Friday, March 09, 2012


Henceforth ye shall be called “The Oxymoronic Database!” Because of course, the URL is neither Ethics.gov nor Ethics.Data.gov, it is actually: explore.data.gov/ethics and there is no record of me staying in the Lincoln bedroom... Oh wait, that would be accurate.
March 08, 2012
White House Launches Ethics.gov with searchable datasets
"Ethics.Data.gov brings together datasets from across the government to help citizens easily access this information, empowering Americans to hold government accountable.
  • Enter a name and see every record of that person across the entire collection of ethics data - including campaign finance, lobbying, and White House visitor records.
  • Ethics.Data.gov brings together datasets from across the government to help citizens easily access this information, empowering Americans to hold government accountable."


What better indication of the truth of an article? (By reporting this, my airline ticket price just went up by the cost of a colonoscopy.)
"When anti-TSA activist Jonathan Corbett exposed a severe weakness in TSA's body scanners, one would expect the story to attract a lot of media attention. Apparently TSA is attempting to stop reporters from covering the story. According to Corbett, at least one reporter has been 'strongly cautioned' by TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz not to cover the story. If TSA is worried that this is new information they need to suppress to keep it away from terrorists, that horse may have left the barn years ago. Corbett's demonstration may just be confirmation of a 2010 paper in the Journal of Transportation Security that concluded that 'an object such as a wire or a boxcutter blade, taped to the side of the body, or even a small gun in the same location, will be invisible' to X-ray scanners."


The FBI finally grasps the obvious? Or is this just another request for a bigger budget?
"Robert S. Mueller III, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), yesterday warned Congress of terrorist hacking. He believes that while terrorists haven't hacked their way into the U.S. government yet, it's an imminent threat. Mueller said, 'To date, terrorists have not used the Internet to launch a full-scale cyber attack, but we cannot underestimate their intent. Terrorists have shown interest in pursuing hacking skills. And they may seek to train their own recruits or hire outsiders, with an eye toward pursuing cyber attacks.'"

(Related) And the power companies would like a tax break (or outright grant) too...
NYC goes dark: Secret demo for senators simulated cyberattack on power grid
… The FBI, NSA, DOJ, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan all took part in the simulated New York City power grid attack which was undoubtedly meant to scare the stuffing out of senators and win support for cybersecurity legislation. In fact Senator Susan Collins told Bloomberg, "The mock attack on the city during a summer heat wave was 'very compelling.' It illustrated the problem and why legislation is desperately needed." [Because laws will work where failure to implement Computer Security Best Practices has not? Bob]


Perhaps because I teach math, but sometimes the numbers just jump out at you. Do we have innumerate reporting or did this bust frighten off some small guys?
After Megaupload Bust, Putlocker and RapidShare Pick Up Slack
The Feds shut down Megaupload two months ago, but browser-based filesharing hasn’t slowed down. It has just moved to other websites.
Before the takedown, Megaupload was the most popular web-based filesharing service — by far. In a recent study of 1,600 networks, Palo Alto Networks — a company that makes its living scanning corporate networks for unauthorized software — found that it accounted for about a quarter of all filesharing traffic [“about a quarter” is about 25% Bob] on these networks. That was about 10 percent more than its nearest competitor.
… Putlocker seems to be the big winner. It went from being the source of about 6 percent of web-based filesharing to 28 percent, when measured by the amount of networking bandwidth used. To put that in perspective, Megaupload accounted for about 25 percent of bandwidth before it was shut down. “Putlocker is on the rise,” King said.
Rapidshare got a boost too, jumping from 8 percent to 15 percent, according to Palo Alto’s latest data, which is based on a survey of 241 networks, conducted after the Megaupload takedown.
[So, Putlocker grabbed (28-6=) 22% and Rapidshare grabbed 15-8=) 7% for a combined grab of 29% More than Meagupload had in total. Bob]


We can, therefore we must! We knew that, right?
Drones, Dogs and the Future of Privacy
… Under a fresh mandate from Congress, the Federal Aviation Administration will begin to relax its restrictions around the domestic use of “unmanned aerial systems,” leading to greater use of drones by public agencies and, eventually, the private sector.

(Related) When all of the technology is “off the shelf,” “We can” actually becomes “Anyone can.” The next question is “What is the difference between a Drone and a really slow Cruise Missile with a limited payload? No doubt DHS will need to get into the Barrage Balloon business to protect our boarders.
Don’t Freak Out, But Iran Is Helping Venezuela Build Drones


Does this smack of Monopoly Power? Or is it just the cost of access?
"Google has been pressuring applications and mobile game developers to use its costlier in-house payment service, Google Wallet for quite some time. Now Google warned several developers in recent months that if they continued to use other payment methods — such as PayPal, Zong and Boku — their apps would be removed from Google Play. The move is seen as a way to cut costs for Google by using their own system."


...and one for the IP lawyers.
"When Onlive, the network gaming company, started offering not just Microsoft Windows but Microsoft Office for free on the iPad, and now on Android, it certainly seemed too good to be true. Speculation abounded on what type of license they could be using to accomplish this magical feat. From sifting through Microsoft's licenses and speaking with sources very familiar with them, the ugly truth may be that they can't."


Haven't I been saying this for years? (Yes, you have Bob, we just didn't care.)
"We've frequently discussed the growing trend among video game publishers to adopt a business model in which downloading and playing the game is free, but part of the gameplay is supported by microtransactions. There have been a number of success stories, such as Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online. During a talk at the Game Developers Conference this week, Valve's Joe Ludwig officially added Team Fortress 2 to that list, revealing that the game has seen a 12-fold increase in revenue since the switch. He said, 'The trouble is, when you're a AAA box game, the only people who can earn you new revenue are the people who haven't bought your game. This drives you to build new content to attract new people. There's a fundamental tension between building the game to satisfy existing players and attract new players.' He also explained how they tried to do right by their existing playerbase: 'We dealt with the pay-to-win concern in a few ways. The first was to make items involve tradeoffs, so there's no clear winner between two items. But by far the biggest thing we did to change this perception was to make all the items that change the game free. You can get them from item drops, or from the crafting system. It might be a little easier to buy them in the store, but you can get them without paying.'"


A much clearer way to look at “post PC?” Similar to the “Internet of Things?”
"Speaking at a tech conference in Seattle this week, former Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie had some interesting things to say about the state of the computing industry. 'People argue about "are we in a post-PC world?" Why are we arguing? Of course we are in a post-PC world. That doesn't mean the PC dies, that just means that the scenarios that we use them in, we stop referring to them as PCs, we refer to them as other things.' Ozzie also thinks Microsoft's future as a company is strongly tied to Windows 8's reception. 'If Windows 8 shifts in a form that people really want to buy the product, the company will have a great future. ... It's a world of phones and pads and devices of all kinds, and our interests in general purpose computing — or desktop computing — starts to wane and people start doing the same things and more in other scenarios.'"

(Related) I drove my PC... (Also a business opportunity here)
"This month, Ford is borrowing something from the software industry: updates. With a fleet of new cars using the sophisticated infotainment system they developed with Microsoft called SYNC, Ford has the need to update those vehicles — for both features and security reasons. But how do you update the software in thousands of cars? Traditionally, the automotive industry has resorted to automotive recalls. But now, Ford will be releasing thirty thousand USB sticks to Ford owners with the new SYNC infotainment system, although the update will also be available for online download. In preparing to update your car, Ford encourages users to have a unique USB for each Ford they own, and to have the USB drive empty and not password protected. In the future, updating our gadgets, large and small, will become routine. But for now, it's going to be really cumbersome and a little weird. [Sounds like a job for a geek! Bob] Play this forward a bit. Image taking Patch Tuesday to a logical extreme, where you walk around your house or office to apply patches to many of the offline gadgets you own."


Attention Ethical Hackers: I told you we started too late. But it's not over yet.
Chrome Owned by Exploits in Hacker Contests, But Google’s $1M Purse Still Safe
A $1 million purse that Google has offered to hackers who can produce zero-day exploits against its Chrome browser appears to be safe after the first day of its three-day Pwnium hacking contest, which yielded just one contestant and one successful zero-day attack.
The absence of competitors has made for a very quiet contest, particularly since the sole competitor in the Google competition so far didn’t even show up for the event. The successful attack code, which actually exploited two vulnerabilities in Chrome, was developed by Russian university student Sergey Glazunov, who lives somewhere outside Siberia and sent in his code via a proxy who was present at the contest event.
Glazunov earned $60,000 from Google for his exploit. The remaining $940,000 in the purse, which Google has promised to pay out in increments of $60,000, $40,000 and $20,000 – depending on the severity and characteristics of the exploits – is awaiting other challengers who so far have yet to join the contest.


For my Data Mining and Data Analytics students. Even if you don't have as much information as Steven Wolfram, “you can observe a lot just by looking” as Yogi Berra said.
The Personal Analytics of My Life
One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I’ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world’s largest collections of personal data.
Every day — in an effort at “self awareness” — I have automated systems send me a few e-mails about the day before. I’ve been accumulating data for years and though I always meant to analyze it I never actually did. But with Mathematica and the automated data analysis capabilities we just released in Wolfram|Alpha Pro, I thought now would be a good time to finally try taking a look — and to use myself as an experimental subject for studying what one might call “personal analytics.”
Let’s start off talking about e-mail. I have a complete archive of all my e-mail going back to 1989 — a year after Mathematica was released, and two years after I founded Wolfram Research. Here’s a plot with a dot showing the time of each of the third of a million e-mails I’ve sent since 1989:


Strangely enough, these work for students too
This afternoon at NCTIES I gave my popular best of the web presentation to a packed room. The presentation covers 70 resources in 60 minutes. You can view all of the resources in the slides below.

(Related) and these work for non-students

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