My
tax dollars at work?
"A new audit of the Internal
Revenue Service has found the
agency paid refunds to criminals who filed false tax returns, in
some cases on behalf of people who had died, according to the
Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), which is
part of the U.S. Treasury. The IRS stands to lose as much as $21
billion in revenue over the next five years due to identity theft,
according to TIGTA's
audit (PDF), dated July 19 but publicized on Thursday. 'While
the IRS does not have access to all third-party information documents
at the time tax returns are filed, some third-party information is
available. However, the IRS has not developed
processes to obtain and use this third-party information."
Is
“nothing has changed” the best they can say?
LinkedIn’s
Jeff Weiner On Password Theft: With 174M Members, ‘Health Of Our
Network’ Is Strong As Ever
The theft, as well as the flurry of
negative publicity, may have caused some members to question the
professional social network’s ability to keep their data safe.
However, during today’s conference call on the
company’s second quarter earnings, Weiner said “the
health of our network” remains “as strong as it was prior to the
incident.”
Local
unfortunately.
Memo
to MSM: Please ask these questions about the Holmes case
August 3, 2012 by Dissent
Like many, I’ve been watching and
reading the media for insights as to what happened and whether a
tragedy could have been avoided. And as a privacy advocate, I’ve
spent some time mulling over whether federal privacy laws such as
FERPA and HIPAA may have become obstacles to the shooter’s
psychiatrist preventing this tragedy.
Sadly, the level of interviews I’ve
seen on TV has been pretty abysmal. The worse was a CNN interview
involving Dr. Drew Pinsky who seemed to have no knowledge of relevant
federal and state laws as they might interact in this case.
If you’re going to interview people,
how about finding someone who actually has expertise
on HIPAA, FERPA, Colorado law, and medical ethics? [I know where we
could find someone like that... Bob] Or if you can’t
find one professional with all those qualifications, bring two people
together and let them interact.
In any event, here are the questions I
wish the media would ask of knowledgeable experts:
1. Dr. Fenton
reportedly referred her concerns to the university’s threat
assessment team in June. Might she have been more likely to notify
authorities, his parents, or arrange for an involuntary commitment if
she hadn’t sought the opinions of others? And doesn’t the
treating psychiatrist still have an ethical and legal obligation to
pursue her concerns via notification and/or involuntary commitment
even if the threat assessment team does not agree?
2. If the threat
assessment team did not conclude there was a serious or imminent
threat in June, did the psychiatrist contact them again in July?
3. Do we know if
the psychiatrist attempted to persuade Holmes to admit himself for
psychiatric treatment?
4. Do we know if
the psychiatrist sought Holmes’ permission for her to talk to his
parents?
5. Did the
psychiatrist (incorrectly) believe that her obligations were moot
because the student resigned from the university? Did she ever
discuss termination or transfer of care with Holmes?
6. Many
universities now have threat assessment teams. Is it possible that
their use creates a “diffusion of responsibility” problem whereby
the original referrer feels less pressure to take action to protect
the patient and community?
7. Do we know if
Holmes saw the psychiatrist in the week preceding the murders?
8. Did the
psychiatrist consult with CU’s lawyer or her own attorney as to her
ethical and legal obligations in this case?
Psychiatry is not a hard science, and
practitioners will make mistakes. Was a mistake or mistakes made in
this case? It is easy to conclude that they were, but without more
facts and analysis, we really don’t know whether the relevant laws
hampered the psychiatrist or whether the psychiatrist felt –
correctly or incorrectly – constrained by the law(s) and wanted to
take further steps consistent with her ethical obligations to protect
the safety of the patient and the community.
I doubt we’ll get answers to most of
these questions in the near future, but they are important questions
to ask if we want to learn any lessons from this terrible situation.
How hard is it to locate you out of the
millions surfing the net? This is worth a read.
… How does a search engine track
you? It all starts with your search query. Perhaps you’re feeling
down in the dumps and you want to hit up Google so you can search for
some home flu remedies. As soon as you type that query into the
search box and hit Enter, Google records it. If you’re logged into
a Google account, it’ll be associated with that account. If not,
it’ll be tied to your IP address.
After you’ve entered a search query,
you’re presented with a big list of search results. Whenever you
click on a search result, Google records that, too. But not only
that, Google sends some of your information to that site as well: the
search query that you used, your current browser, and some of your
computer specifications.
That doesn’t seem so bad, right?
After all, you might think that there’s no way that anyone
could identify you as a person simply from the browser you use. But
you’d be wrong to think that. The truth is that your browser
configuration is likely to be unique, and thus trackable. See
for yourself by using Panopticlick’s
browser traceability test.
(Related) Ahhh, crap. Perhaps I could
start an “I'll vote for you if you stop bugging me” site?
Google
Takes Political Online Ads Local, Allows Campaigns To Target
Congressional Districts
… Today, Google launched a new tool
that allows political campaigns to simply select their district and
ensure that their ads are shown only within their district. This
tool, says Google, allows campaigns to “quickly and easily target
their search, display, mobile and video ads solely within
that particular district’s border.”
Reasonable
based on Ethics?
Defining
Reasonable Security
August 3, 2012 by admin
Tracy Kitten writes:
Last month, an
appellate court in Boston reversed a lower court’s ruling that
favored a bank in a legal dispute over a 2009 account takeover
incident (see PATCO
ACH Fraud Ruling Reversed.)
Was that appellate
ruling fair? Based on the security practices that most banking
institutions used in 2009, probably not. The case exemplifies the
challenges courts – and the attorneys arguing both sides – face
in resolving cases involving ACH and wire fraud. The key issue? How
to define “reasonable” security – and how that definition
changes over time.
Read more on BankInfoSecurity.
[From the article:
Regardless, the ruling marks the first
time we've seen a federal court's review of a legal dispute involving
fraud linked to account takeover. And that, on its own,
makes this case special.
What
a coincidence, just in time for the elections.
4
Confirmed (at last) for Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board
August 3, 2012 by Dissent
Peter Swire informs us that on its way
out the door, Congress confirmed 4 of 5 nominees for the Privacy and
Civil Liberties Oversight Board:
Tonight the U.S.
Senate confirmed four of the five nominees for the Privacy and Civil
Liberties Oversight Board: Rachel Brand; Elizabeth Cook; Jim Dempsey
(of the Center for Democracy and Technology); and Pat Wald (long-time
judge on the DC Circuit).
This is good news.
The PCLOB has not been up and running for several years, and now it
will have a quorum. The importance of having the Board in place has
been underscored recently by the Senate’s consideration of the
cybersecurity bill. If there is lots of information sharing, then
there should be effective oversight of that sharing.
The goods news is
incomplete, though.
Read more on Concurring
Opinions.
[From the article:
The lack of a chair matters. As
discussed in my testimony
this week in the Senate Homeland Security Committee, the statute
allows only the Chairman to hire staff
Fodder
for the Software Testing class...
Remember the computer glitch that
caused market turmoil Wednesday morning?
As
we told you, it was caused by a computer glitch that accidentally
forced Knight Capital Group to buy a great number of stocks.
… The
Wall Street Journal reports that price of shares of the
company took a beating yesterday, dropping 33 percent. At one point,
today, they were down 52 percent to "$3.35, its lowest
split-adjusted price since October 1998."
A new look at an old law... Perhaps
Hollywood isn't in charge?
Embedding
copyright-infringing video is not a crime, court rules
Embedding a copyright-infringing video
on another Web site is not illegal, a court ruled yesterday.
Judge Richard Posner ruled at the U.S.
Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals that MyVidster, a social video
bookmarking site, did not infringe the copyright of Flava Works, a
porn production company, when it embedded copyright-infringing
versions of Flava Works content from third-party Web sites.
The decision overturned a preliminary
injunction from 2011, imposed by a lower court after Flava Works
filed suit against MyVidster in 2010.
According to
the Appeals Court ruling, MyVidster "doesn't touch the data
stream" and therefore doesn't host the infringing video, but
links to versions hosted elsewhere on the Web.
MyVidster was "not encouraging
swapping, which in turn encourages infringement," the ruling
said:
It looks like China will colonize the
moon, so India wants Mars. Godspeed to both. If we (the US) no
longer has the will to explore, it's good that someone has.
New submitter susmit writes with news
of India's new
goal for launching a satellite to Mars in 2013. From the article:
"India
plans to launch a mission to Mars next year, putting an orbital probe
around the red planet to study its climate and geology, top space
department officials said on Thursday. ... A 320-tonne Indian Polar
Satellite Launch Vehicle rocket will be used to carry the orbiter
spaceship, blasting off from the ISRO launch site at Sriharikota in
the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Another senior official at
ISRO, requesting anonymity, estimated the cost
of the mission at 4.0-5.0 billion rupees ($70-90 million
dollars)."
Could this become a trend? (With so
many similar experiments, is anyone tracking what works?)
Mexico’s
new President proposes a national online university
Mexico’s President-Elect, Enrique
Peña Nieto, who takes office on December 1, has pledged to create a
National Digital University as one plank in a strategy to increase
university enrollment by 50% by 2018, which would mean creating
another 1.5 million places.
According to Nieto’s plan, ‘students
will be able to access 13 majors through powerful technology
platforms available in 135 access centres across the country.’
No doubt my students will want a wall
sized picture of ME! (Scary, isn't it)
Print
your own giant posters
If you have more time on your hands
than money, there are some easy solutions for printing infinitely
large posters from even the most modest printer.
… Once you have the image as a
digital file on your computer, you're now ready to process it so that
it's ready to print. The processing could be as simple as enlarging
the image and segmenting it into separately printable sections.
Sites such as Block Posters
or Faster Poster specialize in
this kind of basic scaling and chopping, and spit out a downloadable
PDF that can be printed on any computer.
… If you're trying to print out a
banner, or garage sale sign, it's fine. If you're going for
something to hang on the wall that you will see every day, try this
next technique.
Download a free program called
Rasterbator. In spite of the name, there's really nothing salacious
about this software. The official release is available only for
Windows, but a ported
version for Mac and
Linux is also
available, though it involves the additional installation of the
Mono .NET development
framework.
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