Government probably never promised to
keep everything confidential. It gets back to the “public
information” vs. “analyzed, categorized and published
information” debate.
Office
of the New York City Public Advocate Hacked
December 24, 2011 by admin
Okay, this is bad. So bad that if it
had been published before I wrote my “worst
breaches of 2011” post, it would have probably made the list.
The Office of the New York City Public
advocate was
hacked and the entire database appears
to have been dumped, including thousands of pages of highly personal
details of those who sought the public advocate’s assistance via a
form on their web site: names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail
addresses, medical conditions, financial woes, and reports of abuse
and domestic violence as well as the expected complaints about
landlords, construction, noise, and rats and mice — lots and lots
of rats and mice. The requests for assistance appear
to go back to April 2010, raising the question as to why
such old material was still on the server instead of being archived
or moved offline.
Politically, exposure of reports of
alleged police misconduct and city government incompetence should be
embarrassing to the agency. That is, if the mainstream media ever
find out about the breach and journalists decide to work their way
through the entries.
IT has faced this problem AT LEAST
since the early days of Apple computers (with VisiCalc) IT tried to
ban or at least avoid responsibility for PC's (Little machines for
little problems), local area networks, even phone systems (the early
link to the Internet)
"The BYOD (bring your own
device) phenomenon hasn't been easy on IT, which has seen its control
slip. But for these five technologies — mobile
devices, cloud computing services, social technology, exploratory
analytics, and specialty apps — it has already
slipped, and Forrester
and others argue IT needs to let go of them. That also means not
investing time and money in all the management apps that vendors are
happy to sell to IT shops afraid of BYOD — as this post shows, many
just won't deliver what IT hopes."
If your insurance company required you
to follow “Best Practices” to collect on your policy, would you
comply? (I've got five years of examples saying “No!”)
"The high profile hacks to
Sony's systems this year were quite costly — Sony estimated losses
at around $200 million. Their insurance company was quick to point
out that they don't own a cyber insurance policy, so the losses won't
be mitigated at all. Because of that and all the other notable
hacking incidents recently, analysts expect
the cyber insurance industry to take off in the coming year.
'Last October, the S.E.C. issued a new guidance requiring that
companies disclose "material" cyber attacks and their costs
to shareholders. The guidance specifically requires companies to
disclose a "description of relevant insurance coverage."
That one S.E.C. bullet point could be a boon to the cyber insurance
industry. Cyber insurance has been around since the Clinton
administration, but most companies tended to "self insure"
against cyber attacks.'"
A project for Computer Law students?
"I am a developer and released
some code at one point under GPLv2. It's nothing huge — a
small Drupal module that integrates a Drupal e-commerce system (i.e.
Ubercart) with
multiple Authorize.net accounts — but very useful for non-profits.
Earlier today I discovered that a
Drupal user was selling the module from their website
for $49 and claiming it was their custom-made module. I'm no lawyer,
but my perspective is this violates both the spirit and law of GPLv2,
most specifically clause 2-b: 'You must cause any work that you
distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is
derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a
whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this
License.' Am I correct in my understanding of GPLv2? Do I have any
recourse, and should I do anything about this? I
don't care about money, [Consider
everything an attorney fee? Bob] I just don't
want someone selling stuff that I released for free. How do most
developers/organizations deal with licensing infringements of this
type?"
Is this a real concern, or does Putin
have adequate control? If “Arab Spring” was hot, imagine a
“Russian Winter”
Protesters
target Putin for their 'Russian Winter'
TENS of thousands
of people fed up with Vladimir Putin's domination of Russian politics
and his perceived arrogance towards them jammed one of Moscow's
broadest avenues to protest, vowing to keep building the pressure
until the long-time leader is driven from power.
''Russia without
Putin!'' the crowd chanted as it protested against alleged fraud
during recent parliamentary elections in which Prime Minister Putin's
United Russia Party garnered nearly 50 per cent of the vote.
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