Monthly Archives: June 2015

“. . .  When The Company You Gave It To Is.

Sometimes, though, there is hope for consumer protection. The NYT points to the sale of Texas-based dating site True.com as an example. In 2013, as part of a bankruptcy proceeding, True tried to sell its database of 43 million members’ personal information to another dating site based in Canada. However, the site’s privacy policy had promised never to sell or share members’ details without their permission, so the Texas attorney general’s office was able to intervene.

“It’s ‘we are never going to sell your data, except if we need to or sell the company,’” Hal F. Morris, assistant attorney general for Texas, told the NYT. “That is the type of information that people were entitled not to have trafficked and sold to the highest bidder. I think it’s an important safety issue for consumers.”

Full article is at consumerist.com.

“Data privacy is a big enough deal that Americans need a new right — something nobody even imagined a generation ago.

Your computer and cellphone are already tracking and sending a lot of data about you, and although you may not realize it, you can listen in. (You can generally do it by installing something called a “root certificate.”) Even though only a few people might do this, their findings benefit us all. For example, in 2012, it was a Stanford graduate student, Jonathan Mayer, who first publicized the fact that Google was circumventing the security system in Apple’s Safari browser to track users across the Web, contrary to Google’s prior statements to consumers.

The problem is that today’s Internet of Things devices are different: For the most part, you can’t eavesdrop. Manufacturers are shipping devices as sealed-off products that will speak, encrypted, only with the manufacturer’s servers over the Internet. Encryption is a great way to protect against eavesdropping from bad guys. But when it stops the devices’ actual owners from listening in to make sure the device isn’t tattling on them, the effect is anti-consumer.

To address the technical issues and make these systems more robust and secure, we have started the Secure Internet of Things Project, a collaboration among Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan.”

Read the full article at politico.com.

“We have developed a low-voltage, single-catalyst water splitter that continuously generates hydrogen and oxygen for more than 200 hours, an exciting world-record performance,” said study co-author Yi Cui, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford and of photon science at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

In an engineering first, Cui and his colleagues used lithium-ion battery technology to create one low-cost catalyst that is capable of driving the entire water-splitting reaction. (See video.)”

Source: news.stanford.edu

“On this ‘[ . . . ] episode of On the Media, we’re engaging in some chillingly informed speculation: what would happen if we, as a species, lost access to our electronic records? What if, either by the slow creep of  technological obsolescence or sudden cosmic disaster, we no longer could draw from the well of of knowledge accrued through the ages? What if we fell into…a digital dark age?”

Source: onthemedia.org

Bonus link: [internet archive]