Thursday, February 28, 2013

Big Data means there is more to steal...
Overseas hackers nab more than 1TB of data daily
The study, shared exclusively with The Verge, says that overseas hackers are stealing as much as one terabyte of data per day from governments, businesses, militaries, and academic facilities. Apparently, the hackers are using a network of 500 computer servers.

(Related)
"The Guardian reports that hackers have been targeting officials from over 20 European governments with a new piece of malware called 'MiniDuke.' 'The cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, which discovered MiniDuke, said the attackers had servers based in Panama and Turkey – but an examination of the code revealed no further clues about its origin (PDF). Goverments targeted include those of Ireland, Romania, Portugal, Belgium and the Czech Republic. The malware also compromised the computers of a prominent research foundation in Hungary, two thinktanks, and an unnamed healthcare provider in the US.' Eugene Kaspersky says it's an unusual piece of malware because it's reminiscent of attacks from two decades ago. 'I remember this style of malicious programming from the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. I wonder if these types of malware writers, who have been in hibernation for more than a decade, have suddenly awoken and joined the sophisticated group of threat actors active in the cyber world.' The computers were corrupted through an Adobe PDF attachment to an email."


Has parenting become so impossible in the digital age?
Another potential game-changer, reported by BBC:
A Northern Ireland man has launched a legal challenge to compel Facebook to stop his teenage daughter using the site or publishing suggestive images.
The social media company should be forced to do more to stop the 13-year-old girl having highly sexualised contact with men, the High Court heard.
The case could have major implications for Facebook in the UK.
Read more on BBC.


Perhaps the alien autopsy?
February 27, 2013
Public.Resource.Org's FedFlix - view government videotapes on the web
"FedFlix is a joint venture with the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) in cooperation with other government agencies including the National Archives. They send us government videotapes, we upload them to the Internet Archive, YouTube, and our own public domain stock footage video library — then we send the government back their videotapes and a disk drive with their digitized video. To The Movies!


Assuming you find stuff to share...
… there are some excellent tools that are free as well and work practically flawlessly.


But is it working?
How Teachers Are Using Technology at Home and in Their Classrooms
A survey of teachers who instruct American middle and secondary school students finds that digital technologies have become central to their teaching and professionalization. At the same time, the internet, mobile phones, and social media have brought new challenges to teachers, and they report striking differences in access to the latest digital technologies between lower and higher income students and school districts.
Read Full Report View Online Download


Worth experimenting?
Presentation.io - Sync Your Presentations To Your Audience's Laptops and iPads
Presentation.io is a new service that is designed to help your audience follow along with your presentations. Presentation.io does this by allowing the members of your audience to see your slides on their laptops, iPads, and Android tablets and watch them change when you advance your slides. This ensures that everyone is on the same slide at the same time. Presentation.io includes a backchannel that allows your audience to comment on and ask questions about your slides.
To start using Presentation.io upload a PPT or PDF to your free Presentation.io account. Presentation.io then gives you a URL to distribute to your audience. When the members of your audience open that URL they will be able to see and follow along with your presentation. When you're done with your presentation just click "stop presenting" and the synchronization stops.
Presentation.io's free service allows you to share your presentations for 48 hours then you'll have to upload them again.


Could be the future...
Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud
Help me design the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other -- using resources and mentoring from the cloud. Hear his inspiring vision for Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE), and learn more at tedprize.org.

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