Phil does good software. Adding the
Seals is interesting, but probably not significant. Perhaps they
could market to law firms for client communications?
Email
Privacy Pioneer Launches Silent Circle To Protect Mobile, Internet
Calls
An Internet
privacy veteran and inventor of a popular
email
encryption scheme is launching a suite of new products next month
that will allow people to scramble their mobile phone calls, e-mails,
text messages and Internet voice and video calls.
Phil
Zimmermann, creator of the standard email encryption known
as PGP, which stands for ‘Pretty Good Privacy’, will roll out the
private, encrypted communications tools on September 17 through his
company,
Silent
Circle.
The software will
be available for download to iPhones, Androids, desktops and laptops
worldwide, and will give customers the ability to scramble their
mobile and Internet voice calls and messages, including those
conducted via
Skype
and
FaceTime.
No mention of the resolution of the
'excessive force' claim. If the quotes were published in a newspaper
article there would have been no violation (and everyone could claim
they were mis-quoted) Would this also apply to a live TV interviewer
asking the same questions? (Perhaps answering with a camera in your
face is “consent?”)
Anatomy
of a Privacy Victim
Stewart Baker
writes:
Adam Mueller, a
police-the-police campaigner,
has
been convicted and sentenced to three months in jail for
recording and posting telephone conversations with a police captain,
a high school principal and a school secretary in Manchester, NH.
Mueller was calling for comment on a student’s cell phone video
allegedly showing a Manchester officer using excessive force. The
conviction has led to sympathetic coverage in both the
left
and
right
blogospheres.
But one point
hasn’t gotten much coverage. It turns out that Mueller was
convicted of violating a privacy law.
He had recorded a
conversation “without the consent of all parties to the
communication,” a violation of
NH
570-A:2. New Hampshire is one of about a dozen “all party
consent” states.
(Related) Another pesky Privacy law
Rich Daly reports:
Strong state
privacy laws continue to complicate health information exchanges’
efforts to ease health-data sharing, a senior federal health
technology official said Monday. And a key to overcoming such
obstacles may be greater use of meta tags.
Joy Pritts, chief
privacy officer in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health
Information Technology, told a Washington health policy gathering
that some health information exchanges are not accepting electronic
health records containing mental health or substance-abuse data.
Their refusal stems from concerns that certain state medical privacy
laws that are more strict than federal law and require individual
patient agreement before their data is shared preclude exchanges’
use of the information.
The proposed solution – meta-tagging
sensitive elements and requiring patient permission to open the
protected elements – may not be an adequate solution, however. In
the last few years, we have seen all too many hacks of data that
custodians may have believed were secure. As long as the sensitive
data are embedded, they will be at some level of risk of acquisition
and viewing by unauthorized individuals.
Perhaps the law does apply to Hulu
Hulu’s
attempt to dismiss privacy lawsuit fails
Hulu’s attempt to dismiss a
consolidated class action complaint alleging violations of the Video
Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) failed when federal Magistrate Judge
Laurel Beeler
denied
their motion on Friday.
The lawsuit (
previous
coverage) is one of a few that were filed over the use of
re-spawning cookies (“supercookies”). In this case, the
plaintiffs allege that their personally identifiable information was
shared, without their knowledge or consent, with third parties that
included online ad networks, metrics companies,and social networks
such as Scorecard Research (“Scorecard”), Facebook, DoubleClick,
GoogleAnalytics, and QuantCast.
Hulu’s arguments –
all of which were rejected by the court – claimed that the
plaintiffs did not have standing, a streaming service was not covered
by the VPPA, and even if it was, the sharing of data was part of the
firm’s “usual course of business,” and hence, did not violate
the Act.
Their motion to dismiss also argued
that the plaintiffs were not paid “subscribers” to their service.
The VPPA talks about “consumers,” defined as renters,
purchasers, or subscribers. Hulu argued –
unsuccessfully – that the term “subscriber” should involve some
payment, and since the plaintiffs hadn’t paid anything,
they had no standing. The court disagreed.
In September 2011, Congressmen Markey
and Barton
asked
the FTC to investigate the use of re-spawning cookies as a
deceptive and unfair practice under the FTC Act. The FTC, however,
has not taken any action that has been made public as of this date. .
In light of Hulu’s failure to get a
dismissal of the lawsuit, can a settlement be far behind?
The tools of Big Brother
Big
Brother is watching UAE’s kids: National ID cards roll-out
Emirati and
expatriate children under the age of 15 across the country have to
register for a national ID card by September 30 to avoid fines.
There is however an exception for expatriate children whose visa is
set to expire later this year…. Except the two exempted
categories, most UAE residents have already registered for national
ID cards, Al Khoury said. “About 95 per cent of the population has
already registered as the deadline for all other categories has
ended,” he said.
We can, therefore we must?
Scottish
police have snooped on emails and calls 85,000 times in the last five
years
Mark Aitken reports:
Scots police have
secretly accessed people’s private email and phone records more
than 85,000 times in the last five years.
But each
application to telecom firms for the information can contain requests
for several different individuals, so the true scale of the scrutiny
is far greater.
Northern
Constabulary, who serve a population of 300,000, made more than
20,000 snooping applications – roughly one for every 15 people in
the area.
Yesterday,
one civil liberties campaigner warned Scotland was moving towards the
same levels of surveillance as China and Iran.
An argument we will have here in the US
Australian
Privacy Foundation slams privacy amendments
Chris Jager reports:
The Australian
Privacy Foundation (APF) has slammed the Federal Government’s
proposed amendments to privacy legislation as a “lost opportunity”
in improving areas such as credit reporting practices and protection
from data off-shoring.
APF board member
Nigel Waters told a Senate inquiry late last week that the proposed
bill would “significantly weaken” privacy protections for
Australians.
The amendments
would introduce a new set of privacy principles aimed at improving
practices within both Government and the private sector, while
providing
the Privacy Commissioner with new powers, and the ability to fine
companies up to $1.1 million for repeated breaches of the law.
However, Waters
criticised the proposed amendments for further complicating aspects
of the privacy regime, stating the act would fail to
meet current international best practice standards.
“Can't tell your claims without a
scorecard!” (I still don't get it.)
All
of Apple's patent claims against Samsung in one chart
Problems are inevitable, so we might as
well create a few “I told ya so” articles
FAA
Documents Raise Questions About Safety of Drones in U.S. Airspace
Good managers find enabling lawyers –
the other kind are a dime a dozen. (It's much easier to say, “You
can't do that!” than it is to say, “Here's what you must do
before you do that.”)
"In the
documentary Scared Straight! a group of
inmates terrify young offenders in an attempt to 'scare them
straight'" (hence the show's title) so that those teenagers will
avoid prison life. A 2002 meta-analysis of the results of a number
of scared straight and similar intervention programs found that they
actively increased crime rates, leading to higher re-offense rates
than in control groups that did not receive the intervention. For
those considering the use of social media in their business, it is
quite easy to read Navigating Social Media Legal Risks:
Safeguarding Your Business as a scared straight type of
reference. Author Robert McHale provides so
many legal horror stories, that most people would simply be too
afraid of the legal and regulatory risks to every consider using
social media."
Keep reading for the rest of Ben's
review.
Perspective (and it's not like they
have just one) What other industries will need data centers of this
scale?
"JPMorgan Chase spends $500
million to build a data center, according to CEO Jamie Dimon.
That figure places the firm's facilities among the most expensive in
the industry, on a par with investments by Google and Microsoft in
their largest data centers. Dimon discussed
the firm's IT spending in an interview in which he asserts that
huge data centers are among the advantages of ginormous banks. Dimon
also offered a vigorous defense of the U.S. banking industry. 'Most
bankers are decent, honorable people,' Dimon says. 'We're wrapped up
in all this crap right now. We made a mistake. We're sorry. It
doesn't detract from all the good things we've done. I am not
responsible for the financial crisis.'"
The strait is a mere 21 miles wide, the
channel much narrower, but you would think that a 333meter long
tanker would be noticed even at night. The Porter at 154 meters
should be agile enough to avoid the tanker. So what really happened?
US
Navy ship collides with oil tanker in Gulf
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A U.S.
Navy guided missile destroyer was left with a gaping hole on one side
after it collided with an oil tanker early Sunday just outside the
strategic Strait of Hormuz.
The collision left a breach about 10
feet by 10 feet (three by three meters) in the starboard side of USS
Porter. No one was injured on either vessel, the U.S. Navy said in a
statement.
The collision with the
Panamanian-flagged and Japanese-owned bulk oil tanker M/V Otowasan
happened about 1 a.m. local time.
For my Ethical Hackers.
"NASA's Curiosity rover has now
been on the surface of Mars for just over a week. It hasn't moved an
inch after landing, instead focusing on orienting itself (and NASA's
scientists) by taking instrument readings and snapping images of its
surroundings. The first beautiful full-color images of Gale Crater
are starting to trickle in, and NASA has already picked out some
interesting rock formations that it will investigate further in the
next few days. Over the weekend and continuing throughout today,
however, Curiosity is attempting something very risky indeed: A
firmware upgrade. This got me thinking: If NASA can transmit new
software to a Mars rover that's hundreds of millions of miles away...
why
can't a hacker do the same thing? In short, there's no reason a
hacker couldn't take control of Curiosity, or lock NASA out. All you
would need is your own massive 230-foot dish antenna and a
400-kilowatt transmitter — or, perhaps more realistically, you
could hack into NASA's computer systems, which is exactly what
Chinese hackers did 13 times in 2011."
Perspective and a case study for my
Business Continuity students. Be careful who you annoy..
WikiLeaks
endures a lengthy DDoS attack
… "The attack is well over
10Gbits/second sustained on the main WikiLeaks domains," read
one of several tweets the organization posted on Friday. "The
bandwidth used is so huge it is impossible to filter without
specialized hardware, however... the DDoS is not simple bulk UDP or
ICMP packet flooding, so most hardware filters won't work either.
The range of IPs used is huge. Whoever is running it
controls thousands of machines or is able to simulate them."
It's no longer a few wax cylinders...
With a Google account (and audio & video gear) I could stream
seminars to a global audience.
Google
Nerds Request Entry to Your Rock Concert
The internet has revolutionized the
distribution of music over the past 15 years, but the staging of big
concerts and smaller live shows has remained steadfastly analog.
Musicians who worried that tools like Napster and BitTorrent
undermined their livelihoods could take solace in the notion that
they’d still make money off ticket sales.
But today Google launched a feature
that could be hugely disruptive to the concert business. You
wouldn’t necessarily know it from its complicated title — Google+
Hangouts On Air Studio Mode — but the new feature finally takes
live concert streaming from an occasional internet curiosity
requiring big-company expertise to something any band can do.
By making it easier to stage live shows
for far-flung fans, Google will change the music business in ways
that are hard to predict. Clearly, established artists will still be
able to charge for live, face-to-face shows — a video conference
might be better than no concert, but it’s not yet a substitute for
the real thing. At the same time, Google’s mass video conferences
can open doors. At least one artist is already saying she’s found
stardom through a precursor to Google+ Hangouts On Air Studio Mode
that launched four months ago.
Is this the new Yahoo?
Yahoo
unveils #HashOut, a social media talk show
As a slew of Internet companies have
started creating their own content, Yahoo is also getting in the
game.
The Web pioneer
announced
today that it is working on a social media talk show called
#HashOut with some big-hitter names like Arnold Schwarzenegger's
ex-wife and journalist Maria Shriver, Princeton professor Anne-Marie
Slaughter, "Lost" co-creator Damon Lindelof, and more.
Yahoo is deeming the show as "a
new way to talk about the news," and says that it is also "the
first talk show conducted over social media."
