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...
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.
via @PrivacyMatters
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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