WERU 89.9 FM Blue Hill, Maine Local News and Public Affairs Archives

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

We’ve been following the deployment of so-called smart meters which, as has been pointed out, are not particularly secure, giving rise to privacy concerns for consumers. Now there is a problem for the utilities themselves according to this report about an FBI document: hacking of smart meters to steal electricity.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/04/fbi-smart-meter-hacks-likely-to-spread/

There are lots of free college courses available online. Here are some sites where you can find out more:

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

http://mitx.mit.edu/

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/

http://oyc.yale.edu/courses

http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses

http://www.open-of-course.org/courses/

http://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative

http://opencontent.org/ocwfinder/

http://www.ocwsearch.com/

Standard Podcast [ 7:18 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Interested in keeping yourself to yourself as you move around the web? There are tools to help you do that. Listen up and take a look at:

http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot

http://www.torproject.org

http://gnupg.org

Standard Podcast [ 7:36 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

It seems as if lots of the media as well as lots of politicians are upset over the privacy policies of Google, Facebook, and other commercial web companies, and with good reason. But users have a choice about what company’s services to use. There is no choice about government so it behooves us to keep up on current and future government use of technologies
that affect out personal privacy that most politicians don’t seem to want to talk about. Here are a few.

Standard Podcast [ 7:40 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In this edition, we update a couple of topics we’ve looked at recently – the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an alternative to SOPA which troubles many in this country and aboard; and a reminder that our privacy laws are reducing the competitiveness of U.S. companies trying to do business in countries worried about ubiquitous U.S. surveillance of personal information.

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Standard Podcast [ 8:51 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Computers are getting remarkably good at identifying faces. That can be very cool for automatically tagging the people in the photos you upload to your computer, but maybe not quite as cool when Facebook, Google, and your local police department start doing the same thing.

Standard Podcast [ 7:25 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Smile – you’re on Candid Camera! No, not the TV show, the every day security show that is going on all over the country and all over the world. Going to lower Manhattan? There are a thousand security cameras there per square mile
- and they are being tied together so police can access the images from any of them. Visiting London? You’re image will probably be recorded 300 times in a day. Well, you might say, these cameras help police solve crimes.
Maybe, but they can be used for lots of other things as well. Here are some of them in this show from the Electronic Cottage archives.

Standard Podcast [ 8:41 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

We’ve heard a lot about the Internet lately with the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. What we haven’t heard so much about are questions about personal information security right here at home. Today we take a brief look at both in this first installment on Internet Security.

Standard Podcast [ 7:20 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Today, let’s catch up on some recent developments in labs and elsewhere that will be affecting our lives sooner or later ranging from storing information in bacteria to letting government agents have access to our reading habits for no particular reason.

Standard Podcast [ 7:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download