Part 2 – Video
26-03-2012 15:43 Walking Condi and Benito Bergmann part 2
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Part 2 - Video
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Bernard Tomic asks for his father to be removed from stadium – Video
24-03-2012 21:50 Bernard Tomic asks the umpire for his father to leave the court in Miami
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Bernard Tomic asks for his father to be removed from stadium - Video
FTC urges transparency law for Internet data brokers
The Federal Trade Commission on Monday urged Congress to enact Internet privacy laws that would force data brokers to reveal what information they buy and sell about consumers.
In a wide-ranging report that also supports self-regulatory efforts by businesses, the FTC stopped short of supporting laws that would mandate anti-tracking buttons on Web sites a proposal that Internet advertisers have lobbied hard to keep out of legislation.
The report largely mirrors similar proposals made last month by the White House and highlights a growing consensus among federal officials that consumers need stronger protection for their online privacy.
Over the past year, the FTC has cracked down on Google and Facebook for allegedly exposing user data when launching new products. The agency said that cellphone applications present new privacy challenges: Legal statements are unclear and too hard to read on small screens and companies such as Apple and Google do not force developers to post notices in app stores.
After two years of intense debate between powerful companies and privacy advocates, the FTCs recommendations were a relief to businesses that hope to use consumer data to customize advertising based on a users likes and dislikes without strict government rules.
We wanted not to erect a stop light for businesses but to take a closer look at traffic patterns, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said during a news conference.
Much of the 73-page report focused on the need for companies to clearly explain how they collect data about users and for what purposes they use that information.
The FTC called for legislation on data brokers the Web's information middlemen, such as Lexis Nexis and Choicepoint who take data that has been collected online and merge the information with documents offline to create detailed portraits of consumers.
The brokers sell a wealth of highly personal information about consumers but never interact directly with them, according to the report. Consumers are often unaware of the existence of these entities, as well as the purposes for which they collect and use data.
The FTC said a law should allow consumers to see what those portraits would look like . And the agency said that data brokers should be forced to reveal their data-collection practices.
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FTC urges transparency law for Internet data brokers
Internet not replacing traditional media
Published: March. 26, 2012 at 5:24 PM
GOTHENBURG, Sweden, March 26 (UPI) -- Researchers say young people in Sweden, although heavy users of the Internet, are not abandoning traditional media such as TV, radio and recorded music.
Olle Findahl of the University of Gothenburg, who conducted a study of 9-to-24-year-olds' media habits, said although the age group watches TV and listens to radio and recorded music less today than 30 years ago, they still use traditional media more than the Internet.
Children between the ages of 9 and 14 spend 75 percent of their media time on traditional media, while those between the ages of 15 and 24 spend about 60 percent of their time on traditional media, a university release reported Sunday.
Findahl said the change in media use is similar to what happened when television was introduced in the 1950s and it appears people are using the Internet to complement, not replace, older media.
The rise of Internet use does not appear to have a negative correlation with the use of traditional media. In fact, the most intense Internet users are also heavy consumers of traditional media, the researchers said.
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Internet not replacing traditional media
Decapitating the internet
26 March 2012 Last updated at 19:53 ET By Prof Alan Woodward Department of Computing, University of Surrey
A recent threat, purportedly from the hacker group Anonymous, stated boldly that its members would stop the internet on 31 March.
The term "Operation Blackout" was coined and it caused much discussion in all the usual forums.
Those issuing the threat even stated how they would do it. They claimed they could disable the Domain Name Service (known by engineers as the DNS) and that would stop the internet. How so?
The Domain Name Service is what converts the web addresses you type into your browser (such as http://www.bbc.co.uk) into what the internet actually uses: IP addresses (something like 212.58.244.66).
It is essentially the phone book for the internet. If you could prevent access to the phone book then you would effectively render the web useless.
The theory behind the proposed attack is based on the fact that the Domain Name Service is a tree structure: it starts with 13 servers at the top level and each of those talks to the next level down, which then pass it on to a further level down, and so on.
When a change is made at the top level it is copied out across the net so that when you look up what is effectively your local copy of the phone book, it takes you to the correct place.
If somehow one could prevent some or all of the 13 top level members of the DNS from working, specifically from communicating with others, then this would disrupt the remainder of the tree, and very quickly no-one would be able to use the addresses that we all typically know.
When the threat was made, it did cause some concern as the would-be hackers correctly identified the locations of the top level systems.
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Decapitating the internet