Perhaps DoJ should hire some lawyers?
"A judge in New Zealand has
ordered
the U.S. government to hand over evidence seized in the
Megaupload raid so Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants can use it to
prepare a defense for an extradition hearing. The judge wrote,
'Actions by and on behalf of the requesting State have deprived Mr.
Dotcom and his associates of access to records and information. ...
United States is attempting to utilize
concepts from the civil copyright context as a basis for the
application of criminal copyright liability [which]
necessitates a consideration of principles such as the dual use of
technology and what they be described as significant non-infringing
uses.' Once the defense attorneys have gathered and presented their
evidence, the judge must decide whether the U.S. can make a
reasonable case against Dotcom."
Cloud computing: Something we clearly
need to address.
Is
the Cloud Too Risky for Some Purposes?
“Forrester says that sometime this
year we will have reached the point where 50 percent of companies are
using some form of SaaS. The Yankee Group says that 41 percent of
large companies already have or will deploy Platform as a Service
technology in the next 12 months. VMWare and the Cloud Industry
Forum (CIF) estimates cloud adoption to be at 48 percent of
businesses in the UK.”
But Weisinger notes
in his post for the enterprise content management (ECM) firm Formtek
too a Wisegate report that found “50 percent of organizations
think that the cloud is still too risky for handling most data and
are only comfortable with using it for ‘commodity’ applications
like CRM and email.”
(Related)
PCI
DSS Compliance in the Cloud: Challenges and Tactics
Perhaps the largest point of confusion
with regards to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI
DSS) and cloud computing is the question of upon whose shoulders does
compliance fall? In 2011, several cloud providers began asserting
that their clouds were validated as PCI DSS compliant. That’s all
well and good, but unfortunately this validation does
not trickle down to the providers’ customers who deploy
servers within the provider’s infrastructure. If your organization
wants to migrate PCI DSS in-scope systems to public cloud, there are
several things to consider.
First and foremost, a cloud provider’s
platform is just that – a platform. Physical servers are not
certified PCI compliant by the hardware manufactures; just as
operating system vendors are not. The platform and software employed
serves as a medium upon which businesses can operate. It should be
noted, however, that PCI certification for a provider does not just
cover material, but process as well.
Apparently, “Ignorance of the
Constitution” is a defense.
No
Constitutional Issue in Shared Autopsy Photos
May 29, 2012 by Dissent
Tim Hull reports:
Despite a clear
constitutional right to control death images of relatives, a district
attorney is not liable for sending an autopsy photograph to the
press, the 9th Circuit ruled Tuesday.
In the first
decision of its kind, the federal appeals court in San Francisco
found that “the common law right to non-interference with a
family’s remembrance of a decedent is so ingrained in our
traditions that it is constitutionally protected.”
Read more on Courthouse
News.
Related: Opinion in Marsh
v. County of San Diego (via Venkat Balasubramani).
[From the Courthouse
News article:
The panel found that Brenda Marsh had a
clear right to control her son's death images, but
since that right was not clearly established when Coulter released
the photographs, he has qualified immunity.
… This intrusion into the grief of
a mother over her dead son-without any legitimate governmental
purpose-'shocks the conscience' and therefore violates Marsh's
substantive due process right."
A bit of a follow up... “Papers,
student!” I assume the students will be required to have their IDs
on them at all times. What happens if the ID is in school but the
student isn't?
Arphid
Watch: schoolkids in Houston and San Antonio TX
A school district in San Antonio,
Texas, plans to put RFID chips in student ID cards. A spokesperson
for the Northside Independent School District said, “We want to
harness the power of technology to make schools safer, know where our
students are all the time in a school, and increase revenues.”
… The RFID chips
will reportedly work only while the students are on school property.
[Want to bet? Bob]
(Related)
Texas
school district to track kids through RFID tags
It does seem a shame that money is
mentioned in all of this. One might have been able to understand it
if this was purely a safety issue, but clearly it isn't. Indeed, in
Houston, two school districts already enjoy this technology and it
has reportedly brought them hundreds of thousands of extra dollars.
The Northside district, Kens 5 News
says, loses
$175,000 a day because of late or absent kids.
… However, after cases such as the
one in Philadelphia were a school was sued for allegedly
spying on a student off-campus (the school settled for around
$600,000), some parents will surely be concerned that the kids will
be snooped upon.
It's not as if this sort of tagging
offers absolute security. What if an ID is stolen? What if the
system is hacked and someone with evil purpose can quite literally
track the movements of all the kids?
(Related)
Students
will be tracked via chips in IDs
… Chip readers on campuses and
on school buses [Which do leave school property Bob] can
detect a student's location but can't track them once they leave
school property. Only authorized administrative officials will have
access to the information, Gonzalez said.
… He said officials understand that
students could leave the card somewhere, throwing off the system.
They cost $15 each, and if lost, a student will have
to pay for a new one.
… The district plans to spend
$525,065 to implement the pilot program and $136,005 per year to run
it, but it will more than pay for itself, predicted Steve
Bassett, Northside's assistant superintendent for budget and
finance. If successful, Northside would get $1.7 million next year
from both higher attendance and Medicaid reimbursements for busing
special education students, he said.
Incontrovertible proof that Economists
live in a world of fiction?
Economist
Paul Krugman Is a Hard-Core Science Fiction Fan
If you follow the news at all, you’ve
probably seen Paul Krugman — Princeton professor, New York
Times columnist, and Nobel Prize-winning economist —
championing the idea that government spending can lift us out of the
economic crisis. What you may not know is that Krugman is also a
huge science fiction fan.
“I read [Isaac Asimov’s] Foundation
back when I was in high school, when I was a teenager,” says
Krugman in this week’s episode of the Geek’s
Guide to the Galaxy podcast, “and thought about the
psychohistorians, who save galactic civilization through their
understanding of the laws of society, and I said ‘I want to be one
of those guys.’ And economics was as close as I could get.”
… “If you read Ender’s
Game, his brother and sister actually end up shaping
planetary debate through their online aliases, and the debates they
have with each other under assumed names,” Krugman says. “So all
of this was prefigured, which is why science fiction
is good for your ability to think about possibilities.”
For my Statistics students Still a
long way from a true “Reality Test.”
"The Global Economic
Intersection reports on a project to statistically
measure political bias on Wikipedia. The team first identified
1,000 political phrases
based on the number of times these phrases appeared in the text of
the 2005 Congressional Record and applied statistical methods to
identify the phrases that separated Democratic representatives from
Republican representatives, under the model
that each group speaks to its respective constituents with a distinct
set of coded language. Then the team identified
111,000 Wikipedia articles that include 'republican' or 'democrat' as
keywords, and analyzed them to determine whether a given Wikipedia
article used phrases favored more by Republican members or by
Democratic members of Congress. The results may surprise you. 'The
average old political article in Wikipedia leans Democratic' but
gradually, Wikipedia's articles have lost the disproportionate use of
Democratic phrases and moved
to nearly equivalent use of words from both parties (PDF), akin
to an NPOV [neutral point of view] on average. Interestingly, some
articles have the expected political slant (civil rights tends
Democrat; trade tends Republican), but at the same time many
seemingly controversial topics, such as foreign policy, war and
peace, and abortion have no net slant. 'Most
articles arrive with a slant, and most articles change only mildly
from their initial slant. The overall
slant changes due to the entry of articles with opposite slants,
leading toward neutrality for many topics, not necessarily within
specific articles.'"
(Related) Think of it as “Behavioral
Advertising” The candidates are “products”
"The Romney and Obama campaigns
are spending heavily on television ads and other traditional tools to
convey their messages. But strategists say the
most important breakthrough this year is the
campaigns' use of online data to raise money, share information and
persuade supporters to vote. The practice,
known as 'microtargeting,' has been a staple
of product marketing. Now it's facing the greatest
test of its political impact in the race for the White House. ...
The Romney team spent nearly $1 million on digital consulting in
April and Obama at least $300,000. ... Campaigns use microtargeting
to identify potential supporters or donors using data gleaned from a
range of sources, especially their Internet
browsing history. A digital profile of each person
is then created, allowing the campaigns to find them online and
solicit them for money and support."
(Related) Toward an “automated
congress?” True democracy? Politics by and for the Internet
connected?
"Having
read pretty heavily on the topic, weighed the pros and cons, and seen
a few
relevant
slashdot
articles,
I wondered why an elected representative
couldn't use online and in-person polling of constituents to decide
the way he or she votes. Though we are living in
the 'information age' and have rich communications media and
opportunities for deep and accessible deliberation, we are getting by
(poorly) with horse-and-buggy-era representation. In the spirit of
science and because I think it's legitimately a better way of doing
things, I recently
announced my candidacy for Vermont's State Senate in Washington
County."
How do you think such polling could be
best accomplished? Do you think it's worth trying? Whether or not
you buy into it, it's something that's only been made feasible in
recent times with modern technology.
Perspective
Rise
Of The Machines: IP Traffic Is Poised To Quadruple By 2016, Driven By
An Influx Of New Devices
The latest VNI forecast shows a massive
uptick in data usage, from the 369 Exabytes of IP traffic used
worldwide in 2011 to approximately 1.3 zettabytes in 2016. According
to Cisco, that rapid growth in data traffic will be driven by a
proliferation of connected devices, ever-increasing broadband
connectivity, and greater adoption of IP video worldwide.
Perspective
‘Walking
Around Naked On The Internet’: McAfee Says 17% Of PCs Globally Lack
Malware Protection
Some eye-opening stats out today from
McAfee, the Intel-owned IT
security company: a study of 28 million computers in 24 countries has
found that 17 percent of all PCs do not have any form of security at
all on them against viruses, worms, spyware and other Internet
malware – a transgression that McAfee compares to “walking around
naked on the Internet.”
But McAfee notes that while the average
worldwide figure for unsecured PCs works out to one
out of every six users, some countries are taking their
security more seriously than others…
For my Infograph loving friends...
Infogram is an amazing new web tool
platform for creating infographics quickly and easily. The tool is
very simple to use and offers a whole host of unique WYSIWYG editing
options from dragging content around to in-tool data table
formatting.
… The site is free, robust, and
going to be getting some more customized features and more templates
soon. Looks like a great place for teachers and students to play
with the art of visual explanation.
e-Textbooks are coming – deal with
it.
iPad
Only No More: Inkling Debuts HTML5-Powered E-Book App For The Web
Inkling,
the San Francisco-based startup that’s known for making super slick
interactive digital versions of college textbooks and other
educational titles for the iPad, has debuted its first ever platform
for the web browser.
‘Inkling for Web’ requires no Flash
or other plug-ins, and is powered entirely by technologies such as
HTML5, CSS and Javascript,
Something for my website students
Learn
to Code With Mozilla’s ‘Thimble’ Editor
Mozilla Thimble is a new web-based code
editor, part of the company’s recently
unveiled “Webmakers” project. Thimble is designed to give
novice webmakers an easy-to-use online tool to quickly build and
share webpages.
You can check out Thimble over at the
new Mozilla Thimble website.
Keep in mind that Mozilla hasn’t formally launched Thimble; the
company is still testing, fixing bugs and iterating the app.
Thimble is slightly different than
other online code editors you may have tried, putting the emphasis on
teaching HTML to newcomers rather than catering to advanced users.
Thimble offers side-by-side code editor and code output panels which
help new users see immediate results.
… Thimble can also load pre-made
project templates to help users get started with some content that’s
ready to build on. Currently the featured projects section of the
Thimble homepage is still awaiting content, but among the coming
projects is a tutorial on editing and creating your own Tumblr theme,
as well as others from Mozilla’s various Webmaker partners.
To help new users get their
Thimble-created projects on the web Mozilla has also bundled a
publishing function directly into the editor. Once you’ve got your
Thimble page looking the way you’d like it, just hit the “Publish”
button and Thimble will output and host your page, offering up a URL
to share with friends and another to edit your page if there’s
something you need to change.
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