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Berkeley Laptop With Grad Student Info Stolen

Slashdot | Berkeley Grads’ Identity Data Stolen
“Did you get a graduate degree from Berkeley? Or maybe you just applied but didn’t go there? If so, your identity may have been stolen. A laptop was stolen containing names, social security numbers, birthdates, and addresses of grad students, alumni, and applicants. University police suspect that the thief just wanted the laptop, but the irony of California’s mandatory notification law is that the thief may now know they have something even more valuable. Berkeley has set up a website with information on the breach.“

Big Question: Why was all of this info stored on a laptop anyway? It seems to me that it would make a certain amount of sense to not allow data like this to be saved on a laptop in the first place.

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Datablogging, The Newest thing

John Robb’s Weblog
“The concept is simple. Data is usually locked up in monolithic applications (CRM, ERP, etc.). Application seats are expensive. Training is expensive. Etc. People that need the data often can’t get to it.

What if human readable data flows (via RSS) could be generated by these applications? It would allow the development of easy to read weblogs (that republished these RSS flows) that almost everyone in the company would find valuable. The combinations are almost limitless and the flow is completely automated.“

I’ve been recommending this sort of approach to folks for awhile. To me RSS feeds are essentially a by-product of data entry in any db system, just one last statement (open the RSS file and add and entry) tagged on the end of the code that creates or edits the row in the db.

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Yahoo Searches For Creative Commons Licenses

TechWeb | News | Yahoo Launches Search For Nontraditionally Licensed Content
“Yahoo Inc. on Thursday released in beta a search engine that looks for pictures, writings and other creative works that are available for reuse under nontraditional copyright licenses offered by a nonprofit group.

The new online tool searches the web for sites with a Creative Commons license. The San Francisco organization has created a range of protections for authors and artists by replacing the “all rights reserved” of traditional copyright with “some-rights-reserved” alternatives.“

Larry Lessig, the engine behind Creative Commons, reports on the new tool here. This feature lets you use Yahoo! to find works that can be re-used and shared according to the various CC licenses. So, need a bit of graphic, a photo, or some music to spice up your site? This is the search tool to use.

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de.lirio.us – Social Bookmarking, Tagging, Blogging & Notes

de.lirio.us – Social Bookmarking, Tagging, Blogging & Notes. Mmmmm, Notes.

“de.lirio.us – My latest project. All the buzzwords, in one package!

Blogging, tagging, folksonomies, social bookmarking, and a bit more. And the whole thing is open source.

What’s really sweet about this is that you can include a long
detailed note with each post in addition to a one line description. That becomes your blog post.. if you want or just leave it for folks to read.

Please try it out, tell your buds, kick some tires. In the spirit of open source, it ain’t perfect, but good enough to do a release & let people poke at it.

More here too.

The source code is open source & in perl if you feel like hacking it up some.“

Perhaps the coolest tool of late, an open source del.icio.us

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Will Banks Pay $200,000 For a Re-Mastered Knoppix?

Knoppix Remastered for Phishing Prevention
“Cybersource, an electronic payment services company, has announced a new product called “Coastguard” to help make accessing online banking sites more secure. Coastguard is basically a remastered Knoppix CD that has DNS servers and other settings are automatically configured to use secured bank servers. This is a departure from token-based systems that other companies use.

I like the fact that this company was able to recognize how useful Knoppix is, particularly for this kind of security. Of course, at a $250,000[AUD] price tag, it’s not exactly cheap. For the cost you do get complete access to the remastered CD with the ability to further tweak it, although I think you could probably pay a lot less for someone who knows Knoppix to create a remastered version just for you.“

The deal is the bank buys the master and the hardware for burning copies of the CD. The disc can be customized by the bank. The CDs are distributed to customers who then boot the disc and connect directly to the bank. It certainly would be secure, but imposes a huge support burden I think. Knoppix is cool, but in the hands of civilians it can be a little difficult to use. Now if they have really stripped it down and made it plug-n-play, that would be good. I suspect that we won’t here about this, at the 200K+ price point again.

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Open Source Doc Management With KnowledgeTree

freshmeat.net: Project details for KnowledgeTree
“KnowledgeTree is a feature-rich document management system featuring knowledge management, document version control, hierarchical document management, support for common file formats (MS Word, MS Excel, PDF, TXT, HTML), extensible meta data, creation of custom document types, application managed document links that guarantees consistent data and eliminates emailing documents, easy publication of documents, subscription agents, archiving according to expiry date, expiry time period, or utilisation for enhanced speed, and much more.“

May be of interest to teknoids looking for a less expensive solution to knowledge management.

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