Nobody's business, or everybody's?

The most indispensable chief executive in the United States, beloved by customers and investors for his magnificent turnaround of the company he founded — and for the amazing gadgets his company produces — can no longer be trusted on the subject of whether he is healthy enough to continue running the company. Although Mr. Jobs says he will return in June, [Needham & Company analyst Charlie Wolf, who follows Apple] wrote in his note that investors were likely to “assume the worst — at the extreme, the possibility that Mr. Jobs will never return to Apple as full-time C.E.O.” And Mr. Wolf has always been a big supporter of Steve Jobs. Incredible.

It is really hard to write about Steve Jobs and his health. Nobody wants to see another human being suffer a recurrence of cancer. Everybody — myself very much included — hopes that Mr. Jobs will get well and come back to work. I can even understand why he doesn’t want to disclose details about his medical problems to the world — it’s very distasteful, and Mr. Jobs also believes strong [sic] that it’s nobody’s business except his and his family’s.

But he’s wrong. There are certain people who simply don’t have the same privacy rights as others, whether they like it or not. Presidents. Celebrities. Sports figures. And, at least in terms of his health, Steve Jobs. His health has become a material fact for Apple shareholders. His vagueness about his health, his dissembling, his constantly changing story line — it is simply not an appropriate way to act when you are the most important person at one of the most high-profile companies in America. On the contrary: it is infuriating.

Joe Nocera: "It's Time for Apple to Come Clean" @ NY Times Executive Suite blog (15 Jan 2009)

Related: Apple's Culture of Secrecy (New York Times, 26 July 2008)

Nah, no way this is going to be abused

Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.

The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB "thumb drive" that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.

The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer.

It also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator can scan for evidence on site.

Seattle Times: Microsoft device helps police pluck evidence from cyberscene of crime

Why anyone with more than a passing interest in the security of their information would use Microsoft products in the first place is sort of beyond me.

I wonder how many of these little USB drives have gone missing or been copied since the initiation of the COFEE program... and I wonder what the inevitable follow-on DONUT program is going to do. (Talk about pandering to your audience.)

The list is life

Wasn't surprised to find that when this story ran, it was on Bloomberg news. If any company would have an exquisite sensitivity for the cash value of data, presented in a form that's useful to the user, it's Bloomberg.

April 28 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama's supporters are giving him more than just record amounts of cash. They also are providing personal information that may make his donor list the most powerful tool in U.S. politics.

Even if the Democratic presidential candidate doesn't succeed in his White House bid, this data will make Obama a power broker in the party for years to come. For the interest groups or Democratic candidates he chooses to sell it to, it would provide a gold mine of information and access to potential donors.

Almost 2 million people have entered personal information on Obama pages on social-networking Web sites such as Facebook, MySpace and his campaign's mybarackobama.com, offering home addresses, phone numbers, their views on specific issues and the names of friends. The data have allowed Obama, 46, to raise more than $200 million, fill sports arenas with supporters across the nation and motivate millions more with custom-tailored messages.

"It's gigantic," said Laura Quinn, chief executive officer of Catalist, a company that maintains a database of 280 million Americans. The list is as "transformational" as the advent of political advertising, she said.

Bloomberg News: Obama's "Gigantic" Database May Make Him Party's Power Broker

Electronic health records: not private, not safe

In a recent survey of 307 healthcare information-technology managers, Cisco Systems found that investing in database security is the managers’ biggest priority. As hospitals shift into the digital world with electronic records and wireless devices, protecting data is becoming increasingly important.

But the Business Technology Blog also found something worrisome: The survey reported that 16% of respondents had a security breach at their organization in the last six months; 24% reported a breach in the past 12 months.

Wall Street Journal Business Technology Blog: Electronic Health Records Aren't Safe (12 March 2008)

In other words, assuming that this is an accurate sample, there's at least a one-in-four chance that your private health records have been compromised in the last year.

social graphs = social networks

There's a lot of buzz now about business strategies revolving around "social graphs."

If you've ever tried to figure out what a "social graph" really is as a term of art (it has to do with a branch of mathematics called graph theory) and how it's actually different from what we've all been calling "social networks," Dave Winer helpfully explains this for you:

Graphs are useful for modeling stuff that goes on in computers. They are also part of a field of math called combinatorics that's related to statistics, and also related to a highly theoretical area of math called topology...

...[B]efore we talked about social graphs we called them social networks, and you know what -- they're exactly the same thing, and social network is a much less confusing term, so why don't we just stick with it? (Answer: we should, imho.) So if you don't want to sound like an idiot, call a social graph a social network and stand up for your right to understand technology, and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated.

If you're a specialist in any field of endeavor, you can probably come up with many examples of how a "term of art" in your field has a subtly--or radically--different meaning as a word in common English usage.

If you're trying to communicate with people, here's a big hint: Use the word--or the meaning--that they're likely to understand.

How to avoid sounding like a monkey (Dave Winer, Scripting News, 21 September 2007)

...and the women aren't all that attractive, either

From the "This would be funny, only it's happening to me" department:

A private e-mail address, linked to a pseudonym that I use for occasional print and Web articles, has been helpfully subscribed to an "online dating" site.

The word "dating," in this case, seems to have the same euphemistic meaning that the transsexual hookers in New York City's Meatpacking District always understood: "...honey, want a date?" (a line not infrequently delivered in a disconcerting basso profundo.)

Even better: Having logged in with the credentials provided by the semi-literate prankster who set this up (since he or she used my e-mail address, I got all the notifications of account creation, as well as the many "special offers" that begin pouring into my inbox this morning)... there is no way to delete the account from the site via the web interface.

Okay. Scratch one e-mail account, set up another, add some random characters into the name.

Good thing they're disposable these days.

The Google-Postini deal

BusinessWeek's Stephen Baker on Google's purchase of Postini:

Yes, Google's $625 million deal for spam-fighter Postini adds another business application to its portfolio. But when I heard about it, I thought only one thing: Our bosses will gain an ever more powerful tool to search and analyze our e-mails and messages.

[...]

As Google storms into the market, more managers will be able to search employees e-mail the way they now search the Web. Imagine being able to call up every e-mail in the enterprise over the last month, for example, that mentions a key competitor and an upcoming product or service. Want to see it as it's happening? Sign up for an alert for certain keywords. It doesn't have to stop there. Once these data are searchable, it will become ever easier for managers to apply advanced analytics to corporate messaging. They'll be able mine these data for the latest trends of words and subjects that employees are writing about. Mapping the social networks inside and outside the company will be a cinch. And as automatic reading programs improve, companies will also be able to track the rising and falling sentiments of their work force.

Google with Postini: Searching Our E-mail (BusinessWeek Blogs, Stephen Baker, 10 July 2007)

Abuse of "National Security Letters"

EFF has obtained FBI documents showing years of chronic problems with its use of National Security Letters (NSLs). The issue first drew widespread attention four months ago, when the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General released a report [31M PDF] revealing extensive misuse of NSLs in a sampling of four FBI field offices.

These findings were, unfortunately, not surprising to critics of the Bureau's NSL power. Before the USA PATRIOT Act was passed in 2001, the FBI could unilaterally issue these demands only to obtain the records of suspected terrorists or spies. Under the changes made by the controversial anti-terrorism law, however, the FBI can now use NSLs to get telephone, Internet, financial, credit, and other personal records about anybody -- without any court approval -- as long as it believes the information could be “relevant” to an authorized terrorism or espionage investigation.

"EFF Receives First Set of FOIA Documents on the FBI's Misuse of National Security Letter Authority" (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 9 July 2007)

Current, apparent definition of a terrorist: Anyone the FBI would like to get a free pass to wiretap.

Smile for the cameras

The pervasive-surveillance society comes a little closer to home:

By the end of this year, police officials say, more than 100 cameras will have begun monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.

The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, as the plan is called, will resemble London’s so-called Ring of Steel, an extensive web of cameras and roadblocks designed to detect, track and deter terrorists. British officials said images captured by the cameras helped track suspects after the London subway bombings in 2005 and the car bomb plots last month.

If the program is fully financed, it will include not only license plate readers but also 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security officers, and movable roadblocks.

New York Plans Surveillance Veil for Downtown (New York Times, 9 July 2007)

Science-fiction author David Brin has some very interesting ideas on topics like this.

"These people are gullible..."

The thieves operated from small offices in Toronto and hangar-size rooms in India. Every night, working from lists of names and phone numbers, they called World War II veterans, retired schoolteachers and thousands of other elderly Americans and posed as government and insurance workers updating their files.

Then, the criminals emptied their victims’ bank accounts.

Richard Guthrie, a 92-year-old Army veteran, was one of those victims. He ended up on scam artists’ lists because his name, like millions of others, was sold by large companies to telemarketing criminals, who then turned to major banks to steal his life’s savings.

Mr. Guthrie, who lives in Iowa, had entered a few sweepstakes that caused his name to appear in a database advertised by infoUSA, one of the largest compilers of consumer information. InfoUSA sold his name, and data on scores of other elderly Americans, to known lawbreakers, regulators say.

InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”

Bilking the Elderly, With a Corporate Assist (New York Times, May 19, 2007)

Predators of all species instinctively seek out easy pickings: the old, infirm, weak and sick. It's true whether you're talking about lions stalking herds of wildebeest or human scum like this using computerized databases to identify easy marks for telemarketing and banking fraud.

A few people may eventually do some jail time for this.

I'd like to see them driven through the public streets with horsewhips first. After a fair trial, and after sentencing, but before their delivery to the Big House, where, it is to be hoped, they will enjoy a steady diet of institutional food and forced sodomy.

Even if you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they're not watching you

If you think you're being watched, you probably are.

As more news creeps out about the complicated scheme Hewlett-Packard Co. used to spy on executives, board members and reporters to find out who was leaking information to the media, one might wonder: Is someone, right this very minute, watching my keystrokes? Or reading my e-mail? Doing background checks on me even after I'm hired? Noticing when I come and go based on my key card?

How about all of the above -- and more.

[...]

"Technology has provided a capability that we never had before to check up on employees like never before," said Manny Avramidis, senior vice president of global human resources at the American Management Association. "It's within an organization's right to monitor anything you do during work time using work tools."

Welcome to surveillance culture, private-enterprise style.

Every Move You Make (Washington Post, October 1, 2006)

AOLStalker

This searchable database contains 36389569 searches made by AOL users from 01 March, 2006 - 31 May, 2006. The data was released under a non-commercial research license by AOL. The associated README file contains further information about what data was provided. If you find any data that actually makes it possible to identify a user, please let us know using the [!]-function and we'll remove those references.

AOLStalker.com

Fake Name Generator

Tired of giving up your personal information to register for websites, just so you can read an article in a newspaper you're not registered for?

The Fake Name Generator will automatically create a brand new name, snailmail and e-mail address, phone number, and birthdate for you, as well as generating a fake MasterCard number that is perfectly useless for buying anything but *will* pass the bone-stupid validation algorithm that most sites use to "verify identities."

Here's the one it just offered me:

Matthew T. Cahoon
234 4th Street
Cross Plains, TX 76443

Email Address: Matthew.T.Cahoon@pookmail.com
(More information at PookMail.com)

Phone: 254-725-5626
Mother's maiden name: Jones
Birthday: December 19, 1951

MasterCard: 5484 8115 0376 9063
Expires: 3/2007

Like your name? You can always view this specific name and address here.

Oh, and "pookmail?" It's a temporary e-mail server. You create any address you like (e.g., "bitemeyouspammers@pookmail.com") when you register for a new website. For 24 hours, you can log in to that address at pookmail without a password, retrieve your verification e-mail, and move on. (After 24 hours, your temporary ID is wiped.)

Good stuff.

Personally, whenever I have to give name, address and other personal information at a site that I don't want to share it with, which is almost all of them, I register as Richard Milhous Nixon.

And let me tell you, the late President sure does get around.

Fake Name Generator

(Hat tip: security guru Bruce Schneier)