Thursday, November 01, 2012

Is this a real threat or a “Give me a bigger budget to waste” plea? Since she compares hurricane Sandy to terrorsts, I strogly suspect the latter...
Homeland Security chief: Banks 'under attack' by hackers
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said today that hackers are "actively" attacking some of the country's largest financial institutions.
According to a report in The Hill, America's top security official issued the warning at a Washington Post event today, but didn't specify the nature of the attacks.
"Right now, financial institutions are actively under attack," The Hill quoted Napolitano as saying. "We know that. I'm not giving you any classified information... I will say this has involved some of our nation's largest institutions. We've also had our stock exchanges attacked over the last [few] years, so we know... there are vulnerabilities."
Napolitano also said that the hackers have been successfully pilfering funds from the banks, but wouldn't elaborate.


For the “How NOT to do it” folder: “We don't need no stinking (secure) logs! If we have logs then we have detailed records of what happened.”
"The final report that was handed to the Dutch government today indicates that all 8 certificate servers of the Dutch company DigiNotar were fully hacked. (Report PDF in English.) Because the access log files were stored on the same servers, they cannot be used to find any evidence for or against intrusion. In fact, blatant falsification has been found in those log files. A series of so-far unused certificates has also been found. It is unknown if and where these certificates have been used."


For the “How NOT to do it” folder: ToS shouldn't be an after-thought.
"In January, hackers got hold of 24 million Zappos customers' email addresses and other personal information. Some of those customers have been suing Zappos, an online shoes and clothing retailer that's owned by Amazon.com. Zappos wants the matter to go into arbitration, citing its terms of service. The problem: A federal court just ruled that agreement completely invalid. So Zappos will have to go to court—or more likely settle to avoid those legal costs. Here's how Zappos screwed up, according to Eric Goldman, a law professor and director of Santa Clara University's High Tech Law Institute: It put a link to its terms of service on its website, but didn't force customers to click through to it."


For the April First folder: “Hello, I'm Mitt Romney and my cellphone was just stolen. Would you please cancel ###”
"U.S. cellphone carriers took a major step on Wednesday toward curbing the rising number of smartphone thefts with the introduction of databases that will block stolen phones from being used on domestic networks. The initiative got its start earlier this year when the FCC and police chiefs from major cities asked the cellular carriers for assistance in battling the surging number of smartphone thefts. In New York, more than 40 percent of all robberies involve cellphones and in Washington, D.C., cellphone thefts accounted for 38 percent of all robberies in 2011."


If it's this easy, why don't we do it in the US? Encrypt the files by default and you have full (not just plausible) deniability?
MegaUpload will be reborn as Me.ga in January
Kim DotCom is once again making news and thumbing his nose at authorities.
DotCom told Reuters today that he will launch Mega, the son of MegaUpload, near the first anniversary of the police raid on his home and the shutting shut down of MegaUpload, a storage service accused of hosting millions of pirated movies, music and other digital media.
… The new cloud storage service will differ from MegaUpload in an important ways, according to DotCom. First, instead of using the .Com domain name, it will operate on the Gabon-based domain Me.ga.
The service will also not make use of any U.S. hosting companies. Me.ga will also enable copyright owners will be able to get "direct delete access" of pirated content provided they agree not to hold Me.ga's operators responsible for the infringement, DotCom told Reuters.


The future of education? Somehow, I doubt it.
Not content with being the young upstart in the LMS industry taking on the aging giants of Blackboard and Desire2Learn, Instructure has now decided to enter another market and take on some of the upstarts there, namely Coursera and edX. That is, tonight it launches the Canvas Network, which in the words of CEO Josh Coates, is “our answer to the whole MOOC hype.”
It’s an answer that Instructure’s current clients have helped devise, too, Coates says, noting that many of the schools that run its LMS Canvas are pondering that hype and weighing whether they should join the Coursera or edX platform (or fear being left out of the MOOC race entirely). In many cases, these schools already offer online classes to their own students, but simply don’t have the reach — the marketing reach or the instructional reach — that the xMOOCs promise.
The Canvas Network
So with the new Canvas Network, Instructure has compiled a catalog of free, open online classes run on the Canvas LMS by Canvas customers. The network launches with participation from a dozen institutions, including Brown, the University of Washington, and the University of Central Florida. There are 2 dozen courses, including “Introduction to Openness in Education” taught by BYU’s David Wiley and “Gender Through Comic Books” with lectures voiced by Stan Lee. (Yes, that Stan Lee.)
Registration opens now, with the first classes beginning in January.
… But Instructure does have some experience on the MOOC front, having been the platform used for the MOOC MOOC run by the Hybrid Pedagogy folks back in August. Coates said that the company was able to learn a lot during this week-long MOOC about how it would have to tweak the LMS features to account for open participation at a massive scale.
[For me to “borrow” ideas from?


For my lawyer friends who are planning that 6,000 square foot wine cellar...
There are a lot of CAD applications we’ve covered here at MUO, including Angela’s review of LibreCAD, which I used for a little bit of interior design as well. Then, in Directory we’ve covered apps like BabyCAD and DesignYourRoom. However, I think the absolute best application to “sketch up” a room design like this is obviously SketchUp!


A couple of FONT tools for my website class...
WhatFont is a simple tool that you can use to find out what a type of font is.
The most direct way to acquire it is through the website, especially for the bookmarklet. I would also recommend this method for downloading the Safari extension. For Chrome, you can head right to the Chrome Web Store and get it that way.

(Related) Now that you have a few thousand favorite fonts, you need to organize them.
NexusFont gives Windows users the ability to effectively organize and manage the fonts installed on their computers. Once installed and started, NexusFont runs a scan and locates all the fonts installed on your computer system. The software allows you to view each font as a sample text, giving you a clearer idea of what your text will look like.
The sample text used can be modified by the users. You can then easily browse through these fonts and select the one you want to use.


Perspective
How Teens Do Research in the Digital World
… According to this survey of teachers, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project in collaboration with the College Board and the National Writing Project, the internet has opened up a vast world of information for today’s students, yet students’ digital literacy skills have yet to catch up:
  • Virtually all (99%) AP and NWP teachers in this study agree with the notion that “the internet enables students to access a wider range of resources than would otherwise be available,” and 65% agree that “the internet makes today’s students more self-sufficient researchers.”
  • At the same time, 76% of teachers surveyed “strongly agree” with the assertion that internet search engines have conditioned students to expect to be able to find information quickly and easily.
Read Full Report


Tools for geeks...
Get Windows 8 for Dummies: Pocket Edition e-book for free

Tools for literate geeks... Not free, but perhaps my students would program a free App for that...
Romeo:
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Juliet:
Relax Romeo. Tis but my iPad, glowing as I read.
Shakespeare has been brought kicking and screaming up into the iPad generation, with the launch of a new set of apps intended to leverage the tablet’s multimedia flexibility with a splash of Leonardo DiCaprio. The Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth apps, the handiwork of developers Agant and Cambridge University Press, match the classic texts with audio recordings featuring actors such as Michael Sheen and Kate Beckinsale, interactive timelines showing key themes, and glossaries to better understand arcane English.

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