As expected.
MPR News reports that
several Minnesota banks have sued Target over its recent data breach:
The First Farmers & Merchants National Banks of Grand Meadow,
Cannon Falls, Luverne, Fairmont, and Brownsdale.
And for those keeping
count, MPR reports:
So
far, Target now faces 22 data breach lawsuits in the
Minnesota U.S. District Court alone. The cases would no
doubt be consolidated if they go forward.
Read more on KARE11
I think this may be a
very viable “take over the world” strategy. It's certainly worth
discussing with my students. (Statistically, half the world is below
average.)
Facebook’s
Plan to Conquer the World — With Crappy Phones and Bad Networks
… At Mobile World
Congress today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new
Internet.org innovation lab where developers will be able to test the
kinds of challenging connectivity conditions they might expect to
find in the developing world–without even leaving California. He
was describing something that had its roots in this trip to Africa.
Facebook had already conquered America. Now, it wanted to take on
the rest of the world–especially the parts where people weren’t
even online yet. The first step in that journey was to score a
phone. Something cheap. Something you couldn’t get in the US.
Srinivasan and George
Wang, another of Facebook’s Android project managers, rose early
and headed to an electronics market on the outskirts of Lagos.
Called Computer Village, it
sprawls across several square blocks just off of Kodesoh Street in
Ikeja and is chock full of every type of device imaginable, new
and used, genuine and counterfeit, legal and decidedly not.
Perhaps it will say
that making videos of students in their bedrooms is a bad idea. Same
for strip searches, expulsion for blogging, forcing students to
reveal their phone passwords, and all the other things I blog about.
Benjamin Herold writes:
Seeking
to help schools and districts better protect students’ privacy, the
U.S. Department of Education released new guidance Tuesday on the
proper use, storage, and security of the massive amounts of data
being generated by new, online educational resources.
The
guidelines,
produced by the department’s privacy technical
assistance center, highlight the rapidly evolving,
often-murky world of educational technology and student data privacy:
“It depends” is the department’s short answer to two major
questions related to the laws governing the sharing of sensitive
student information with third-party vendors.
[....]
The
new federal guidelines are non-binding and contain no new
regulations, reflecting a desire to encourage “self-policing” by
industry and better policies and practices by school systems as first
steps towards shoring up students’ privacy protections.
Read more on Education
Week.
Pardon me while I yawn,
but non-binding, non-enforceable “guidelines” have done basically
nothing in the area of privacy protection. Unless we see regulations
with teeth to protect student and parent privacy and data security,
we’re just wasting time.
Is this a viable
strategy for Facebook? If Google was in the bidding for WhatsApp,
perhaps so! I wonder if my students know what a “dial tone” is,
or why we say “Dial” at all?
Facebook Inc Chief
Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg took a victory lap at the world's
largest mobile technology conference in Barcelona on Monday, after
beating out Google Inc in a
$19 billion acquisition of free messaging service WhatsApp.
But he faces bigger hurdles on the horizon.
Just 18 months after
appearing at risk of getting crushed by the swelling mobile wave, the
No. 1 social network is riding high. It gets a huge chunk of ad
revenue on world-wide users of smartphones and tablets, from
virtually nothing several years ago.
Now, Zuckerberg's
purchase of WhatsApp
- while raising eyebrows with the hefty price paid for a company that
boasts 450 million users but has little revenue - places Facebook
at the heart of smartphone communications.
"In the U.S. you
can dial 911 and get access to basic services," Zuckerberg said,
referring to the country's national emergency services phone number.
"We want to create
a similar kind of dial tone for the Internet," he said, citing
messaging, search and weather information among the essential online
services that he said people throughout the world should be able to
access on Internet-connected phones.
(Related) Perhaps “we
want to rule the world” is not the best way to avoid attention.
Facebook-WhatsApp
deal may spark probes
Facebook Inc.’s plan
to buy WhatsApp Inc. for as much as $19 billion risks triggering
privacy probes across the European Union as watchdogs seek to know
how the mobile-messaging startup’s treasure trove of client data
will be used, the European Union’s top privacy regulator said
yesterday.
… The main concern
for privacy regulators is the collection of data from its users’
address books on their phones when they download the application,
Kohnstamm said.
The risk with such a
database is that “it is tempting to use this data” for a
completely different purpose, said Kohnstamm.
The company’s
“collection of data of people that aren’t using WhatsApp is
extreme and is not compliant with Dutch and European law.”
This could be amusing
(and useful)
The
World’s Constitutions to Read, Search and Compare
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on February 25, 2014
“New constitutions
are written every year. The people who write these important
documents need to read and analyze texts from other places.
Constitute
offers access to the world’s constitutions that users can
systematically compare them across a broad set of topics — using a
modern, clean interface.
HOW
TO USE CONSTITUTE? Constitute allows you to interact with the
world’s constitutions in a few different ways.
- Quickly find relevant passages. The Comparative Constitutions Project has tagged passages of each constitution with a topic — e.g., “right to privacy” or “equality regardless of gender” — so you can quickly find relevant excerpts on a particular subject, no matter how they are worded. You can browse the 300+ topics in the expandable drawer on the left of the page, or see suggested topics while typing in the search bar (which also lets you perform free-text queries).
- Filter searches. Want to view results for a specific region or time period? You can limit your search by country or by date using the buttons under the search bar.
- Save for further analysis. To download or print excerpts from multiple constitutions, click the “pin” button next to each expanded passage you want to save. You can then view and download your pinned excerpts in the drawer on the right.”
Copyright free?
Introducing
eBooks from the Federal Depository Library Program
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on February 25, 2014
“To help meet the
needs of the Federal Depository Library (FDL) community, the U.S.
Government Printing Office (GPO) has made eBooks available in the
Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP). These titles are
joining the growing number of online resources that have been a vital
part of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) for over 20
years. Users can download GPO-provided files of eBooks free of
charge, for use on various eBook reading devices. GPO’s goal is to
expand and provide greater access to U.S. Federal Government content.
eBook titles can be accessed via catalog records available in the
CGP. Catalog records include descriptive information, as well as
Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs) that link to the eBook
titles. PURLs provide web links that can be reliably cited in other
publications. Each CGP record displays the available formats for a
title—.mobi, .epub, as well as other digital formats. Every month,
newly-acquired eBook titles are added to the CGP for public access.”
A markup language (lots
of templates here) that makes it easier to write complex Math
formulas!
– Keep your LaTeX
collaborators up to date by letting everyone access and edit the same
LaTeX document. ShareLaTeX is the easiest LaTeX editor to get
started if you’ve never used LaTeX before. Access the LaTeX editor
and compile your LaTeX documents from any computer.
A Chrome App (based in
Germany) that lets you pretend to be in another country...
– Unblocks websites.
Encrypts your browser traffic. Wifi & hacker protection.
ZenMate is free, easy to install and use! Here’s what you’ll get
through the ZenMate VPN proxy service – total privacy, they encrypt
all your browser traffic. Total freedom – forget location
restrictions.
Dilbert illustrates
moderate “Fear of public speaking”
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