I almost don't bother with these any more. They are small scale (usually less than a few thousand people) and not really an indication of a systemic failure. But the customer relations hit has got to hurt – especially when millions of Youtube viewers are watching...
http://wcbstv.com/watercooler/local_story_121055435.html
May 1, 2007 8:55 am US/Eastern
YouTube Shocker: Chase Bank Records Found In Trash
Video Exploits Security Lapses With Customer Info
Jay Dow Reporting
(CBS) NEW YORK A bank error that's certainly not in your favor has found its way onto the Internet, and now officials say very personal information of thousands of Chase Bank customers could find its way into the hands of identity thieves.
A new YouTube video flaunting the personal information of Chase Bank customers is getting a lot of attention. The video shows a person holding numerous confidential financial documents of bank customers, and pointing out information that is supposed to be protected by the bank.
"Social Security Numbers here as well as date of birth," one person could be heard saying on the video, pointing to one of the documents.
Bank statements, credit reports and other personal documents were seen being unearthed in the video.
Researchers for the Service Employees International Union, which is battling the banking giant over its use of non-union security employees, found the documents out in the open. [No bias here! Bob] They were found in trash bags that were left outside several New York City Chase branches.
If they can recognize your face, why not read your lips?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/01/177254&from=rss
Lip-Reading Surveillance Cameras
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 01, @02:16PM from the open-the-pod-bay-doors dept.
mrogers sends us to Infowars for the following news from the UK, "which is fast becoming the front line of the war on privacy": "'Read my lips..."' used to be a figurative saying. Now the British government is considering taking it literally by adding lip reading technology to some of the four million or so surveillance cameras in order identify terrorists and criminals by watching what everyone says. Perhaps the lip-reading cameras and the shouting cameras will find something to talk about."
Related
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/01/AR2007050100600_pf.html
British motorists face spy in sky monitoring
By Jeremy Lovell Reuters Tuesday, May 1, 2007; 9:25 AM
LONDON (Reuters) - Spies in the sky may track motorists in Britain within a decade if the government goes ahead with controversial plans to introduce road user charging schemes, scientists said on Tuesday.
The plans were unveiled in a report on future transport policy in November as a way of cutting congestion and prompted 1.8 million people to sign an electronic protest petition.
Monitoring would be via a combination of static cameras to capture license plate details, electronic tags in vehicles that would be read by roadside monitoring stations and global positioning system satellites to read on-board transponders.
Don't count this out yet. Even if criminals are unwilling to take the risk doesn't mean it isn't still a viable tool of cyberwar.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/01/2135212&from=rss
Death Knell For DDoS Extortion?
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 01, @07:17PM from the greener-pastures dept. Security The Internet IT
Ron writes "Symantec security researcher Yazan Gable has put forward an explanation as to why the number of denial of service attacks has been declining (coincident with the rise of spam). His theory is that DoS attacks are no longer profitable to attackers. While spam and phishing attacks directly generate profit, he argues that extortion techniques often used with DoS attacks are far more risky and often make an attacker no profit at all. Gable writes: 'So what happens if the target of the attack refuses to pay? The DoS extortionist is obligated to carry out a prolonged DoS attack against them to follow through on their threats. For a DoS extortionist, this is the worst scenario because they have to risk their bot network for nothing at all. Since the target has refused to pay, it is likely that they will never pay. As a consequence, the attacker has to spend time and resources on a lost cause.'"
Parents want to know but are afraid to ask their kids?
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/6420AP_WA_Kissing_Protest.html
Last updated April 30, 2007 11:01 a.m. PT
Gig Harbor High School students protest kissing camera surveillance
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
GIG HARBOR, Wash. -- A couple of dozen Gig Harbor High School students are demonstrating outside the school today to protest the use of a surveillance camera to catch two girls kissing.
One student reporting the demonstration for the school paper, Amber Critchley, says they are saying the school shouldn't have interfered and that sexual orientation shouldn't matter.
Principal Greg Schellenberg says the protest is a disruption but classes are continuing.
He says he congratulated the students on holding a peaceful demonstration. The students are wearing "free love" T-shirts and waving peace signs.
Schellenberg says the school was wrong to show surveillance video to the parents of one girl who was seen kissing another girl. He says the parents of one girl had asked the school to report anything unusual with her.
Schellenberg says she is no longer at the school, but the other girl remains a student.
He says the school does not target gay and lesbian students.
One of those tools to eliminate lawyers?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070426/010447.shtml
We'll Have To Wait For The Next Lawsuit To Find Out If A Web Crawler Can Enter Into A Contract
from the settled-away dept
Last month, news spread concerning a somewhat odd lawsuit involving the Internet Archive and the question as to whether or not a computer spider can enter into a contract just by indexing a website. The case involved a woman who ran a website and had put some text at the bottom claiming that just visiting the website was entering into a contract, and part of that contract included not copying or distributing the content. The Internet Archive's spider did what it does and archived the page, leading to the threat of a lawsuit. The Internet Archive preemptively went to court to have a judge say they were in the clear, at which point the woman countersued. Of course, she didn't just countersue for copyright infringement, but a range of charges including racketeering. Most of the discussion focused on whether or not a spider could enter into a contract, though an equally compelling question is whether or not you can automatically force someone to give up their fair use rights. Unfortunately, neither question is going to be decided in this case. WebProNews reports that the woman and the Internet Archive have settled the case out of court with both sides putting happy faces on the story. At the same time, however, WebProNews also reports that the woman in question is still going after some of her critics, including publishing all sorts of personal information about at least two of them, potentially violating some privacy laws (at least one of the critics she's revealing info on is a minor). So perhaps there will still be a lawsuit stemming from this situation after all.
This is a hot story. The “secret number” is all over the net!
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070501/202154.shtml
AACS Discovers The Streisand Effect: The More You Try To Suppress Something, The More Attention It Gets
from the let's-try-this-again dept
If you follow tech related sites, by now you've heard the story that the folks who control AACS, the copy protection used in next generation DVDs, have decided to send DMCA takedown notices to various sites that have posted the 128-bit integer that is needed, along with some software, to decrypt the video content on these new DVDs. This is odd for a few reasons. The key came out many months ago and has been available on the web for quite some time. There are, of course, the basic questions concerning whether or not this key alone really does violate the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA -- but that's a separate issue. What's more intriguing here is trying to understand the thought process behind the decision to send out these takedown notices. As anyone who's been online for more than about two days knows, the more you try to suppress something online, the more attention you're going to call to it. Years back, we joking referred to this as the Streisand Effect -- after an incident where Barbara Streisand tried to remove some photos from the web, making them a lot more popular. The name has stuck, and it still amazes us that anyone doesn't recognize what will happen when they try to make such a move. While the group has forced some sites to pull pages here and there, every page they pull is just increasing the anger from a growing group of folks who are making sure the number shows up in many, many more places -- including directly in a URL. Digg, which was one of the sites accused of taking down pages about this, has been under a massive effort from folks to make sure that every story on the front page somehow points to the key in question (and it's interesting to see the anger of users turned against Digg for taking down some of these stories, even though they're pretty much required to thanks to the DMCA). As happened with DeCSS, it's only a matter of time until someone writes a song incorporating the key as well. Effectively, all that's been done here is to draw much, much more attention to the fact that the encryption on next generation DVDs is incredibly weak -- so that a lot more people now know about it. Most of us honestly couldn't have cared any less about the integer or the inner workings (or non-workings) of the encryption system -- and yet now we know a lot more. That can't be the intended consequence of these notices, but that's what's happened. Nice work, Hollywood.
It should have been obvious that they would do this (see next article for more obvious patents...)
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070501/203602.shtml
That Didn't Take Long: Vonage Asks Court To Review Verizon Patents Under New Supreme Court Rules
from the quick-response dept
Well, that certainly didn't take very long at all. Just a day after the Supreme Court smacked down the Federal Circuit for not properly reviewing patents for "obviousness," Vonage has used the case as an opportunity to ask the courts for a retrial in their VoIP patent lawsuit with Verizon. Vonage claims that, under the new obviousness test, Verizon's patents may be toast. When combined with recent discoveries of prior art that certainly may be true. This certainly is opportunistic of Vonage, but it will be interesting to see how the courts react to this request. One that that's definitely become clear is that courts at all levels are actually going to have to look more closely at obviousness, rather than brushing it off as they have for years. In the meantime, expect many more cases along these lines in the near future. It may clog the system for a bit, but if the end result is fewer bogus patents, it's worth it.
See! This is why patent attorneys get the big bucks!
Attention patent attorny types: I have a method for determining the page number even when the pages aren't numbered! I call it counting!
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070430/163631.shtml
Amazon Patents Counting Book Pages To Figure Out Unnumbered Page Numbers
from the doing-the-math dept
theodop writes "The USPTO has issued Amazon a brand spanking new patent for Determining Page Numbers of Page Images, a process which the e-tailer explains involves 'extracting all numbers that are exactly one different than a number found on an adjacent page'." Basically, they've figured out a way to look at pages in a book and see if some of the pages don't have numbers, and then use basic addition and subtraction to figure out what the actual number of those pages are. This isn't particularly complicated. Why should one company get a patent for it?
Geeks of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but a few stupid laws!
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070430/011612.shtml
The Growth Of The Pirate Bay As A Political Movement
from the good-or-bad? dept
Tim Lee points us to an LA Times article on the growing success of The Pirate Bay's political movement, noting that its membership is growing in Sweden and is nearly equal to that of the country's Green Party. This is ironic for a few reasons -- most of all being that the entertainment industry was so proud over the raids on the Pirate Bay's servers last year, insisting that it had killed off the site. Instead, the site was back up in days, and the attention propelled what had been a fairly minor search engine for BitTorrent trackers into the limelight -- helping to get it many more users and to get the political movement some traction. In fact, we've now seen other political parties take on some of the Pirate Bay's platform. To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this. I don't support the Pirate Bay's position that unauthorized downloads are defensible. Instead, I think that copyright holders need to come to the realization that they're actually better off by letting people download content -- not that it needs to be forced upon them by users taking matters into their own hands. That said, by taking such an extreme position (and having it get some attention), perhaps it's more likely that content holders will come to this realization. They'll simply be forced to adapt and will start coming up with more successful business models that actually benefit from free downloads rather than trying to block them and sue their best customers.
Better than pins in a wall map?
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/014730.html
May 01, 2007
Global Incident Map Displays Terrorist Acts, Suspicious Activity, General Terrorism News
GlobalIncidentMap.com: "This free public service website was created to give the public, law enforcement, military, and government individuals a new way to visualize, and become instantly aware of terrorism and security incidents across the world...While this website employs much automation, the news gathering itself is not automated - news items are located, reviewed, and manually entered into the database...Immediately below the map there is a scrolling list of the most recently added incidents - click an item of interest to get to the full incident description and links to related news items, as well as a more precise satellite/map image...This page automatically reloads every 420 seconds." Users may search by type of incident, country, date/time and city.
NPR on the Media interview with Morgan Clements, founder and publisher of the Global Incident Map
It's always nice to see how the other half lives...
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/014724.html
April 30, 2007
WSJ Posts CEO Compensation Scorecard
WSJ free article - CEO Compensation Scorecard: "...starting with this year's proxies, the SEC has changed how companies report pay. For companies whose fiscal year ended after Dec. 15, 2006, the SEC now mandates a table that includes salary, bonus, the accounting cost of stock and stock-option awards, incentive-plan payments, change in pension value and deferred-compensation earnings, and all other compensation -- typically perquisites. It also includes, for the first time, a "total compensation" column, which attempts to make pay across companies more comparable."
For in-depth looks at CEO compensation, see the CEO pay posts in WSJ.com's Marketbeat and Health Blog.
Background
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/014723.html
April 30, 2007
The Broadband Factbook Sent to Congress
Press release: "This week, the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA) delivered the Broadband Fact Book to Congress on the heels of an OECD report and hearings in both houses of Congress on broadband deployment. The Factbook, available in hard copy and online is part of an IIA initiative, and according to the group, its purpose is "to prepare for the impending explosive growth in video applications and downloads that is triggering the deluge of data, and to inform why it portends both a tremendous opportunity and an important challenge." The Factbook is a resource for policy makers and all Americans that are learning about high-speed broadband -- how we use it, who benefits, the future demands on the Internet and what the United States must do to bring faster, affordable and more reliable broadband to every American."
Not getting enough politics in the newspapers and on TV?
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/014734.html
May 01, 2007
washingtonpost.com Launches Presidential Campaign Tracker
Via Adrian Holovaty, see the "washingtonpost.com's Presidential Campaign Tracker uses information from campaigns, media reports and other sources to compile a listing of events involving presidential candidates and their spouses. The tracker covers events since January 2007. It does not include every event -- particularly fundraisers, which often are unannounced. Some events will be added retroactively as more details become available.
The list of candidates gives you an overview of recent and upcoming campaign events. Each candidate gets his or her own page (e.g., Mike Huckabee). In addition, each candidate gets a page for each state he or she has visited -- e.g., Mike Huckabee's visits to Iowa, or the full list of states Barack Obama has visited.
You can browse by date on a color-coded calendar, and, of course, each day has its own permalink (e.g., April 13, 2007). Each state gets its own page, too, so you can keep an eye on past and future candidate visits to Illinois, for example.
RSS feeds for every candidate and every state [are available]. Full information is here."
Perhaps my math students would be interested? Nahhhh...
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/01/1827259&from=rss
Mathematica 6 Launched
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 01, @08:41PM from the simulate-this dept. Math Software Upgrades
Ed Pegg writes "Wolfram Research has just released Mathematica 6. That link, in addition to the usual 'dramatic breakthrough' material, has an amazing flash banner that simultaneously shows a thousand mathematical demonstrations all at once. The animations came from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, a free service with 1200+ dynamically interactive examples of math, science, and physics, all with code. For the product itself, much is new or improved, with built-in math databases, improved visualizations, and more."
