Tuesday, March 19, 2013

“We'll do anything for the children, except provide adequate security...”
TeamSHATTER reports on data breaches in the higher education vertical throughout the United States.
The past year has seen a substantial uptick in the amount of total records breached. In 2012, there was a dramatic increase in the total number of reported records affected (1,977,412), but a relatively low amount of institutions (51) that reported breaches. In fact, the past year has seen the most reported compromised records in the higher education sector since 2006, based on data since tracking began in 2005.
Read more on Help Net Security.


“Make a big thing about our willingness to give up surveillance technique “X” but don't mention “Y” or “Z” and certainly not “A” through “W”
Declan McCullagh reports:
The Obama administration has dropped its insistence that police should be able to warrantlessly peruse Americans’ e-mail correspondence.
But at the same time, the Justice Department is advancing new proposals that would expand government surveillance powers over e-mail messages, Twitter direct messages, and Facebook direct messages in other ways.
Read more on CNET.

(Related) For example:
David Kravets writes:
The President Barack Obama administration is claiming that authorities do not need court warrants to affix GPS devices to vehicles to monitor their every move.
The administration maintains that position despite the Supreme Court’s infamous decision last year that concluded that attaching the GPS devices amounted to search protected by the Constitution.
The administration is set to make its argument Tuesday before a federal appeals court in a case testing the parameters of the high court’s 2012 decision. If the government prevails, the high court’s ruling would be virtually meaningless.
“This case is the government’s primary hope that it does not need a judge’s approval to attach a GPS device to a car,” Catherine Crump, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a telephone interview.
Read more on Threat Level.
I’m not sure why David characterizes the Jones decision as “infamous,” but over on FourthAmendment.com, John Wesley Hall comments:
Wired, of course, is bent out of shape about the government making any argument for exceptions. We intuitively know, however, that the Solicitor General wrote the brief and put the AUSA’s name on it. It’s the advocate’s job to make an argument for exceptions.


As governments recognize that huge volumes of data exist in private hands, they suddenly find a need for that data.
The Australian government could tap data from Google, Twitter and Facebook as it seeks to embrace big data, according to an issues paper released Friday evening.
“Private sector organisations such as Google, Twitter and Facebook hold enormous data stores on Australian citizens and people across the world, and offer access to these on commercial terms,” the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) wrote in the report.
“While needing to carefully consider the veracity of this data, it may be that agencies could consider using this data as part of big data analytics projects.”
Read more on Computerworld AU

(Related) The agreement may be official or simply a response to “Do you want to keep getting DHS money?”
Joe Wolverton, II, J.D. writes:
The Missouri Department of Revenue is colluding with the Department of Homeland Security to collect citizens’ biometric information and store it in a massive federal database. This information includes the names of those who apply for a concealed carry weapons permit.
This was the allegation investigated at a meeting of the Appropriations Committee of the Missouri state senate, chaired by state Senator Kurt Shaefer (R-Dist. 15).
Read more on The New American.


How do I surveil thee
Let me count the ways...
A very brief overview of your house as a tool for Big Brother.
Smart Homes: Our Next Digital Privacy Nightmare
The hyper-connected smart home of the future promises to change the way we live. More efficient energy usage, Internet-connected appliances that communicate with one another and cloud-enhanced home security are just some of the conveniences we'll enjoy.
It's going to be amazing. It will also open up major questions about privacy.


Grits also has a colletion of posts on drones, if that's your thing...
GritsforBreakfast blogged about the sessions at the recent YaleISP conference on Location Tracking and Biometrics, which you can still watch online here.
It took two weeks, but today I finally finished the last two posts summarizing my notes from panels at the conference. Here they are all in one place for easy reference:


Dang! I've already created a Final Exam for my Discrete Math students or I would have included something like this... Also works as an economic study.
March 11, 2013
Abstract:
This paper proposes an analysis framework and model for estimating the impact of information security breach episodes. Previous methods either lack empirical grounding or are not sufficiently rigorous, general or flexible. There has also been no consistent model that serves theoretical and empirical research, and also professional practice. The proposed framework adopts an ex ante decision frame consistent with rational economic decision-making, and measures breach consequences via the anticipated costs of recovery and restoration by all affected stakeholders. The proposed branching activity model is an event tree whose structure and branching conditions can be estimated using probabilistic inference from evidence – ‘Indicators of Impact.’ This approach can facilitate reliable model estimation when evidence is imperfect, incomplete, ambiguous, or contradictory. The proposed method should be especially useful for modeling consequences that extend beyond the breached organization, including cascading consequences in critical infrastructures. Monte Carlo methods can be used to estimate the distribution aggregate measures of impact such as total cost. Non-economic aggregate measures of impact can also be estimated. The feasibility of the proposed framework and model is demonstrated through case studies of several publicly disclosed breach episodes.
You can download the full article from SSRN.


Convergence. My students use cellphones in place of traditional land lines, and some of them have already dropped cable since everything they wan is available online...
Whether you’re thinking of cutting the cord or just want to watch TV on your own schedule instead of the television network’s, there are more legal ways to watch TV online than ever. Even better, many of these legal options are free.
HitBliss is a new service. It’s a sort of store you can purchase TV shows and movies from, just like Apple’s iTunes. However, you can also watch targeted ads and receive credit you can put towards watching streaming TV shows and movies. Watching two minutes of ads gives you roughly enough credit to pay for a TV show episodes, so HitBliss appears to have fewer advertisements than traditional television.
Hulu is well-known in the USA as a popular way to watch recent TV shows. Unlike services like Netflix, Hulu offers recent TV episodes from currently airing seasons. You’ll have to pay for a Hulu Plus subscription to watch some shows – and older seasons of shows – but Hulu Plus also offers a week-long free trial where you can watch TV online – everything for free.
Every television network has its own website, and many networks offer recent episodes for free streaming.
Netflix, Lovefilm (in the UK), and Amazon Prime Instant Video are all popular ways of watching TV shows online, but they’re not free. However, it’s easy to forget that Netflix, Lovefilm, and Amazon all offer free trials you can enjoy for 30 days.
Sony’s Crackle offers a limited catalog of TV shows (and movies) for completely free streaming. To get all of its content, you’ll have to be in the USA, although some of its catalog is also available in the UK, Canada, and Australia. Like many services, Crackle offers a mobile app.
YouTube is a common destination for people looking for free TV shows online. You can find lots of free TV shows on YouTube. But let’s be honest – most free TV shows on YouTube are put up by users and not officially sanctioned. However, sometimes television networks put up free TV show episodes on YouTube.
YouTube offers a YouTube TV Shows page where you can watch TV online – watching shows that have been put up on YouTube legitimately.
Livestation offers video streams of live TV news networks. They’re completely legitimate and approved video streams, too.
BBC iPlayer offers a variety of BBC television shows for free in the UK, including the popular Doctor Who series. As with other services on this list, international users can get in on the action, too.


Tools for my MOOC?
Soo Meta - A Nice, New Way to Create Multimedia Presentations
Soo Meta is a new digital presentation tool from the same people that developed the YouTube remixing tool Dragon Tape. Soo Meta allows you to combine videos from YouTube, pictures from the web or from your desktop, text, and voice recordings to create a presentation. You can also pull content in from Pinterest and Twitter to use in your final product.
The Soo Meta editor is fairly easy to use. Create a free account to get started then open your browser to SooMeta.com/create/ and title your first project. After titling your project add a background image from your computer or from the web. Next pull in a video from YouTube. The video can be yours or any other publicly shared video. You can trim the start and the end time of the video in the Soo Meta editor. To add text just click the text box in the editor and type. Finally, to narrate a frame (Soo Meta calls them chapters) in your project click the microphone icon in the editor and make your recording. Completed Soo Meta projects can be embedded into your blog or website. I created a one chapter story about my dogs and embedded it below (press the green play button in the lower right corner).


Tools for my techies...
Many people have realized the importance of learning how to code as a life skill. No matter where you go, and what job you have, it’s always seen as in a positive light if you know how to work some code, even if that’s not your profession. As this importance increases ever more, there are plenty of new initiatives to get kids to learn code in school. While it’s great to see them, you can take control of your coding education by taking some steps on your own.
The best – and probably most surprising part – is that it doesn’t have to be a boring ordeal.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)