history
instructors. The money from the O’Sullivan Foundation will be used
in part to expand the Khan Academy further, to at least 5
full-time-equivalent teachers.
… The system will also enable
others to tap into some of the tools and analytics that Khan Academy
is developing.
Khan Academy intern David Hu offered
some great insight this week into what these analytics look like. In
a blog post entitled, “How
Khan Academy Is Using Machine Learning to Assess Student Mastery,”
Hu detailed the efforts underway at Khan Academy to rethink how its
model for student proficiency works. Currently, it relies on a
“streak” — that is, students must get a certain number of
questions right in a row in order to move on. Hu proposes an
alternate approach to ascertaining whether or not a student has
gained proficiency (defined as a 94% or greater likelihood of
correctly answering the next question asked involving that skill)
using a logical regression model. Hu hypothesizes that with this new
proficiency model, learning outcomes should increase, in part by
moving students off of problems that they’re good at more quickly.
… “Teachers don’t
scale,” I remember Sal Khan saying to me when I
interviewed
him last year. What can scale, he argues, is the
infrastructure for content delivery. And that means you
just need a handful of good lecturers’ record their lessons; the
Internet will take care of the rest.
… “The school of the future will
not resemble the school of today,” Khan says. “In the past, the
assembly-line, lecture-homework-exam model existed because
that’s what was possible in the no-tech and low-tech classrooms of
their day.” His team now have $5 million to take that
lecture-homework-exam model into the high-tech classroom… or
something.
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