Data-collection company DoubleClick returned to the privacy spotlight on Monday after a French Web site uncovered evidence indicating several of the company's servers had security holes and may have been breached.

"There are three servers, at least, under their domain that were vulnerable," the Webmaster of online magazine Kitetoa, who asked that his name not be used, said on Monday. "If you can see that they are vulnerable to three very old vulnerabilities, you can imagine that their security is quite poor."

Last Thursday, contributors to Kitetoa found remnants of a program designed to crack open the security of Microsoft's common Web software on a site owned by DoubleClick. Two days later, posters to the Webzine also found another server--this one owned by DoubleClick's offline data collection subsidiary, Abacus Direct--that was vulnerable to similar flaws.

WashTech.com part of the Washington Post - CIA: Making Sense of the Deluge of Data.

It is a question CIA scientists have spent millions of dollars addressing in recent years in a search for "data mining" technologies that produce knowledge from raw information.

The answers can be found, not surprisingly, in CIA computers, programmed to automatically transcribe audio signals and translate Web pages in Chinese, Russian and numerous other languages. There's also software that can turn a bad guy's life story into a three-dimensional diagram of linked phone calls, bank deposits and plane trips.

There's a system that alerts an analyst any time a new page goes up on a Web site of interest. And smart new search engines use "natural-language processing" instead of key words to answer complex queries.

"The challenge we're trying to address here is how do we help individuals deal with the mass of information," said Larry Fairchild, head of the CIA's Office of Advanced Information Technology. "There is so much information coming in now in so many different formats -- audio, imagery, geospatial, text. If you add language to that, you see how complex the data field is."

Attack Registry Intelligence Service: My Incident List. ARIS analyzer is a free service designed by SecurityFocus.com to allow participating network administrators to submit suspicious network traffic and intrusion attempts anonymously, for detailed analysis and reporting. Our aim is to help our participants track incidents and find patterns in attacks that will serve as a gauging system for the Internet community.

Slashdot | Attack Registry And Intelligence Service. The service allows you to submit logs from several different intrusion detection systems automatically and quasi-anonymously.

Press Release - Privacy Foundation - TiVo's Data Collection and Privacy Practices.

Press Release - March 2001 TiVo Inc. - Response to Privacy Foundation Report.

SiliconValley.com part of San Jose Mercury News - Privacy Foundation criticizes TiVo practices.

USA TODAY - Privacy organization hits recorder maker.

Jim Barton, TiVo's chief technology officer, says that linking data to individuals would be possible by altering its software. But, he says, "we have gone to great lengths to make sure it could never be traced back to its source."

Richard Smith of the University of Denver-based Privacy Foundation points to TiVo as "one of the first pieces of consumer electronics that 'phones home' and can provide identifiable data, (yet) gives the impression in the manuals that they are not collecting information on the shows you are watching."

CNN.com - Sci-Tech - Privacy group criticizes TiVo for collecting info.

The industry leader, TiVo, acknowledged it has collected information from its 154,000 subscribers for an anonymous database to be sold to advertisers and TV networks.

"We don't disclose personally identifiable information as a matter of policy, and we won't as a matter of policy," TiVo chief privacy officer Matt Zinn said.

I haven't seen anything yet that specifies what they mean by personally identifiable information. There have already been studies (NEWSWEEK October 16 issue-- via MS-NBC - 'It Doesn't Take Much To Make You Stand Out'- Sorry but the MSNBC link is dead, from the Tuesday, October 10,2000 issue of Privacy Digest) that have show that "Eighty-seven percent of the population of the U.S. can be uniquely identified [only] by their date of birth, gender and five-digit ZIP code," says Latanya Sweeney, assistant professor of computer science and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Web sites often ask for such seemingly innocuous information and people provide it, thinking that they will remain unknown.

Slashdot | TiVo Usage Info Collected For Sale.

SiliconValley.com part of San Jose Mercury News - Privacy Foundation criticizes TiVo practices.

In an advisory scheduled to be released today, the Denver-based Privacy Foundation details how TiVo recorders in users' homes are set up to automatically transmit streams of data to the company's Alviso headquarters each night, including extensive viewing information. This is in contrast to statements in the owner's manual for the TV recorder, which asserts that ``unlike the Internet, all of your personal viewing information remains on your PTV receiver in your home.''

Matthew Zinn, Tivo's chief privacy officer, said that phrase has since been removed from the manual and that data collection policies have also been modified. Zinn said the changes were not made in response to the Privacy Foundation. ``From day one, privacy has been a huge initiative for TiVo,'' he said.

Davos Newbies March 26,2001.

There was a popular myth current in certain circles last autumn: it didn't make a difference whether George W Bush or Al Gore became president, since both of them were centrist politicians with few important differences. The barrenness of this logic is being exposed on an almost daily basis.

Bob Herbert in today's New York Times describes one of the most indefensible consequences of Bush's radical right-wing agenda, the slashing of programmes to help the nation's poorest and most troubled children. As Herbert points out, funding childcare programmes makes sense even from a conventional right-wing viewpoint, since it boosts the performance of welfare to work plans.

Further commentary on the right-wing rush of the administration comes from Dan Gillmor, best known as a perceptive technology observer in the San Jose Mercury News. It's a depressing ledger. I had little confidence that Gore would become a good president, but I'm fairly certain that on the issues that matter (to me at least) his heart was generally in the right place. So far, on every issue that counts, Bush is on the wrong side of my fence.

Incidentally, Gillmor's column on hierarchies of trust is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand information in the digital age. I spoke on a panel in Davos on this issue -- truth and trust in the information age -- but none of us approached the subject with Dan's clarity.

In the light of Dan's comments, I have some questions about pointing to the fascinating Maptricks site by cartographer Ian Thomas. Apparently (I haven't done the checking that necessary scepticism should require) Thomas lost his job at the US Geological Survey because he continued to produce maps that demonstrated the important biological diversity of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Bush, of course, wants to authorise oil exploration and production in the ANWR, which may threaten that very diversity. Have a look at what Thomas is doing and give it some thought.

The Davos Newbies site has an extra interesting collection of links today.

Washington Post - Bush Team Has 'Right' Credentials. President Bush is quietly building the most conservative administration in modern times, surpassing even Ronald Reagan in the ideological commitment of his appointments, White House officials and prominent conservatives say.

[ ... ]

Bush's collection of "movement" conservatives, those identified with moral, religious or small-government causes, is wide-ranging: Cuban-born Otto Reich, active in Reagan's anti-Sandinista efforts in the 1980s, will head the State Department's Latin American operation; Christian activist Kay Coles James, former dean of the Robertson School of Government at Pat Robertson's Regent University, will head the Office of Personnel Management; slated to be solicitor general is Theodore B. Olson, who served on the board of the Richard Mellon Scaife-funded American Spectator magazine and argued a pivotal Supreme Court case against affirmative action.

[ ... ]

Most of the sub-Cabinet and White House appointees are unknown to the public and will remain unknown throughout their terms. But they have extraordinary influence, and in some cases foes fear them more than Cabinet officers. A case in point is John D. Graham, named to head the little-known Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which vets all significant or controversial regulations.

Graham is founder of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, which is funded by more than 100 large corporations and trade groups, including Dow, 3M, Dupont, Monsanto, Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute. He is the leading proponent of "comparative risk analysis" to balance the need for regulation against the risk of the event, and he was prominent in the 1995 regulatory reform battles.

"John Graham has a long history of opposing even the most broadly accepted public health protection measures, including the measure to reduce drinking water contamination," said Greg Wetstone, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. Graham's nomination, Wetstone said, "is arguably the single sharpest stick in the eye of the public interest community yet."

Technology News from Wired News - Blaming the 'Defective' People. People worry about a lot of things during economic hard times. Should we fear eugenics being used once again by people who want to blame our country's problems on 'bad genes'?

[ ... ]

Today, with the completion of the human genome map, genetic science is once again being put on a pedestal.

"The current hype that surrounds genetics will provide plenty of fuel for those who wish to push neo-eugenic schemes, whether or not they use the discredited description of 'eugenics,'" Lombardo said.

Allen said that like in the '20s and '30s, increasing numbers of researchers today are wrongly blaming criminal and other negative bahavior on genes.