Search
Dear Potus 08 - Via CFP: Technology Policy '08:
From the in-progress page on the program wiki:
If the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy community wrote a letter to the next President of the United States about our priorities for technology policy, what would we say -- and how would we get him or her to read it?There's only one way to find out.
At this year's conference dinner, we will launch a collaborative effort to write a short letter to the next President from the CFP '08 attendees. We'll get these initial results up on a wiki for comments and evolution, and refine them over the follwing 36 hours. By Friday morning, if we've managed to converge on something plausible, we'll start circulating the current draft for signatures. At the end of the conference, we'll mail the current draft to the presidential campaigns and invite their response.
We'll also put it all up on the web - with a Creative Commons "by" (attribution) license - and invite others to use it for whatever purposes they want as we revise our initial draft, get broader involvement and discussion, and try to get our voice heard amidst the din of the campaigns.
We'll be using this blog as a big part of the "Dear Potus 08" project, both to update the details -- currently described as "mostly TBD" -- and to discussparticular topics. The 9.5 theses thread is the best place to get involved with the technology policy discussion right now. In this thread, any questions or thoughts about "Dear Potus 08" -- or links to similar projects?
Bruce Schneier's Security Matters: Prediction -- RSA Conference Will Shrink Like a Punctured Balloon - Via Wired Magazine:
Last week was the RSA Conference, easily the largest information security conference in the world. More than 17,000 people descended on San Francisco's Moscone Center to hear some of the more than 250 talks, attend I-didn't-try-to-count parties, and try to evade over 350 exhibitors vying to sell them stuff.
Talk to the exhibitors, though, and the most common complaint is that the attendees aren't buying.
It's not the quality of the wares. The show floor is filled with new security products, new technologies, and new ideas. Many of these are products that will make the attendees' companies more secure in all sorts of different ways. The problem is that most of the people attending the RSA Conference can't understand what the products do or why they should buy them. So they don't. read more »
Wisconsin Court Upholds Discipline of Pharmacist - Via ACLU Blog:
Today RHRealityCheck blogged on the victory for reproductive freedom today in Wisconsin. Today an appeals court upheld a lower court's ruling that the state's Pharmacy Examining Board was right to discipline pharmacist Neil Noesen for failing to fill, based on religious objections, a woman's birth control prescription. On the decision, RHRealityCheck writes: read more »
Social Network Aggregation, Killer App in 2008? - Via Slashdot:
blogdig writes "Managing scattered online Social Life on multiple Social Networking sites, I sense, will become a Killer App Category 2008. There are several startups now in the "Social Network Aggregation" space and this App Category should diversify and catch momentum in 2008. Some startups are focusing on identity consolidation, others on messaging consolidation and on tracking friends. Some like Profilefly offer consolidation of multiple things like Profiles, Contacts and Bookmarks... read more »
Obama’s Digital Policy - Via Freedom to Tinker:
The Iowa caucuses, less than a week away, will kick off the briefest and most intense series of presidential primaries in recent history. That makes it a good time to check in on what the candidates are saying about digital technologies. Between now and February 5th (the 23-state tsunami of primaries that may well resolve the major party nominations), we’ll be taking a look.
First up: Barack Obama. A quick glance at the sites of other candidates suggests that Obama is an outlier — none of the other major players has gone into anywhere near the level of detail that he has in their official campaign output. That may mean we’ll be tempted to spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about him — but if so, I guess that’s the benefit he reaps by paying attention. Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch tech primary provides the best summary I’ve found, compiled from other sources, of candidates’ positions on tech issues, and we may find ourselves relying on that over the next few weeks. read more »
Branding and Building Trust: Social and Ethical Issues - Via IT Conversations: Panel Discussion :
Studies show that consumers care about the perceived honesty and values of brands and companies. They want to trust that companies will do the right thing with any and all data collected on line. This raises a number of interesting and difficult problems. The panelists first examine what exactly we mean by trust, privacy, transparency, security and fraud. One thorny issue is the inherent asymmetry of information. Consumers can't always tell when they are revealing information to companies, and they can't always know how the companies may use that data. They often assume security laws protect them when they don't. read more »
The Airport Security Follies - Jet Lagged - Air Travel - Via Opinion - New York Times Blog:
Six years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd. The changes put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic, and largely of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational, wasteful and pointless.
The first variety have taken place almost entirely behind the scenes. Explosives scanning for checked luggage, for instance, was long overdue and is perhaps the most welcome addition. Unfortunately, at concourse checkpoints all across America, the madness of passenger screening continues in plain view. It began with pat-downs and the senseless confiscation of pointy objects. Then came the mandatory shoe removal, followed in the summer of 2006 by the prohibition of liquids and gels. We can only imagine what is next. read more »
Ohio Study Confirms Voting Systems Vulnerabilities - Via Slashdot:
bratgitarre writes "A comprehensive study of electronic voting systems (PDF) by vendors ES&S, Hart InterCivic and Premier (formerly Diebold) found that 'all of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election'. In particular, they note all systems provide insufficiently protection against threats from election insiders, do not follow well-known security practices, and have 'deeply flawed software maintenance' practices." --- Some of these machines are the ones California testers found fault with last week.
(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)
Cracking open the cybercrime economy - Via ZDNet UK:
"Over the years, the criminal elements, the ones who are making money, making millions out of all this online crime, are just getting stronger and stronger. I don't think we are really winning this war."
As director of antivirus research for F-Secure, you might expect Mikko Hypponen to overplay the seriousness of the situation. But according to the Finnish company, during 2007 the number of samples of malicious code on its database doubled, having taken 20 years to reach the size it was at the beginning of this year.
There seems to be some serious evidence then for the idea of an evolution from hacking and virus writing for fun to creating malicious code for profit. Security experts are increasingly pointing to the existence of a "black" or "shadow" cyber-economy, where malware services are sold online using the same kinds of development methods and guarantees given by legitimate software vendors. read more »
The 'Malware Economy' Evolves - Via Slashdot:
superglaze writes "ZDNet UK has a feature on how the malware economy is turning into a recognizable traditional IT economy. Leasing botnets? Malware support? Welcome to the new age of computing. read more »
Fair Use Advocates Issue Principles for Protecting Online Videos: "
San Francisco - Online video-hosting services like YouTube have ushered in a new era of free expression online, as well as vigorous copyright enforcement efforts. Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of leading public interest groups issued a 'Fair Use Principles' document that sets out six concrete guidelines designed to minimize the collateral damage that copyright enforcement efforts may inflict on video creators who are 'remixing' copyrighted material into new video creations.
Fair use is the copyright doctrine that permits unauthorized uses of copyrighted material for transformative purposes. Creators naturally quote from and build upon the media that makes up their culture, yielding new works that comment on, parody, satirize, criticize, and pay tribute to the expressive works that have come before. Consequently, much of the new 'remix' creativity on video hosting sites like YouTube depends on fair use. read more »
It seems that they have deactivated their search interface for now. Hopefully they are working with the community to try and find a less intrusive way to do this. If it was opt-in(with notification) and users could exclude their nicks from archiving, a lot of people would not be protesting so hard.
It looks even worse then TechCrunch thought. IRseek is going even further than just creating an archive of all conversations on IRC. They are planning on an Alert Service. You won't even have to go and look for conversation about your company in their archive. Instead, as soon as you get mentioned they will alert you. read more »
IRSeeK.com (Beta) - The most comprehensive public-chatroom search engine on the web. :
A little bit about us...
IRSeek utilizies the power of the people on IRC and brings it to the rest of the community to enjoy and learn from.
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) remains one of the most active platforms for sharing knowledge and collaborating on the Internet. www.IRSeek.com (still in Beta) strives to make this hidden gem available to the entire Internet community. By constantly archiving thousands of active, highly-focused, public chat-rooms in a wide variety of topics read more »
Will IRSeeK Have A Chilling Effect on IRC Chat? - Via TechCrunch :
New Israeli startup IRSeek is indexing public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels at the rate of 6 million conversations a day. 300 million conversations have now been indexed by the company. The most popular networks, including EFnet, DALnet, Freenode and QuakeNetUndernet, are all being monitored - IRSeeK is now “listening” to 2000+ channels across 10 networks. read more »
Webcasts - From Regulation to Competitive Advantage - An Introduction to Worldwide Privacy Laws - The Conference Board: Webcast
Date: October 30, 2007
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM 16.00-17.30 CET Time Zone Converter
Many companies have responded to public concerns about privacy by turning it to their commercial advantage. Enthusiastic promotion of privacy protection — rather than just grudging compliance with legal requirements — can lead to better employee relations and customer loyalty. This webcast will present an introduction to international and comparative data protection and privacy law and regulation and explain how the law in several countries attempts to protect reasonable customer expectations of personal privacy. read more »
What Do Air Conditioners Have to Do With Identity Theft? Bills Schwarzenegger Should Sign to Protect Your Privacy - California Progress Report: A couple of days ago, we wrote about AB 779, a bill by Assemblymember Jones that would require retailers in California to follow existing industry standards in protecting personal information including your social security number, to notify you if there is a security breach, and to pay the cost of card replacement if these data protections weren't followed. read more »
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Google
Yahoo
Technorati