Viet-Justice

What are the proper tools needed to stop gangs? Yes, community outreach programs are helpful as well as parental involvement. What else could help? Those who are involved in violent gangs should take the opportunity to get out and do something with their lives before another rival gang ends it for them. If the community and parents can’t turn these people around then it’s up to the police to do it.

I vote for expanding the SWAT Team. The best way to clean up the neighborhood is to clean out the hood. More weapons confiscated from gangs and drug dealers should be placed in capable police hands. Actually there are quite a few weapons in Iraq that we could have shipped back here for our police officers to put to use.

Let this be a lesson to encrypt your data. Citigroup is claiming UPS lost a box of backup tapes with 3.9 million customer’s data while enroute to the Experian credit bureau. This seems like a very simple thing to do when making backup tapes, but apparently nobody gave too much thought to that before. Though you don’t think of UPS losing too many packages until they lose one of yours that puts you in the spotlight. Perhaps the new UPS slogan should be “What can Brown lose for you?”

The American Family ASSociation has decided to end its boycott of Ford Motor Co. having made their point. Can someone suggest that they try to make a point by boycotting all communication with the outside world?

Newsweek has decided to run a useful article about the “tuner” generation. Apparently we’re seeing a come back to the hot rods of yesteryear, but with import vehicles. Like most hobbies it’s pretty expensive and it definitely takes dedication.

France, Ireland, the UK and Sweden have introduced legislation requiring that telcos and ISPs retain logs of all communications for one year. This would apply to telephone conversations, e-mail and text messaging. The reason for doing so is because cell phone records were very helpful in solving the Madrid bombing case. Under this proposed legislation, the contents of phone conversations e-mail and text messages would not be retained. But the logs of their existence would remain. We may think things are bad in the United States, but this is a far greater invasion of privacy than anything that has been proposed in the US. While on the surface, it may not seem like a lot of information that is being recorded, but is still creepy nonetheless. Another problem, this creates is that it places a burden on communications providers to record this and present it to law enforcement in a timely manner. It is not a good time to be a communications provider in Europe. On the other hand is a great time, if you are a maker of mass storage and compliance software.

MSNBC is covering the story along with other outlets.

I think Stanford is way off base here. First of all hacking is bypassing some form of access control such as a password or other protection. In this case there was no protection except for security by obscurity. If you knew where to go type in your application number then you would get results immediately. So much for protection. Had Stanford developer’s been smart they would have added some program logic that would not display the results until after Date >= x.

One thing organizations need to realize is that if you don’t take any steps to protect your data then it can legally be accessed by the public. I would also argue that since no substantial controls were in place then the data must have been classified as “public”, rather than some higher classifcation such as secret or top secret. Once you arrive at that conclusion, it’s difficult to see why these applicants were rejected for accessing public data. I would rate this as a goof on Stanford’s part rather than a violation of any computer tresspass law.