Small
but interesting.
US
Postal Service Suffers Massive Data Breach, Over 800K Employees And
Customers Exposed
…
Data on as many as 800,000 employees
may have been stolen along with data on customers who called the
USPS' various call centers between January and August of this year.
…
That's actually a little surprising,
given the scope of the operations that the Post Office oversees. If
you get mail -- and 99.9% of us do, even if it's junk -- the Post
Office has a record of your name and address.
…
Getting access to this information --
as well as possibly a web of data on who
sends packages to whom -- could be useful to nation-states
who want to track the actions of specific targets.
…
There’s no word yet on who may have
perpetrated the attack, or exactly what the infection vector was.
Congress has requested more information from the USPS on the attack,
It's what you do after the disaster.
South
Korea court jails captain of doomed ferry for 36 years
The captain of a South Korean ferry that capsized in April killing
304 passengers was jailed for 36 years on Tuesday after a court found
him guilty of negligence,
but was acquitted of homicide for which prosecutors had sought the
death penalty.
The court convicted the
ship's chief engineer of homicide for not aiding two
injured fellow crew members, making him the only one of four facing
homicide charges to be found guilty on that count, and sentenced
him to 30 years in prison.
The remaining 13 surviving crew members of the ferry Sewol were found
guilty of various charges, including negligence, and handed down
prison terms ranging from five to 20 years.
Using
the Bully Pulpit? Is it because the elections are over, or because
he's heading out of town?
President
Obama on Monday put the full weight of his
administration behind an open and free Internet, calling for a strict
policy of so-called net
neutrality and formally opposing deals in which
content providers like Netflix would pay huge sums to broadband
companies for faster access to their customers.
The
president’s proposal is consistent with his longstanding support
for rules that seek to prevent cable and telephone companies from
providing special access to some content providers. But the
statement
posted online Monday, as Mr. Obama traveled to
Asia, is the most direct effort by the president to influence the
debate about the Internet’s future.
…
Mr. Obama said that new rules under consideration by the F.C.C.
should adhere to several key principles:
No website or service should be blocked by an Internet service
provider;
no content should be purposefully slowed down or sped up;
there should be more transparency about where traffic is routed;
and no paid deals should be made to provide a speed advantage to some
providers over others in delivering content.
That
last principle would directly affect some of the megadeals already
being made by companies like Netflix, whose video streaming service
has been gobbling up bandwidth and slowing down the Internet as
millions of people attempt to watch movies and television shows on
their computers and tablets.
(Related)
So I don't have to keep explaining it!
6
things to know about net neutrality
If
you've found most
pieces on net neutrality tl;dr (that's "too
long; didn't read" in Internet parlance), we're here to help.
1.
What is it? Net
neutrality, sometimes called "open
Internet," is the idea that all Internet traffic should be
treated the same way. It's
the way the Internet works now.
2.
Why are we talking about it now? The FCC has been debating a
rule change
3.Why
it's important: If net neutrality goes away, regular folks
won't have to pay more directly for Internet access — but the
higher access fees paid by businesses would almost certainly result
in costs passed down to customers. Less-wealthy entities — think
schools, nonprofits, start-ups, small businesses — would
be handicapped online, unable to offer the same kind of fast access
to their websites that better-funded businesses could.
4.But
net neutrality sounds great. Who on Earth could possibly oppose it?
… Some broadband service providers argue that because they've born
the cost of building out the nation's broadband network, they should
be allowed to recoup those costs.
5.About
that ... : The U.S. has the 13th-fastest
average broadband speeds in the world, behind
Bulgaria.
6.What
happens next: FCC
Chairman Tom Wheeler has issued a statement saying Obama's remarks
will be entered into the record on this discussion (and
the pushback from broadband service providers has already begun).
Now,
we wait.
Damned
if you do, damned if you don't. You need to know the “Goldilocks zone” – the “just right” amount of information to release.
Christopher
Hoyme of Jackson Lewis writes:
Most employers are well aware that potential liability lurks if
unauthorized information is disclosed to third parties. Obvious
examples would include unauthorized employee or applicant health or
financial information or personal information such as social security
numbers and the like.
In
an interesting twist, the Minnesota Supreme Court considered whether
liability could be created when disclosure of requested information
was incomplete.
Read
more about Larson
v. The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, CMInformation
Specialists, Inc., on National
Law Review.
Tools
for privacy?
Firefox
10-Year Anniversary Release Focuses on Privacy
…
While
performance is an important aspect when it comes to surfing the
Internet, recent revelations have made many users more aware of the
importance of privacy. In a survey conducted last month by Harris
Poll on behalf of Mozilla, 74% of the 7,000 respondents said they
felt Internet companies knew too much about them, while 54% admitted
doing something online that they wanted to forget.
In
response to the survey results, the new version of Firefox comes with
two new important privacy features. One of them is the introduction
of the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo
as a pre-installed search option.
…
Another privacy-oriented feature introduced in the latest version of
Firefox is called "Forget." Users
can rely on the "Forget" button to tell the Web browser to
delete their recent activity. Users don’t have to
specify what they want cleared; they only have to choose how much
they want to forget.
"Once
you tell Firefox you want to forget the last 5 minutes, or 2 hours,
or 24 hours, it takes care of the rest.
This
could make a great “case study,” since it seems to include all
the major failures possible in systems development, starting with “no
one in charge.” (Not a very detailed report)
Let’s
compile massive databases on students where the databases are riddled
with errors. It’s good preparation for when they’re adults and
have credit reports.
Howard
Blume reports:
The rollout of a new student records system for Los Angeles schools
was problematic at just about every level, according to a
consultant’s report released Thursday.
[...]
In tracing what went wrong, the report concludes that L.A. Unified
didn’t properly account for the greater size and complexity of its
needs compared to Fresno Unified, from which L.A. adapted the
software.
The entire development process “has been mired with software bugs,”
the consultants wrote. And there was a “deficiency” in available
experts and insufficient involvement from people who would be using
the system.
At many points, red flags indicated serious issues, “but when
it came to the ‘Go/No Go’ decision,” the leadership always said
“Go.”
Read
more on L.A.
Times.
[Here
is the report:
Just
in case.
A
new typeface could help people with dyslexia read with ease
A
Dutch designer has created Dyslexie, a typeface that he hopes will
make it easier for people with dyslexia to read.
[Individuals
can get it free here:
For
my Geeks!
Mozilla
Introduces the First Browser Built For Developers: Firefox Developer
Edition
…
In celebration of the 10th anniversary of Firefox, we’re excited
to unveil Firefox
Developer Edition, the first browser created specifically for
developers.
Worth
having?
First
Aid Smartphone Apps Save Lives
For
my spreadsheet students.
Visualize
Your Data & Make Your Spreadsheets User Friendly With An Excel
Dashboard
…
The main function of an Excel Dashboard is to transform a great deal
of information into one manageable screen. What you choose to put on
that screen is up to you, but this guide will instruct you how to
best draw together different types of Excel content into a single
environment. From there, you might choose to implement it to keep an
eye on project progress at your place of business, or you might use
it at home to track your finances — the same techniques can be
applied to a broad spectrum of uses.
Ideas
for the Big Data class.
Hacking
a Universe's Worth of Data
…
this past Friday about 130 hackers gathered in the Hayden
Planetarium to participate in the American Museum of Natural
History’s very first hackathon.
The
premise was simple: The museum handed the huge dataset they call The
Digital Universe to the hackers and gave them 24 hours to make
something.
…
Christina Wallace,
head of the museum’s brand-new BridgeUp:
STEM program, says that the hackathon had one other purpose,
beyond exploring data: “We wanted to quietly showcase the diversity
of people who go into science and tech careers. Half our
participants at the hackathon are women. All four of our judges are
women—that one we didn’t even plan, they were just the best.”
(BridgeUp: STEM is a program for high-school girls to introduce them
to computer science, and its applications in fields like genetics and
archaeology and paleontology.)
For
my vets.
Vets
can make out with several freebies on Veterans Day
No comments:
Post a Comment