Some of the unanswered
questions resulting from some very poorly managed breach
announcements. Perhaps Congress will ask these questions for us?
The
eBay Data Breach: What You Need To Know
In what is one of the
biggest breaches of user
data yet, eBay has revealed that in March 2014 its servers
were compromised. Other than confirming that staff accounts were
co-opted and advising eBay account holders to change their passwords,
it is revealing nothing else.
How do I surveil thee?
Let me count the
ways...
The
Transparency Reports Database – Government Requests for Users Data
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on May 25, 2014
Silk
Transparency Project - “An increasing number of Internet and
telecommunication companies are publishing reports detailing the
number of government requests for user
interaction data the
companies have received in a given period of time. Technology and
telecommunications companies store data on all user interactions.
This includes “non-content data” (also called metadata).
Metadata consists of login times, user location and IP addresses of
users involved in the communication. Technology and telecom
companies sometimes
store actual content – recordings or copies of emails, chats, video
chats, and voice calls.
Governments file requests for this data for anti-terrorism
surveillance but also for drug investigations and other law
enforcement purposes. Called “Transparency Reports”, these
reports also state how often the company complies with the government
request. Silk
collected all
Transparency Reports from major service providers and normalized them
into a comprehensive data resource for investigating government
requests for users’ data. You can Explore the different Country
/ Company
/ Reporting
Period pages to
research specific queries or click here
for our findings on:
I wonder if my Criminal
Justice students would find this interesting? Should be no Privacy
implications, since all the data is public – right?
Searching
Social Media – Googling Facebook, Searching Twitter
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on May 25, 2014
Stosh
Jonjak, Part 1, | Part
2 “Have you experienced an increase in social media search
requests? As attorneys become more likely to turn to social media
during their informal discovery processes, I have found an uptick in
questions like: “could
you please do a social media background check on this person?”
This is a growing information need I believe law librarians are
excellently suited to fill, and really the next generation of public
records search requests. Through conducting these searches and by
leaning on the expertise of others I have put together my own toolkit
on tricks to use. [Here] I list methods incorporating Google
advanced search terms to conduct searches on Facebook [and Twitter]
quickly and with high relevancy.”
Should be simple to
check the “best source” for revisions. Are there enough to
support a “Corrections and Revisions Blog?”
New
Paper – The (Non) Finality of Supreme Court Opinions
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on May 25, 2014
Adam
Liptak, New York Times: “The
Supreme
Court has been quietly revising its decisions years after they
were issued, altering the law of the land without public notice.
The revisions include “truly substantive changes in factual
statements and legal reasoning,” said Richard
J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard and the author of a
new study examining the phenomenon. The court can act
quickly, as when Justice Antonin
Scalia last month corrected an embarrassing error in a
dissent in a case involving the Environmental Protection Agency. But
most changes are neither prompt nor publicized, and the court’s
secretive editing process has led judges and law professors astray,
causing them to rely on passages that were later scrubbed from the
official record. The widening public access to online versions of
the court’s decisions, some of which do not reflect the final
wording, has made the longstanding problem more pronounced.
Unannounced changes have not reversed decisions outright, but they
have withdrawn conclusions on significant points of law. They have
also retreated from descriptions of common ground with other
justices, as Justice Sandra
Day O’Connor did in a major gay rights case.”
After Outsourcing and
Off-shoring raised wages in other countries, this makes sense.
(Video interview)
The
Reshoring Wave: It’s Taking America by Storm
… There are many
factors fueling this move, including labor costs, transportation,
quality issues and patriotism, among others. Hal Sirkin, a senior
partner at Boston Consulting Group, has been examining this trend for
years and admits that the recent surge in reshoring has shocked even
experts and researchers. Knowledge@Wharton sat down with Sirkin to
discuss the different elements contributing to the reshoring trend
and how it affects global business dynamics, the labor market and
even the U.S.-Mexico relationship.
This is an interesting
idea. I read this as the potential for an almost real time survey on
any question you can properly format. Perhaps my statistics students
could try it. (Okay, probably not but I can dream.)
Online
and social media data as a flawed continuous panel survey –
Microsoft
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on May 25, 2014
“There is a large body of research on utilizing online activity to
predict various real world outcomes, ranging from outbreaks of
influenza to outcomes of elections. There is considerably less work,
however, on using this data to understand topic-specific interest and
opinion amongst the general population and specific demographic
subgroups, as currently measured by relatively expensive surveys.
Here we investigate this possibility by studying a full census of all
Twitter activity during the 2012 election cycle along with
comprehensive search history of a large panel of internet users
during the same period, highlighting the challenges in interpreting
online and social media activity as the results of a survey. As
noted in existing work, the
online population is a non-representative sample of the offline world
(e.g., the U.S. voting population). We extend this work to show how
demographic skew and user participation is non-stationary and
unpredictable over time. In addition, the nature of user
contributions varies wildly around important events. Finally, we
note subtle problems in mapping what people are sharing or consuming
online to specific sentiment or opinion measures around a particular
topic. These issues must be addressed before meaningful insight
about public interest and opinion can be reliably extracted from
online and social media data.” Latest
version (May 15, 2014)
(Related) If you don't
know why you should be doing something like the survey described in
the previous post. Read these.
6
Free Social Media Guides All Business Owners Should Read
Another reason for
Google to improve its translation tool.
Chinese
agencies announce open-access policies – Nature
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on May 25, 2014
“China has officially
joined the international push to make
research papers free to read. On 15 May, the National
Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), one of the country’s
major basic-science funding agencies, and the Chinese Academy of
Sciences (CAS), which funds and conducts research at more than 100
institutions, announced that researchers they support should deposit
their papers into online repositories and make them publicly
accessible within 12 months of publication. The policies, which went
into effect the same day they were announced, are similar to the
mandate set by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Xiaolin
Zhang, director of the National Science Library at the CAS in
Beijing, says that another major research-funding agency, the
national ministry of science and technology, is also researching
open-access policies. He expects that its policy will take a similar
line. (The ministry had not provided comment by the time this
article was published.) Richard
Van Nordeen, 19
May 2014, corrected May 20 2014.
For my student Vets.
Because we remember.
VA
National Gravesite Locator Tool
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on May 25, 2014
“The database
of burial information is updated each day. Search for burial
locations of veterans and their family members in VA National
Cemeteries, state veterans cemeteries, various other military and
Department of Interior cemeteries, and for veterans buried in private
cemeteries when the grave is marked with a government grave marker.
The Nationwide Gravesite Locator includes burial records from many
sources. These sources provide varied data; some searches may
contain less information than others. Information on veterans
buried in private cemeteries was collected for the purpose of
furnishing government grave markers, and we do not have
information available for burials prior to 1997. Erroneous
information can be corrected, but we are unable to add to the
information contained in the existing record. If your search returns
incorrect information about a veteran or family member buried in a
national cemetery, please contact the cemetery directly to discuss
your findings. To report incorrect information about a veteran
buried in a private cemetery, click on “Contact Us” at the top of
this page. Names cannot be added to the listing if a government
grave marker was not furnished for the grave, or if the existing
government grave marker was furnished prior to 1997. For more
complete information concerning individual records, we suggest you
contact the cemetery or local officials.”
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