Sunday, December 11, 2011


A simple illustration. Many organizations are not able to go back to manual processes. e.g. could any company calculate a payroll without the computers?
"The Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper is reporting that a hospital with campuses in Lawrenceville and Duluth, Georgia turned ambulances away after the discovery of 'a system-wide computer virus that slowed patient registration and other operations.' They're only currently accepting patients with 'dire emergencies.' A spokeswoman for the hospital said the diversion happened because 'it's a trauma center and needs to be able to respond rapidly.' The situation began on Thursday afternoon and is expected to last through the weekend."
[From the article:
Patients were waiting longer at registration on Friday, and the virus also was affecting departments such as the pharmacy, radiology and labs. A system of runners are dealing with a variety of tasks, such as running orders down to the pharmacy or delivering X-rays to doctors


Something to watch. If employees use their computers as they use the phones on their desks (for personal reasons) have they committed a crime?
When Computer Misuse Becomes a Crime
December 10, 2011 by Dissent
Ginny LaRoe has a helpful article on the upcoming rehearing en banc of United States v. Nosal , a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals case that asks whether violating an employer’s computer use policy is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law that started life as an anti-hacking statute.
A few years ago, Bay Area federal prosecutors took up a white-collar case that wasn’t particularly sexy, indicting a handful of employees of an executive recruiting firm who had tapped an internal database to get information to start a competing business. The U.S. attorney’s office quickly cut deals with two of the lower-level employees before indicting its main target, David Nosal, an executive at Korn/Ferry International, charging him and a woman named Becky Christian with a slew of crimes, including trade secret theft.
And they invoked the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the 1980s anti-hacking statute.
What started as a routine prosecution stemming from an employment dispute has turned into a heated battle — with national implications — over civil liberties in the digital age. At oral argument on Thursday, an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals will sort out whether the CFAA allows for the federal prosecution of employees who so much as check a ballgame score on a work computer or fib on Facebook in violation of a terms of use agreement.
Read more on Law.com. Nosal’s petition for rehearing en banc can be found here.


Probably not, but interesting to speculate who had the tech skills and why they might want to create a tool like this...
"Despite the U.S. and Israel being widely assumed to be responsible for Stuxnet, Russia is the more likely culprit, says U.S. Air Force cyber analyst. The nuclear gangsterism of the past 20 years gives it plenty of motive. Quoting: 'So what better way to maintain Russian interests, and innocence, than to plant a worm with digital U.S.-Israeli fingerprints? After all, Russian scientists and engineers are familiar with the cascading centrifuges whose numbers and configuration – and Siemen’s SCADA PLC controller schematics – they have full access to by virtue of designing the plants. ... the observers of the virus could alert the Iranians before full nuclear catastrophe struck. The Belarusian computer security experts who 'discovered' the code seemingly played that role well. They didn't seem too preoccupied with reverse engineering the malicious code to see what it was designed to do.'"


When you are on a jury, you can't use social networks for any reason? Is that realistic? I can see a problem with using your smartphone while evidence/arguments are going on, but before or after it should be okay to complain about the coffee...
"The Arkansas Supreme Court had overturned a murder conviction due to a juror tweeting during the trial. Erickson Dimas-Martinez was convicted in 2010 of killing a teenager and was sentenced to death. His lawyers appealed the case on account of a juror tweeting his musings during the trial and because another juror nodded off during the presentation of evidence. Tweets sent include 'The coffee here sucks' and 'Court. Day 5. here we go again.' In an opinion, Associate Justice Donald Corbin wrote 'because of the very nature of Twitter as an... online social media site, Juror 2's tweets about the trial were very much public discussions.' Dimas-Martinez is to be given a new trial."


(Completely unrelated) Is this unexpected given the differing cultures of the users of these technologies?
December 09, 2011
Pew - Twitter and the Campaign
  • "A detailed examination of more than 20 million Tweets about the race for president finds that the political discussion on Twitter is measurably different than the one found in the blogosphere — more voluminous, more fluid and even less neutral. But both forms of social media differ markedly from the political narrative that Americans receive from news coverage, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which examines campaign coverage and the online conversation from May 2-November 27. One distinguishing factor about the campaign discourse on Twitter is that it is more intensely opinionated, and less neutral, than in both blogs and news. Tweets contain a smaller percentage of statements about candidates that are simply factual in nature without reflecting positively or negatively on a candidate. In general, that means the discourse on Twitter about the candidates has also been more negative."


For my Ethical Hackers
"Can you play an MP3 file? Then you can jailbreak the new Kindle Touch. A new hack was posted this morning that roots the Kindle Touch/K5 and opens the way for future hacks. The hacker also reveals that the K5 runs on HTML5, which should make it a lot easier to come up with new apps. Epub, anyone?"


For my Math students...
Desmos Calculator is a free to use web tool that comes as an app for Google Chrome. The tool’s interface is completely online and loads up once you click on the app’s icon in Chrome. You can choose to plot normal graphs or polar graphs by typing in the equation of your fun ctions. You can also plot sample plots on the graph. You can plot multiple equations on a single graph and choose custom colors for each. Your graphs can be exported to PNG files for sharing.


Yes, it's trivial and useless... What's your point?
Get Your PC Into The Snowy Christmas Spirit With DesktopSnowOK
DesktopSnowOK is an incredibly lightweight, portable, no-installation-required piece of software that can turn your Windows desktop or laptop from summer in Florida to winter in Colorado in just a second.


Geeky stuff
Live USB Install Puts Linux On Your Thumb Drive With Ease
Boot one of over a hundred Linux distros from a USB disk. With Live USB, software you can run on both Windows and Linux computers, it only takes a couple of clicks to make your USB disk a bootable Linux disk. The live CD just might be the most useful tool in any geek’s arsenal – we’ve pointed out 50 uses for live CDs in the past and plan on showing you many more. As time goes on, however, CD drives become less common. That’s why booting from a USB drive is useful: it works on notebooks and other devices without optical drives.
Linux Live USB Creator, a similar program, can help create live USB drives, but it only works on Windows.
… Ready to try this out? If so, head over to the Live USB download page. You’ll find a DEB package there for Ubuntu and source code for other Linux distributions. You’ll also find the Windows download.


Gary Alexander sends something for my Computer Security troops...
January is Data Privacy Month: Free Webinars and Easy Ways to Increase Awareness
During the month of January, EDUCAUSE is expanding on Data Privacy Day to provide an entire month’s worth of activities and resources to help raise data privacy awareness. You can participate by attending the upcoming webinars and creating a plan to increase awareness on your campus with the easy-to-implement suggestions listed below. You can also visit the EDUCAUSE Data Privacy Month page for additional resources and information.

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