Sunday, March 17, 2013

Amazing how cheap stupidity is these days...
Back in October, Equifax and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) agreed to settle charges that Equifax violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act and Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act by improperly selling lists of millions of consumers who were late on their mortgages.
In settling the FTC’s complaint, Equifax agreed to pay its full $392,803 gross revenues as disgorgement of its ill-gotten gain from the conduct challenged by the Commission’s complaint. The order also prohibits Equifax from 1) furnishing prescreened lists to anyone that it does not have reason to believe has a permissible purpose to receive them; 2) failing to maintain reasonable procedures designed to limit the furnishing of prescreened lists to anyone except those who have a permissible purpose to receive them; and 3) selling prescreened lists in connection with offers for debt relief products or services and mortgage assistance relief products and services, when advance fees are charged, with limited exceptions.
Following a period of public comment, the Commission vote approving the final order by a vote of 3-0-2, with Commissioner Joshua D. Wright and former Chairman Jon Leibowitz not participating.


Some clear examples for my Intro to Computer Security class. Nightmares are free...
The Internet is a surveillance state
… The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.
… This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

(Related) Perhaps they should purchase the “history of their life” from one of the “Big Data” companies. If they don't, someone from “Here is the unvarnished truth (dot com)” may build a less flattering image for them.
Hugh Pickens writes
"Most ancestors from the distant past are, at best, names in the family records, leaving behind a few grainy photos, a death certificate or a record from Ellis Island. But J. Peder Zane writes that retirees today have the ability to leave a cradle-to-grave record of their lives so that 50, 100, even 500 years hence, people will be able to see how their forebears looked and moved, hear them speak, and learn about their aspirations and achievements. A growing number of gerontologists also recommend that persons in that ultimate stage should engage in the healthy and productive exercise of composing a Life Review. In response, a growing number of businesses and organizations have arisen to help people preserve and shape their legacy — a shift is helping to redefine the concept of history, as people suddenly have the tools and the desire to record the lives of almost everybody. The ancient problem that bedeviled historians — a lack of information about people's everyday lives — has been overcome. New devices and technologies are certain to further this immortality revolution as futurists are already imagining the day when people can have a virtual conversation with holograms of their ancestors that draw on digital legacies to reflect how the dead would have responded."


Replacing “Mad Men” with a “Mad Microcomputer” because ad placement has to happen NOW!
March 16, 2013
Mobile Search Moments: Understanding How Mobile Drives Conversions
Google Mobile Ads Blog: "In this era of mobility, our smartphones are always with us, keeping us connected anytime and anywhere. With this constant connectivity, we’ve come to expect information (literally) right at our fingertips just a search away - whether it’s locating the nearest sushi restaurant or booking flights for your upcoming trip. In Mobile Search Moments: Understanding How Mobile Drives Conversions, we set out to understand when and why people turn to mobile search, the actions they take as a result, and how marketers can capitalize on every mobile search moment. We found that there’s an immediacy effect of mobile search, with more than half of the resulting conversions (going into a store, calling a business, or making a purchase) happening within just one hour. Working with Nielsen, we also wanted to push the standard of mobile research. It’s traditionally been difficult to quantify mobile’s full impact on driving conversions, particularly since consumer surveys are often constrained to broad recall questions. Instead, we asked participants to log their mobile searches over two weeks in a diary smartphone app - logging more than 6,000 mobile searches in total. We followed up to ask them what actions resulted from those searches, helping us draw more precise, measurable connections between mobile searches and the conversions that they drive online and offline."


Moving with the times? Is reaching out to India different than reaching out to Indiana?
On March 7, 2013, Judge Engelemayer of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York issued a novel order allowing the Federal Trade Commission to serve certain papers (other than the initial summons and complaint) on a defendant using Facebook private messages in conjunction with email. Read that again. A federal judge allowed the FTC to serve legal papers using Facebook.


Something for the lawyers (and my Ethical Hackers)
When you create a document on your computer, the saved files carries important information with it in the form of metadata. Sometimes when the information in the metadata is sensitive, you might want to remove it before sharing the digital document. Here to help you do that easily is a freeware desktop app called Metadata Cleaner.
… You can select individual files or select them in a batch by specifying their folder. Supported digital document file formats include DOC, XLS, and PPT.

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