Since there have been laptops, there have been
people who just can't imagine why anyone would steal them. I hope my
Computer Security students don't fail like this.
Montana Public Radio reports
that New West Health Services is notifying 25,000 members after a
laptop with their PHI was stolen. Here’s the statement that was
posted on New West Medicare’s site today, with one interruption by
me for a short, but tasteful, rant:
New West Health Services d/b/a New West Medicare has unfortunately learned of an incident involving a company laptop computer that was stolen from an off-site location. The computer contained electronic files with personal information from past and present New West customers. The computer was password protected, [Worthless Bob] and there is no evidence to suggest that the information stored on the laptop was the target of the theft or that any customer information has been accessed or misused.
… Based on the forensic investigation, New West believes that the laptop contained customers’ names, addresses and, in certain instances, driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers or Medicare claim numbers. The laptop may have also contained limited information related to some individuals’ payment of Medicare premiums, including electronic funds transfer information (bank account number, account holder name, account type and bank routing number) or credit card information (card holder name, credit card account number, expiration date and CVV (“Card Verification Value”) number). Additionally, the laptop may have contained some customers’ health information, including dates of birth, medical history and condition, diagnosis and/or prescription information.
… out of an abundance of caution, New West is proactively notifying impacted members so they can take steps to safeguard their personal information going forward.
Okay, they
should not be allowed to claim that they are (only) notifying out of
an “abundance of caution,” when they are required by law to
notify.
These tools
would allow us to write less ambiguous policies in many areas.
Definitely worth looking at!
Automated
Comparisons of Ambiguity in Privacy Policies and the Impact of
Regulation
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jan 15, 2016
Reidenberg, Joel R. and Bhatia, Jaspreet and
Breaux, Travis and Norton, Thomas B., Automated Comparisons of
Ambiguity in Privacy Policies and the Impact of Regulation (January
9, 2016). Fordham Law Legal Studies Research Paper Forthcoming.
Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2715164
“Website privacy policies often contain
ambiguous language that undermines the purpose and value of privacy
notices for site users. This paper compares the impact of different
regulatory models on the ambiguity of privacy policies in multiple
online sectors. First, the paper develops a theory of vague and
ambiguous terms. Next, the paper develops a scoring method to
compare the relative vagueness of different privacy policies. Then,
the theory and scoring are applied using natural language processing
to rate a set of policies. The ratings are compared against two
benchmarks to show whether government-mandated privacy disclosures
result in notices less ambiguous than those emerging from the market.
The methodology and technical tools can provide companies with
mechanisms to improve drafting, enable regulators to easily identify
poor privacy policies and empower regulators to more effectively
target enforcement actions.”
Reasonable? Until they miss something…
The National Security Agency has released its
Transparency
Report on the implementation of the USA Freedom Act — as well
as the minimization
procedures to be used for the new non-bulk telephone metadata
program — giving us a first glimpse of how the law’s reforms are
being cashed out in practice. There are some useful points of
clarification here — including one or two surprises — but also
many questions left unanswered.
There is political puffery and then there is
outright lying. Can Congress tell the difference?
FBI Director James Comey recently told
the Senate Judiciary Committee that encryption routinely poses a
problem for law enforcement. He stated that encryption
has “moved from being available [only] to the sophisticated bad guy
to being the default. So it’s now affecting every
criminal investigation that folks engage in.”
Another case of government being government.
The Freedom
of Information Act is Broken: A Report from House Oversight Cmte.
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jan 15, 2016
U.S. House of Representatives Committee on
Oversight and Government Reform, Jason Chaffetz (UT-3), Chairman –
FOIA
Is Broken: A Report Staff Report, 114th Congress, January 2016.
“The Freedom of Information Act established a
right for the public to access federal agency records. The statute
simply requires requesters to reasonably describe the records they
wish to receive and the agency is required to produce those records
in 20 working days. In practice, however, the FOIA process is much
more complicated and difficult to navigate. Many of the
complications are engineered into the process by the federal agencies
themselves. The FOIA process is broken. Unnecessary complications,
misapplication of the law, and extensive delays are common
occurrences. Agencies fail to articulate reasons for delays or
explain how to navigate the process. Requesters wait months, not
weeks, before receiving any response. Even a denial on a
technicality can be significantly delayed because the agency may fail
to read the request for months. Unreasonable requests for detail and
repeated ultimatums to respond within narrow windows or start all
over reinforce the perspective that the process is designed to keep
out all but the most persistent and experienced requesters.”
They're crazy, right? What constitutes
propaganda? The best propaganda is truth. ISIS is using Trump in
their marketing pitch because “Trump hates Muslims” is seems as
true. Will I be branded a terrorist for saying that?
Can Twitter
Be Liable for ISIS Tweets?
Islamic State has been able to mobilize followers
via social media sites like Twitter.
Could those social media sites be held liable for such online
activity?
A
civil lawsuit filed against Twitter Inc. in California federal
court this week could offer some answers.
The
lawsuit was brought by a plaintiffs’ class-action law firm on
behalf of the wife of a Florida defense contractor who was one of two
Americans killed in a shooting spree attack in Jordan last
November. It alleges that ISIS was responsible for the attack and
that Twitter helped contribute to the bloodshed by allowing the
terrorist group to use the site to spread propaganda, attract new
recruits and raise money.
Twitter
says the suit has no merit. “While we believe the lawsuit is
without merit, we are deeply saddened to hear of this family’s
terrible loss….. Violent threats and the promotion of terrorism
deserve no place on Twitter and, like other social networks, our
rules make that clear,” a Twitter spokesman said in a statement
Thursday.
The lawsuit “will be a very big deal if it
survives a motion to dismiss, but that is a very big if,” wrote
Brookings Institution fellow Benjamin Wittes and Harvard Law School
student Zoe Bedell in an
analysis of the complaint posted on Lawfare Blog,
I'm sure the price is nice, but binge watching is
good too.
Amazon
Prime price slashed 25% this weekend to celebrate Golden Globe win
This weekend Amazon is celebrating its Golden
Globe wins for the series Mozart in the Jungle with a price
drop on an annual Prime membership. Starting at 9 p.m. Pacific on
Friday and lasting until 11:59 p.m. local time on Sunday, Amazon is
selling an annual Prime subscription for $73—a $26 dollar price
cut.
… During the same time as Amazon is offering
the cheap Prime price, the retailer is allowing free streaming of
seasons one and two of Mozart in the Jungle for
everyone—not just Prime subscribers.
A poster for the next time I teach spreadsheets.
Be The
Smartest Person At Work With These Excel Tricks
For my Geeky students.
15
Incredible Firefox Addons For Geeks
More ways to harrass teach my
students!
4 Free
Tools for Creating & Playing Interactive Quiz Games
The following are interactive quiz game tools that
I've used with great success in my classroom and or in my workshops.
Kahoot:
This is the obvious one to include in this post as
it did inspire the post. Kahoot
provides a fun way to gather feedback from a group through their
phones, iPads, Chromebooks, or any other device that has a web
browser and an Internet connection. You can include pictures and or
videos as part of each question that you create and share in a Kahoot
activity. Players are awarded points for answering correctly and
quickly. Or you can turn off the points system to use Kahoot in a
non-competitive environment.
Socrative Space Race:
Socrative
is a free student response system that allows you to gather feedback
from students through any Internet-connected device. One of my
favorite aspects of Socrative is the variety of ways in which you can
pose prompts and questions to your students. The Space Race feature
has been a hit everywhere that I've shown it over the years. The
Space Race feature allows you to create virtual teams for answering
questions or prompts. The screen students see masks their
classmates' names, but as the teacher you can see your students'
names and download a report of students' responses.
Quizalize:
Quizalize
is a free quiz game platform. Students play your quiz games on their
laptops or tablets by going to the Quizalize website then entering
their names and a class code. Students are awarded points for
correctly answering questions quickly. Students are given feedback
instantly on every quiz question that they answer. A total score is
presented to students at the end of every quiz. Creating quizzes on
Quizalize is a simple process. To get started just name your quiz
and tag it with a subject label. As you write each quiz question you
can include a picture and up to four answer choices. You can specify
a time limit of 5 to 120 seconds for each question. Quizalize
offers a marketplace in which you can find quizzes created by other
users. Some of the quizzes are free and others are sold for a dollar
or two. To be clear, creating and playing your own quizzes is
completely free.
Triventy:
Triventy
uses a concept that is similar to Kahoot. To play a Triventy quiz
game the teacher projects the game questions at the front of the room
and students answer the questions on their mobile devices or laptops.
Points are awarded for answering correctly. Bonus points are
awarded for answering quickly. Students join the quiz game by going
to Triv.in and entering the game pin assigned to your game.
Saturday silly.
Hack
Education Weekly News
… President Obama delivered his final State of
the Union address Tuesday evening . “Education”
showed up several times in the speech, including the idea that every
students need to learn to “write
computer code.”
… Via
The Hill: “House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz
(R-Utah) is warning that a hack on the Department of Education would
dwarf last year’s massive breach at the Office of Personnel
Management. ‘Almost half of America's records are sitting at the
Department of Education,’ Chaffetz said at a Brookings Institution
event on Thursday. ‘I think ultimately that’s going to be the
largest data breach that we've ever seen in the history of our
nation.’”
… “Bronx Science Bans Cellphones From Wi-Fi
as Students Devour It,” says
The New York Times. [Potentially
dangerous Bob]
… Tech and business training company General
Assembly is expanding
to Denver.
… The
Apollo Education Group announced
that it was exploring selling off the University of Phoenix,
the biggest
for-profit university in the US. More
via Phil Hill.
… “Oral Roberts University is now requiring
all freshmen to wear tracking devices to monitor their physical
activity,” News
on 6 reports. “It appears as though school staff and
instructors will be able to access the fitness tracking information
gathered by the students’ devices. ‘The Fitbit trackers will
feed into the D2L gradebook, automatically logging aerobics points,’”
according to the university’s website.
… The
opening paragraphs from Education Week’s look at “the future of
big data and analytics” in education: “Imagine classrooms
outfitted with cameras that run constantly, capturing each child’s
every facial expression, fidget, and social interaction, every day,
all year long. Then imagine on the ceilings of those rooms infrared
cameras, documenting the objects that every student touches
throughout the day, and microphones, recording every word that each
person utters. Picture now the children themselves wearing
Fitbit-like devices that track everything from their heart rates to
their time between meals.” Imagine.
… Via
The Washington Post: “The U.S. Education Department’s new
planned system of records that will collect detailed data on
thousands of students – and transfer records to private contractors
– is being slammed by experts who say there are not adequate
privacy safeguards embedded in the project.”
No comments:
Post a Comment