Gosh. Won't it be
wonderful when we can do the same thing in this country?
More on a government
plan to allow private companies to purchase patient data from the
NHS without patient knowledge or consent. Stephen Adams reports:
A
secret plan to sell confidential medical records to private companies
for as little as £1 has been drawn up by officials.
From
next month, GPs will start sending detailed NHS patient records to a
central database for the first time under the new General Practice
Extraction Service (GPES).
Yet
doctors do not have to tell patients about the project, described by
campaigners as an ‘unprecedented threat’ to medical
confidentiality.
The
records – held for every person registered with a GP – will
contain details of medical conditions, as well as ‘identifiable’
information including a patient’s NHS number, postcode and date of
birth.
Private
firms such as Bupa can then apply to the Health Service to buy and
use data from the records for research.
Read more on Daily
Mail.
Tools & Techniques
for my Ethical Hackers.
Here’s
what you find when you scan the entire Internet in an hour
Until recently,
scanning the entire Internet, with its billions of unique addresses,
was a slow and labor-intensive process. For example, in 2010 the
Electronic Frontier Foundation conducted
a scan to gather data on the use of encryption online. The
process took two to three months.
A team of researchers
at the University of Michigan believed they could do better. A lot
better. On Friday, at the Usenix security conference in Washington,
they announced ZMap, a
tool that allows an ordinary server to scan every address on the
Internet in just 44 minutes.
… The ability to
rapidly find computers with security vulnerabilities can be a good
thing if it allows ethical security researchers and software vendors
to find and notify systems administrators about problems before
information is released to the general public. But ZMap could also
be used for evil. A malicious hacker could use the tool to rapidly
identify computers that have unpatched vulnerabilities and compromise
them in parallel, creating a million-machine botnet in a matter of
hours.
Significant? Teachers
and students do this all the time to access “blocked” websites.
Any implications for telemarketers who ignore the 'do not call'
lists?
Orin Kerr writes:
During
the debate over the Aaron Swartz case, one of the legal issues was
whether Swartz had committed an unauthorized access under the CFAA
when he changed his IP address to circumvent IP
address blocking imposed by system administrators trying
to keep Swartz off the network. There was significantly more to the
CFAA charges than that, to be clear, including circumventing a
subsequent MAC address block and (most significantly) entering an MIT
storage closet to install his computer directly. But changing IP
addresses to get around IP address blocking was at least one of the
possible grounds of unauthorized access. On Friday, Judge Breyer of
the Northern District of California handed down the first decision
directly addressing the issue. Judge Breyer ruled that changing IP
addresses to get around a block is an unauthorized access in
violation of the CFAA. The decision is here: Craigslist
v. 3taps, Inc..
Read more on The
Volokh Conspiracy.
Something to toss out
in my Ethics class...
There are times when I
wish I was still teaching so that I could share an extraordinary case
with psychology students and enjoy their reactions as they are
challenged to think. Over the decade that I spent teaching
undergraduate and graduate students, I had a handful of books that I
would use to introduce and put a human face on topics such as the
scientific method or psychosurgery. If I was still teaching, I’d
add Rebecca Skloot’s book, The
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, to my list.
...[More]
I'm not sure having my
car's battery talk to my car computer which then talks to my garage
computer which then contacts my house computer which then schedules
an appointment with a mechanic (based on my calendar) and notifies
the car dealer, manufacturer and part supplier is as good an idea as
they seem to think.
Cisco
– The Internet of Everything in Motion
“In
2012, there were 8.7 billion connected objects globally,
constituting 0.6% of the ‘things’ in the world. In 2013, this
number is exceeding 10.0 billion. Driven by reducing price per
connection and the consequent rapid growth in the number of
machine-to-machine (M2M) connections, we expect the number of
connected objects to reach 50bn by 2020 (2.7% of things in the
world). We expect connectivity costs to reduce at a 25% CAGR during
2012-20, which is approximately equal to the growth in number of
connected objects (implying price-elasticity demand of 1). Lastly,
we believe that more than 50% of the connected objects added during
2013-20 will be added in the last 3 years of the decade. This also
implies that the maximum connected objects are likely to be added
when the connectivity costs are the lowest.”
Perspective. For my
Business, Accounting and Economics students.
The
Real Value of Big Data is Difficult to Measure
Is
Big Data an Economic Big Dud? by James Glanz, August 17, 2013 –
See related graphic here.
“If pencil marks on
some colossal doorjamb could measure the growth of the Internet, they
would probably be tracking the amount of data sloshing through the
public network that spans the planet. Christened by the World
Economic Forum as “the new oil” and “a
new asset class,” these vast loads of data have been
likened to transformative innovations like the steam locomotive,
electricity grids, steel, air-conditioning and the radio. The
astounding rate of growth would make any parent proud. There were 30
billion gigabytes of video, e-mails, Web transactions and
business-to-business analytics in 2005. The total is expected to
reach more than 20 times that figure in 2013, with off-the-charts
increases to follow in the years ahead, according to Cisco, the
networking giant. How much data is that? Cisco estimates
that in 2012, some two trillion minutes of video alone traversed the
Internet every month… What is sometimes referred to as the
Internet’s first wave — say, from the 1990s until around 2005 —
brought completely new services like e-mail, the Web, online search
and eventually broadband. For its next act, the industry has pinned
its hopes, and its colossal public relations machine, on the power of
Big Data itself to supercharge the economy. There is just one tiny
problem: the economy is, at best, in the doldrums and has stayed
there during the latest surge in Web traffic. The rate of
productivity growth, whose steady rise from the 1970s well into the
2000s has been credited to earlier phases in the computer and
Internet revolutions, has actually fallen. The overall economic
trends are complex, but an argument could be made that the slowdown
began around 2005 — just when Big Data began to make its
appearance. Those factors have some economists questioning whether
Big Data will ever have the impact of the first Internet wave, let
alone the industrial revolutions of past centuries. One theory holds
that the Big Data industry is thriving more by cannibalizing existing
businesses in the competition for customers than by creating
fundamentally new opportunities. In some cases, online companies
like Amazon and eBay are fighting among themselves for customers.
But in others — here is where the cannibals enter — the companies
are eating up traditional advertising, media, music and retailing
businesses, said Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of
Minnesota who has studied the phenomenon…”
I know I'll need these
soon.
Rubrics4Teachers
offers a LOT of pre-made rubrics covering a variety of subjects that
are available for your use. You can search by subject matter or by
term.
Rubistar
is an easy to use online rubric makers that also offers accounts (so
you can store and access the rubrics you make), templates, and
pre-made rubrics for a variety of subjects. Everything on the site
is free.
IRubric
... offers rubric building tools, and a searchable database of
pre-existing rubrics from other teachers.
For my students. If
you can't find yourself on this graphic, you can't be in my class.
1997 was a million
(Internet) years ago! Interesting how the language has changed.
Revisit
the amazing Internet the cool kids used in 1997
Sixteen years ago, the
name Netscape was becoming a household name, and if the instructional
guide to getting kids online from 1997 in the video below is any
indication, horizontal stripes were totally in.
If you have half an
hour to spare, check out this amazingly cheesy tour of the early
"cybernet," as presented by an enthusiastic and remarkably
average American family
No comments:
Post a Comment