True, but is it wise?
“Government immunity” is indistinguishable from “government
don't give a damn.”
Jess Davis reports:
A
Texas appeals court on Thursday blocked a civil rights advocacy group
from deposing the state comptroller about a 2010 data breach that
published online personal information about millions of Texans,
saying the agency has governmental immunity.
Read more on Law360.com
(sub. required).
(Related) Stop
worrying bout what you are going to say and think about what your
customers are going to hear.
From the
probably-shouldn’t-say-that dept.:
Yes, laptops that
possibly contained personally identifiable information were stolen
from our office in a burglary, but we don’t need to
strengthen our security measures, says
the Atlantic
Canada Opportunities Agency.
Why would anyone want
this? (My Ethical Hackers would never consider using this to create
and document any alibi)
– is an iOS app that
automatically and privately detects where you went
and what you did. It keeps track of the restaurants you
ate at, the museums you visited, and even your hikes and romantic
strolls. Remember every detail of your day trip, vacation or weekend
getaway, so that you can share with your family and friends.
(Related) Perhaps we
could teach a class on stalking?
Derrick Harris writes:
…
In order to highlight what’s possible, a group of researchers from
the International Computer Science Institute has released a new tool
called “Ready or Not” that lets you enter any Twitter or
Instagram username and see every place that user has been and what
they’ve tweeted while there. It also includes a chart that shows
how frequently users are at certain locations at certain times of
day. The thought of this information getting into the hands of the
wrong person — or, if you’re just into having some semblance of a
private life, the thought that it exists — is a pretty troubling
proposition.
The
Ready or Not tool, ISCI researcher Gerald Friedland acknowledged,
certainly engages in a bit of fear-mongering; but that’s the point
Read more on GigaOm.
Related: See the
Teaching
Privacy web site.
In an effort to become
more transparent...
Ellen Nakashima
reports:
Director
of National Intelligence James R. Clapper on Thursday evening
announced that from now on the government will release the total
number of surveillance orders issued each year to telecom providers
in national security investigations.
They
include the number of targeted persons affected by these classified
orders, Clapper said in a news
release.
Read more on Washington
Post. And then tell me why IContheRecord.com
is posting “likes” under their announcement.
(Related) ...while
remaining totally opaque.
Mike Masnick writes:
So,
last night Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that
the administration will start releasing
some data on how many FISA records it seeks, and how many “targets”
there are. In a first draft of that post, I had originally
speculated that this hopefully meant the various tech companies could
finally add
FISA request numbers to their transparency reports, as they’d
requested. However, after reading Clapper’s statement carefully,
it seemed fairly obvious that what they were releasing was a lot
more limited than what the tech companies have been asking for —
including the number of people impacted. Given that, I removed the
paragraph about how it might impact tech companies, because it seemed
likely that the feds weren’t actually going to allow the tech
companies to reveal some basic metadata about the FISA requests they
receive. Indeed, today was the (many times extended) deadline for
the DOJ to respond to the legal
filings by various tech companies to publish those numbers, and
it appears that the DOJ has
officially turned down the request.
Read more on TechDirt.
So suppose the big
guns in tech got together and put the government on notice that
starting on _______ date, they were going to start disclosing the
data – with or without the government’s consent. What would the
government do if the tech companies stuck together? Could DOJ
prosecute? Sure. But would they? They need the businesses’
cooperation. Maybe it’s time for the tech companies and providers
to just say “NO” to the government’s demands for less than
adequate transparency.
[Interesting
“Boston Tea Party” level idea, but I suspect the government has
all the carrots and sticks necessary to “entice” cooperation on
their terms. Bob]
(Related) Wouldn't it
be interesting if telecoms had First Amendment traditions like
journalists?
What is the sound of a
lead balloon?
Mark Hosenball reports:
The
British government has asked the New York Times to destroy copies of
documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward
Snowden related to the operations of the U.S. spy agency and its
British partner, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ),
people familiar with the matter said.
The
British request, made to Times executive editor Jill Abramson by a
senior official at the British Embassy in Washington D.C., was
greeted by Abramson with silence, according to the sources.
Read more on Reuters.
I didn’t realize that ProPublica is also in possession of some of
the files.
“If you don't like
how we violate your privacy, remember that we could always nullify
the treaties we've been ignoring!”
Christopher Wolf
writes:
The
US privacy framework is under attack from officials in the EU
following revelations about NSA surveillance. Yesterday, US
Department of Commerce General Counsel Cameron Kerry delivered his
valedictory
address before his departure from his position next week, and
focused both on the progress made by the Obama Administration in
privacy and offered the strongest push-back to date on the attacks
leveled against the US framework from the EU, including threats to
nullify the EU-US Safe Harbor Agreement.
Read more on Chronicle
of Data Protection.
Registration required.
Still nothing positive on the “breach of contract” argument.
Margaret Dale and David
Munkittrick of Proskauer have this article
on Law.com about the state of standing in data breach lawsuits.
Perspective. Big Data
is really big. ( 1000 bytes is one kilobyte,
1000 KB is one megabyte,
1000 MB is one gigabyte,
1000 GB is one terabyte,
1000 TB is one petabyte,
1000 PB is one exabyte,
1000 EB is one zettabyte, 1000 ZB is one
yottabyte
So one Zettabyte is
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.)
Cisco
Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2012–2017
“This
forecast is part of the Cisco® Visual Networking Index (VNI), an
ongoing initiative to track and forecast the impact of visual
networking applications. This document presents the details of the
Cisco VNI global IP traffic forecast and the methodology behind it.
For a more analytical look at the implications of the data presented
in this paper, please refer to the companion document, The
Zettabyte Era-Trends and Analysis, or the VNI
Forecast Highlights tool.
Executive
Summary - Annual global IP traffic
will surpass the zettabyte threshold (1.4 zettabytes) by the end of
2017. In 2017, global IP traffic will reach 1.4 zettabytes per
year, or 120.6 exabytes per month. Global IP traffic
will reach 1.0 zettabytes per year or 83.8 exabytes per month in
2015. Global IP traffic has increased more than fourfold in the past
5 years, and will increase threefold over the next 5 years. Overall,
IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23
percent from 2012 to 2017. Busy hour Internet traffic
is growing more rapidly than average Internet traffic. Busy hour
Internet traffic increased 41 percent in 2012, compared to 34 percent
growth in average traffic. Busy-hour Internet traffic will increase
by a factor of 3.5 between 2012 and 2017, while average Internet
traffic will increase 2.9-fold. Busy-hour Internet traffic will
reach 865 Tbps in 2017, the equivalent of 720 million people
streaming a high-definition video continuously. Metro
traffic will surpass long-haul traffic in 2014, and will
account for 58 percent of total IP traffic by 2017. Metro traffic
will grow nearly twice as fast as long-haul traffic from 2012 to
2017. The higher growth in metro networks is due in part to the
increasingly significant role of content delivery networks, which
bypass long-haul links and deliver traffic to metro and regional
backbones. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) will
carry over half of Internet traffic in 2017. 51 percent of all
Internet traffic will cross content delivery networks in 2017
globally, up from 34 percent in 2012. Nearly half of all IP
traffic will originate with non-PC devices by 2017. In
2012, only 26 percent of consumer IP traffic originated with non-PC
devices, but by 2017 the non-PC share of consumer IP traffic will
grow to 49 percent. PC-originated traffic will grow at a CAGR of 14
percent, while TVs, tablets, mobile phones, and machine-to-machine
(M2M) modules will have traffic growth rates of 24 percent, 104
percent, 79 percent, and 82 percent, respectively.”
For my students...
Find Cheap Textbooks
Online
While not free, Book
Renter allows students to rent college textbooks for around 20%
of the cover-price. Once finished you simply mail the textbook back
to them. You can even take notes and highlight in the books. They
also cover the UPS postage costs of returning the books.
If you prefer ebooks
then Ecampus.com
is a great resource for you. The company, aside from offering the
same physical book rental service as BookRenter, allow students to
cheaply
rent eBook versions of textbooks. The files have an expiry of 6
months, after which they will be unusable.
… If you’re still
set on buying your textbook, check out this article about finding the
cheapest
deals on college textbooks.
Sprint Through
Lectures
… a favourite study
technique of mine is gaining credence around the web: listening
to audio books while jogging. I find myself continuing to jog to
listen to the rest of the lecture, where as I would normally have
stopped far earlier. So, in the end I accomplish more by exercising
both body and mind with the help of audiobooks.
Find Audio Lectures
On OpenCourseware
OpenCourseware
(OCW) has been around quite a few years at this point.
OCW offers a vast
collection of course material, presentations, articles, videos and
audio lectures from some of the world’s most highly regarded
universities on virtually every degree subject out there. The
biggest contributors are MIT, Stanford, and the Open University.
Many of these universities will push their open
course content under their own brands, but they all belong to the
OpenCourseware Consortium
I’m a huge fan of
their audio lectures. I’ll often listen to a lecture subject I
missed in real life, or gain extra knowledge by listening to related
topics. For example, I took an OCW module on Social Media to better
equip myself for my marketing module.
Similar to OCW,
although a little more closed off, is Khan
Academy, a huge resource of free
video lectures and beautifully presented tutorials.
Forget Google
Scholar — Use Journal Repositories
Google Scholar is the
primary research tool for a lot of students.
… Despite Google’s
best efforts, there’s a more effective way.
I suggest going
straight to journal repositories. Find the top five journals in your
study area and use their online search facilities. .... A personal
favourite of mine is Emerald
Insight.
Then, go to the website
of the top 10 universities you can think of, such as Harvard, Brown
or Oxford, and search through their online journals. Universities
always publish their research to protect their rankings.
When sifting through
thousands of articles and journals, don’t scroll. Save time by
using Ctrl+F to find specific keywords and topics. I also do this
when reading huge eBooks or reports. Going digital is so much
better.
Primary Research
Bumps Up Your Grade
Email people; lots of
people. A little primary research for an assignment can take as
little as five minutes. When citing a paper or article, I normally
email any questions to the author. This is something very few
students do outside of their final year thesis. Author contact
details are typically found on the inside page of a report or on the
university’s website. I’ve found university professors (even
those in different countries with nothing to do with my college) very
open to questions about their work and they have no problem being
referenced in a student assignment. It’s easy bonus points to bump
up a grade.
Learn How To Type
Seriously. Typing
properly is the biggest time saver in college, where writing 10,000
words of notes and academic assignments per week is the norm.
Saikat did an awesome
rundown of some great
online typing tutorials, my favourite being Typing
Web. It’s a well-designed typing tutor that tells you just what
each finger should be doing and grades your performance.
For my amusement...
… “MOOC”
(along with “selfie” and “bitcoin”) entered the Oxford
Dictionaries Online this week. The definition provided: “a
course of study made available over the Internet without charge to a
very large number of people. anyone who decides to take a MOOC simply
logs on to the website and signs up.” Tracing the origins of
the word to MMORPGs, Stephen
Downes notes the dictionary gets both the usage and the etymology
of the word wrong.
… Inside
Higher Ed has released its annual Survey
of Faculty Attitudes on Technology. It “finds
significant skepticism among faculty members about the quality of
online learning, with only one in five of them agreeing that online
courses can achieve learning outcomes equivalent to those of
in-person courses, and majorities considering online learning to be
of lower quality than in-person courses on several key measures (but
not in terms of delivering content to meet learning objectives).”
… Students in the
Lodi School District have fought back against the
district’s plans to create a new social media policy
that would make the students
“submit to the school’s disciplinary authority for what they say
on social networking sites, even off-campus on their personal time.”
Among the types of speech the policy sought to ban: cyberbullying,
liking or retweeting prohibited content, and subtweeting. After
protests and pushback and letters of support from the Student Law
Center, the
district has dropped the policy.
My wife says Dilbert
has nailed the Budget process exactly.
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