Congress says,“We'll look into it.”
February 28, 2012
FTC
Releases Top Complaint Categories for 2011
News
release: "The Federal Trade Commission today released its
list of top consumer complaints received by the agency in 2011. For
the 12th year in a row, identity theft complaints topped the list.
Of more than 1.8 million complaints filed in 2011, 279,156 or 15
percent, were identity theft complaints. Nearly 25 percent of the
identity theft complaints related to tax- or wage-related fraud. The
report breaks out complaint data on a state-by-state basis and also
contains data about the 50 metropolitan areas reporting the highest
per capita incidence of fraud and other complaints. In addition, the
50 metropolitan areas reporting the highest incidence of identity
theft are noted."
(Related)
Another
week, another round of Congressional questions and posturing?
February 29, 2012 by admin
How many data breach investigations can
one Congress initiate without actually doing anything?
What is the point of asking
Grindr questions about its security? Hasn’t
Congress heard enough by now to know that most companies and apps do
not implement adequate security despite what they say on their sites?
What, if anything, does Congress intend to do to prevent these
breaches?
And surely they should also be asking
questions about all the law enforcement-related sites that get hacked
due to inadequate security, right? Don’t government sites that
retain citizens’ personally identifiable information have an
obligation to adequately secure those data?
If Congress is not going to actually do
anything useful, let’s stop this farce of letters and inquiries
already so that we can just get on with the never-ending rounds of
class action lawsuits over preventable breaches.
Short videos by smart people. You
don't have to agree, but you should listen... A tool for my Intro to
Computer Security class.
TED
2012: New Browser Add-On Visualizes Who Is Tracking You Online
In the hour that Mozilla CEO Gary
Kovacs lets his 9-year-old daughter surf the web every day, her
wanderings have been tracked by dozens of sites.
To some degree, it’s to be expected.
Tracking our online behavior is
big business. The revenues involved in the top online tracking
companies in the space is over $39 billion, Kovacs says. It’s not
something that will be slowing any time soon.
But that isn’t for a lack of trying.
Kovacs unveiled a new Firefox add-on named Collusion on Tuesday at
the Technology Entertainment and Design conference (TED), a
visualization tool that depicts the number and different types of
sites that are tracking your browsing as you surf the web.
… “The memory of the internet is
forever,” Kovacs said. “We are being watched. It’s now time
for us to watch the watchers.”
You can download the browser add-on
today at Mozilla’s
web site.
Tom Cruise answered this in 'Minority
Report' – if “pre-crime” is bad, then “pre-adjudication”
must be too. (Let the argument begin!)
Can
Magistrate Judges Rule on How the Fourth Amendment Applies to the
Execution of a Court Order At the Time of the Application?
February 28, 2012 by Dissent
Orin Kerr writes:
Last week, I filed
an
amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit on a very important question in
high-tech crime investigations. As far as I know, the issue is a
matter of first impression in any court. Here’s the question: When
privacy statutes require the government to obtain a court order
before collecting records or conducting surveillance, is the
constitutionality of the future execution of the order ripe for
adjudication at the time of the application?
That’s a
mouthful, so let me try an example. Imagine you’re a federal
magistrate judge. The government comes to you with an application
for a court order to collect records as required by a federal privacy
statute. The government has satisfied the statutory standard set by
Congress. But you think that the statute is unconstitutional, and
that compliance with the statute therefore will violate the Fourth
Amendment. Here’s the question: Can you deny the order and issue
an opinion explaining your denial based on your conclusion that the
collection of the records would violate the Fourth Amendment? Or do
you have to issue the order, let the government execute it, and then
wait for an ex post challenge to the constitutionality of the
government’s conduct?
Read more on The
Volokh Conspiracy. It’s an interesting question and one that
seems increasingly important in these days of government seeking
Twitter or social media records on users.
Ubiquitous surveillance. It makes
little difference if the camera faces backwards, I can still
determine where you are and how you got there (plus, I can count the
people you ran over to get there)
"Every year around 17,000
people are injured and over 200 die in backover accidents
involving cars, trucks and SUVs. Now the Chicago Tribune reports
that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will send
Congress a proposal mandating
a rearview camera for all passenger vehicles starting in 2014.
'Adoption of this proposal would significantly reduce fatalities and
injuries caused by backover crashes involving children, persons with
disabilities, the elderly and other pedestrians,' says NHTSA in its
proposal. But the technology won't come cheap. In its study, the
NHTSA found that adding a backup camera to a vehicle without an
existing visual display screen will probably cost $159 to $203 per
vehicle, shrinking to between $58 and $88 for vehicles that already
use display screens. Toyota of Albany Sales manager Kelvin Walker
says he believes making backup cameras standard on cars made after
2014 is a good idea. 'If you want to get a backup camera with a
mirror in it now, it
may cost you $700 to $800 as an additional dealer option or you
have to purchase a navigation which is about $1,500 to $1,600. So
$1,600 compared to $200? You do the math.'"
[Perhaps someone should. Since we produce about 4 million cars each
year in the US, this means we will spend about $800,000,000 each year
to try to prevent 200 deaths. That's $4,000,000 per death or roughly
$47,000 per injury, per year! Of course, nothing says any injury or
death will actually be prevented. Would this money be better spent
trying to cure some disease? Bob]
For my geeks...
Where
to get the Windows 8 beta
Microsoft has made this "Consumer
Preview" available for free--just as they did with Windows
7.
You can download it from Microsoft's
own site or CNET's
Download.com, and be sure to check out CNET's
official First Take.
For those rare occasions when I want to
show my students a video...
Recent events have seen well-known
torrent directories like BTJunkie closing their doors or being
threatened with closure, leaving many people wondering about the
legalities of torrents and which directories are still open to find
them in anyway. The good news is that the process of torrenting is
legal – BitTorrent is just a peer-to-peer method for downloading
which happens to have many legal uses.
However, just knowing the process is
legal doesn’t mean that all the torrents out there are. To find
legal torrents, the best thing you can do is look for them in
directories that specialise in legal material of some kind, like
public domain or creative commons works. In order to help you find
the best of these legal torrent directories, here’s a list of some
of the best.
I'm adding this to my RSS feed.
Productive Web Apps is a free to use
website that helps you discover interesting web apps which you will
find useful. When you visit the website, you can start browsing the
apps featured on the homepage, find out which sites are the latest
additions, or browse the apps categorically. You will find apps for
health, entertainment, business, lifestyle, and more.
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