Group items tagged

"Google has expressed outrage following a report that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has hacked its data links."

"The Legal Implications of Surveillance Cameras District administrators need to know the law and make these policies clear. By: Amy M. Steketee District Administration, February 2012 undefined The nature of school security has changed dramatically over the last decade. Schools employ various measures, from metal detectors to identification badges to drug testing, to promote the safety and security of staff and students. One of the increasingly prevalent measures is the use of security cameras. In fact, the U.S. Department of Education reported that more than half of all public schools used security cameras during the 2007-2008 school year to monitor students, a 30 percent increase over eight years prior. While security cameras can be useful in addressing and deterring violence and other misconduct, they also raise several legal issues that can leave school administrators in a quandary. Does the use of surveillance cameras to capture images violate a student or staff member's right of privacy? If the images captured on a surveillance recording are of a student violating school rules, may district administrators use the recording in a disciplinary proceeding? If so, are parents of the accused student entitled to review the footage? What about parents of other students whose images are captured on the recording? How should schools handle inquiries from media about surveillance footage? Can administrators use surveillance cameras to monitor staff? I outline the overriding legal principles, common traps for the unwary and practical considerations. Advertisement Legal Principles Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Fourth Amendment prohibits the government, including public schools, from conducting unreasonable searches or seizures. Courts have generally held, however, that what an individual knowingly exposes in plain view to the public will not trigger Fourth Amendment protection because no search has occurred. Someone who is videotaped in public has n

"On Wednesday night, in advance of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, iHealth Labs, a start-up in Mountain View, Calif., unveiled the iHealth Blood Pressure Dock, an attachment for iOS devices that can measure and record heart rate and blood pressure. The kit, which costs $100, comes with a blood pressure cuff and a battery-powered dock that doubles as a charging station for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. The hardware is available for sale in Apple retail stores, through Apple.com and on the company's Web site. The kit also requires a mobile application to log the results, which is available for free through iTunes."

When a malaria research project in Uganda was expanded into a full-fledged malaria case-tracking effort across the country in 2006, health officials saw the move as a great opportunity to save lives... But after starting with such promise, the project quickly became mired in a series of technology shortcomings... It finally all came together this spring after the introduction of a few key high-tech tools -- a modern relational database, nine smartphones and a remote-access software application that was originally meant for a completely different use.

"Facebook's photo-sharing app Moments will not be made available in Europe due to concerns about its use of facial recognition, it has been revealed. The app, which allows users to share mobile-phone photos with friends without posting them publicly, was launched in the US this week. The Irish data regulator said that users must be given a choice about whether they want it, with an opt-in. There is currently no timetable for such a feature, said Facebook. Richard Allen, Facebook's head of policy in Europe said: "We don't have an opt-in mechanism so it is turned off until we develop one." Moments arranges the photos on someone's mobile phone into groups, based on when they were taken. The facial recognition technology can identify Facebook friends to whom users can then forward the photos. Combining data The social network is taking facial recognition very seriously and announced earlier this year that its DeepFace AI system was powerful enough to identify users with a 97.25% level of accuracy. But the social network's use of the technology has not gone down well with European and Canadian regulators. In 2010, Facebook rolled out facial recognition technology to identify people in photos but, two years later, it was forced to withdraw the technology from Europe, after Ireland's data protection commission highlighted privacy issues. At the time, the privacy commissioner of Canada said: "Of significant privacy concern is the fact that Facebook has the ability to combine facial biometric data with extensive information about users, including biographic data, location data, and associations with friends." The system, which is increasingly used by technology and other firms, is the subject of debate in the US too. Recent talks between privacy organisations and government agencies aimed at creating a code of conduct around facial recognition technology broke down after they failed to reach agreement. "At a base minimum, people should be able to walk down a publ

"Parking Auction, a New York City-based start-up, has developed a mobile web application that allows drivers who are leaving a parking space to connect with those looking for a spot in a particular area - for a price."

"Even though a hard drive with a terabyte (or 1,000 gigabytes) of storage can hold thousands of photographs, songs and movies and costs less than $100, storing your files in a distant commercial data center, encrypted and secure, increasingly makes more sense. Cloud backups are appealing for another reason: as computing becomes more mobile - on laptops, tablets and smartphones - you need to have reliable access to the data anywhere over an Internet connection. "

"WE LIVE IN AN AGE of increasingly smart machines. In recent years, engineers have pushed into areas, from voice recognition to robotics to search engines, that once seemed to be the preserve of humans. But I.B.M. has a particular knack for pitting man against machine. In 1997, the company's supercomputer Deep Blue famously beat the grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess, a feat that generated enormous publicity for I.B.M. It did not, however, produce a marketable product; the technical accomplishment - playing chess really well - didn't translate to real-world business problems and so produced little direct profit for I.B.M. In the mid '00s, the company's top executives were looking for another high-profile project that would provide a similar flood of global publicity. But this time, they wanted a "grand challenge" (as they call it internally), that would meet a real-world need. "

"A key feature of several of the intrusions was the use of wardriving, a technique in which hackers mount a high-strength Wi-Fi receiver inside a vehicle and search for networks that can be penetrated. Once a Wi-Fi network is located through wardriving, hackers can remotely watch for information that may reveal the network's security setup and vulnerabilities."

Interesting term 'wardriving'

"Printed-on-demand robots might be a reality before the end of the decade if a US-based project achieves its goals. Researchers aim to build a desktop technology that would allow an average person to design and print a machine within 24 hours. The team says that making it easier to create specialised robots could have a "profound impact on society"."

"Now that Google has conquered a majority of the earth's major streets with its Google Street View project, the company is starting to move inside. It's creating the Google Art Project, a virtual equivalent of 17 major art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Britain and National Gallery in London, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, among many others. Amit Sood, director of the project, said in a company blog post that the documentation of major museums began when a small group of Google employees with a passion for art started wondering how they could make major art museums, and the works they house, more accessible to people worldwide."

"AN ANGRY red dot flashes at the top of your computer screen. As your mouse creeps over it, a message appears: ''Twitter use has exceeded the department average of 58.6 minutes per day - please self-regulate.'' A quick click and a display appears mapping your internet use, including a graph devoted to the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. It may be Orwellian, but this scene, or some variation, is coming to a workplace near you."

"This past month in the journal Pediatrics, researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York published the results of a study showing that text messaging could significantly improve the rate of adherence among young liver transplant patients. Using a program called CareSpeak, the researchers issued text messages to a group of 41 pediatric liver transplant patients. The text messages reminded the patients to take their medications, which ranged from one to three different pills once or twice a day. "

An older article, but relevant nonetheless.

"Browse by subject or dateFor a text-only version of the browse by subject or date feature, please follow this link. News search Web feature Share and bookmark Researchers enable a robot to fold towels More than just a household convenience, the project is a step forward in the robotic manipulation of non-rigid objects"

"Stanford Hospital discovered last month that a contractor had posted a private database containing medical records of 20,000 patients to a public homework assistance Website in search of help on how to create bar graphs."

A number of issues are raised here: lack of policies, privacy, security. Also combines technologies: use of databases to create examples of charts in spreadsheets; medical records. It's a great article to build on some terms/technologies and introducing more.

Mississippi had a problem born of the age of soaring student testing and digital technology. High school students taking the state's end-of-year exams were using cellphones to text one another the answers. Enlarge This Image Drew Angerer/The New York Times John Fremer, 71, a Caveon co-founder who was once the chief test developer for the SAT. CHEAT SHEET A High-Tech Approach Articles in this series examine cheating in education and efforts to stop it. Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (77) » With more than 100,000 students tested, proctors could not watch everyone - not when some teenagers can text with their phones in their pockets. So the state called in a company that turns technology against the cheats: it analyzes answer sheets by computer and flags those with so many of the same questions wrong or right that the chances of random agreement are astronomically small. Copying is the almost certain explanation.

Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash Alert Print Post commentRetweetFacebookCascading fail By John Leyden * Get more from this author Posted in Enterprise Security, 20th August 2010 15:03 GMT Malware may have been a contributory cause of a fatal Spanair crash that killed 154 people two years ago. Spanair flight number JK 5022 crashed with 172 on board moments after taking off from Madrid's Barajas Airport on a scheduled flight to Las Palmas on 20 August 2008. Just 18 survived the crash and subsequent fire aboard the McDonnell Douglas MD-82 aircraft. Spanair's central computer which registered technical problems on planes was infected by Trojans at the time of the fatal crash and this resulted in a failure to raise an alarm over multiple problems with the plane, according to Spanish daily El Pais.

Although this is an Op-Ed piece, I thought it worth our attention. I could serve as a stepping off place for a unit on AI and Robotics, or stimulate a myriad of debates at the end of such a unit. I have enjoyed my summer reading of Lanier's book You Are Not Your Gadget_ and share this piece with you.

Lanier wrote _You Are Not Your Gadget_. He is considered the "father" of virtual reality

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