Monday, June 03, 2013

“...and if we cave in here, every country will want us to log everything each of their citizens does.”
UK Guardian – 5 largest internet companies challenge tracking legislation
Alan Travis, home affairs editor, The Guardian: “The five biggest internet companies in the world, including Google and Facebook, have privately delivered a thinly veiled warning to the home secretary, Theresa May, that they will not voluntarily co-operate with the “snooper’s charter”. In a leaked letter to the home secretary that is also signed by Twitter, Microsoft and Yahoo!, the web’s “big five” say that May’s rewritten proposals to track everybody’s email, internet and social media use remain “expensive to implement and highly contentious”.”


It might be possible to learn something here.
UN Special Report on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue. United National General Assembly, Human Rights Council, April 17, 2013.
  1. “The present report analyses the implications of States’ surveillance of communications for the exercise of the human rights to privacy and to freedom of opinion and expression. While considering the impact of significant technological advances in communications, the report underlines the urgent need to further study new modalities of surveillance and to revise national laws regulating these practices in line with human rights standards.
  2. Innovations in technology have increased the possibilities for communication and protections of free expression and opinion, enabling anonymity, rapid information-sharing and cross-cultural dialogues. Technological changes have concurrently increased opportunities for State surveillance and interventions into individuals’ private communications.
  3. Concerns about national security and criminal activity may justify the exceptional use of communications surveillance technologies. However, national laws regulating what would constitute the necessary, legitimate and proportional State involvement in communications surveillance are often inadequate or non-existent. Inadequate national legal frameworks create a fertile ground for arbitrary and unlawful infringements of the right to privacy in communications and, consequently, also threaten the protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression.”


For my Computer Forensics students.
Whenever you delete a file from your computer it is never 100% deleted but simply the space it occupied is freed for other files to take place. Until that freed space is overwritten by a new file you have the possibility to recover your accidentally deleted files and folders. So if you are looking for a way to recover your deleted files, check out Undelete Navigator. It is a free downloadable program for Windows that lets you detect, browse and recover deleted files.
Related tools – DiskDigger for Android.


This might be a fun project for my students...
Hackers Spawn Web Supercomputer on Way to Chess World Record
Based in San Francisco, the Hack Reactor is one of many crash software development courses that seek to teach computer programming through several weeks of complete immersion in code. Pethiyagoda enrolled in the school this past March, and over the past several weeks, he and three other hackers-in-training have teamed with one of the giants of the tech industry — the Pivotal Initiative, the big data spin-off company from EMC and VMware — to approach a new world record for what’s called the N-Queens Problem, a classic math puzzle that plays out on a chess board.
But more importantly, in working to solve this problem, this four-person team — Cameron Boehmer, John S. Dvorak, and Tim Sze, as well as Pethiyagoda — has developed a new breed of software that lets you pool the processing power of potentially thousands of machines just by pointing them to a single website. They call this creation Smidge. It’s a kind of ad hoc supercomputer built with JavaScript, the standard programming language of the web.
Though little more than an experiment at this point, the project is yet another way the net is stretching the boundaries of “distributed computing,” where thousands — or even tens of thousands — of machines are pooled together to solve a common task. Popular web outfits like Google and Amazon operate in this way, and these web giants have spawned a whole new breed of distributed software that lets others benefit from the same tricks of the trade.


Something for the Summer?
Three Places to Search for Free Online Courses
The summer is a great time for us to learn new skills, refresh our memories on topic that we'll be teaching in the fall, and just satisfy intellectual curiosities. The boom in MOOC and other online course offerings means that we don't have to go far to find courses that meet our needs. Here are three places to find your next free, online course.
Open Culture, which I've featured here many times, has a list of more than 700 free online courses. Some of the courses are canned content in the form of recorded lectures while others are course that will be available this summer. Unfortunately, there isn't a search tool on Open Culture just for the courses so you'll have to scroll through the lists to find what you want.
RedHoop is a search engine for online courses that I learned about from a recent Life Hacker post. RedHoop allows you to search for courses from popular providers including Coursera, Udemy, and Udacity. You can refine your search to show only free courses.
SkilledUp, like RedHoop, is a search engine for online courses. You can filter search results according to cost and course provider. SkilledUp indexes more course providers than RedHoop, but many of those course providers are paid services. I do like that SkilledUp allows you to refine your search according to content delivery method. For example, I can filter out courses that are lecture-based.

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