House passes bill undoing Obama internet privacy rule
House passes bill undoing Obama internet privacy rule
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House passes bill undoing Obama internet privacy rule
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Internet users raise funds to buy lawmakers' browsing histories in protest | TheHill - 0 views
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Great news! The House just voted to pass SJR34. We will finally be able to buy the browser history of all the Congresspeople who voted to sell our data and privacy without our consent!” he wrote on the fundraising page.Another activist from Tennessee has raised more than $152,000 from more than 9,800 people.A bill on its way to President Trump’s desk would allow internet service providers (ISPs) to sell users’ data and Web browsing history. It has not taken effect, which means there is no growing history data yet to purchase.A Washington Post reporter also wrote it would be possible to buy the data “in theory, but probably not in reality.”A former enforcement bureau chief at the Federal Communications Commission told the newspaper that most internet service providers would cover up this information, under their privacy policies. If they did sell any individual's personal data in violation of those policies, a state attorney general could take the ISPs to court.
The Newest Reforms on SIGINT Collection Still Leave Loopholes | Just Security - 0 views
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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper this morning released a report detailing new rules aimed at reforming the way signals intelligence is collected and stored by certain members of the United States Intelligence Community (IC). The long-awaited changes follow up on an order announced by President Obama one year ago that laid out the White House’s principles governing the collection of signals intelligence. That order, commonly known as PPD-28, purports to place limits on the use of data collected in bulk and to increase privacy protections related to the data collected, regardless of nationality. Accordingly, most of the changes presented as “new” by Clapper’s office (ODNI) stem directly from the guidance provided in PPD-28, and so aren’t truly new. And of the biggest changes outlined in the report, there are still large exceptions that appear to allow the government to escape the restrictions with relative ease. Here’s a quick rundown.
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National security letters (NSLs). The report also states that the FBI’s gag orders related to NSLs expire three years after the opening of a full-blown investigation or three years after an investigation’s close, whichever is earlier. However, these expiration dates can be easily overridden by by an FBI Special Agent in Charge or a Deputy Assistant FBI Director who finds that the statutory standards for secrecy about the NSL continue to be satisfied (which at least one court has said isn’t a very high bar). This exception also doesn’t address concerns that NSL gag orders lack adequate due process protections, lack basic judicial oversight, and may violate the First Amendment.
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Retention policy for non-U.S. persons. The new rules say that the IC must now delete information about “non-U.S. persons” that’s been gathered via signals intelligence after five-years. However, there is a loophole that will let spies hold onto that information indefinitely whenever the Director of National Intelligence determines (after considering the views of the ODNI’s Civil Liberties Protection Officer) that retaining information is in the interest of national security. The new rules don’t say whether the exceptions will be directed at entire groups of people or individual surveillance targets. Section 215 metadata. Updates to the rules concerning the use of data collected under Section 215 of the Patriot Act includes the requirement that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (rather than authorized NSA officials) must determine spies have “reasonable, articulable suspicion” prior to query Section 215 data, outside of emergency circumstances. What qualifies as an emergency for these purposes? We don’t know. Additionally, the IC is now limited to two “hops” in querying the database. This means that spies can only play two degrees of Kevin Bacon, instead of the previously allowed three degrees, with the contacts of anyone targeted under Section 215. The report doesn’t explain what would prevent the NSA (or other agency using the 215 databases) from getting around this limit by redesignating a phone number found in the first or second hop as a new “target,” thereby allowing the agency to continue the contact chain.
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Elon Musk fires every Twitter exec involved in banning Trump, hiding Biden laptop story - 4 views
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Leftists and other progressives have lost their cool on the completion of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. Advertisement - story continues below "It's like the gates of hell opened on this site tonight," claimed tech columnist Taylor Lorenz on social media. Fox News reported Musk, the noted billionaire of SpaceX and Tesla fame, immediately fired several top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and Vijaya Gadde, the chief of legal policy, trust and safety.
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Musk accused them of misleading him – and other investors – over the number of fake accounts on the platform, Fox reported a source confirmed.
InternetNews Realtime IT News - Novell Turns ICE Into Kablink - 0 views
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The newly-renamed project is being expanded with workflow capabilities that Novell hopes will expand business usage. The Kablink project is Novell's effort to grow the market for open source collaboration solutions, and chip away at the hold that Microsoft's Sharepoint commands among small business users.
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"We have a system inside of Kablink that allows developers to create business objects and these business objects model data," McConnell explained. "Then with the model of the data you can pass it views for forms and displaying the business model. So you can model a business object and then add collaboration items for that object." With the Kablink release, workflow capability is being added to the ICEcore collaboration features. A business user can now create a business workflow for a process -- be it approval, development or otherwise and attach that workflow to the business objects.
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"We think our offering is unique; there are point solutions that have workflow embedded in them but the kind of social networking collaboration that we do, I don't know anyone that has a workflow component that can do the things that we can," McConnell claimed. "There are customers that have designed ISO 9000 processes with this, so it's a nifty thing to have, especially in an open source project."
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See the video demo of the enterprise version at http://www.novell.com/products/teaming/demo.html Sourceforge project home page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/icecore/ Project home page at http://www.icecoreopen.org/ Reading related materials. This is open source crippleware. Enterprise version has features unavailable in open source version. Open source version packaged for SuSE, RHEL, and Windows, but clients only for Windows and SuSE (seems somewhat odd since the demo shows it running in Firefox). License is CPAL. Intra-corporate politics afoot? Seems like an X/K/Ubuntu package would be a natural for the Kablink product itself and drive uptake. OTOH, this is a new acquisition for Novell, so packaging may reflect what was done before Novell acquired. A lot of signs on the web site that the rebranding from ICEcore to Kablink was rushed, conceivably for OSCON, where it was announced.
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Google Wins Patent For Data Center In A Box; Trouble For Sun, Rackable, IBM? -- Data Ce... - 0 views
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Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has obtained a broad patent for a data center in a container, which might put a kink in product plans for companies like Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA), Rackable Systems, and IBM (NYSE: IBM). The patent, granted Tuesday, covers "modular data centers with modular components that can implemented in numerous ways, including as a process, an apparatus, a system, a device, or a method."
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The U.S. Patent Trademark Office site reveals patent number 7,278,273 as describing modules in intermodal shipping containers, or those that can be shipped by multiple carriers and systems. It also covers computing systems mounted within temperature-controlled containers, configured so they can ship easily, be factory built and deployed at data center sites.
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If this sounds familiar, it might just be. Google's patent description resembles Sun Microsystems' data center in a box, called Project Blackbox. During its debut last year, Sun installed a Blackbox -- essentially a cargo container for 18-wheelers -- outside of Grand Central Station in New York City to show how easily one of their data centers could be installed. Google's patent description also has similarities to Rackable Systems' ICE Cube as well as IBM's Scalable Modular Data Center.
PT's blog » Compound documents in ICE and beyond: referencing parts of things - 0 views
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Ben O'Steen has put up some thoughts on what he refers to as 'compound' documents and how to store them in repositories and allow for referencing of parts of a document, such as a table, a graph or even a paragraph. Why did I add the scare quotes to compound? While to a computer scientist a research paper with its graphs and tables and paragraphs might be compound, I suspect most authors tend to think of a research article as a single entity. Until we start giving them access to services that make it clear that it's not monolithic, that is. As background, Ben gives four rules: Note that the four rules of the web (well, of Linked Data technically) are in essence: * give everything a name, * make that name a URL … * which results in data about that thing, * and have it link to other related things.
The Internet May Be Underwater in 15 Years - 1 views
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When the internet goes down, life as the modern American knows it grinds to a halt. Gone are the cute kitten photos and the Facebook status updates—but also gone are the signals telling stoplights to change from green to red, and doctors’ access to online patient records. A vast web of physical infrastructure undergirds the internet connections that touch nearly every aspect of modern life. Delicate fiber optic cables, massive data transfer stations, and power stations create a patchwork of literal nuts and bolts that facilitates the flow of zeros and ones. Now, research shows that a whole lot of that infrastructure sits squarely in the path of rising seas. (See what the planet would look like if all the ice melted.) Scientists mapped out the threads and knots of internet infrastructure in the U.S. and layered that on top of maps showing future sea level rise. What they found was ominous: Within 15 years, thousands of miles of fiber optic cable—and hundreds of pieces of other key infrastructure—are likely to be swamped by the encroaching ocean. And while some of that infrastructure may be water resistant, little of it was designed to live fully underwater. “So much of the infrastructure that's been deployed is right next to the coast, so it doesn't take much more than a few inches or a foot of sea level rise for it to be underwater,” says study coauthor Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It was all was deployed 20ish years ago, when no one was thinking about the fact that sea levels might come up.”
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“This will be a big problem,” says Rae Zimmerman, an expert on urban adaptation to climate change at NYU. Large parts of internet infrastructure soon “will be underwater, unless they're moved back pretty quickly.”
Federal Court Rules Suspicionless Searches of Travelers' Phones and Laptops Unconstitut... - 1 views
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n a major victory for privacy rights at the border, a federal court in Boston ruled today that suspicionless searches of travelers’ electronic devices by federal agents at airports and other U.S. ports of entry are unconstitutional. The ruling came in a lawsuit, Alasaad v. McAleenan, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and ACLU of Massachusetts, on behalf of 11 travelers whose smartphones and laptops were searched without individualized suspicion at U.S. ports of entry.“This ruling significantly advances Fourth Amendment protections for millions of international travelers who enter the United States every year,” said Esha Bhandari, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “By putting an end to the government’s ability to conduct suspicionless fishing expeditions, the court reaffirms that the border is not a lawless place and that we don’t lose our privacy rights when we travel.”
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The district court order puts an end to Customs and Border Control (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) asserted authority to search and seize travelers’ devices for purposes far afield from the enforcement of immigration and customs laws. Border officers must now demonstrate individualized suspicion of illegal contraband before they can search a traveler’s device. The number of electronic device searches at U.S. ports of entry has increased significantly. Last year, CBP conducted more than 33,000 searches, almost four times the number from just three years prior. International travelers returning to the United States have reported numerous cases of abusive searches in recent months. While searching through the phone of Zainab Merchant, a plaintiff in the Alasaad case, a border agent knowingly rifled through privileged attorney-client communications. An immigration officer at Boston Logan Airport reportedly searched an incoming Harvard freshman’s cell phone and laptop, reprimanded the student for friends’ social media postings expressing views critical of the U.S. government, and denied the student entry into the country following the search.For the order:https://www.eff.org/document/alasaad-v-nielsen-summary-judgment-order For more on this case:https://www.eff.org/cases/alasaad-v-duke
European Commission proposes new Investment Court System for TTIP and other EU trade an... - 0 views
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"Brussels, 16 September 2015 The European Commission has approved its proposal for a new and transparent system for resolving disputes between investors and states - the Investment Court System. The Investment Court System would replace the existing investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism in all ongoing and future EU investment negotiations, including the EU-US talks on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)."
FCC Chairman Moves Toward Real Net Neutrality Protections | Free Press - 0 views
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In an appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler indicated that he will move to protect Net Neutrality by reclassifying Internet access under Title II of the Communications Act. The chairman plans to circulate a new rule in early February. The agency is expected to vote on it during its Feb. 26 open meeting. Free Press President and CEO Craig Aaron made the following statement: “Chairman Wheeler appears to have heard the demands of the millions of Internet users who have called for real Net Neutrality protections. The FCC’s past decisions to put its oversight authority on ice resulted in Net Neutrality being under constant threat. Wheeler now realizes that it’s best to simply follow the law Congress wrote and ignore the bogus claims of the biggest phone and cable companies and their well-financed front groups. “Of course the devil will be in the details, and we await publication of the agency's final decision. But it’s refreshing to see the chairman firmly reject the industry’s lies and scare tactics. As we’ve said all along, Title II is a very flexible, deregulatory framework that ensures investment and innovation while also preserving the important public interest principles of nondiscrimination, universal service, interconnection and competition.”
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Title II is for "common carriers." See http://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/1934new.pdf pg. 35. Under Section 202: "(a) It shall be unlawful for any common carrier to make any unjust or unreasonable discrimination in charges, practices, classifications, regulations, facilities, or services for or in connection with like communication service, directly or indirectly, by any means or device, or to make or give any undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to any particular person, class of persons, or locality, or to subject any particular person, class of persons, or locality to any undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage. (b) Charges or services, whenever referred to in this Act, include charges for, or services in connection with, the use of common carrier lines of communication, whether derived from wire or radio facilities, in chain broadcasting or incidental to radio communication of any kind. (c) Any carrier who knowingly violates the provisions of this section shall forfeit to the United States the sum of $6,000 for each such offense and $300 for each and every day of the continuance of such offense.
HART: Homeland Security's Massive New Database Will Include Face Recognition, DNA, and ... - 0 views
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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly building what will likely become the largest database of biometric and biographic data on citizens and foreigners in the United States. The agency’s new Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) database will include multiple forms of biometrics—from face recognition to DNA, data from questionable sources, and highly personal data on innocent people. It will be shared with federal agencies outside of DHS as well as state and local law enforcement and foreign governments. And yet, we still know very little about it.The records DHS plans to include in HART will chill and deter people from exercising their First Amendment protected rights to speak, assemble, and associate. Data like face recognition makes it possible to identify and track people in real time, including at lawful political protests and other gatherings. Other data DHS is planning to collect—including information about people’s “relationship patterns” and from officer “encounters” with the public—can be used to identify political affiliations, religious activities, and familial and friendly relationships. These data points are also frequently colored by conjecture and bias.
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DHS currently collects a lot of data. Its legacy IDENT fingerprint database contains information on 220-million unique individuals and processes 350,000 fingerprint transactions every day. This is an exponential increase from 20 years ago when IDENT only contained information on 1.8-million people. Between IDENT and other DHS-managed databases, the agency manages over 10-billion biographic records and adds 10-15 million more each week.
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DHS’s new HART database will allow the agency to vastly expand the types of records it can collect and store. HART will support at least seven types of biometric identifiers, including face and voice data, DNA, scars and tattoos, and a blanket category for “other modalities.” It will also include biographic information, like name, date of birth, physical descriptors, country of origin, and government ID numbers. And it will include data we know to by highly subjective, including information collected from officer “encounters” with the public and information about people’s “relationship patterns.”
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What would happen if pt moved from targeting the not so open OpenOffice, to target governments and enterprises trying to set future information system requirements?
NY State is next up on this endless list. Most likely they will follow the lessons of exhaustive pilot studies conducted by Massachusetts, California, Belgium, Denmark and England, and end up mandating the use of both open standard "XML" formats, ODF and OOXML.
The pilots concluded that there was a need for both XML formats; depending on the needs of different departments and workgroups. The pilot studies scream out a general rule of thumb; if your department has day-to-day business processes bound to MSOffice workgroups, then it makes sense to use MSOffice OOXML going forward. If there is no legacy MSOffice bound workgroup or workflow, it makes sense to move to OpenOffice ODF.
One thing the pilots make clear is that it is prohibitively costly and disruptive to try to replace MSOffice bound workgroups.
What NY State might consider is that the Web is going to be an important part of their informations systems future. What a surprise. Every pilot recognized and indeed, emphasized this fact. Yet, they fell short of the obvious conclusion; mandating that desktop applications provide native support for Open Web formats, protocols and interfaces!
What's wrong with insisting that desktop applciations and office suites support the rapidly advancing HTML+ technologies as well as the applicat