Do you suppose GCHQ read all of Hillary's emails
too?
Alexander J. Martin reports:
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has ruled that GCHQ is allowed to collect the communications of MPs.
An IPT announcement stated that it “heard and resolved issues relating to the status, meaning and effect of what has been called the Harold Wilson Doctrine, or the Wilson Doctrine, originating in the statement in the House of Commons on 17 November 1966 by the Rt Hon Harold Wilson, the then Prime Minister.”
Wilson promised that MPs’ and peers’ phones would not be tapped by the security services. However, he also said that he might secretly remove this rule, and only tell parliament that he had done so at some later point decided by him. [The only time you can trust a politician is when they tell you they are not trustworthy. Bob]
Read more on The
Register.
Interesting. I can use this for my Computer
Security and Statistics students. More reporting (or more
sensational reporting) does not change reality. Come to think of it,
I should send this to my Risk Management students too.
Cyberattacks
Are Not On the Rise, Researchers Say
… That's the finding of research from the
University of New Mexico Department of Computer Science, which
suggests that while cybersecurity should remain a priority,
cyberattacks are not growing unabated.
The study published in the Journal of Interactive
Marketing, "Hype
and Heavy Tails: A Closer Look at Data Breaches," provides
some reassuring news.
… By using a statistical modeling method known
as the Bayesian approach, the authors conclude that the data provided
by the PRC shows neither an increase in size nor in frequency of
cyberattacks since 2005.
The study also differentiates between negligent
and malicious data breaches; negligence implies the data was exposed
accidentally through lack of security, while malicious breaches mean
a hacker purposefully set out to bypass security measures in search
of the data. The authors conclude that negligent
breaches occur twice as often as malicious breaches do,
meaning such the negligent variety are avoidable if the proper
security measures are taken.
This is about “standing.” I wonder if
Coca-Cola had a reason to keep employee data on those laptops? Six
or seven years for notice to be sent to the employees?
Judy Greenwald reports:
A Coca-Cola employee who was the victim of identity theft after company laptops were stolen did suffer actual harm as a result, and can pursue a putative class action lawsuit against the company, says a Pennsylvania federal court.
Shane K. Enslin began working for a company that was eventually acquired by the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. in 1996, according to the ruling by the U.S. District Court in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in Shane K. Enslin v. The Coca-Cola Company et al.
Read more on Business
Insurance.
[From
the article:
Mr. Enslin was required to provide the company
with personal identification information including his social
security number, address, bank account information, credit card
numbers, driver's license information and motor vehicle records,
according to the ruling.
Over
nearly a six-year period beginning In January 2007 and
continuing through November 2013, about 55 company laptops containing
information on more than 74,000 people, including Mr. Enslin were
stolen, according to the ruling.
By December 2013, all 55 laptops were recovered,
and an employee who was responsible for retaining or destroying the
laptops, was arrested and charged with felony and misdemeanor theft,
according to the ruling.
In February 2014, Mr. Enslin received a letter
from the company informing him of the theft and offering him one year
of credit monitoring.
A few months later, Mr. Enslin began to experience
identity theft, including the unauthorized purchase of thousands of
dollars of merchandise on his credit cards and attempts to have his
address changed. In July 2014, an identity thief was able to obtain
a job using his name.
… While a number of Mr. Enslin's individual
charges were dismissed, Judge Joseph F. Leeson Jr. held he had
standing to file suit against the company based on the harm he
suffered and that a connection could be drawn between the identity
theft and the laptops' theft.
If you know the device I use, you can tie that to
everything I do – and therefore who I am.
Venkat Balasubramani writes:
Many VPPA cases involve free online streaming services. Here, plaintiff alleged that he downloaded the Cartoon Network app, and Cartoon Network then disclosed to Bango, an ad network, plaintiff’s device ID and the videos he viewed. Plaintiff also alleged that Bango easily could derive his identity and thus knew both his identity and the videos he viewed.
The district court rejected plaintiff’s arguments, concluding that plaintiff was a “subscriber” of Cartoon Network, but it did not disclose personally identifiable information to Bango. (Blog post on the district court ruling here: “Android ID Isn’t Personally Identifiable Information Under the Video Privacy Protection Act“.) The Eleventh Circuit affirms on alternate grounds, holding that the plaintiff wasn’t a “subscriber.”
Read more on Technology
& Marketing Law Blog.
Interesting. How were they spending their time?
Will the FTC take over for Justice because of the Wyndham
decision?
Justice
Department Data Reveal 29 Percent Drop in Criminal Prosecutions of
Corporations
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Oct 13, 2015
“Criminal prosecution of corporate violators by
the U.S. Department of Justice declined by 29 percent between FY 2004
and FY 2014, despite
repeated claims to the contrary by top officials. [They
lost touch with reality long ago? Bob] Meanwhile over
the same period, there has been little change in the number of times
investigators at the various federal agencies have asked that
criminal cases be brought against corporations; such referrals have
actually increased by 2.6 percent. Moreover, the overall number of
corporations in the country that could be investigated for criminal
wrongdoing has grown by about 24 percent. These findings are based
on a new analysis by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records
Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of hundreds of thousands of records
developed and collected by the Justice Department. The case-by-case
records were obtained by TRAC as the result of a 17-year litigation
effort under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Supporting data
from the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the Internal Revenue Service
also contributed to these findings. For an in-depth analysis of this
observed decrease in the criminal prosecution of corporations, see
the report at: http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/406/“
Perspective. Interesting read.
For a
decade or two, for most people 'the internet' meant a web browser, a
mouse and a keyboard. There were a few things around the edges, like
IM, Spotify, Skype or Steam (or, for some people, email), but for
most people and for almost all activities, the web was the
internet. The web was the platform, not the PC operating
system - people created services for the web, far more than for
Windows or MacOS.
And once the browser wars died down, the browser
was pretty much a neutral platform. Browser technology changed and
that made new things possible (Google Maps, say), but the browser
makers were not king-makers and were not creating or enabling
entirely new interaction models.
…
On mobile this is different - it's the operating system itself that's
the internet services platform, far more than the browser, and the
platform is not neutral.
There's an App for that? Looking for technical
errors in how the ticket is written?
Fixed, The
App That Fixes Your Parking Tickets, Gets Blocked In San Francisco,
Oakland & L.A.
Fixed,
a mobile
app that fights parking tickets and other traffic citations on
users’ behalf, has had its parking ticket operations blocked in
three of its top cities, San Francisco, Oakland and L.A. after the
cities increased the measures they were taking to block Fixed from
accessing their parking ticket websites.
… Using its app, Fixed customers could snap a
photo of their parking ticket using their phone’s camera, and then
Fixed would check against a variety of common errors before writing a
customized letter to the city on the user’s behalf. The app also
cleverly tapped into Google Street View to check to see if the city
had the proper signage in place in the area a ticket was received.
Founder David Hegarty once
noted that over half of tickets have an issue that would make
them invalid, but the city didn’t tend to play by its own rules
when arbitrating disputes. That made Fixed’s “win” rate only
20%-30% on tickets, as
of earlier this year. (When the company won, it charged a
success fee of 25% of the original fine – a reduction in what a
customer would have otherwise paid.)
… When Fixed began faxing
its submissions to SFMTA last year, the agency emailed the
startup to stop using their fax machine. When Fixed pointed out that
it was legal to do so, the agency simply shut off their fax.
For my students.
Wix Editor
Produces Modern, Code-Free Websites
The Wix
Web-development firm wants small business owners to put
away their HTML guides and CSS tutorials. The company just launched
a new editor and design toolset that produces professional-level
small
business websites and requires no meddling with the
underlying code.
I can use this in many classes to keep my students
from going overboard.
How to Make
Your Graphs & Tables Look More Professional
Whether you’re creating charts
and graphs in Excel
or formatting data
tables in Word, there’s one thing you should always keep in
mind: if it doesn’t look good, no one will read it.
… What’s the key takeaway? Less is
more. Remove or mute all unnecessary elements so that the
spotlight can shine on the data you want to present. After all, data
is what it’s all about.
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