billso.com

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which develops and administers the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) that is used in the MBA admissions process, has taken over the domain name Scoretop.com as of 20 June 2008, shut down the web site, and obtained a hard drive from the ISP provider containing Scoretop subscriber information.

GMAC alleges that Lei Shi and other participants in Scoretop provided 6000 paid subscribers with access to authentic, live GMAT exam questions. GMAC has canceled one person’s GMAT score in late 2007, and may cancel other scores if a forensic examination of the drive and server logs yields a list of GMAT exam takers.

David Wilson, president and CEO of GMAC, claims the organization will not “cancel a score where we think there’s a shadow of a doubt.” But GMAC’s investigation has left some potential and current MBA students wondering if or when they will be questioned.

See these Business Week articles by Louis Lavelle called GMAT Scandal Claims First Casualty and GMAT Cheating Scandal: Answers From GMAC for more details.

Malia Zimmerman and her fellow travelers Cliff Slater and Charley’s Taxi president Dale Evans are busy promoting the construction of more roads and elevated HOV lanes on their remarkably ugly web sites, as well as the abysmally designed honolulutraffic.com. The Hawaii Reporter has been emailing single image messages for an anti-rail group and a sister web site, ZeroShibai.com.

‘Let the people decide’ not to receive spam

But there’s no unsubscribe or opt-out link in email messages or on their web sites. In 2008, that’s not just ignorant - it may be illegal. So much for respecting the privacy of Internet users. Malia seems more concerned about her First Amendment protection from civil lawsuits than respecting user privacy.

Another petition site, Let Honolulu Vote, has similar problems with design and privacy.

Perhaps StopRailNow could spend some of the money they are spending on full-page advertisements in the Honolulu Advertiser, Star-Bulletin and MidWeek on an email management service like SafeSubscribe.

I did send an unsubscribe request to info [at] stoprailnow [dot] com on 9 May 2008. It’s a very simple message that folows the standard pattern for unsubscribing:

I haven’t received a message from them since. But I didn’t receive any acknowledgment of my request, either. I remember the days when the Hawaii Reporter’s web server was kept in a bedroom.

Laws, technology and expectations have changed since then.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• Honolulu mass transit
• 8 June 2008: Why Honolulu needs rail
• 20 April 2008: Honolulu newspapers to City Council: Enough already!
• 17 April 2008: Back on track
• 15 April 2008: Council members discuss mass transit research
• 2 April 2008: Still on track?
• 20 March 2008: Like a fifth wheel
• 6 February 2008: Hawaii has highest car ownership costs in the USA
• 19 June 2007: City council, planners still arguing over mass transit routes, modes

CIOs and IT managers tend to focus on preserving data. But what happens when companies need to destroy data?

It’s easy to shred paper data, but destroying digital files may require more tools than a sledge hammer and a blowtorch.

For many companies, data removal or sanitizing is a bigger concern. Hard drives are expensive, and sometimes removing the data from a drive is a better choice.

Many people have asked me how they can erase data from their hard drive or USB device, so that they can sell or give the device to someone else.

Formatting the device won’t do the job, at least with the default settings. Erasing the file using the standard tools in the Windows and Mac operating systems usually leaves behind some or all of the files.

Mac OS has a “secure empty trash” command that will overwrite files, as described in these articles from MacGeekery and MacObserver.

Many companies sell data erasure software, including Active @ Killdisk and OnTrack.

Blancco provides enterprise tools to help companies destroy and remove digital data. This chart from DataErasure.com, a Blannco marketing web site, lists some Federal fines and penalties that are related to data privacy and disclosure.

This video from DataCenter.tv is a bit long, but it’s got some good information about Blancco’s business model.

Image provided by JcMaco under a Creative Commons license.

billso.com uses Google Analytics to monitor and assess the traffic on this site. There are several Google cookies that help that service follow users throughout the site. The tracking information is anonymous.

The comments feature records a self-reported name and address. The IP address of the author is also recorded.

All users are tracked through standard web logs and other tools.

I’m commenting my own posts when I want to add new content and links to an article.

If you have an ID on Yahoo, AOL, WordPress.com, flickr or several other services, you can use OpenID right now to log in to billso.com

This blog also supports Gravatar.

To leave a comment, users may log in with an OpenID, Gravatar or an ID from billso.com. (Added 5 April 2008)

I have enabled direct commenting to many of the article pages, but I do review, edit and delete comments because of privacy and spam issues. I have far more spam robots that want to post free ads on my site than I do actual readers. I find myself agreeing with James Farmer: comments that users post into a blog require a great deal of my time and resources to manage. Comments are twee.

Readers can e-mail me their comments, too. In your email, please include the phrase “I give billso.com permission to post my comments”.

Sometimes I refer to old articles in my blog, and those will appear as direct comments.

TRACKBACKS AND PINGS

Bloggers are welcome to post their own comments in their blog, along with a link to my article. My blog will automatically find and list these links as comments, although it may take 2 days for the comments to appear with my blog post. It’s not an instantaneous process.