Friday, October 26, 2012

Oh sure. Now that the Privacy Foundation has broken the ice, all kinds of “Privacy Advocate wanna-bes” are following in our footsteps. I can't wait to examine the video my drone took to see how many of our panalists ideas they ripped off!
Lawmakers mull restrictions on domestic drones
October 25, 2012 by Dissent
Brendan Sasso reports:
House Judiciary Committee lawmakers discussed legislation to restrict the use of drones in domestic airspace during a field forum at Rice University in Texas on Thursday.
Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), who chaired the forum of the Subcommittee on Crime, urged Congress to take up his Preserving American Privacy Act, which would only allow police to use drones with a warrant and to investigate a felony.
Read more on The Hill.

(Related) Escalation! Arms Race! (Drones with ping pong paddles?) What's next? Paint balls to mark evil doers? (Bank robbers, illegal boarder crossers, j-walkers) We are slipping down that slope.
Drop Ping-Pong Balls on People With This iPhone-Controlled Copter
Here at Wired we’re big fans of office weaponry. And drones. So when we learned of the Kickstarter for the iStrike Shuttle, for the iStrike Shuttle, an iOS-controlled flying machine that can drop ping-pong balls onto your target of choice, we got pretty excited.

(Related) This is just a walking drone...
Watch this DARPA robot climb, leap, and walk past obstacles


Of course they do! Part of the “Ubiquitous Surveillance” paln. Let's hope it's not the same engineers NASA used on the Mars lander that confused Meters and Feet...
U.S. looks to replace human surveillance with computers
… The U.S. government has funded the development of so-called automatic video surveillance technology by a pair of Carnegie Mellon University researchers who disclosed details about their work this week -- including that it has an ultimate goal of predicting what people will do in the future.
… Their Army-funded research, Oltramari and Lebiere claim, can go further than merely recognizing whether any illicit activities are currently taking place. It will, they say, be capable of "eventually predicting" what's going to happen next. [Very like “Minority Report” but without the psychics Bob]


Not a lot of coast in Colorado, but we do have Coast Guard. (Including the crypto weenies at Buckley)
Coast Guard Boardings and Your Fourth Amendment Rights, Part 1
October 26, 2012 by Dissent
FourthAmendment.com points us to an article by Clark Beek that begins:
Sorry, but when it comes to Coast Guard boardings, you don’t have any rights.
I’m surprised how many boaters don’t know this. The US Coast Guard can board your boat any time they want, and look anywhere they want, without probable cause or a warrant. They can do this on the open sea, or while you’re asleep aboard in your marina at midnight. They can look through your bedsheets, in your lockers, in your bilges, in your jewelry box, or in your pockets. They can do it carrying just their sidearms, or they can do it carrying assault rifles. They can be polite about it or they can be rude, but mostly they’re polite.
Read more on SailFeed. The article really was an eye-opener for me. I’m filing this in my “I didn’t know that” file and looking forward to Part 2 of the article.


For my Ethical Hackers: Ride free! Drive E-470 toll-free!
How much do you know about RFID chips? Do you know how many you’re carrying at any given moment? Do you know what information is stored on them? Do you know how close a hacker needs to get to you in order to steal that information? Have you considered any form of RFID protection? And most importantly, do you know what RFID protection will be effective?
These days, RFID chips are present in all sorts of items, such as credit cards, library books, grocery goods, security tags, implanted pet details, implanted medical records, passports and more. Some schools now require their students wear RFID tags. The amount of information which could be learned about you from your RFID chips is quite a lot! Plus, you never know what those information thieves are planning on doing with your information, either. So, it’s best to understand the risks of RFID hacking and limit your exposure to harm. Here’s the basics of what you need to know.


Also for my Ethical Hackers. Tap both ends of the conversation easily. There's an App (Okay, a web service) for that!
If you follow two celebrities on Twitter and want to check out the conversations that have taken place between them, you might have to alternate between their streams and look for handles in their tweets. Here to make matters simpler is a web service called Conweets.
Similar tools: TweetsBetween and Bettween.


A recap, with sage advice...
Class Actions Adding to the Cost of Data Breaches
Big data yields big data breaches, and potentially produces large class sizes, making such lawsuits attractive to plaintiffs’ lawyers. Companies that store or process personal information face an increasing risk of class action lawsuits based not only on the company’s use of that information, but also on the theft or misuse of that personal information due to data breach. Many states, such as California and Delaware, which have liberal data breach laws that allow private rights of action for security incidents regardless of a likelihood of injury, have facilitated class action lawsuits. In one such case, plaintiffs sought damages of $5,000 per customer from the defendant, which could have resulted in possible damages totaling in the tens of billions of dollars – far more than the defendant company was worth. A recent survey of data breach litigation found that the average settlement award in these cases was approximately $2,500 per plaintiff, with mean attorneys’ fees reaching $1.2 million.1
Conclusion
The likelihood of a data breach or privacy issue occurring in any business has become a virtual certainty. Class action lawsuits stemming from such incidents have upped the ante with the potential of millions of dollars of attorneys’ fees if not damage recoveries. All companies would be prudent to increase their risk mitigation efforts to beef up administrative, technical, and physical security to prevent data breaches coupled with enforcing security and privacy policies and procedures and strengthened indemnification provisions with third parties who have access to a company’s data.


An interesting editorial on Open Access published in an Open Access Journal.
October 25, 2012
Editorial - Delivering on a Network-Enabled Literature
Neylon C (2012) More Than Just Access: Delivering on a Network-Enabled Literature. PLoS Biol 10(10): e1001417. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001417
  • "By any measure it has been a huge year for the open-access movement. At the beginning of the year, it looked possible that the public access policy of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) might be rolled back by the Research Works Act, a legislative attempt supported by Elsevier and the Association of American Publishers to make such policies illegal. But as we move towards year's end, the momentum behind open access looks unstoppable with the announcement of major policy initiatives in the United States, the European Union, Denmark, and the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, there is still much to be done and the challenges remain large, but the remaining questions are largely ones of implementation, not principle."


Part of the Economic history of the world. This is how money worked (until we dropped the gold standard)
October 25, 2012
Center for Financial Stability Publishes The Bretton Woods Transcripts
Kurt Schuler: "The transcripts of the Bretton Woods conference were never meant to be published, but we have them. Today the CFS releases The Bretton Woods Transcripts, an e-book edited by me and Andrew Rosenberg. It contains verbatim proceedings of many meetings from the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which established the IMF and World Bank and began an era of international economic cooperation that endures today. The Web page for the book contains much more information about it, plus extensive background material that is being made readily available for the first time. Over the next few weeks I will comment here on elements of the book, and offer some details about the conference and its participants that are not in the book."


Just a comment. The US strategy is to treat any use of Weapons of Mass Destruction equally, meaning if Syria uses chemical weapons, we could nuke Damascus.
Exclusive: U.S. Rushes to Stop Syria from Expanding Chemical Weapon Stockpile
The regime of embattled Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is actively working to enlarge its arsenal of chemical weapons, U.S. officials tell Danger Room. Assad’s operatives have tried repeatedly in recent months to buy up the precursor chemicals for deadly nerve agents like sarin, even as his country plunges further and further into a civil war. The U.S. and its allies have been able to block many of these sales. But that still leaves Assad’s scientists with hundreds of metric tons of dangerous chemicals that could be turned into some of the world’s most gruesome weapons.


Interesting.
Amidst STEM Education Hype, NoRedInk Is On A Mission To Fix America’s Grammar Problem
… With STEM education reform now being touted as the key to America’s economic future, it’s easy to forget the other side. One recent national study, for example, found that only “one quarter of eighth and 12th graders are proficient in writing.” On top of that, College Board reported that reading and writing scores on the SAT hit record lows in the U.S. last year.
It’s this not-so-pretty picture of humanities education in the U.S. that led Jeff Scheur, a high school english teacher in Chicago, to create NoRedInk — an adaptive learning tool that aims to help students (and you) improve their writing and grammar skills. To help get students engaged, the startup works to personalize the learning process by generating custom curricula for students based on their interests, adapting feedback, tutorials and coaching to their particular abilities and allowing them to view problem areas in color-coded heat maps.
… Rather than casting a broad net, the startup’s lessons focus on what students are getting wrong, while offering them the opportunity to watch tutorials when they get stuck. NoRedInk eschews multiple choice (really, the enemy of writing), instead prompting students to input the correct answer themselves or drag-and-drop the right punctuation mark, for example. As they progress through lessons, students and teachers can track progress in NoRedInk’s dashboard, which is broken down into skill areas (and lets students view their analytics heat map-style).
… And so far, it seems to be working. With no marketing, NoRedInk has managed penetration into four percent of schools in the U.S., was one of the three winners of Citi and NBC’s Innovation Challenge and was accepted into Imagine K12′s current batch of startups. (Which launch at the accelerator’s Demo Day on Friday, October 26th.)
Today, the startup has 70,000 users and teachers and students have completed 3.5 million questions — two million of which were in the past month. Over 300 schools have applied to participate in “NoRedInk Premium,” a paid, suped-up version of the service built specifically for schools that launches this winter.
As the service is free for everyone else, the premium offering represents NoRedInk’s play at creating an up-selling opportunity (and business model, really), hooking teachers and students with the basics for free and charging schools if they want to integrate the service school-wide.

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