Friday, May 24, 2013

Don't bank on your phone...
"A new piece of Android malware has been discovered that can intercept your incoming text messages and forward them on to criminals. Once installed, the trojan can be used to steal sensitive messages for blackmailing purposes or more directly, codes which are used to confirm online banking transactions. The malware in question, detected as "Android.Pincer.2.origin" by Russian security firm Doctor Web, is the second iteration of the Android.Pincer family according to the company. Both threats spread as security certificates, meaning they must be deliberately installed onto an Android device by a careless user."


I don't recall them using the term “surge” in relation to drones.
Obama Swears Drone Surge Is Done
Drones will play a big role in U.S. counterterrorism for the foreseeable future. But the frenetic pace of drone strikes that have come to define President Obama’s war on terrorism is at an end, Obama declared today.
In the months and years ahead, drone strikes once conducted by the CIA will become more of a U.S. military responsibility. The rules for launching the strikes will become stricter — there must be a “near certainty” that no civilians will be killed, for instance — and they’ll become less frequent.


It's okay to have the printer and it's okay to have the template for a gun, so how will they know you haven't actually used them to make a gun?
"'Untraceable, undetectable, cheap and freely available.' That's how Australian police have described the 3D-printable gun known as The Liberator today as they announce that they will be seeking to make the download, construction and possession of these weapons illegal. In their tests, Police printed the 15 parts required to assemble The Liberator in 27 hours and assembled it within 60 seconds with a firing pin fashioned out of a steel nail. The two guns were test fired into a block of resin designed to simulate human muscle, and the first bullet penetrated the resin block up to 17 centimeters. [That's 6.69291 inches – what caliber weapon did they print? That seems low, even for a .38 Bob] NSW Police Ballistics division confirm that it would be a fatal wound if pointed at someone."
[From the article:
“[3D-printed weapons] are truly undetectable, truly untraceable, cheap, easy to make. [This] weapon cost us $35 to make. We made that on a base entry level 3D printer. That printer cost us $1700. It truly is a home printer for so many people to make untraceable weapons. It is an emerging threat.


I guess I'll have to live with the fact that I'll never understand bureaucracies – which is probably easier than suddenly realizing I do understand them.
The Declassification Engine: Your One-Stop Shop for Government Secrets
The CIA offers an electronic search engine that lets you mine about 11 million agency documents that have been declassified over the years. It’s called CREST, short for CIA Records Search Tool. But this represents only a portion the CIA’s declassified materials, and if you want unfettered access to the search engine, you’ll have to physically visit the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.
Using the Freedom of Information Act, historians and researchers have urged the CIA to provide them with their own copy of the CREST electronic database, so that they can seek greater insight into U.S. history and even build up additional checks and balances against the government’s approach to official secrecy. But the agency won’t do it. “Basically, the CIA is saying that the database of declassified documents is itself classified,” explains Steve Aftergood, a senior research analyst with the Federation of American Scientists, who oversees the federation’s government secrecy project.
… “The state of the declassified archives is really stuck in the middle of the 20th Century,” says Aftergood. He calls it a “fairly dismal picture,” but he also says there’s an enormous opportunity to improve the way we research declassified materials — and improve it very quickly — through the use of modern technology.
That’s the aim of a new project launched by a team of historians, mathematicians, and computer scientists at Columbia University in New York City. Led by Matthew Connelly — a Columbia professor trained in diplomatic history — the project is known as The Declassification Engine, and it seeks to provide a single online database for declassified documents from across the federal government, including the CIA, the State Department, and potentially any other agency.


This on the other hand, is easy to understand.
"The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AT&T Mobility, the second-largest wireless carrier in the U.S., has added a new monthly administrative fee of 61 cents to the bills of all of its contract wireless lines as of May 1, a move that could bring in more than a half-billion dollars in annual revenue to the telecom giant. An AT&T spokeswoman said the fee covers 'certain expenses, such as interconnection and cell-site rents and maintenance.' The increased cost to consumers comes even though AT&T's growth in wireless revenue last year outpaced the costs to operate and support its wireless business. The company has talked of continuing to improve wireless profitability. Citigroup analyst Michael Rollins noted that the new administrative fee is a key component for accelerating revenue growth for the rest of the year. He said the fee should add 0.30 of a percentage point to AT&T's 2013 revenue growth; he predicts total top-line growth of about 1.5%. Normally, consumers could vote with their wallets by taking their business elsewhere. AT&T would be required to let customers out of their contracts without an early termination fee if it raised prices, but it is avoiding this by simply calling the increase a 'surcharge,' effectively forcing millions of people to either pay more money per month or pay the ETF."


Perspective ...and this is just so kids can play games! (and Microsoft can make a few more billions)
Xbox One: Our Servers Will Have More Power Than All the Computers in 1999! Us: Really?! Expert: Almost.
Watching the reveal of the Xbox One this week, one particular claim about Microsoft's new console caught my ear. Marc Whitten, the executive in charge of Xbox Live, the company's online gaming network, charted its historical progression.
"When we launched Xbox Live in 2002, it was powered by 500 severs. With the advent of the 360, that had grown to over 3,000," Whitten said. "Today, 15,000 servers power the modern Xbox Live experience."
Then Whitten said something extraordinary, "This year, we will have more than 300,000 servers for Xbox One, more than the entire world's computing power in 1999."


Amazing to me that my students (who write Apps all the time) were not aware of this.
Meet the Man Who Sold a Month-Old App to Dropbox for $100M
When Mailbox sold itself to Dropbox for a reported $100 million or so this March, the month-old iPhone app wasn’t even available to the public. People could download the email organizer, but using it required joining a mailing list that stretched to nearly 800,000 names at one point.
Mailbox was popular because it provided innovative new ways to organize and clear an inbox. Users can swipe a message to the left to “snooze” it, a command that instructs Mailbox to resurface the email after a set period of time. Other swipes — hard left, right, or hard right — archive, delete, or file messages.


What is the “Next Big Thing?” (178 page PDF) Some perspective for my Intro to IT class
May 23, 2013
Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy
"Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy, a report from the McKinsey Global Institute, cuts through the noise and identifies 12 technologies that could drive truly massive economic transformations and disruptions in the coming years. The report also looks at exactly how these technologies could change our world, as well as their benefits and challenges, and offers guidelines to help leaders from businesses and other institutions respond. We estimate that, together, applications of the 12 technologies discussed in the report could have a potential economic impact between $14 trillion and $33 trillion a year in 2025. This estimate is neither predictive nor comprehensive. It is based on an in-depth analysis of key potential applications and the value they could create in a number of ways, including the consumer surplus that arises from better products, lower prices, a cleaner environment, and better health."


This may or may not be useful. I can't get to the URL because it keeps timing out – possibly this report is in high demand OR they are under a Denial of Service attack
May 23, 2013
Report - The Condition of Education 2013
"The Condition of Education 2013 [May 2013] summarizes important developments and trends in education using the latest available data. The report presents 42 indicators on the status and condition of education, in addition to Spotlights that look more closely at 4 issues of current interest. The indicators represent a consensus of professional judgment on the most significant national measures of the condition and progress of education for which accurate data are available."


This is enough to make my geeks giggle...
… Where this becomes practical is if the different operating systems are Live CDs, that is, small operating systems designed specifically to provide maintenance to a computer from outside of the computer’s own operating system. This can be handy if the computer’s own operating system is corrupted through misuse, poor maintenance, or worse, malware.
MultiBootUSB is available on SourceForge and appears to be a pretty popular program for just this kind of task. The MultiBootUSB software is also a portable application, meaning you simply put the MultiBootUSB-6.4.1.exe file onto your USB drive and run it all from the USB drive.
One thing that I immediately noticed is that XBoot has a lot more documentation than MultiBootUSB, which is to say that it has some documentation.
… Installation of XBoot is really easy; double-click the executable file and it opens in seconds. From there it’s quite simple to add your ISOs – just drag and drop them into the main box.
There seemed to be a lot of recommendations for YUMI around the web, so I added it to the crop to be tested
… Once you get to the part where you are adding distributions to your USB stick, YUMI lays out exactly which ones are known to work, as well as where to download the distributions from.


It's kind of a teacher's in-joke...
Integrate iPads Into Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy With This ‘Padagogy Wheel’

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