Monday, October 21, 2013

You know you want to attend this seminar. Go to the website, get the flyer, email or call today!
Big Data Privacy: Business & Government
Friday, October 25, 2013
Contact Privacy Foundation Administrator Cindy Goldberg at cgoldberg@law.du.edu
or Anne Beblavi at abeblavi@law.du.edu, or call 303-871-6303


Anything for money?
Regular readers will recall that back in April 2012, this blogger filed a complaint against Experian with the FTC over their numerous data breaches. Jordan Robertson of Bloomberg News provided media coverage of Experian’s breaches and the complaint in November last year. To date, however, the FTC has not announced any investigation or charges against Experian.
A report by Brian Krebs yesterday will hopefully nudge the FTC into quicker action.
Brian reports:
An identity theft service that sold Social Security and drivers license numbers — as well as bank account and credit card data on millions of Americans — purchased much of its data from Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, according to a lengthy investigation by KrebsOnSecurity.
[...]
Martin said he first learned of the ID theft service after hearing from a U.S. Secret Service agent who called and said the law enforcement agency was investigating Experian and had obtained a grand jury subpoena against the company.
While the private investigator ruse may have gotten the fraudsters past Experian and/or CourtVentures’ screening process, according to Martin there were other signs that should have alerted Experian to potential fraud associated with the account. For example, Martin said the Secret Service told him that the alleged proprietor of Superget.info had paid Experian for his monthly data access charges using wire transfers sent from Singapore.
“The issue in my mind was the fact that this went on for almost a year after Experian did their due diligence and purchased” Court Ventures, Martin said. “Why didn’t they question cash wires coming in every month? Experian portrays themselves as the databreach experts, and they sell identity theft protection services. How this could go on without them detecting it I don’t know. Our agreement with them was that our information was to be used for fraud prevention and ID verification, and was only to be sold to licensed and credentialed U.S. businesses, not to someone overseas.”
You can read more details of his investigation on KrebsOnSecurity.


Perspective
Reality Check – ‘For every day of government shutdown, about one million emails at CDC go unread.’
“The broader question is, what are the outbreaks that we don’t know about? At any one time, we’re investigating 25 or 30 clusters of illness. Initially we had sent home the vast majority of the staff working on foodborne disease. When it became clear that [the shutdown] was going to go on more than a week, we called a bunch of them back. But our monitoring systems throughout the agency are working at really skeletal levels and that means we have more blind spots, we may be slower to respond, and we may be less effective at prevention. For instance, here’s what we’re responding to right now: An outbreak of Legionella in a residential facility in Alabama. An outbreak of tuberculosis in another state. An investigation of a fatal case of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever on an American Indian Reservation in Arizona where we’ve been working for two years to control that disease. A serious healthcare-associated infection outbreak in Baltimore. A cluster of infants who have been dying, or getting severely ill, in another part of the country. A cluster of meningitis in a university in the northeast that is going to require a very complicated response. An outbreak of hepatitis B in healthcare…”


Oh the horror, the horror! (This was not a homework project for my Ethical Hackers/Ninjas, even if it does sound like one of my 'extra credit' projects.)
Kentucky’s Case of the Missing Bourbon
… 65 cases of Pappy Van Winkle, one of the nation’s most expensive and sought-after bourbons, disappeared from a warehouse here.


Could be handy
– is a Shopify app that allows you to create personalized business documents like invoices, labels, orders and batch print them in minutes. Print or download hundreds of documents with a couple of clicks in either PDF or HTML format. Choose from a wide range of components, like barcodes, QR codes, images, text fields, formatting tools, and more.


Another Infographic.
The Differences Between Digital Natives And Digital Immigrants
… all of our young digital natives are being taught by “digital immigrants”, or, folks who didn’t grow up with the internet. Pretty obvious, but think of it this way: Let’s say you go to school and have to take English classes (and English is your native language). Your teacher’s native language is not English (and let’s say hypothetically their English is not great), and even though he/she may be very knowledgeable about literature and much of the other stuff to go along with it, there’s a language barrier getting in the way.

(Related) Perspective
Online Dating & Relationships
One in ten Americans have used an online dating site or mobile dating app; 66% of these online daters have gone on a date with someone they met through a dating site or app, and 23% have met a spouse or long term partner through these sites. Public attitudes toward online dating have become more positive in recent years, but many users also report negative experiences.


Perspective (May also be Related)
PC shipments to continue their freefall this year, says Gartner
The PC industry is likely to experience another rough year, according to analysts at Gartner.
Global shipments of desktops and notebooks are expected to nestle in at 303 million this year, an 11.2 percent drop from 2012. Stirring in ultramobile PCs (which include hybrid laptops/tablets), shipments are forecast to decline by 8.4 percent this year, Gartner said on Monday.
Tablets will continue to heat up the market, with shipments surging by 42.7 percent in 2013 to reach 184 million. However, smaller and cheaper tablets are giving their larger and more expensive counterparts a run for their money.


Oh, the things I make my students do...
5 Free Apps and Sites for Creating Short Animations
Creating animations can be a fun element to add to a creative writing project. Creating the animation could be the final piece of the project in which students bring their short stories to life. You could also have students create short animations to use as story starters for their written works. Here are five free tools that students can use to create animations.

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