There's just nothing more I can say about this so I'll stick with pointing you to the news articles and just shut up.
On second thought, here's an interesting article stating that they knew about the breach since last May!
Rather than try to prevent people from copying or sharing music with drm, Microsoft has patented a watermarking procedure that will allow them to tag music with IDs that are very hard to remove.
First take: this is bad, bad news. While Ars Technica believes that this could help to get rid of the much hated DRM, I believe the replacement is far worse. Now instead of merely being annoying in preventing you from copying a CD, the RIAA will be able to track music by ID to see where (and who) it came from. If your son shares a song online that's from your CD collection, you will be much easier to find and prosecute.
Tags: Big Business, DRM, Microsoft, Tracking
How many years has it been since America's Funniest Home Videos came around? How many videos do you still see of some dad somewhere teaching his kid to swing a bat, but he stands behind him and gets nailed in the crotch? You think they'd learn.
Well the same can be true of these laptops. How many times does a company/government branch have to lose a laptop before they learn? The simplest solution is to stop putting people's data on laptops! Sheesh.
Tags: Lost Laptops, Ohio State University
The Consumerist reports that one of their readers asked for a non-RFID credit card from American Express. Granted, they only disabled contactless transactions in their database and did not issue him a spychip-free card, but one of the commenters said that they were able to do so with Washington Mutual.
It never hurts to ask, but it can certainly hurt to not.
Of course, you could just physically disable the RFID with a hammer, drill, or knife.
Tags: Credit Cards, RFID
Reading the wikipedia page, you can find that the No-fly list was implemented on 9/11 2001 and ballooned from 16 names to over 40,000. There have been many false positives including children and some famous people (fortunately some of whom are congress members).
According to this story, all the millions of dollars, the time wasted, and the frustration cast doubt whether the program was worth it. The man described in this article is actually Gerry Adams, a spokesman for the Irish Republican Movement.
It's because of suspected past ties to the IRA that he has been flagged eternally for extra security checks and constant harrassment. Read the story for a well written example of such which includes this awesome quote:
I hand the FBI young gun a copy of my travel schedule – a document that has been in the possession of the US state department for the past month or so.
"Huh," he says. "Why are you going to the White House, sir?"
"To see the president."
"Huh. Why?"
"He asked me," I say evenly.
In what has become the norm and not the exception, an expensive Department of Defense project has been shown to be a complete failure wasting millions of dollars and all of our time. What makes this story interesting is it was due in no small part to the efforts of the Government Accountability office that this project was scrapped. They discovered that the program was using live data on American citizens instead of dummy data and that none of the required privacy protections had been put in place. Go figure.
Most frightening is this line:
The privacy office concluded that although required privacy analyses were ignored, the Privacy Act was not technically violated because the live data were covered by privacy notices issued earlier for other programs that originally gathered the information.Which demonstrates the danger of taking data for one reason, but using for a completely different reason altogether.
Tags: Accountability, Big Brother, Data Mining, DHS
First he refused to show his reciept and the Circuit City people blocked his car. Then when he called for the police and they asked for his driver's license, he refused and was arrested.
I'm going to try and follow this case because this guy says there's no law requiring that he show his reciept and also no law requiring that he present ID to the officer. If that's true, I hope he sues both Circuit City and the police station for all their worth. People who abuse consumers and citizens merely because of their ignorance of their rights is one of the main reasons I began this website.
Oh, and in case you don't see the problem, check out this nicely put comment from Slashdot.org:
That bag contained his private property that he had just purchased. He gave them money for it, it's his, not theirs.
Should he be able to inspect their cash registers after his purchase? After all, they contain money that was his just moments before.
Would you feel differently about the privacy implications if he were leaving Wal*Mart and had just filled his prescription for an STD, or to prevent his frequent diarrhea? Pharmacists are licensed professionals, trained on the privacy aspects of their profession. You're saying that I should have to expose my medical condition to any minimum-wage flunkie who gets curious?
Go Michael, go!
He'll continue to update his blog with information on the case. Today's entry included this quote:
You don’t have to stand in front of a tank or refuse to move to the back of the bus to make a difference in the world.Well said.
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Products you purchase in the store almost always have warranties already. Depending on how good it is, you could be completely wasting your money buying an extended one when the default one will do.
[Click for full description]What is an extended warranty and how do you know when you see one?
[Click for full description]If you're going to spend your money on a warranty, first consider all the factors.
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