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Monthly Archives: August 2005

Risk Assessment Survey Indicates Data Breaches Involving Personal Info Are Routine

From the Reconnex August Insider Threat Index: “Ninety-one percent of companies who completed a Reconnex 48-Hour e-Risk Assessment in the month of July had credit card numbers entering or leaving their network and eight-two percent exposed social security numbers. Most concerning was the amount of personal data including name and SSNs exposed directly in the… Continue Reading

MSN Search Makes RSS Easy

From Jim Moore’s Journal: Reporting on systems evolving, the following posting yesterday provides step by step details on how researchers can easily and effectively leverage RSS: RSS-oriented search engines are appearing, including MSN search, with RSS output and one-click subscriptions to leading news aggregators. Continue Reading

FOIA Lawsuit to Obtain JFK Records Blocked by CIA

From the New York Review of Books, this letter, Blocked, signed by a distinguished group of authors, journalists and researchers, responding to the CIA’s refusal to produce copies of documents in response to a FOIA lawsuit under the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Act. [thanks Mike] Related reference: The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection… Continue Reading

Web Search Emphasizes The Present to the Detriment of Access to Data on the Past

A forthcoming report from New Media & Society, Multiple Presents: How Search Engines Re-write the Past, by Iina Hellsten, Loet Leydesdorff, and Paul Wouters (available in PDF, 28 pages). “Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously. The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting Web pages with newer ones, adding new pages… Continue Reading

More Than 4 Million FOIA Requests Made in 2004

The Coalition of Journalists for Open Government has issued two new reports, one of which addresses overall federal agency responsiveness to FOIA requests (the overwhelming majority of which come from the public not the media), and the second which provides a review of FOIA litigation decisions during the period of 1999 through 2004. The combined… Continue Reading

THOMAS Will Launch New Search Engine By Year’s End

Federal Computer Week reported that THOMAS will soon offer users a significant improvement in search capabilities with the addition of “browse navigation that can access content across different systems contained within the Thomas Web site.” [Peggy Garvin] Redesign of the site has been underway for some time now, with incremental improvements released to the public… Continue Reading

New Players Offer Deep Web Access to Facilitate Online Job Search

“Simply Hired and Indeed, upstarts less than a year old, are getting attention for their Google-like approach to helping people find jobs. They do for job listings what Google does for general information — crawl or “scrape” listings from thousands of sites and create a free, searchable index in one spot.” [Link] Duo’s search engine… Continue Reading

Study Reveals Extremely Limited Scope of Legal Citations

Smith, Thomas A.C., The Web of Law (Spring 2005). San Diego Legal Studies Research Paper No. 06-11. “I present in this article the preliminary results of a significant citation study of nearly four million American legal precedents, which was undertaken at my request by the LexisNexis corporation using the Shepard’s citation service. This study demonstrates… Continue Reading