Saturday, March 31, 2012


If this is correct, we just went from possibly huge to probably trivial.
Sources: Global Payments breached – Wall Street Journal
March 30, 2012 by admin
Robin Sidel and Andrew R. Johnson report:
Global Payments Inc., which processes credit cards and debit cards for banks and merchants, has been hit by a security breach that has put some 50,000 cardholders at risk, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
Read more on the Wall Street Journal. Global Payments has not confirmed as of the time of this posting.
But 50,000? That’s a far cry from possibly 10 million. Is this the same breach that was reported earlier today by Brian Krebs or another breach?
Both Heartland Payment Systems and First Data Corp. have denied being involved in any of the breach reports from today.

(Related)
Global Payments confirms data breach
March 30, 2012 by admin
After being named by the Wall Street Journal earlier today, Global Payments Inc. has issued a press release about their breach:
Global Payments Inc, a leader in payment processing services, announced it identified and self-reported unauthorized access into a portion of its processing system. In early March 2012, the company determined card data may have been accessed. It immediately engaged external experts in information technology forensics and contacted federal law enforcement. The company promptly notified appropriate industry parties to allow them to minimize potential cardholder impact. The company is continuing its investigation into this matter.
“It is reassuring that our security processes detected an intrusion. It is crucial to understand that this incident does not involve our merchants or their relationships with their customers,” said Chairman and CEO Paul R. Garcia.
Global Payments will hold a conference call Monday, April 2, 2012 at 8:00 AM EDT.
[...]
And that’s all they wrote in the way of details. For now, anyway.


It's not fair! (But it is amusing.) Bruce is using real facts!
"A nice summary at TechDirt brings word that Bruce Schneier has been debating Kip Hawley, former boss of the TSA, over at the Economist. Bruce has been providing facts, analysis and some amazing statistics throughout the debate, and it makes for very educational reading. Because of the format, the former TSA administrator is compelled to respond. Quoting: 'He wants us to trust that a 400-ml bottle of liquid is dangerous, but transferring it to four 100-ml bottles magically makes it safe. He wants us to trust that the butter knives given to first-class passengers are nevertheless too dangerous to be taken through a security checkpoint. He wants us to trust that there's a reason to confiscate a cupcake (Las Vegas), a 3-inch plastic toy gun (London Gatwick), a purse with an embroidered gun on it (Norfolk, VA), a T-shirt with a picture of a gun on it (London Heathrow) and a plastic lightsaber that's really a flashlight with a long cone on top (Dallas/Fort Worth).""


Maybe you can gather information, but you can't make it public?
Judge Allows Actress Suing IMDb Over Age Revelation to Go Forward on Lawsuit
March 30, 2012 by Dissent
Eriq Gardner reports:
Huang Hoang, the actress who sued IMDb for revealing her real age, got a small boost Friday in Washington federal court. The judge overseeing the case has decided that Hoang’s allegations that IMDb breached contract and violated laws on consumer protection are plausible enough to continue. But the judge also offered some relief to the Amazon.com subsidiary by dismissing two of Hoang’s core claims and striking her wish to collect $1 million in punitive damages.
Read more on Hollywood Reporter. The claim about what the privacy policy meant in terms of use of her data is an issue privacy advocates will want to watch – if the case doesn’t settle before trial.


If you are an honest user caught up in this RIAA mandated lawsuit(?) do you have any rights? Or is this one of those extreme cases of “caveat emptor” that chills commerce – “Don't do anything that the RIAA or MPAA finds objectionable...”
Megaupload User Demands Return of Seized Content
An Ohio man is asking a federal judge to preserve data of the 66.6 million users of Megaupload, the file-sharing service that was shuttered in January following federal criminal copyright-infringement indictments that targeted its operators.
Represented by civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, Kyle Goodwin wants U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady, the judge overseeing the Megaupload prosecution, to order the preservation of the 25 petabytes of data the authorities seized in January. Goodwin, the operator of OhioSportsNet, which films and streams high school sports, wants to access his copyrighted footage that he stored on the file-sharing network. His hard drive crashed days before the government shuttered the site Jan. 19.
“What is clear is that Mr. Goodwin, the rightful owner of the data he stored on Megaupload, has been denied access to his property. It is also clear that this court has equitable power to fashion a remedy to make Mr. Goodwin — an innocent third party — whole again,” the group wrote the judge in a Friday legal filing.

(Related) The Big Chill goes on... Apparently what the did to MegaUpload wasn't sufficient? Or the MPAA wasn't able to use nukes?
White House calls for new law targeting 'offshore' Web sites
Only weeks after protests over two digital copyright bills demonstrated the political muscle of Internet users, the White House is publicly endorsing new copyright legislation that also would target suspected pirate Web sites.
After the unprecedented outcry against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act -- designed to target offshore copyright-infringing Web sites -- supporters of the bills on Capitol Hill backed down and moved on to other topics.
But the White House today reignited the congressional debate by throwing its weight behind legislation targeting offshore Web sites. "We believe that new legislative and non-legislative tools are needed to address offshore infringement," today's report (PDF) says.


“Gee, someone doesn't like our stalking app?”
Report: Foursquare shuts off API for Girls Around Me app
An app that employed Foursquare and Facebook data to show the real-time location of women has raised an uproar and is making people think about how social media exposes them.
The tagline is "In the mood for love, or just after a one-night stand? Girls Around Me puts you in control! Reveal the hottest nightspots, who's in them, and how to reach them..."


I'm afraid this is accurate and everyone is looking for ways to summarize all your activity online and that means accessing everything! Why would this be considered good?
The Search for the Google of the Social Graph
Search is the great triumph of computer science and mathematics. A multi-billion dollar industry was built from a highly technical paper about random walks on the web, which was becoming more obtuse as it grew exponentially.
Google’s search breakthrough ensured that the web would not be a victim of its own success.
Now, the social web faces a similar problem. It is enormous, and growing, and central to our lives. There are many successful companies in the social space, just as there were search leaders before Google emerged. Yet so far there is no Google for the social graph.
… It won’t be easy. I’d like to offer up four challenges that I find important, though undoubtedly there are more:
2. A person is the sum of all of their profiles: Identity across social networks must be solved. Linking Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, LinkedIn, etc. would be invaluable to researchers. Actions across social networks are similar (liking, following/friending, sharing, etc.), so to have a complete list of actions from a single individual across networks would vastly increase the amount of data available from looking at a single social network.
4. Let data be free: Many types of social data are not public or are difficult to get. All Twitter data is only accessible to the select few members of the firehose club. Facebook data is available for only a select few users. Search was made possible by web crawlers and a similar accessibility of data must be in place for the social graph. Of course, accessibility of data brings up lots of privacy concerns.


Perspective. This is good, because we wouldn't want just anyone to know about [Deleted by the Copyright/Trademark Nazis] or the cure for [Deleted by the Copyright/Trademark Nazis] or how to make [Deleted by the Copyright/Trademark Nazis]
The Missing 20th Century: How Copyright Protection Makes Books Vanish
The above chart shows a distribution of 2500 newly printed fiction books selected at random from Amazon's warehouses. What's so crazy is that there are just as many from the last decade as from the decade between 1910 and 1920. Why? Because beginning in 1923, most titles are copyrighted. Books from before 1923 tend to be in the public domain, and the result is that Amazon carries them -- lots of them. The chart comes from University of Illinois law professor Paul Heald. In a talk at the University of Canterbury in March 16, he explained how he made it and what it shows.
… Heald says that the numbers would be even more dramatic if you controlled for the number of books published in those years, because there are likely far more books published in 1950 than in 1850.
You can watch Heald's whole talk, "Do Bad Things Happen When Works Fall Into the Public Domain?" below.


Thank god I teach Math...
"American high school students are terrible writers, and one education reform group thinks it has an answer: robots. Or, more accurately, robo-readers — computers programmed to scan student essays and spit out a grade. The theory is that teachers would assign more writing if they didn't have to read it. [Amen! Bob] And the more writing students do, the better at it they'll become — even if the primary audience for their prose is a string of algorithms. ... Take, for instance, the Intelligent Essay Assessor, a web-based tool marketed by Pearson Education, Inc. Within seconds, it can analyze an essay for spelling, grammar, organization and other traits and prompt students to make revisions. The program scans for key words and analyzes semantic patterns, and Pearson boasts it 'can "understand" the meaning of text much the same as a human reader.' Jehn, the Harvard writing instructor, isn't so sure. He argues that the best way to teach good writing is to help students wrestle with ideas; misspellings and syntax errors in early drafts should be ignored in favor of talking through the thesis."


Just a reminder...
Have you backed up your data today?
It's World Backup Day.

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