Friday, October 18, 2013

Small, but local. Was someone stealing office supplies and selling them at a yard sale?
Student records from Pueblo Community College, including Social Security numbers, were found by a Pueblo woman in a box of office supplies purchased at a South Side yard sale last summer in Pueblo.
Read more on Pueblo Chieftain (sub. req. for full access).


For my Ethical Hackers. This is NOT how you do it. When researching, always have a document in process that starts, “Once upon a time, there was a bank robber.” Interesting that the narcs were looking at bank robbery video...
Alleged bank robbers' Google search: 'What happens if you rob bank?'
[From the Boston.com article:
Narcotics detectives who viewed surveillance footage believed they recognized McLoud, a suspect in the ongoing investigation of a heroin ring based at 51 Torrey St., just around the corner from the bank, police said.


When you look up “naiveté” in the dictionary, guess whose picture you find. If indeed he was “uniquely qualified” why did he give the files to journalists.
Edward Snowden: Zero chance Russia, China nabbed files
NSA leaker Edward Snowden says he didn't take top-secret agency files with him when he fled to Moscow and that he was also able to protect the documents from Chinese spies.
… "As part of Snowden's flight from American justice, he went to two of the most repressive and technologically sophisticated countries on Earth. (Hong Kong is, of course, part of China)," Toobin wrote, continuing later with: "An American citizen walks into their countries bearing the keys to our most secret programs, and both -- both! -- China and Russia decline to take even a peek. That is a preposterous proposition."
In the interview with Risen, however, Snowden claims he was uniquely qualified to foil any attempts by China to access his cache of documents. As an NSA contractor, he says, he was well-versed in Chinese cyberspying programs and even taught a course on Chinese cybercounterintelligence.
As for Russia, Snowden said he gave his entire cache of classified materials to journalists before he left Hong Kong -- and kept no copies for himself -- "because it wouldn't serve the public interest" for him to hang onto the files.


And then there are the merely delusional... Too bad he didn't realize it wasn't 1955 until after the election.
Anthony Weiner: I'd probably be mayor if it wasn't for the Web
The still disappointed candidate says that if this was still 1955, he would have been elected mayor.


A TED talk for my students who don't have time to read... (and how Big Data defeats privacy)
Alessandro Acquisti: Why privacy matters
The line between public and private has blurred in the past decade, both online and in real life, and Alessandro Acquisti is here to explain what this means and why it matters. In this thought-provoking, slightly chilling talk, he shares details of recent and ongoing research -- including a project that shows how easy it is to match a photograph of a stranger with their sensitive personal information.


Of course they can. Perhaps reporters should read at least a summary of how instant messaging and email systems work.
Dan Goodin reports:
Contrary to public claims, Apple employees can read communications sent with its iMessage service, according to researchers who have reverse engineered it.
The finding, delivered Thursday at a Hack in the Box presentation titled How Apple Can Read Your iMessages and How You Can Prevent It, largely echoes the conclusion Ars reached in June.
Read more on Ars Technica.


What's in it for Facebook? Does this give them more ammunition for the advertising? “Hey teenage guys! Need a beer? Here's a picture of Tony Teenager drinking Budweiser! You should drink Budweiser too!”
Vindu Goel reports:
Facebook has loosened its privacy rules for teenagers as a debate swirls over online threats to children from bullies and sexual predators.
The move, announced on Wednesday, allows teenagers to post status updates, videos and images that can be seen by anyone, not just their friends or people who know their friends.
Read more on New York Times.
Right, because letting teens increase their digital footprints that can come back to bite them is such a great marketing strategy. Gah….


These websites must be rather profitable if you can pay out $110 million and still smile...
Isohunt to permanently shutter after settlement with MPAA
… After years of court battles over copyright infringement with the Motion Picture Association of America, Isohunt has agreed to settle.
Under the terms of the settlement (PDF), which was issued on Thursday, Isohunt's founder Gary Fung has seven days to shut down the site, as well as close three other sites that redirect to Isohunt -- Podtropolis, TorrentBox, and Edtk-it.com. Fung has also agreed to pay $110 million in damages.


For my students. I'll use this next 'Constitution Day'
Constitution Annotated – Online and Searchable
“The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation (popularly known as the Constitution Annotated) contains legal analysis and interpretation of the United States Constitution, based primarily on Supreme Court case law. This regularly updated resource is especially useful when researching the constitutional implications of a specific issue or topic. The Featured Topics and Cases page highlights recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that demonstrate pivotal interpretations of the Constitution’s provisions.” The complete PDF version, which is large and loads slowly, is here.
The Index and Tables From the Constitution Annotated


Interesting in an “I wonder what's going on” kind of way.
Indonesia tops China as source of Internet attacks
… Akamai noted in the report that its "methodology captures the source IP address of an observed attack and cannot determine attribution of an attacker." Which basically means, the actual attackers aren't always in the country where their attack traffic is originating.


For my students, who need to write persuasively.
The Supreme Court Has Solved the Angry-Email Problem: Justices Only Send Each Other Memos on Paper
Speaking during an interview at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, D.C., Wednesday night, Supreme Court Associate Justice Kagan elaborated on remarks she'd made in August about how Supreme Court justices don't use email.
"We don't to each other. I obviously do to my clerks," said Kagan about the decades-old communications technology. "But the justices themselves do not communicate by email."
"So how do you communicate?" senior editor at large Pattie Sellers of Fortune asked.
"Well, we either talk to each other, which is not a bad thing," said Kagan, to applause from the well-heeled audience of female CEOs and business leaders.
"Or we write memos to each other," she continued.
"And you know, you have to remember that the Court is an institution where...we're not horse trading. We're not bargaining. We're reasoning. And we're trying to persuade people. And often the best way to do that is by putting things down on paper in a kind of careful and deliberate way and saying this is what I think and, and giving people an opportunity to read a memo and to think about it and to reflect on it," she said.


I tell my students that reading Dilbert every day is like taking MBA classes... (Scott has an MBA)
Scott Adams on Whether Management Really Matters
The Dilbert creator talks with HBR senior editor Dan McGinn. For more, read his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.
TRANSCRIPT
A written transcript will be available by October 25.


For all my Math students, but mostly my Statistics students. (Some nifty graphics)
Math Proves Bacon Is a Miracle Food
… Everything is always better with bacon, right? But if so, how much? And are any foods actually worse with bacon?
We calculated the answer, following a simple methodology that made the most of the 906,539 ratings on foodnetwork.com. First, we searched out all the recipes that fit a certain description-—sandwiches, for example. Then, we calculated the average rating for those foods if they did not include the word “bacon.” We ran the numbers again using only recipes that did include bacon. The results were pretty great. Of all the foods we analyzed, bacon lends the most improvement to sandwiches. Many other foods also benefitted. In fact, we found that when you crunch the data for all recipes, those with bacon do in fact rate higher.


For my students (none of whom live in Australia)
Australian textbook delivery, care of drones
Zookal has partnered with aerial-technology startup Flirtey (a joint venture between Zookal and Vimbra) to start delivering its packages to customers via unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as of next year.
… As of March 2014, customers within 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) of Sydney's central business district will be able to arrange free delivery by air from one of six hexacopters. They will have to order delivery to an outdoor area, and the drone will find the customer based on GPS coordinates sent from an Android app (an iOS app will be built after the program is launched). The UAV will hover over the location and lower the textbooks on a retractable cable, [Too complicated. They must be worrying that students will steal the 'copters Bob] allowing the customer to detach the parcel and the drone to be on its way. The entire process could take as little as two or three minutes.

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