Saturday, January 05, 2013

A con is a con is a con. Did their deletion (refusal to keep) records make it impossible to detect this?
So you’re concerned about your online privacy and are willing to pay for a service that purports to offer privacy and anonymity. Maybe you’re feeling pretty smart because you found a service that says it maintains no logs and no subscriber list. And even better, you think, it offers a lifetime offer.
Sounds good? Well, wait…
As a long-time Cotse.net subscriber and fan, I was surprised to see the following recent notice on their login page:
We’d like to call Ultimate-Anonymity.com/Ultimate-Privacy.net on the carpet for paying us for one single user account then selling all of their own users subscriptions as well as lifetime access to that account under the guise of it being their service. Not only is that a violation of our policies, but we think that behavior is quite unethical.


For my Ethical Hackers... I think we need someone to do some legal research along these lines, here in the US... (Interesting coments)
"The Dutch government's cyber security center has published guidelines (in Dutch) that it hopes will encourage ethical hackers to disclose security vulnerabilities in a responsible way. The person who discovers the vulnerability should report it directly and as soon as possible to the owner of the system in a confidential manner, so the leak cannot be abused by others. Furthermore, the ethical hacker will not use social engineering techniques, nor install a backdoor or copy, modify or delete data from the system, the NCSC specified. Alternatively a hacker could make a directory listing in the system, the guidelines said. Hackers should also refrain from altering the system and not repeatedly access the system. Using brute-force techniques to access a system is also discouraged, the NCSC said. The ethical hacker further has to agree that vulnerabilities will only be disclosed after they are fixed and only with consent of the involved organization. The parties can also decide to inform the broader IT community if the vulnerability is new or it is suspected that more systems have the same vulnerability, the NCSC said."

(Related) A different take on disclosure.
"Whether you agree with his rationale for doing so or not, Adrian Lamo has come forward to discuss his reasoning for exposing Bradley Manning. Manning, now in federal custody, leaked thousands of U.S. intelligence files and documents. Lamo's side of the story shows that he was concerned for Manning's mental health and stability, and for the lives Manning was risking by releasing classified material — Afghan informants, for instance. Either way, this goes to show that if you're going to release stolen/hacked documents, it's best you do it anonymously and don't brag about it."


Dress them in Santa costumes and they deliver through your chimney...
Enter The Dronenet
Here’s my favorite Big Idea of the year so far, via John Robb, who’s always worth your attention: The Dronenet, a “short distance drone delivery service built on an open protocol.”
He fleshes it out in a series of posts, but basically, it would be a network of drones that would carry things the same way the Internet carries data: in packets, over a series of multiple hops, routing on the fly.
… What’s more, it would dovetail awfully nicely with the 3D-printing revolution: I’ve argued before that almost nobody needs their own 3D printer, but the Dronenet could ultimately provide not just same-day but often same-hour delivery of newly printed items.


Facebook clearly can't please all of the people all of the time. Can they please all of the people some of the time?
Louise Osborne reports:
A German state data protection agency has threatened Facebook’s billionaire founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg with a €20,000 (£16,000) fine if Facebook does not allow Germans to have anonymous accounts on the social network.
In letters to Zuckerberg in California, and also to Dublin-based Facebook Ireland Ltd, the data protection commissioner for the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, Thilo Weichert, said the current rules violated German law by requiring users to provide their identities. “It is unacceptable that a US portal like Facebook violates German data protection law, unopposed and with no prospect of an end,” said Weichert.
Read more on The Guardian.
Okay, so what happens if, say, Zuck says, “No problem. I’ll pay the fine.” Then what could the data protection commissioner do? Even if Facebook was fined on a daily basis, if they said, “No problem, we’ll pay the fine.” Then what? [Then we have invented Internet Taxation Bob]


Ah ha!
FTC and Google: No Market, No Foul
… I was surprised to see how few commentators have raised the point that there can’t be a search “market” when no one pays for that service. And that the users of web search are, in fact, the product that Google sells to the consumers of the market it does monopolize — online advertising. Or the fact that by using its advertising revenues to provide services to users for free or greatly discounted it can collapse those markets and own them as well.
For over a year and a half, many experts who follow the internet economy have wisely pointed out that the real consumers in the online search business are advertisers, not the users who interact with the search engine. One of the most profound “aha” moments for me came when I read Nathan Newman’s article “You’re Not Google’s Customer — You’re the Product: Antitrust in a Web 2.0 World” back in March 2011. He correctly argued that web browser users who interact with Google search are in fact the product that gets sold to the real customer — the online advertiser.


“We don't need no stinking cellphone!” What we do need is a device that connects us to the Internet.
"Facebook has chosen Canadian users to be guinea pigs for a new mobile feature to make free phone calls. Facebook's new Messenger app for Apple mobile devices enables voice-over-Internet protocol phone calls, which use data instead of eating into the minutes in a mobile plan."


Perspective A “Big Data” research target?
Library of Congress digs in to full archive of 170 billion tweets
It took four years to hit 21 billion tweets. Now Twitter users generate nearly half a billion a day, and the Library of Congress will be archiving and indexing all of them.


For my “Presentation” class. Great summary!
… Public speaking and presentations is an art though – have you ever sat through a horrendous talk? I know I have and I slightly “ranted” about them in another MakeUseOf article (which I will be referring to occasionally throughout this piece), Avoid Murder By PowerPoint: How To Make Your Presentations Compelling And Memorable. So what makes the perfect presentation? Well, there isn’t just one thing that you must do, but a collaboration of things.
Research & Content Organization
Create An Outline
Know Your Audience
Don’t Clutter The Most Important Points
Create Your Own Personal Handout
Preparation & Assembly
Back Up Your Data and Have a Backup Plan
“Talk First, Write Second”
Practice, Practice, Practice
Be Aware Of Distractions: Both Personal & Grammatical
Get Feedback From Others
Don’t Change Anything Right Before The Presentation
Make Sure Everything Works Before The Talk Starts
Speaking & Delivery
Be Real & Show Your Gratitude
Don’t Talk AT Your Audience
Don’t Forget About Your Mobile Phone
If Possible, Use a Remote To Change Slides
Pointers Are Great, But Also Distracting If Not Used Correctly
Don’t Read The Slides Word For Word – Make Eye Contact
Don’t Worry About What You Look/Sound Like
Visual Display & Projection


Sharing stuff for the new Quarter...
There’s a whole host of educational videos out there. From Sal Khan’s famous set of instructional video lessons to the one-off videos by individuals … there’s a lot to sort through. So where do you start? If you’re like me, you go straight over to the king of all video sites, YouTube. They have a dedicated education section (YouTube EDU) where they have a curated list of resources.
University & College
NPTEL – 10,843 videos
UC Berkeley – 5,082 videos
MIT – 2,470 videos
Stanford University – 1,747 videos
K-12
Hoopla Kidz- 122 videos
Space Lab – 235 videos
Sesame Street – 1,329 videos
Khan Academy – 3,308 videos
Lifelong Learning
Animal Planet TV – 2,636 videos
Google Developers - 1,589 videos
Justin Sandercoe – 370 videos
Big Think – 9,207 videos

(Related)
… Explania describes itself as a place to watch “hundreds of animated explanations, interactive tutorials and instructional videos, and feel free to embed them on your own web pages.” It is free to watch and embed the videos, so if you find one useful, you can easily share it with your classes or even on a class website. Many of the videos are technology how-tos, which may not be useful for your class, but can help you teach your mom to use Twitter, for example.


For my amusement.
… California Assemblyman Dan Logue has proposed legislation to create a pilot program that would investigate ways for the state to offer a college degree that costs no more than $10,000. (There are similar efforts in Florida and Texas.) It’s not clear if Logue’s bill will move forward.
… According to research from the University of Michigan’s Marc Perry, the price of college textbooks has increased 812% since 1978 — something that makes the housing bubble “seem rather inconsequential.”
… A preview of the 2013 Horizon Report for Higher Education is now available online. On the near horizon of ed-tech adoption: the flipped classroom, MOOCs, mobile apps, and tablet computing. The report’s official release will come in February.


Two examples, but this works on any topis you can imagine...
Do you want to save money or find a job? Yahoo Pipes helps with both by grabbing the data you want, like job openings, and feeding it to you immediately. On top of that, it’s remarkably easy to set up and use.
The Pipes technology represents the web’s greatest secret – a ridiculously powerful information-gathering system that, shockingly, very few users have heard about. Its obscurity partly relates to the complexity in building a Pipe. Fortunately, using this software only requires that you access a database of community-created Pipes. Thousands of these creations exist within Yahoo’s servers, allowing users to access subjects as enlightening as science journals or as mundane as Flickr photos.
… To get started immediately, take three simple steps – first, open the pre-built Pipe. Second, input whatever it is you’re looking for, such as the job title or a particular product. Third, and optionally, output the stream as an RSS feed to your favorite feed reader. The first two parts of this article will walk readers through two potential uses for Pipes – getting jobs and finding sales. The third part explains how to integrate a Pipe’s output into an RSS reader.

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