LexisNexis, a leading provider of information and services solutions, today announced that it has acquired the assets of Florida Legal Periodicals, a wholly owned subsidiary of Law Bulletin Publishing Company of Chicago. Florida Legal Periodicals is a market leader in the collection and distribution of Florida and Alabama verdict and settlement information. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Theft of Internet connections becoming more common
Although Luis pays his $40-a-month bill to Cox Communications for his Internet, he said he didn’t have time to call the company when he was having problems with his Internet connection.
Instead, he simply searched for another wireless connection in his apartment complex in Gainesville.
Once he found an unsecured connection, he used it. Illegally.
“I needed it to look things up for research,” he said. “I’m kind of lost without the Internet.”
He finished his work and checked his e-mail all from someone’s wireless connection.
Mike Phillips, the agent supervisor of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Florida Computer Crime Center, said most Internet theft occurs in residential areas and apartment complexes.
“It happens all the time, and I think it happens too often,” he said.
He said residents pay for the Internet, buy a wireless router but don’t set up passwords or security to prevent others from stealing the connection.
Source: Gainesville Sun
Flying Without ID? Know What’s in Your Files
Fliers who find themselves attempting to fly without identification should prep themselves on what their old addresses were, when their wedding anniversary is and and their children’s addresses.
Knowing those and other bits of personal information in public records will be key to convincing federal employees to let you past the x-ray machines onto your plane.
That’s because under new rules from the Transportation Security Administration, travelers who try to fly without identification now have to do more than just let screeners paw through their bags and wand them up and down.
Now, those who left their license at home or had it stolen have to answer a series of questions relayed to the screener by employees in TSA’s operations center in Virginia, where employees have access to databases of public records, including those compiled by data giant Lexis Nexis.
The idea is for screeners to know that the person holding a boarding pass in the name of Buster Brown, actually is that person. For travellers without ID, they better hope that the notoriously inaccurate private dossiers about them are correct.
Source: Wired
Future doctors share too much on Facebook, UF researchers say
Would it bother you to know that your physician smokes cigars and likes to do “keg stands”? That your gynecologist was a member of a group called “I Hate Medical School”? That your urologist is a fan of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”?
That is exactly the sort of information many people share on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. According to a new University of Florida study, many medical students are sharing far too much.
“College has traditionally been a time in life when non-normative behaviors are considered OK,” said Dr. Lindsay Acheson Thompson, an assistant professor of general pediatrics at UF’s College of Medicine. “I’m not sure I would want to have a permanent, public record of everything I did 10 years ago, but many of our students are creating just such a record, and they need to understand the problems this may cause.”
Thompson and several researchers from the UF’s colleges of Education and Medicine did a review of the Facebook sites of 362 UF medical students and residents and found that a significant portion of them were publicizing personal information most physicians would never share with their patients.
The study was published this week in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
The researchers looked up more than 800 medical students by name on Facebook, finding that 44 percent of them (for a total of 362) had profiles on the social networking service. Only 37 percent of those students had made their Facebook entries private — the most obvious safeguard against revealing too much personal information on the Web.
Source: University of Florida News
Privacy on the Web: Is It a Losing Battle?
Source: Knowledge@Wharton
Visit the Amazon.com site to buy a book online and your welcome page will include recommendations for other books you might enjoy, including the latest from your favorite authors, all based on your history of purchases. Most customers appreciate these suggestions, much the way they would recommendations by a local librarian.
But, what if you visited an investment site, only to find advertising messages suggesting therapies for your recently diagnosed heart condition? Chances are that you would experience what Fran Maier calls the “creepiness” factor, a sense that someone has been snooping into a part of your life that should remain private.
Maier is the Executive Director of TrustE, a nonprofit that sets guidelines for online privacy and awards a seal of approval to companies meeting those guidelines. She was a speaker at the recent Supernova conference, an annual technology event in San Francisco organized by Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach in collaboration with Wharton.
Tools for the attacker, tools for the defender
Like any good tools, network analysis programs can be used for either good or evil. During his weeklong SANS course on in-depth Web application training, Intelguardians consultant Kevin Johnson demonstrated and discussed some of the tools commonly used by both attackers and by Web application penetration testers. These are the tools attackers can gain entry to your system, so you should know know what they are, and what they can do. They are also essential for network security auditing. Most are available for free.
+ The new weakest links: “Web apps are rife with small vulnerabilities that can open the door to big trouble. Thinking like a hacker can help you find them.”
+ Sniffing out passwords on Web sites
+ Watch what you say about yourself
Source: Government Computer News
The Case of the Missing White Pages
There’s no white pages for cellphone numbers, and it doesn’t seem likely that there’ll be one soon. A few years ago, the cellphone industry’s main trade group hired a company to assemble such a directory, but the effort collapsed after some carriers lobbied against it and surveys showed a majority of customers didn’t want it. Subsequent efforts have fared little better: Earlier this year, a company called Intelius shuttered an online directory of 90 million mobile numbers amid anger from cellphone users and threats from Verizon. (Intelius — not Intellius, as I had it earlier — still offers a reverse-lookup service, for a fee.)
In backpedaling, Intelius said that “it’s clear the market is still not ready.” But it may never be.
The principal reason there’s no cellphone directory is simple: We don’t want one.
…
Why not? Because in a number of important ways, the cellphone is more of a break with traditional telephone service than it is an evolution of it. And those differences will only become more apparent in the coming years.
Source: Wall Street Journal
A company called Medical Justice has created a patient contract to help physicians eliminate or reduce malicious comments posted online about them. However, some experts say the contracts raise potential legal problems and send patients a negative message.
Source: iHealthBeat
The latest new and modified LCSH (Library of Congress Subject Headings) direct from LC.
Abbreviations used on the list:
UF= Use For
BT= Broader Term
RT= Related Term
May Subd Geog = May by Subdivided by Geographic Location (Baseball–Chicago, IL) is an example.
Note: Lists from earlier in 2008, along with 2007 and 2006 lists can be found via the drop-down menu at the top of the page.
Source: The Library of Congress
Organisations should cut their stores of personal information to lessen the job of protecting it, according to Richard Thomas.
Source: Kable’s Government Computing
With stories surfacing on news channels regularly about lost or stolen data or the ability to recover data from discarded or resold computers and their hard drives, Computerworld decided to look at some cheap methods of removing that sensitive data from your hard drive permanently. And, what better place to look than YouTube?
Source: Computerworld
You may think that you are anonymous as you browse web sites, but pieces of information about you are always left behind. You can reduce the amount of information revealed about you by visiting legitimate sites, checking privacy policies, and minimizing the amount of personal information you provide.
Source: U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team
The Menlo Park startup is one of several companies helping control what pops up on search engines in a new and growing field called online reputation management.
“Search engines tell a story about a person, and if they aren’t careful, they may tell the wrong story,” says Eric Goldman, assistant professor and director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law.
Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal
Thanks to Pete W.