Don't mess with the Swiss!
They may be neutral in many areas, but they will hunt you down and
use the “this is really going to hurt” blade on their Swiss Army
Knife...
Swiss
Confirm Falciani Arrest in Spain Over HSBC Data Theft
July 24, 2012 by admin
Neil MacLucas of Dow Jones Newswires
reports:
Switzerland has
confirmed the arrest in Spain of Herve Falciani and are now seeking
extradition of the Italian-French citizen being sought by police in
connection with the theft of customer data from the Geneva branch of
HSBC Private Bank.
[...]
Copies of the HSBC
data, which lists the names and account details of thousands of
customers, is now in the hands of French tax authorities, who are
using it to chase alleged tax dodgers with money stashed in
Switzerland.
Mr. Falciani has
denied preliminary allegations by the Swiss authorities of breaching
banking secrecy and stealing banking records. His home in France was
raided at the behest of Swiss authorities, who had launched a probe
into allegations of violations of bank secrecy.
HSBC announced in
2009 that data on customers had been stolen in 2006 and 2007 by Mr.
Falciani, who had worked at the bank as a computer specialist.
Read more on Fox
Business.
Some of the previous coverage on this
case can be found on this blog here.
Interesting. What did their contract
allow? Did the school's auditors check?
OSU
notifying individuals of data security breach
July 25, 2012 by admin
Joce DeWitt reports:
Oregon State
Police currently are investigating a security breach by a vendor who,
while under contract to Oregon State University, copied information
from a check register data base without permission. The action could
have compromised the private information of 21,000 students and
employees who were associated with OSU between 1996
and 2009.
[...]
The 30,000 to
40,000 checks contained information such as names, OSU ID, date,
check number and the amount of the check. Records
after 2004 did not include Social Security numbers. [What percentage
is that? Bob]
Read more on Corvallis
Gazette-Times.
Interesting and somewhat unexpected.
"Washington D.C. Metropolitan
Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier says, 'A bystander has the
same right to take photographs or make recordings as a member of the
media,' and backs it up with a General
Order to her Department. Quoting: The Metropolitan Police
Department (MPD) recognizes that members of the general public have a
First Amendment right to video record, photograph, and/or audio
record MPD members while MPD members are conducting official business
or while acting in an official capacity in any public space, unless
such recordings interfere with police activity.'"
We knew this was
happening. This is just one measure...
Russia
Is Stockpiling Drones to Spy on Street Protests
Small surveillance drones are starting
to be part of police departments across America, and the
FAA will soon open up the airspace for more to come. This drone
invasion has already raised
all kinds of privacy concerns. And if you think that’s bad,
across the ocean, Russia seems hell-bent on outdoing its former Cold
War enemy.
Russia’s leading manufacturer of
unmanned aerial vehicles, Zala Aero,
has provided the Russian government with more than 70 unmanned
systems, each containing several aircraft. According to an
article published yesterday on Open Democracy Russia,
the Kremlin’s romance with drones started in 2006, when the
Interior Ministry deployed a Zala
421-04M to monitor street protests at a G8 summit in St.
Petersburg. The Russian government has
also bought drones from Israel.
Oh, look at the evil Oxford Council –
and not us.
UK:
Council ordered to stop unlawful recording of taxi passengers’
conversations
July 25, 2012 by Dissent
I had covered a controversial plan in
Oxford to record taxi passengers (audio and video). While media
attention was focused on Oxford City Council, apparently another
council had gone ahead with the plan. Until now. From the
Information Commissioner’s Office:
Southampton City
Council has been ordered to stop the mandatory recording of
passengers’ and drivers’ conversations in the city’s taxis, the
Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced today.
Since
August 2009, the council has required all taxis and private hire
vehicles to install CCTV equipment to constantly record images and
the conversations of both drivers and passengers.
The ICO has ruled
the council’s policy breaches the Data Protection Act, concluding
that the recording of all conversations is disproportionate given the
very low number of incidents occurring compared to the number of
trouble free taxi journeys. An
enforcement notice has been issued to the council who now have
until 1 November to comply.
[...]
A copy of today’s
enforcement notice served to the council can be found on the
ICO’s Taking action page.
Attention Ethical Hackers!
Grabbing control of this tool is only worth 1% of your final project
grade. Please do not send me the entire Tweet history of any
Political Twits.
Twitter
to release tool that exports users' tweet history
Following the path of Facebook,
Twitter's CEO says the company is developing a new feature that will
let users download all tweets they ever posted to the social network.
Behavioral Advertising:
“We have determined that you are an idiot and therefore are likely
to vote for our candidate.”
85%
of Americans hate targeted political ads on Facebook
The majority of Americans are very much
against the practice of tailored political ads, a specific market
that is seeing tremendous growth as we get closer and closer to the
2012 election. In fact, most Americans dislike tailored political
advertising so much they claim it decreases their chance of voting
for a candidate they already support.
The new results come from a 20-minute
questionnaire conducted by a team of researchers at the University
of Pennsylvania's Annenberg
School for Communication. The full findings based on the 1,503
respondents surveyed are in the 28-page document titled "Americans
Roundly Reject Tailored Political Advertising" (PDF).
A working model? At least
a start on that “Best Practices” checklist... (None of these
steps are easy)
July 24, 2012
Using
Electronic Health Records to Improve Quality and Efficiency: The
Experiences of Leading Hospitals
S. Silow-Carroll, J. N. Edwards, and D.
Rodin, Using
Electronic Health Records to Improve Quality and Efficiency: The
Experiences of Leading Hospitals, The Commonwealth Fund, July
2012
- "An examination of nine hospitals that recently implemented a comprehensive electronic health record (EHR) system finds that clinical and administrative leaders built EHR adoption into their strategic plans to integrate inpatient and outpatient care and provide a continuum of coordinated services.
- Successful implementation depended on:
- strong leadership,
- full involvement of clinical staff in design and implementation,
- mandatory staff training, and
- strict adherence to timeline and budget.
- The EHR systems facilitate patient safety and quality improvement through: use of checklists, alerts, and predictive tools; embedded clinical guidelines that promote standardized, evidence-based practices; electronic prescribing and test-ordering that reduces errors and redundancy; and discrete data fields that foster use of performance dashboards and compliance reports. Faster, more accurate communication and streamlined processes have led to improved patient flow, fewer duplicative tests, faster responses to patient inquiries, redeployment of transcription and claims staff, more complete capture of charges, and federal incentive payments."
Ye Olde Law Library?
Okay, not that old, but interesting.
July 24, 2012
Australasian
Colonial Legal History Library is Launched
Via Graham Greenleaf: "AustLII
will today launch the
Australasian Colonial Legal History Library. This is the first
version of the Library, containing over 220,000 searchable documents
from before 1900, from the seven Australasian colonies (including New
Zealand). It is being developed in conjunction with NZLII.
Development of further databases is underway and will expand the
Library's contents considerably over the next year. A paper that
AustLII presented at the Australian Historical Association Conference
to explain the Library, 'Digitising and Searching Australasian
Colonial Legal History', is now available for download at SSRN."
Global Warming! Global
Warming! It's good to know that Al Gore made Global Warming illegal!
Or did he make mocking Global Warming illegal?
July 24, 2012
Climate
Change and Existing Law: A Survey of Legal Issues Past, Present, and
Future
CRS - Climate
Change and Existing Law: A Survey of Legal Issues Past, Present, and
Future, Robert Meltz, Legislative Attorney, July 2, 2012
- "Efforts to mitigate climate change — that is, reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—have spawned a host of legal issues. The Supreme Court resolved a big one in 2007 — the Clean Air Act (CAA), it said, does authorize EPA to regulate GHG emissions. Quite recently, a host of issues raised by EPA’s efforts to carry out that authority were resolved in the agency’s favor by the D.C. Circuit. Another issue is whether EPA’s “endangerment finding” for GHG emissions from new motor vehicles will compel EPA to move against GHG emissions under other CAA authorities. Still other mitigation issues are (1) the role of the Endangered Species Act in addressing climate change; (2) how climate change must be considered under the National Environmental Policy Act; (3) liability and other questions raised by carbon capture and sequestration; (4) constitutional constraints on land use regulation and state actions against climate change; and (5) whether the public trust doctrine applies to the atmosphere."
“Any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” A. C. Clarke
Yet, it is only a tool... Question: Can you do better?
"With his Khan
Academy: The Hype and the Reality screed in the Washington Post,
Mathalicious founder Karim
Kai Ani — a former middle school teacher and math coach — throws
some cold water on the Summer
of Khan Love hippies, starting with U.S. Secretary of Education
Arne
Duncan. From the article: 'When asked why so many teachers have
such adverse
reactions to Khan Academy, Khan suggests it's because they're
jealous. "It'd piss me off, too, if I had been teaching for 30
years and suddenly this ex-hedge-fund guy is hailed
as the world's teacher." Of course, teachers aren't "pissed
off" because Sal Khan is the world's teacher. They're concerned
that he's a bad teacher who people think is great; that the guy who's
delivered over 170 million lessons to students around the world
openly brags about being unprepared and considers the precise
explanation of mathematical concepts to be mere "nitpicking."
Experienced educators are concerned that when bad teaching happens
in the classroom, it's a crisis; but that when it happens on YouTube,
it's a "revolution."'"
I've been using LightShot
in Firefox for some time and really like it. I can capture just the
part of the screen I want to emphasize and paste it into my document
(or save or edit online)
Lightshot
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