Good Data About White House E-mail Woes

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Here's an article about the White House's struggle with keeping required records: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080824-white-house-memo-no-white-house-email-recovery-this-year.html

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Best Western Loses Full Details of All Customers From 2008 in Data Breach

Data breaches are about negligence; every time
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Details of how to access the information - which included home addresses, place of employment and credit card details - were sold through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.

And, again, if these companies would stop holding our credit card numbers far past the date that we used them, we wouldn't be having this problem.

Update

Best Western is contradicting the story saying that it's exaggerated. More importantly this:
Most importantly, whereas the reporter asserted the recent compromise of data for past guests from as far back as 2007, Best Western purges all online reservations promptly upon guest departure.

If this is true, then how did they lose anything? Did they? The details are unclear.

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Dunkin Donuts to Use Face Scanners to Target You For Ads

Hey there. Wanna donut!?
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The Wall Street Journal says that Dunkin' Donuts is experimenting with video screens that use facial recognition technology to figure out your age and gender. The screens then display ads targeted specifically to you.

The last thing we need is computers trying to figure out who and what we are so they can target ads to us.

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Ads Scare Parents Into Tagging Kids With Tracking Devices

Beware the puddle militia! They're gonna git ya!
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Privacy nuts like me have been warning people for years that tracking and tagging of all people will start with the kids. It's easy to teach people to accept personal tracking devices by giving it to them when they're young. But how do you do that? Use parents' practically fanatical protective instinct to protect their kids against a largely imaginary threat.

Companies that use scare tactics, especially when inflaming peoples fears of extreme and rare issues, are complete and utter scum.

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States Throw Out Worthless Diebold Voting Machines

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It's actually very encouraging that the same states that were originally duped into buying these machines despite the vast mountain of evidence of their general worthlessness have become smart enough to remove them in time for the upcoming election.

And about this:

"I have a huge inventory of machines that I am not able to use," she complained. "They are just sitting in our warehouse basically useless." Stacked to floor to ceiling are 4,000 machines purchased at $3,500 each. Total cost of that system: $16 million.

How exactly does Diebold get away with selling defective merchandise to the government without being forced to issue a refund?

Update

Today Ars Technica also covers the story and adds some interesting details. For example, it turns out that in one case a voting machine company offered to buy back their machines from the state for $1 each (their original price was $5000 each). At least the state was smart enough to decline). Tags: ,

Internet Service Providers Storing Information About Your Web Searches

They dropped their "don't be evil" motto for a reason
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Google has been inappropriately storing your search records for a long time now, but it looks like they're far from being the only one.

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CAPTCHAs Used to Restore Old Text

Pretty cool use of tech serving multiple functions at once.
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Not long ago, we learned that CAPTCHAs were being broken by people using pornography to motivate live humans to enter code after code. While very annoying, it was a very clever way of defeating the CAPTCHAs and made spammers day.

Now we see another brilliant use of CAPTCHAs in the restoration of old text too obscured for machines to read

A team of computer scientists has taken a common Internet tool for screening out spam and adapted it to help convert text from old books and manuscripts into electronic files. The effort might not put professional transcribers out of business, but it could cut the cost of creating digital libraries After a year of operation, reCAPTCHA has helped resolve about 440 million words for client users that are digitizing newspaper and document archives; von Ahn says his team just completed the entire 1908 archive from The New York Times, for example.

This is a very clever use of what would normally be wasted time similar to the idea of distributed computing as in the SETI@home project.

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Informercials Posing as News

It's totally safe... come closer.
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These infomercials are pretending to be news so you'll give them far more credibility that you would if you knew it was an infomercial.

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Connecticut Sues Countrywide For Deceptive Lending

Dirty bank, dirty deals
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Now here's a state with a Attorney General worth his salt! Richard Blumenthal is suing Countrywide and Bank of America for deceptive lending and is looking for some serious monetary damages to be paid out to the victims. This single move could save thousands of people from forclosures and distress. That's some serious protecting of the innocent. Way to go!

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Petition to Remove Nancy Pelosi For Taking Impeachment “Off the Table”

Why do we need to hold people accountable for abuse?
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I found this online petition to remove Pelosi for failing to do her job and being a political hack. Even if Congress couldn't pull an actual impeachment (which I believe they could for trying to block investigations of the White House staff alone), then they could still do something.

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