Big win, temporarily?
Heartland
gets most of banks’ claims dismissed over its massive data breach
December 7, 2011 by admin
Bonnie Barron reports that Heartland
Payment Systems succeeded in getting a federal court judge to agree
to dismiss
most of the claims in a consolidated lawsuit filed by nine banks
following a massive breach that affected millions of customers.
Rosenthal granted
the banks leave to amend the dismissed claims for breach of contract,
breach of implied contract, express misrepresentation, negligent
misrepresentation based on nondisclosure, and violations of the
California Unfair Competition Law, the Colorado Consumer Protection
Act, the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act
and the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act.
Heartland failed
only in its bid to dismiss the claim that it violated the Florida
Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. The processor had argued
that the act applies only to consumers, not banks, but the Florida
Legislature substituted “person” for “consumer” when it
amended the act in 2001.
Read more on Courthouse
News.
Looks like another successful test of
the “Make the election turn out correctly” app!
Report:
About 60,000 E-Votes Uncounted in NY Election Last Year
… The report
(.pdf), released by the Democracy Program at New York University’s
Brennan Center for Justice, says that instructions displayed on new
optical scan machines confused voters who cast too many votes in the
gubernatorial race, causing some 20,000 votes to be spoiled in that
race.
… New York recently
switched to optical scan machines, after the state was ordered to
replace its antiquated mechanical lever voting machines. With
optical scan machines, voters select their candidates on a paper
ballot, which is then fed into the optical scanner.
The problem occurred with voters who
chose more than one candidate in a race, called “overvoting.”
No surprise. Same for laptops,
tablets, smartphones, etc.
"Antivirus firm Sophos acquired
a passel of USB sticks lost by commuters on trains in the Greater
Sydney metro area at an auction organized by the Rail Corporation New
South Wales. The company analyzed 50 USB sticks and found that not
a single one was encrypted and 33
of them were infected with at least one type of malware."
Interesting, if confused. I guess they
see things differently in Texas.
Federal
district court rules student has cause of action for violation of
privacy rights after school officials disclosed sexual orientation to
her mother
December 7, 2011 by Dissent
Here’s a follow-up on a case
previously
mentioned on this blog: Wyatt
v. Kilgore Indep. Sch. Dist., No. 10-674 (E.D. Tex. Nov. 30,
2011)
Abstract: A
federal district court in Texas has ruled that a student has stated a
valid cause of action for violation of her substantive due process
right to privacy based on school officials’ disclosure of her
sexual orientation to her mother. It rejected school officials’
assertion of qualified immunity as a defense to the privacy claim, as
factual disputes remained regarding whether school officials acted in
an objectively reasonably manner and violated the student’s clearly
established right to privacy.
The district court
also upheld the validity of the student’s claim of municipal
liability based on the school district’s failure to properly train
employees and having a policy of disclosing a student’s sexual
orientation. As with the privacy claim, it found that there were
factual disputes regarding whether the school district has a policy
of disclosing students’ sexual orientation and whether the district
was deliberately indifferent to its duty to properly train employees
to keep students’ sexual orientation confidential.
Read more on NSBA
Legal Clips. Note that this has nothing to do with FERPA, which
only protects education records.
They really see things differently. I
look at virtual training as a place for soldiers to make mistakes,
without dying or killing the wrong people. Corrections (true
training) happen outside the virtual world.
Could
Playing Videogames Be a War Crime?
Is your Xbox illegal under the Geneva
Convention? Could you be hauled before the International Criminal
Court for playing shooter games like Battlefield 3 or Call of Duty?
Absolutely not, says a spokesman for
the International Committee of the Red Cross. “War crimes are
serious violations of the laws of war committed in real life
situations, not on virtual battlefields,” the ICRC’s Bijan
Frederic Farnoudi tells Danger Room.
But Farnoudi’s colleagues aren’t
quite so sure. They believe that virtual worlds and real war crimes
could conceivably be linked — especially if an army uses a virtual
world to train its troops.
… Christian Rouffaer, head of the
ICRC’s international humanitarian law and videogames project, says
that “a soldier trained on a computer or by any other means to
shoot wounded enemy combatants would probably not be the only one to
be prosecuted as it is primarily the responsibility of his commander
to train, educate and to give him lawful orders.” In other words
according to Rouffaer, military training that
violates the Geneva Conventions is still a crime — even if that
training is virtual.
(Related) Also, something for my geeky
ex-military students to think about?
"DARPA has a problem on its
hands: Satellites, unmanned drones (UAVs), and myriad other worldwide
sensors are now so ubiquitous and omnipotent that the Department of
Defense (DOD) doesn't actually know how to make the best use of them.
In other words, the hardware is there, but the software isn't. To
tackle this particularly tricky issue, DARPA is looking for
smartphone app developers to help build 'sophisticated,
adaptive applications.' Yes, DARPA wants to give smartphone
developers access to the DOD's fleet of Hellfire missile-equipped
UAVs. Instead of using a single, remote pilot to fly just one UAV,
DARPA imagines 'an app [...] that allows a swarm of small deployed
UAVs to be controlled as a single unit (a hive [mind] so to speak).'
DARPA also wants app developers to help out
with easy-to-use app interfaces, novel uses of
smartphone-like sensors (accelerometers, cameras, gyros) — and
ultimately, it wants to make a War Market where a soldier can simply
log in with his DOD-issued smartphone or tablet and download Angry
UAVs, Nuke Ninja, and other battlefield
apps."
It matters to me!
Oregon
media shield law did not protect blogger from having to reveal her
sources (updated)
December 7, 2011 by Dissent
Evan Brown reports on a case in Oregon
that will be of interest to bloggers: Obsidian Finance Group, LLC
v. Cox, 2011 WL 5999334 (D.Or. November 30, 2011)
Evan writes:
Plaintiff filed a
defamation lawsuit against defendant, who self-identified as an
“investigative blogger” and a member of the “media.”
Defendant asked the court to protect her from having to turn over
the identity of the sources she spoke with in connection with
drafting the allegedly defamatory content. She claimed that she was
covered under Oregon’s media shield law, which provides in relevant
part that:
No person
connected with, employed by or engaged in any medium of communication
to the public shall be required by … a judicial officer … to
disclose, by subpoena or otherwise … [t]he source of any published
or unpublished information obtained by the person in the course of
gathering, receiving or processing information for any medium of
communication to the public[.]
The court gave two
reasons for finding that defendant was not covered by the shield law.
Read what the reasons were on Internet
Cases.
I thought they had all these nifty “get
by the censors” apps they distributed...
"Less than 12 hours after the
U.S. launched a virtual embassy for Iran, the Iranian government
blocked
access to the website, directing visitors to a government page
proclaiming the site illegal. The White House condemned the move,
calling Iran's internet policies 'an electronic curtain of
surveillance and censorship around its people.'"
Do we now generally accept electronic
signatures?
House
Votes to Make Netflix Playlist Sharing Easier
The House of Representatives on Tuesday
easily passed legislation that updates video privacy laws to make it
easier for online rental services such as Netflix to share
information about customers’ viewing habits with user consent.
Current law requires written consent to
share video records, but the new law would allow companies to obtain
consent over the web.
An interesting look at reality.
Perhaps Cloud Computing isn't the “Perfect Solution?”
December 07, 2011
CSC
Cloud Usage Index
"Independent research firm TNS
surveyed
more than 3,500 cloud computing users in eight countries around the
world to find answers to these and other timely questions. The
survey focused on capturing user information about outcomes and
experiences rather than predictions and intentions. While much
remains to be discovered about how cloud can transform enterprises,
the findings of the CSC commissioned Cloud Usage Index are
nonetheless informative — and often surprising."
- News release: "A survey of information technology (IT) decision makers around the globe found that the shift to cloud computing is driven primarily by a desire to connect employees through the multitude of computing devices in use today. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, 33 percent of survey respondents cited accessibility to information through multiple devices as the most important reason for their decision to adopt cloud computing."
- Infographic of the Cloud Usage Index [Worth a look Bob]
(Related) Employees probably have a
cellphone...
December 07, 2011
Americans
and Mobile Computing: Key Trends in Consumer Research
Americans
and Mobile Computing: Key Trends in Consumer Research, by Aaron
Smith. December 7, 2011 at the Government Mobility Forum
- "The Gadget Landscape - The Rise of Ubiquitous Mobile Connectivity
- How Americans Use Their Phones - Engagement With Mobile Activities and Applications
- The Meaning of Mobile - What is the Value Users Place on Their Mobile Devices?"
This gets filed in my “Wow, that's a
lot of data” and “Who cares?” folders. Still, it does have the
potential to keep today's 12-year-old from being elected president in
2042 based on some snarky tweet he or she made.
"The Library of Congress and
Twitter have signed an agreement that will see an
archive of every public Tweet ever sent handed over to the
library's repository of historical documents. 'We have an agreement
with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic
archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be
public,' said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager
at the library's national digital information infrastructure and
preservation program. Researchers will be able to look at the
Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then
data-mine for interesting information."
Tools for teachers?
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-easy-ways-download-convert-online-videos/
5
Easy Ways To Download & Convert Online Videos
But the opposite is also true.
Sometimes sending a link or embedding a video is not enough, and we
need the actual file, or only its soundtrack. And when that happens,
the default FLV file format rarely cuts it. Luckily, there are
several downloaders-converters out there that make it easy as pie to
download videos and convert them into almost every possible format.
All I could think of was a new
definition for “Blue screen of death.” After Fukashima, this is
probably the only market for nuclear power...
"Microsoft Corp. co-founder
Bill Gates says he is in discussions
with China to jointly develop a
new kind of nuclear reactor. During a talk at China's Ministry
of Science & Technology Wednesday, the billionaire said: 'The
idea is to be very low cost, very safe and generate very little
waste.' Gates backs Washington-based TerraPower, which is developing
a
nuclear reactor that can run on depleted uranium."
A reading list...
The
Open Laboratory 2012 – the final entries
… we are ready to announce the 50
essays and 1 poem that will be published in the sixth annual
anthology of the best science writing online.
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