Tim Smith reports: A former Clemson University official suing the university alleges in court documents it sold surplus computers with confidential personal information on them and tried to conceal it from the public — allegations the school denies. Eugene Troutman, a former Clemson board secretary, alleges that when Clemson officials learned computers had been sold…
Author: Dissent
Twitter Gets Hacked, Badly
Michael Arrington reports: Phishing attacks, which hit Twitter over the weekend, are a sign a service has arrived (Facebook has the same problem). But someone hacking into Twitter’s internal admin tools and compromising 33 high profile accounts, including President Elect Barack Obama, has Twitter users freaking out about what to do. Here is Twitter’s official…
Medical errors, apologies and apology laws
Noni MacDonald, MD MSc and Amir Attaran, LLB DPhi have an editorial in the current issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal that addresses the need for apologies when a medical error occurs. The article describes the history of such laws in the U.S. in the 1990’s: […] Full disclosure to the patient is the…
FL: Video surveillance in a hospital room here was not under a reasonable expectation of privacy
John Wesley Hall, Jr. tells us of a recent court decision that I actually agree with: Defendant was charged with child abuse murder in Florida. After the death of her child in Florida, she moved to West Virginia. Defendant was suspected there of child abuse by Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and video surveillance was…
NY: Law to help protect against identity theft
via CNYLink: Senator John A. DeFrancisco (R-I-C, Syracuse) said that a bill (S8376A) he cosponsored to help prevent identity theft in New York has become law. The law establishes the crime of unlawful possession of a “skimmer” device and protects personal information in several other ways. […] Several other measures recently went into effect (January…
How Technology May Soon "Read" Your Mind
How often have you wondered what your spouse is really thinking? Or your boss? Or the guy sitting across from you on the bus? We all take as a given that we’ll never really know for sure. The content of our thoughts is our own – private, secret, and unknowable by anyone else. Until now,…