Sunday, February 24, 2013

Very interesting, and hopefully very uncommon. BUT, there is only one way to know...
I’ve occasionally blogged about how frustrating it can be to try to notify an organization that they’ve apparently been hacked or had a breach. When that organization is a hospital and I can’t reach anyone, it’s even more frustrating. This week, it happened again. I ranted in Twitter a bit, and Jake Kouns suggested I write it up for the DataLossDB.org site and include some recommendations for organizations. I’ve now done that, here. My recommendations are fairly simply, but important, and I hope HIPAA-covered entities (and all organizations that store PII or PHI, for that matter) take them to heart and implement them.
And for the record, I still haven’t gotten a call back from the hospital that inspired the rant.


More rant than analysis...
Welcome To The Year Of The Hack
The first two months of 2013 have seen a stunning number of the world's best-known companies get hacked. And they're not afraid to tell us about it.
Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr have all been breached. The New York Times extensively documented its own attack, as did the Washington Post. Jeep and Burger King lost control of their Twitter accounts for over an hour. NBC was hacked, embarrassingly and publicly, just a day ago. Minutes before this story was published, Microsoft announced that it, too, had been compromised.
… The hackers have been getting better, and their targets haven't been keeping up.
… "It's always tough to say whether we're seeing a spike in incidents or if we're merely becoming more aware of them," says Brian Krebs, of Krebs On Security. "In some cases, multiple successive compromises at high-profile sites have followed the discovery in the underground of a vulnerability in some kind, he says, "[while] in other cases, it's merely a footrace that the attackers win when the defenders fail to keep up with patches."


“On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.”
Here’s an article you may want to read:
Future Identities: Changing identities in the UK – the next 10 years
DR 5: How will surveillance and privacy technologies impact on the psychological notions of identity?
Ian Brown Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford January 2013
“This review has been commissioned as part of the UK Government’s Foresight project, Future Identities: Changing identities in the UK – the next 10 years . The views expressed do not represent policy of any government or organisation.”
You can download it here (pdf).
Brown does not address how the use of pseudonyms for some online activities and real names for other purposes might impact psychological notions of identity. Does it give individuals a stronger sense of their social identities or does it negatively impact identity while possibly reducing discrimination or other adverse consequences of surveillance? Does the use of pseudonyms to protect privacy allow the benefits of online interactions in identity development for youth without some of the risks for vulnerable groups or does it lead to individuals feeling “less together” as they hide their “real identity” from others online? There’s a lot more that needs to be asked – and answered – about the impact of surveillance and the use of surveillance-reducing techniques on psychological notions of identity.


Unchallenged, this could be the death of Behavioral Advertising... (Or at least annoying)
"Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer has contributed a Firefox patch that will block third-party cookies by default. It's now on track to land in version 22. Kudos to Mozilla for protecting their users and being so open to community submissions. The initial response from the online advertising industry is unsurprisingly hostile and blustering, calling the move 'a nuclear first strike.'"


This strikes me as funny. I wonder what productive companies do?
No more working from home for Yahoo employees, says report
ATD is reporting that CEO Marissa Mayer let it be known yesterday -- via a memo to employees from HR head Jackie Reses -- that come June, any existing work-from-home arrangements will no longer apply.
"To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side," reads the memo, as published by ATD's Kara Swisher, to whom it was leaked. [Apparently, they are unable to use their technology to communicate. Interesting message to send. Bob]


For those who love their eBook readers...
Download your Google Reader feeds – or the individual RSS feed of any website – as an ebook. NewsToebook is a free service that connects to your Google Account, downloads any feed you like and even marks the things it downloads as read. With output for EPUB and MOBI, it supports basically every eReader on the market, and can even directly convert an RSS feed to an eBook if you’re not a Google Reader user.
… this tool isn’t just for Google Reader users. You can directly download any RSS feed by pasting it into the box at NewsToEbook.


This could be interesting, if they don't just ignore the President...
"The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a "policy memorandum" today requiring any federal agency with over $100 million in R&D expenditures each year to develop plans for making all research funded by that agency freely available to the public within one year of publication in any peer-reviewed scholarly journal. The full memorandum is available on the White House website. It appears that this policy would not only apply to federal agencies conducting research, but also to any university, private corporation, or other entity conducting research that arises from federal funding. For those in academia and the public at large, this is a huge step towards free open access to publicly funded research."
Edward Tufte calls the move timid and unimaginative, linking to a Verge article that explains that it's not quite as sweeping as the summary above sounds.


Think it will handle my 8-track collection?
Vudu's in-home Disc to Digital service: Promising yet lacking
… Last year, Walmart-owned Vudu launched its Disc to Digital service that required people to go into Walmart stores for the conversion. Who wants to do that? This is where the "In-Home" version of Disc to Digital comes into play. Opened at the end of last month, the service lets you do the conversion right from your own computer.
You'll be hard-pressed to find the In-Home service at Vudu, […] perhaps because In-Home is still considered a "beta" test service. For those who do want to try it, you'll find the information here.
If you're a Mac user, you're out of luck

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