This is unlikely to stop another “Arab
Spring,” iPhones are too easy to use.
"Hot on the heels of recently
passed legislation further restricting Freedom of Assembly, the
National Front-led Malaysian Government is now working
to make the registration of all tech workers mandatory, making it
an offence punishable by a stiff fine and jail for anyone to plan,
deploy, service and maintain any computing system without a license.
A leaked draft of the legislation has ignited a backlash among the IT
community, which fear the law, when passed, will be devastating to
the tech industry in Malaysia."
So bring in the headsman and do it all
at once!
"The Transportation Security
Administration is getting a lot of negative attention, much of it
from the U.S. government itself. A recent congressional report
blasted the TSA for being
incompetent and ineffective (PDF). A bill to force the TSA to
reduce its screening of active duty U.S. military members and their
families was
approved unanimously by the House of Representatives. After a
TSA employee was arrested for sexually
assaulting a woman while in uniform, a bill has been introduced
to prevent
TSA agents from wearing police-style uniforms and badges or using
the title 'officer.' The bill's sponsor calls these practices 'an
insult to real cops.' The FBI is getting
involved by changing its definition of rape [Rape
is a federal crime? Bob] in a way that might
expose
the TSA's 'enhanced pat-down' screeners to prosecution. Lastly,
public
support for the TSA's use of X-ray body scanners drops dramatically
when people realize there is a cancer risk."
Simple answer. RIAA runs the
anti-piracy division of the Justice Department and they don't need no
stinking constitution!
Senator
Wants Answers from DHS Over Domain Name Seizures
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) said Friday
he would demand answers from the Department of Homeland Security
about its domain seizure program known as Operation in Our Sites
after it was revealed that the government kept a
hip-hop music review site’s name for a year without affording the
owner a chance to challenge the seizure.
Wyden also wants to know why there
was no court record of the case, other than the initial
seizure filing a year ago.
Cue the theme from Mission
Impossible...
6
Holiday Gifts That Are Perfect For The Amateur Spy
Hey! Look what 'whats-his-name' is
proposing! Project for my Ethical Hackers: De-anonymize his medical
record (if it is on the database)
By Dissent,
December 9, 2011
Earlier this week
the Government announced
proposals (40-page / 2.1MB PDF) to change the NHS Constitution so
that information stored about patients would be automatically shared
with life sciences researchers via a new anonymised database unless
patients elect for their details not to be included.
While welcomed by
the life sciences industry as a boost to research, the proposals
raised concerns about the use of patient data.
[...]
“Let me be
clear, this does not threaten privacy, it doesn’t mean anyone can
look at your health records, but it does mean using anonymous data to
make new medical breakthroughs,” Cameron said in a speech detailing
the Government’s plans, according to a report
by the BBC.
Mr. Cameron may firmly believe that,
but studies on re-identifying supposedly “anonymized” data make
it clear that data are often not as “anonymized” as one might
think or home when the data are combined with other data often
readily available in public databases.
The article also quotes Paul Ohm, who
has been instrumental of increasing awareness about the risks of
relying on “anonymization:”
Academic Paul
Ohm, Associate Professor at University of Colorado Law School,
told Out-Law.com in 2009 that research had shown that it is possible
to use anonymised data to identify individuals. He said at the time
that misplaced trust in anonymisation had been
enshrined in privacy legislation.
“Virtually every
privacy law allows you to escape the strictures and requirements of
the privacy law completely once you’ve anonymised your data,” he
said. “Every policy maker who has ever encountered a privacy law,
and that’s in every country on earth, will need to re-examine the
core assumptions they made when they wrote that law.”
Ohm said at the
time that, in some fields of research such as health, it would be
possible to open up much more data than is currently permitted as
long as access to the information was controlled.
“We can’t
trust technology any more but at the same time we don’t want to
keep this information from researchers. So my solution is that we
shift our trust from the technology to the people,” he said. “We
write down the rules of trust among health researchers … [we say]
you can get my data but only on a need to know basis,” he said.
Read more on Out-Law.com
Part of determining trustworthiness of
a research clearly needs to be assessing their security and privacy
protections, as the researcher may be professionally trustworthy, but
if they outsource their database security to another party, well….
Interesting article...
The
Future of Context: Mobile Reading from Google to Flipboard to FLUD
Reading is changing. And arguably, even
more than e-readers, tablets, or “readers’ tablets,”
smartphones are changing it.
Gee, I got them all right. Perhaps the
school board member was a math-phobic?
New submitter newslash.formatb points
to this Washington Post blog post, which
"discusses
the National Assessment of Educational Progress test (specifically,
the math part). One of the school board members took it and was
unable
to answer any of the 60 math questions, though he guessed
correctly on 10 of them. He then goes on to claim that the math
isn't relevant to many people. P.S. — if you want to feel like
Einstein, check out some
sample questions."
Maybe this is mostly about the kind of
life skills that are sufficient to succeed in management.
Tools & Techniques
Quick Screen Share is a simple yet
effective online web service that helps you instantly share screen
activity with friends without having to download any software or
extra add-ons. To get started, visit the site and check the “Your
Screen” or “Their Screen” option; then enter your
name to start the process. Note that you must have Java to make use
of this service.
Once this is done, you will be given a
URL you can send to the person who’d like to share the screen with
you.
Anyone know where I can get a used
Steinway? Yes, Mr. Bach, there's an app for that.
Etude is a must-have iPad application
for all those users who want to learn piano using different digital
tools.
Once installed, all you have to do is
find the song which you want to learn and it will show you all the
keys which you should press at each moment.
In case of pros, they can carry all
their collections in one device rather than carrying piles of papers
and books.
Gosh, I feel smarter already!
2
Ways To Easily Download TED Videos To Your Desktop
So they're not growling at me?
A curious vocal pattern has crept into
the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low,
creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry. Pop singers, such as
Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low
notes and add style. Now, a new study of young women in New York
state shows that the same guttural vibration—once considered a
speech disorder—has become a language fad.
Vocal fry, or glottalization, is a low,
staccato vibration during speech, produced by a slow fluttering of
the vocal chords (listen
here).
