Business, Culture, Writing, and Other Stuff
I've been thinking a while about the case of Google Books massive scanning project. It reminds me of the Harvester machines from Terminator Salvation. Google was hell-bent on acquiring books and it eventually became a battle between publishers and the Google Harvester. Publishers at least had the funds to hire attorneys and the ramifications of [...]
For a while now, the British government's tentacles seem to creep into every facet of its citizens lives. I've been following reports of everything from a family expelled from their neighborhood to government intervention to remove an obese boy from his mother. While noble on the surface, the continuing loss of UK citizen rights is [...]
Now I know why ICE is so ineffective at enforcing immigration law: Video Game Industry Hails Nationwide Piracy Raids In "Operation Tangled Web". The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) today commended U.S. law enforcement agents and prosecutors’ work in undertaking the nation’s first and largest anti-piracy raid of its kind. The action, code-named "Operation Tangled Web," [...]
Wired has an article on the FBI spyware known as CIPAV (see FBI's Secret Spyware Tracks Down Teen Who Made Bomb Threats). The full capabilities of the FBI's "computer and internet protocol address verifier" are closely guarded secrets, but here's some of the data the malware collects from a computer immediately after infiltrating it, according [...]
You can have written procedures, security audits, and even background checks of all your employees. However, one self-important idiot with access to any restricted documentation or media can post it to the Internet with little regard to the law, written procedures, or even common decency. Such is the case with the prison security video of [...]
The whole idea of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was to be a clearinghouse of law enforcement and national security information. That's a good thing except DHS hasn't proven itself to be effective yet with its many levels of bureaucracy and inability to focus on the real problems of border security. Now DHS is [...]
Anybody who has read about modern human trafficking knows about its link with illegal border crossings. There is a problem with U.S. discourse on illegal immigration at many levels, one of which is how it ties to human trafficking. I see stories about human trafficking rings getting broken up by police, but I only see [...]
Just yesterday, I wrote about how Sarbanes-Oxley was nothing more than a pathetic attempt by Congress to make it look like they responded to Enron. My article was to prove a point about proposed security legislation. However, this article came out today: Execs tell regulators Sarbanes-Oxley costs exceed benefits. Two years of compliance with the [...]
This is how terrorism works in the real world. An unusual spam war has erupted on the net, pitting an apparently irate spammer against an Israeli antispam firm that claims it's making junk e-mailers think twice about bugging its customers. Blue Security's controversial method uses reverse spam, if you will, returning massive quantities of opt-out [...]
Organized crime has come a long way: Next step in pirating: Faking a company. After two years and thousands of hours of investigation in conjunction with law enforcement agencies in China, Taiwan and Japan, the company said it had uncovered something far more ambitious than clandestine workshops turning out inferior copies of NEC products. The [...]
Unrest by Parkway Drive