Rep Mike Rogers (R-Mich) actually said this:

"You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated"

Then he was incredulous when law professor Stephen Vladeck disagreed with him "If a tree falls in the forest, it makes a noise whether you're there to see it or not"

"That's a new interesting standard in the law, we're gonna have this conversation and we're gonna have wine, that's gonna get a lot more interesting"

The possibilities are endless.

There's a really good write-up in Techdirt

A good parody article in Popehat too

4 Places you shouldn't use your debit card

Seems like common sense, and I think their sources are "experts" like consultants, but I agree with it, so that works for me.

According to Bankrate.com, there are 4 places NOT to use your Debit card:

1. Outdoor ATM's (Skimmers)
2. Restaurants (Card out of hand)
3. The web (Data Security)
4. Gas Stations (Skimmers)

Ok they've summarized like 95% of my use of the card.

Add that to the "Walmart scam where the cashier hits the cash advance button without telling you and pockets the money"(about.com) (unlikely, but WTH)

JUST SAY NO TO DEBIT CARDS!

Perry

Slashdot has article about Live DDOS Attacks

The Slashdot article talks about a Live DDOS Attack Map, which gets its data from Arbor Networks ATLAS Threat Hub.

This is really interesting, and might deserve its own Blog?

Perry

Supply chain anyone?

Backdoors are not an option, they're a standard feature!


From Craig's blog, that was tweeted by HD Moore

Lest anyone think that D-Link is the only vendor who puts backdoors in their products, here’s one that can be exploited with a single UDP packet, courtesy of Tenda.
After extracting the latest firmware for Tenda’s W302R wireless router, I started looking at /bin/httpd, which turned out to be the GoAhead webserver:

Updated! Wikipedia Sockpuppets lead to Scam on paid Wikipedia entries

Very interesting article on the DailyDot talks about a huge (apparent) network of fake people editing wikipedia entries.  It seems to lead to a paid wikipedia  editing service.

It gets really interesting when they discuss that:

1. It's forbidden to edit wikipedia entries for money, and hugely frowned on to edit your own
2. Wikipedia admins  (may) work at some/most/all of the services
3. The kicker - potential clients get their pages modified or deleted before sales calls

Read more here 

Update 10/22/2013:  In Ars Technica, Joe Mullin discusses the deletion of 250 PR-firm-linked user accounts

Science Magazine performs sting on Open Access Scientific Journals

I guess there are a lot of problems with this open access model

Who's Afraid of Peer Review?

John Bohannon

A spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals. 

On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen. 

In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless. 

I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past 10 months, I have submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals. More than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. Beyond that headline result, the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.