Changes to privacy law would cover the cloud

Featured

6 hrs.

Helen A.S. Popkin

If you're confused over a recent email from Facebook regarding its data use policy, you're not alone.? The email ? with the subject line "Up... Read more

4 hrs.

Suzanne Choney , NBC News

A generation ago, when the Electronic Privacy Communication Act was passed,?"the cloud," a term for massive?server?storage of private?emails, documents and photos, didn't exist. Now some?lawmakers are looking to amend the 1986?law so that information stored in the cloud would require a warrant by the police who want that information from either the cloud?storage provider or the individual.

That amendment to the?Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 2012, the first major changes to 26-year-old law, is expected to be considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

Right now, law enforcement needs only a subpoena, issued by a prosecutor, to search cloud-based storage, whether it's for emails or documents that are shared for collaboration?on sites like Google. A bill by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, would instead require law enforcement to obtain a search warrant issued by a judge.

"The bill pending at the Senate Judiciary Committee to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is long overdue," said Greg?Nojeim, senior counsel and director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's?Project on Freedom, Security & Technology, told NBC News.

"Requiring a warrant for email and other information stored in the cloud would provide privacy to consumers, certainty to law enforcement, and clarity to the companies that receive law enforcement demands."

The ACLU, too, is backing the change. "We believe the statute is very out of date," Christopher Calabrese, ACLU legislative counsel, told NBC News. "All email and all private communications should be covered by a warrant," and not just a subpoena.

Law enforcement groups are opposing the cloud-based?warrant requirement.?The battle comes as courts continue to?wrangle?over whether law enforcement should be allowed to track an?individuals'?cellphone information?without a warrant.?

"The crime scene of the 21st century is filled with electronic records and other digital evidence," wrote?representatives of various investigative, legal and police agencies via the National Sheriffs' Association?in a?letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

If anything, the agency representatives said in the letter, "laws, policies, protocols, and practices related to the process of law enforcement evidence retrieval from communications service?providers are out-of-date and increasingly insufficient moving forward."

Check out Technology, GadgetBox, Digital Life and InGame on?Facebook,?and on?Twitter, follow Suzanne Choney.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/changes-privacy-law-would-cover-cloud-1C7208010

role models ferdinand porsche gregg williams theraflu masters leaderboard frozen four joe avezzano

Crane bursts into flames, collapses on building in Australia

TODAY's Natalie Morales takes a look at video showing the biggest crane in Sydney, Australia, engulfed in flames then crashing down onto a nearby building. Thankfully, nobody was injured in the ordeal.

By Ian Johnston, NBC News

A 210-foot crane burst into flames and its arm then crashed onto a university building in Australia Tuesday as people fled.

Video footage showed flames engulfing the engine and cabin of the crane.

It was the second crane collapse involving multinational construction company Lend Lease. It currently is being sued by two dentists over the collapse of a crane on a 90-story luxury apartment building in New York City during superstorm Sandy.

The University of Technology Sydney said in a statement that the crane caught fire shortly before 10 a.m. local time (10 p.m. ET).

The university said no one was hurt with students and staff evacuating buildings in the affected areas. It added it was working with Lend Lease and the authorities ?to assess the safety of the site and surrounding area.?

Fire crews quickly withdrawn
Fire & Rescue NSW said in a statement that ?a crane driver and a second worker in the cabin evacuated soon after firefighters arrived as the fire spread from the engine to engulf the cabin.?

Fire crews were ?quickly withdrawn when the fire started to destabilize the crane?s structural integrity and its fly boom [the crane arm] collapsed,? the statement said.

About 200 people were evacuated from the area and a 0.6-mile exclusion zone was set up.

On Oct. 29, during superstorm Sandy, a crane operated by Lend Lease collapsed on the One57 building, which includes a number of expensive apartments and a number of businesses.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported that two dentists with offices near the building had filed a lawsuit against Lend Lease and other companies involved, saying they had been forced to close as the area was evacuated.

Police have evacuated the upper floors of buildings near a luxury high-rise on West 57th St. in New York City as damaged crane dangled precariously from what is slated to be Manhattan's tallest residential tower. NBC's Rehema Ellis reports.

Crane left dangling from partly built Manhattan tower

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, said Lend Lease was negligent because it failed to make sure the crane was properly secured before the storm.

"The crane collapse and the ensuing week-long evacuation was a direct result of defendants' failure to prepare, maintain, operate, and secure the crane to withstand the winds of the widely anticipated Hurricane Sandy," the lawsuit said.

There was no response to calls placed with Lend Lease offices in London, U.K., and New York Tuesday.

The British trade magazine Building?s website (requires registration) quoted a Lend Lease spokesperson as saying the crane collapses in Sydney and New York were ?completely unrelated.?

?No one has been injured as a result of the incident,? the spokesperson said, referring to the Sydney collapse. ?Lend Lease is working closely with emergency services and relevant authorities to manage the incident.?

Reuters contributed to this report.

More world stories from NBC News:

Follow World News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/27/15484438-giant-crane-bursts-into-flames-collapses-on-building-in-australia?lite

Christian Bale Sherman Hemsley Olympics Opening Ceremony abc paris jackson paris jackson Katherine Jackson

Car Companies Are Seeing the Light

The three top Automotive X Prize winning vehicles: the X-Tracer Team Switzerland E-Tracer, the Edison2 Very Light Car, and the Li-ion Motors Corp. Wave II. Each vehicle is capable of achieving 100 miles per gallon or the energy equivalent.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

When anonymous Ford executives told the Wall Street Journal this summer that the company would be switching out the steel body of its iconic F-150 pickup for an all-aluminum one beginning in 2014, many brand loyalists at the Ford Truck Enthusiasts forum were somewhat skeptical. Price was a concern, given that aluminum can cost as much as four times as much as steel. Others noted that aluminum is harder to repair, given that fewer body shops equipped to work with the metal: ?(I)t's not like you can just have a dent service repair it when you get a door ding or worse.? And then there was the toughness factor, with many complaining that aluminum just doesn?t evoke that same masculine/cowboy/fulfilled-by-manual-labor aesthetic: ?I like my old steel pickup, I like the feeling of having heavy protection rather then [sic] feeling like a soda can on wheels.?

Ford would later call the executives? prediction ?premature.? Still, it prompted the question: Why would America?s most popular pickup risk alienating its base? Because as the Ford execs noted, an aluminum body would shave 700 pounds off of the truck?s total weight?and the less weight the engine has to move, the less gas it will have to use. ?Weight reduction,? Ford?s global chief of product development told the Wall Street Journal, ?is going to be a big part of our strategy.?

It is possible that the gains in fuel economy will attract new customers, mitigating the loss of those loyalists who prefer the more traditional steel horse. And maybe Ford is seriously concerned with the health of Mother Earth. But it also didn?t have much of a choice.

In July 2011, the Obama administration reached an agreement with 13 major automakers?Ford included?along with the UAW and the EPA to dramatically increase vehicle fuel efficiency standards on all cars and light trucks sold in the United States: By 2025, every carmaker?s fleet would have to average 54.5 miles per gallon. It represented a near-doubling of the current standard of 29 miles per gallon?roughly the highway fuel efficiency of a Ford Taurus.

Environmental groups mostly celebrated the move?the Union of Concerned Scientists, for instance, deemed it ?a very positive development.? (Although, as financial writer Felix Salmon at Reuters has noted, the new standard will still leave us lagging behind just about every government fuel efficiency standard in the developed world.) Conservatives were, predictably, not enthused. When the terms were finalized a year later, a post-primary and pre-centrist Mitt Romney called the measures ?extreme,? arguing that they would ?limit the choices available to American families.? In an article titled ?Obama?s Sneaky, Deadly, Costly Car Tax,? conservative columnist and paid hysteric Michelle Malkin warned that the ?draconian environmental regulation ? will cost untold American lives.?

Perhaps a bit more amenable to regulations because of the bailout, automakers publicly offered their endorsement. But there was some market wariness about both the desire for such vehicles and the quick timeline for such a major move. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, an industry trade group, called the new standards ?ambitious,? ?aggressive,? and ?very, very challenging,? noting how slow the market pickup has been for hybrid cars, which in their decade or so of availability have failed to crack 2.5 percent of vehicle sales.

But it?s not like this call for greater fuel efficiency caught carmakers by surprise. The passage of the Energy Independence and Security Act in 2007 had already set a goal for the national fuel economy standard of 35 mpg by 2020?marking the first substantive change since Congress set the original standard of 27.5 mpg in 1975 (to be reached by 1985) in the wake of the oil crisis. Obama?s two subsequent goalpost relocations?first pushing Bush?s original plan up to 35.5 mpg by 2016 and then extending it with the 54.5-by-2025 plan?just demanded that carmakers act a bit more quickly.

So now the auto industry is forced to tackle something they were able to mostly ignore for a quarter of a century. And with Obama?s re-election, reality just renewed its lease. Where to start?

Some have opted for the direct route, tinkering and tweaking the engine. GM?s new Corvette, for instance, offers something called ?active fuel management,? in which the car cuts off half of the engine?s cylinders during what it calls ?light load? situations like highway coasting. Ford?s new Fusion model offers a similar fuel saving function?a ?start-stop? feature that shuts the engine down when the car is idling. All of the Big Three are even rolling out models that run clean diesel?a more efficient, low-sulfur version of the fuel?in 2013.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=4b9440a0d5fff19368715e79d40b32aa

Olga Korbut Usain Bolt 2012 Olympics Katie Ledecky Aaron Ross Sikh temple lollapalooza Nastia Liukin

Egypt's Mursi faces judicial revolt over new powers

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi faced a rebellion from judges who accused him on Saturday of expanding his powers at their expense, deepening a crisis that has triggered violence in the street and exposed the country's deep divisions.

The Judges' Club, a body representing judges across Egypt, called for a strike during a meeting interrupted with chants demanding the "downfall of the regime" - the rallying cry in the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak last year.

Mursi's political opponents and supporters, representing the divide between newly empowered Islamists and their critics, called for rival demonstrations on Tuesday over a decree that has triggered concern in the West.

Issued late on Thursday, it marks an effort by Mursi to consolidate his influence after he successfully sidelined Mubarak-era generals in August. The decree defends from judicial review decisions taken by Mursi until a new parliament is elected in a vote expected early next year.

It also shields the Islamist-dominated assembly writing Egypt's new constitution from a raft of legal challenges that have threatened the body with dissolution, and offers the same protection to the Islamist-controlled upper house of parliament.

Egypt's highest judicial authority, the Supreme Judicial Council, said the decree was an "unprecedented attack" on the independence of the judiciary. The Judges' Club, meeting in Cairo, called on Mursi to rescind it.

That demand was echoed by prominent opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei. "There is no room for dialogue when a dictator imposes the most oppressive, abhorrent measures and then says 'let us split the difference'," he said.

"I am waiting to see, I hope soon, a very strong statement of condemnation by the U.S., by Europe and by everybody who really cares about human dignity," he said in an interview with Reuters and the Associated Press.

More than 300 people were injured on Friday as protests against the decree turned violent. There were attacks on at least three offices belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood, the movement that propelled Mursi to power.

POLARISATION

Liberal, leftist and socialist parties called a big protest for Tuesday to force Mursi to row back on a move they say has exposed the autocratic impulses of a man once jailed by Mubarak.

In a sign of the polarization in the country, the Muslim Brotherhood called its own protests that day to support the president's decree.

Mursi also assigned himself new authority to sack the prosecutor general, who was appointed during the Mubarak era, and appoint a new one. The dismissed prosecutor general, Abdel Maguid Mahmoud, was given a hero's welcome at the Judges' Club.

In open defiance of Mursi, Ahmed al-Zind, head of the club, introduced Mahmoud by his old title.

The Mursi administration has defended the decree on the grounds that it aims to speed up a protracted transition from Mubarak's rule to a new system of democratic government.

Analysts say it reflects the Brotherhood's suspicion towards sections of a judiciary unreformed from Mubarak's days.

"It aims to sideline Mursi's enemies in the judiciary and ultimately to impose and head off any legal challenges to the constitution," said Elijah Zarwan, a fellow with The European Council on Foreign Relations.

"We are in a situation now where both sides are escalating and its getting harder and harder to see how either side can gracefully climb down."

ADVISOR TO MURSI QUITS

Following a day of violence in Cairo, Alexandria, Port Said and Suez, the smell of tear gas hung over the capital's Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the uprising that toppled Mubarak in 2011 and the stage for more protests on Friday.

Youths clashed sporadically with police near the square, where activists camped out for a second day on Saturday, setting up makeshift barricades to keep out traffic.

Al-Masry Al-Youm, one of Egypt's most widely read dailies, hailed Friday's protest as "The November 23 Intifada", invoking the Arabic word for uprising.

But the ultra-orthodox Salafi Islamist groups that have been pushing for tighter application of Islamic law in the new constitution have rallied behind Mursi's decree.

The Nour Party, one such group, stated its support for the Mursi decree. Al-Gama'a al-Islamiya, which carried arms against the state in the 1990s, said it would save the revolution from what it described as remnants of the Mubarak regime.

Samir Morkos, a Christian assistant to Mursi, had told the president he wanted to resign, said Yasser Ali, Mursi's spokesman. Speaking to the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, Morkos said: "I refuse to continue in the shadow of republican decisions that obstruct the democratic transition".

Mursi's decree has been criticized by Western states that earlier this week were full of praise for his role in mediating an end to the eight-day war between Israel and Palestinians.

"The decisions and declarations announced on November 22 raise concerns for many Egyptians and for the international community," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

The European Union urged Mursi to respect the democratic process.

(Additional reporting by Omar Fahmy, Marwa Awad, Edmund Blair and Shaimaa Fayed and Reuters TV; Editing by Jon Hemming)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/clashes-cairo-mursi-seizes-powers-053441160.html

netanyahu aipac vanessa minnillo super tuesday epidemiology total eclipse of the heart jionni lavalle

Energy efficient windows ? Home Improvement: House Plans

November 20th, 2012 by admin Leave a reply ?

I must change the windows of my home. My old windows aren't bad looking. But although they go well with the house and I still like them, they are lacking the much needed energy efficiency. Heating and cooling my home takes five times longer than it is supposed to. I talked to the contractor that I always use, and after inspecting them, he told me that is time for windows upgrade. Because I really like the window design I have, I went in search for the similar window style only with a better energy efficiency index. I found something that looks promising at the Nitro Windows store my next door neighbor suggested. I?ll see soon enough how they will do.?

Source: http://redtreeinteractive.com/energy-efficient-windows/

Nathan Adrian London 2012 Synchronized Swimming London 2012 hurdles Taylor Kinney Beach Volleyball Olympics 2012 Jessica Ennis Oscar Pistorius

Source: http://wlbt-breaking-news.blogspot.com/2012/11/energy-efficient-windows-home.html

platypus overboard east of eden weather radio indiana autoimmune disease westboro baptist church

Source: http://nagytyre.posterous.com/energy-efficient-windows-home-improvement-hou

d t p zynga Tropical Storm Sandy W S

Source: http://phalanx-behan.blogspot.com/2012/11/energy-efficient-windows-home.html

uk vs louisville university of kansas buckeye west side story final four 2012 bridesmaids winning lottery numbers

Source: http://caner-scanner.blogspot.com/2012/11/energy-efficient-windows-home.html

mary kay ash tiny houses bon iver joan of arc tony robbins abraham lincoln vampire hunter their eyes were watching god