Updated 23 April : The Answer Is “No”
There was a flurry of press during the past week with headlines like this one: “E-book sales make history in the US, top paperback books in sales.”
But is that really what the Association of American Publishers (AAP) data (or the press release) said?
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I’m late to this story. About two weeks ago, Jeff Bercovici indicted Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and “citizen bloggers and crowdsourced reporting” in his take (Forbes Mixed Media) on the Terry Jones Koran-burning story. (I read it because one of my students Tweeted the link.) Bercovici wrote his column about two weeks after Jones lit a match in Gainesville, FL.
I’m so off-balance by the flaws in Bercovici’s arguments that I don’t know where to begin, so I’ll take them in chronological order.
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Two weeks ago Epsilon, a company that sends out 40+ billion emails a year, said it had suffered a data breach but refused to provide details, saying that it “[could not] release the names of its clients.”
Today it seems clear than more than 100 companies were part of this data breach. Most of those affected seem to be financial accounts, that is store- or service-branded credit cards.
Because of the financial nature of the breach, be aware of what is called “spear-phishing” – bogus emails that appear genuine because you can be targeted. Analytical firm Javelin says that people who have been subject to a data breach are four more times likely to be the victim of identity fraud.
What follows is an alphabetical list of companies that have been named informally.
The White House made a big statement about (digital) identity theft on Friday, with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke announcing a public-private sector effort, National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). “The administration hopes to see a robust trusted ID market in the U.S. in three to five years,” according to PC World.
The trusted ID technologies described in NSTIC would allow online users to dump passwords in favor of credentials that can be used on multiple websites. The Obama administration hopes that multiple trusted ID technologies will emerge, officials said.
In order to justify this initiative, the Commerce Department presented faulty “logic” which was regurgitated by PC World:
Cellphone In London: Creative Commons Licensed Photo
Oxford mathematicians have developed a tool that allows British consumers to analyze their mobile phone bills and figure out the most affordable subscription plan.
Their analysis suggests that shifting to the right plan (one more atune to actual usage) would save British consumers £4.899 billion annually. That’s $8 billion. (If the comparison were one-to-one, that would be equivalent to a $40 billion in savings in the U.S. market.)
That money, of course, is going into the pockets of telecos and then on to …. who? Stockholders? Senior executives? Infrastructure improvements? Advertising?
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