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Digital privacy: Who’s guarding the guards? – Business Monday – MiamiHerald.com

August 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

It is with some irony that in April, an article detailing the amount of private data collected on smartphones appeared in the Tech section of the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch’s flagship U.S. paper, which has been documenting the use of Internet-tracking technology and privacy implications for consumers in an investigative series titled “What They Know.”

In July, journalists at Murdoch’s British tabloid, News of the World, were accused of knowing all too well  how to surreptitiously locate and extract private cellphone data  for competitive advantage. Industrial level cellphone hacking was allegedly  enabled by abuse of press access and financial power with help from corrupt politicians and police — reaching all the way into Scotland Yard. News of the World editors were accused of savaging the privacy of anyone they chose, from royals and prime ministers to the final calls of a deceased 13-year-old girl.

Although Murdoch Sr. and his son James Murdoch Jr. have denied knowledge of the hacking, the incidents sound a recurring theme in privacy and technology law: Who will guard the guards? That is, corporate toying with personal data will continue to escalate until the pendulum of public opinion is willing to swing in the direction of greater protection of privacy.

Murdoch’s digital media problems should not be a catalyst for limits on press freedoms — it was, after all, a competing London paper, The Guardian, that stood by the story in spite of possible political reprisal — but  the News of the World  events should be a catalyst for legal and technological  efforts to improve privacy protection. One example: easier-to-use encryption technologies to help consumers protect data — especially Florida’s children and the elderly.

Anyone who has read the biographies chronicling the development of Murdoch’s digital news empire would quickly realize he had a gift for identifying and retaining some of the most talented technology developers on the planet.  For example, Murdoch retained  the world’s leading inventors in cryptography and data transmission to protect his digital  programming content  and efficiently transmit it to his satellite TV subscribers around the world. These alliances gave him a strategic technological advantage for his  global media enterprise.

via Digital privacy: Who’s guarding the guards? – Business Monday – MiamiHerald.com.

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Skype to Buy GroupMe Group Messaging Service

August 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The group messaging battle just heated up with the announcement Sunday that Skype has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GroupMe, a group messaging service that will enhance Skype’s ability to facilitate text and photo messaging.

With this acquisition, Skype said in a press release that GroupMe will provide “best-in-class text-based communications and innovative features that enable users to connect, share locations and photos and make plans with their closest ties.”

via Skype to Buy GroupMe Group Messaging Service.

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TouchPad’s Lesson: Tablets Cost Too Much | PCWorld

August 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Sure, HP’s TouchPad fire sale could take sales away from low-volume tablet makers and further solidify Apple’s market share. Then again, maybe those low-volume tablet makers — HP included — have been hurting themselves with a pricing structure that isn’t attractive to most consumers.

After dropping the TouchPad’s price to $99 for the 16Gb model and $149 for the 32GB variation, HP has sold an estimated 350,000 units this weekend. That’s comparable to launch weekend sales for Apple’s tablet. Granted, HP’s tablet is discontinued and on clearance, but it shows that many consumers are willing to forget about the iPad, if the price is right.

Here’s the problem with the current system: many entry-level tablets cost somewhere around $500 and that’s the same price as the iPad. I’m guessing most consumers that decide to spend a $500 on a tablet will opt to get an iPad. If other manufacturers want to be competitive with Apple’s tablet, which is in many ways the definitive device on the market, they need to give consumers a reason to pick up their device instead.

That hasn’t really been done until now.

HP offering its discontinued tablet for a one-fifth the cost of Apple’s tablet seems to have registered with many price-conscious and deal-hunting consumers.

via TouchPad’s Lesson: Tablets Cost Too Much | PCWorld.

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Master Hacker Kevin Mitnick Shares His ‘Addiction’ : NPR

August 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Famed hacker Kevin Mitnick was 12 years old when he realized he could talk his way to glory and free bus rides.

Mitnick figured out he could ride for free if he found a way to punch his own transfer. He conned a bus driver into telling him where to buy a punch, dug a packet of blank transfers out of a dumpster, and presto – free rides.

That story appears in Mitnick’s new memoir, Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker.

Those free bus rides were the beginning of a career in trickery that eventually landed Mitnick in federal prison for hacking into scores of big phone and tech companies.

But Mitnick tells weekends on All Things Considered host Laura Sullivan that he was never interested in money or power. “My motivation for hacking was all about the intellectual challenge, the seduction of adventure, and, most importantly, the pursuit of knowledge,” he says. “I just wanted to learn everything there was.”

via Master Hacker Kevin Mitnick Shares His ‘Addiction’ : NPR.

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Court Declines to Excuse Production where Party’s Negligent Failure to Preserve Rendered Data “Less Accessible” : Electronic Discovery Law

August 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

United States v. Universal Health Servs., Inc., No. 1:07cv000054, 2011 WL 3426046 (W.D. Va. Aug. 5, 2011)

Here, the Commonwealth sought to avoid producing allegedly inaccessible information.  The court declined to excuse production, reasoning in part that it was the Commonwealth’s own “negligent failure to take steps to adequately preserve information” which rendered the information “less accessible.”  Instead, the court indicated that it would order the backup tapes and forensic images be produced to defendants “for use by a commercial vendor” to retrieve the information “in a format usable by the Commonwealth” and that defendants would bear the costs, subject to a motion seeking reimbursement.

Defendants sought to compel production of documents related to complaints of Medicaid fraud from the Commonwealth of Virginia.  The Commonwealth objected, arguing lack of control of the documents, but was ordered to produce them nonetheless.  Thereafter, the Commonwealth indicated it could not produce the documents because it would be unduly burdensome.  Specifically, the Commonwealth asserted that it was too costly to access backup tapes from the relevant time period and that it did not have the technological capability to search forensic images of hard drives which were made following placement of the (delinquent) legal hold.  Interestingly, while the Commonwealth admitted that there were less expensive alternatives for accessing the at-issue information, it claimed that state agencies were bound by state law to take their “information technology needs” to Virginia Information Technologies Agency, the agency that estimated the allegedly burdensome cost to access the backup tapes in question.

via Court Declines to Excuse Production where Party’s Negligent Failure to Preserve Rendered Data “Less Accessible” : Electronic Discovery Law.

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Privilege Waived? Federal Court Says Don’t Blame Your Electronic Discovery Vendor – Forbes

August 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The buck stops here.

In Thorncreek Apartments III, LLC v. Village of Park Forest (N.D. Ill. Aug. 9, 2011), the Northern District of Illinois held that a litigant that was negligent throughout the discovery process and failed “to check the production database created by the [third-party e-discovery vendor] before it went live online and became available to [opposing] counsel” waived privilege with respect to inadvertently produced documents. (emphasis in original). It is noteworthy that the court never called into question the conduct of the e-discovery vendor. Rather, the first line of defense in such cases clearly lies with the litigant who claims privilege.

Looking forward, the necessary re-review of any production database may involve tens of thousands of documents marked as privileged. In this case, a lengthy review of 250,000 documents yielded 159 documents claimed as privileged, all of which were produced inadvertently.

Are These Privileged?     Source: ozdox.com.au

(Such a review thus would have been easy.) However, the set of documents that might be turned over to opposing counsel is as voluminous as those designated as privileged or otherwise non-responsive. The risks are real; the responsibility imposed on counsel will require serious effort; and the stakes are enormous.

The district court agreed with the plaintiff’s request for an Order finding that six of the 159 documents produced inadvertently by the defendant were not protected from disclosure and that privilege had thereby been waived.

Electronic discovery here was conducted by a major vendor and proceeded in three steps:

Backup tapes were searched based on parameters agreed upon by both the parties and, in some cases, ordered by the court.

The vendor placed the documents into an online database where they were secured for the defendant’s sole use. The defendant then designated them as privileged, responsive, or non-responsive.

The vendor placed those documents labeled for production into a database where the plaintiffs could review them.

via Privilege Waived? Federal Court Says Don’t Blame Your Electronic Discovery Vendor – Forbes.

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Do you REALLY know how to delete data? ( – Security )

August 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

So here’s something I didn’t know and you likely didn’t either–from an IDG News Service story by tech journalist Robert McMillan, quoting independent computer forensics expert Frank McClain: “Because flash memory cells stop working after they’ve been overwritten too many times, flash devices use tricks called ‘wear leveling’ to even out how the memory cells are used. A side effect of wear leveling is that it is ‘almost impossible’ to completely erase data from a flash device.”

Hopefully you do know, as McMillan writes: “When [Microsoft] Word saves a document, it automatically saves data, such as the user’s login name, as part of the file.” But given this ‘wear leveling’ function of flash memory, which of course is used in USB thumb-drives, you can delete a Word file, yet it–along with the user’s login name–can be recovered through computer forensics.

This was dramatically demonstrated in a bizarre incident that happened in Sydney this August. A disguised man broke into a teenager’s bedroom and “chained a black box around her neck,” claiming it was a bomb. Fortunately it wasn’t, but it took a Sydney police bomb squad ten hours to cautiously remove the device from the terrified victim.

Curiously, the perpetrator had left a ransom note on “a 4GB USB stick…saved as a PDF file… a closer look at the USB drive turned up a couple of files that the criminal thought he’d deleted. One of them, a version of the ransom note written in Microsoft Word, contained metadata about the document’s author, including his name: ‘Paul P.’” Oops.

This was part of a trail of evidence leading to the arrest of Paul “Doug” Peters in the US state of Kentucky. As of this writing, authorities seek to extradite him to Australia to face kidnapping and breaking-and-entering charges.

So now you know that purging data from flash memory devices is even harder than you thought. Fortunately in this case, it helped lead to the capture of a suspect in a threatening incident. But it also shows that computer forensics can uncover information in unlikely situations, leading to real-world consequences. Computer security experts take note.

via Do you REALLY know how to delete data? ( – Security ).

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PODCAST: E-Discovery – Without the High Price Tag | Legal Talk Network

August 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Lawyers are constantly complaining about the high cost of e-discovery, so why IS the price so high? On Digital Detectives, co-hosts Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc. and John W. Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises welcome Bill Gallivan, founding member and managing executive of Gallivan Gallivan & O’Melia (GGO), to discuss how to avoid the high cost of e-discovery. Bill talks about some trends that are driving costs down, GGO’s Digital WarRoom platform and the high demand  for accessible, affordable tools.

via E-Discovery – Without the High Price Tag | Legal Talk Network.

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What does HP’s PC purge mean for computer users? | Technology | guardian.co.uk

August 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

What do you call it when the world’s biggest PC manufacturer gets out of manufacturing PCs?

Wise.

Though people have been surprised by HP’s announcement on Thursday that it is getting out of all its hardware businesses – PCs, the TouchPad tablet and the smartphones that were to have followed – the inescapable conclusion is that Leo Apotheker, the new head of HP who came from the enterprise-focused SAP last September, is declining to throw good money after bad (to wit: the purchase of Palm for $1bn) and shifting HP’s focus towards the places where he sees profit: enterprise services.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

“The tablet effect is real, and sales of the TouchPad are not meeting our expectations,” Apotheker says, explaining the movement of consumers from PCs to tablets as one of the problems with the PC division. So HP is exploring options for its unit that “may include separation through spin-off or other transactions.”

For the PC market, it marks the most important inflexion point since IBM caused a collective gasp at the end of 2004 by announcing that it was selling off its PC business to Lenovo – then an unheard-of Chinese company.

via What does HP’s PC purge mean for computer users? | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

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HP + Autonomy – What It Means For Archiving, Records Management, and eDiscovery | Forrester Blogs

August 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

While this purchase holds promise, I’m skeptical about how it will translate to near- and mid-term advantage for enterprise customers focused on information risk management. Here’s why:

HP and Autonomy information risk management portfolios have significant overlap. With its TRIM and IAP product lines, HP today offers records management and archiving products. Leveraging a long string of acquisitions, including Meridio, Zantaz, Interwoven, CA Technologies, and most recently Iron Mountain Digital, Autonomy also sells records management and archiving. Prior to today’s announcement, Autonomy faced some portfolio rationalization challenges. With a broader set of records management and archiving assets after the deal finalizes, HP will face some tough choices in determining which of its product lines will receive corporate investment over the long term. While Autonomy will bring significant new eDiscovery functionality and a rich pool of information risk management specialists with legal expertise, HP and Autonomy records management and archiving customers should be cautious until product direction is clarified.

The two corporate cultures are fundamentally different. While Autonomy has long pushed the edge of the marketing envelope, HP traditionally has taken a very different approach with much tighter linkages between its marketing claims and proven functionality, backed by customer examples. Autonomy’s information risk management vision is compelling, but its “end-to-end” claims lack a solid set of customer success stories using Autonomy’s portfolio in a comprehensive way. In my opinion, a key lesson from this deal is that good marketing pays off. Over the long term, I expect that the two vendors’ profoundly different approaches will cause big bumps in product development and in sales and marketing strategies.

via HP + Autonomy – What It Means For Archiving, Records Management, and eDiscovery | Forrester Blogs.

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