My
Disaster Recovery students have to create a plan to restore all
computing functions in 96 hours. Sony would fail that class too.
Sony
Corporation: Network Is Still Down Following ‘The Interview’ Hack
Sony’s
film division says its computer network is still down more than six
weeks after being hit by a massive computer hack. Sony Pictures
Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton told the Associated
Press on Thursday that the cyberattack hasn’t impacted the
company’s film and TV schedule.
The
network should be back up by the end of January, according to the
report. In the meantime, Sony Pictures’ employees are still being
paid by paper check.
The
Sony hack was likely the largest cyberattack ever to occur on
American soil, experts
say, by hackers who eventually claimed the attack was a response
to the production of “The Interview,” a comedy film that depicted
the fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
…
Sony's losses due to the cyberattack were still being calculated,
but Lynton told the AP that they would not be “disruptive to the
economic well being of the company.”
(Related)
This should be obvious...
he
Obama administration's extraordinary decision to point fingers at
North Korea over the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.
could lead to a courtroom spectacle in the event charges are
ultimately filed against someone without ties to the isolated
country, such as a disgruntled employee or an unrelated hacker.
…
"Once the government says it has good reason to believe North
Korea did it, then that is good reason to believe that the defendant
did not do it unless the defendant was an agent of North Korea,"
said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford
Center for Internet and Society.
(Related)
The story of the Sony hack may not play out for months!
Why
You Still Shouldn't Totally Trust FBI Claims On North Korean Hacking
Of Sony
(Related)
Really interesting. This is how the industry views Sony.
5
Key Questions Facing Sony in Wake of Hack Attack
…
Sony’s leaders must mend fences with top talent and theater
chains, and convince the corporate
brass in Japan that they are still fit to lead the studio amid all
the collateral damage.
“The
brand has been tarnished,” says media analyst Hal Vogel. “They
look a bit incompetent
in the way they handled this. They fumbled about like they had a
loose football.”
1)
Who’s in Charge Here?
Sony Pictures co-chair Amy
Pascal and Sony Entertainment CEO Michael
Lynton are battling for their professional lives. At first
blush, Pascal is the more damaged party. Her racially insensitive
email joking about President Obama’s preference for
African-American films has her trying to make amends with civil
rights leaders, while her uncensored musings about A-list stars has
made her a master at apologizing.
…
Likewise, Lynton’s finger-pointing at exhibitors as the ones
responsible for pulling the plug on “The Interview’s” release
have put him at odds with the major circuits.
2) Studio for Sale?
3) Will ‘The Interview’ Pave the Way for More Online Film
Releases?
4) Will Exhibitors Forgive and Forget?
5) Where was the MPAA?
At one point during the crisis, Lynton said to CNN, “You would
expect the industry to rally around and support you.”
He
was right. Rival studios didn’t step into the fray, and their
mouthpiece, the MPAA, was curiously low key until the FBI concluded
that North Korea was behind the attack. Only then did MPAA chairman
Chris Dodd issue a strongly worded statement condemning the attack as
a work of cyber terrorists.
In
the weeks after the attack, Dodd worked behind the scenes trying to
organize a letter of support for Sony, but it never materialized;
studios had their own fears of becoming a target of the hackers.
If your systems are at risk when clocks are “corrected” then you
probably already have the scientists and programmers who can handle
the issue.
Leap
second: computer chaos feared as scientists let world catch up with
clocks
…
The Earth’s spin is gradually slowing down, by about two
thousandths of a second per day, but atomic clocks are constant.
That means that occasionally years have to be lengthened slightly, to
allow the slowing Earth to catch up with the constant clock.
But
last time it happened, in 2012, it took down much of the internet.
Reddit, Foursquare, Yelp and LinkedIn all reported problems, and so
did the Linux operating system and programmes using Java.
The
reset has happened 25 times since they were introduced in 1972, but
the computer problems are getting more serious as increasing numbers
of computers sync up with atomic clocks. Those computers and servers
are then shown the same second twice in a row — throwing them into
a panic.
Worth
a quick read.
New
Clues from Doc Searls and David Weinberger
“Fifteen years ago, four of us got together and posted The
Cluetrain Manifesto which tried to explain what most businesses
and much of the media were getting wrong about the Web. These New
Clues come from two of the authors of that manifesto, and of the book
that followed. There’s more information here
about this project, and about its authors, Doc
Searls doc@searls.com and David
Weinberger david@weinberger.org.
New
Clues – (Open Source Document) excerpt:
“Hear, O Internet. It has been sixteen years since our previous
communication. In that time the People of the Internet — you
and me and all our friends of friends of friends, unto the last Kevin
Bacon — have made the Internet an awesome place, filled with
wonders and portents. From the serious
to the lolworthy
to the wtf,
we have up-ended titans, created heroes, and changed the most basic
assumptions about How Things Work and Who We Are. But now all the
good work we’ve done together faces mortal dangers. When we first
came before you, it was to warn of the threat posed by those who did
not understand that they did not understand the Internet. These are
The Fools, the businesses that have merely adopted the trappings of
the Internet. Now two more hordes threaten all that we have built
for one another. The Marauders understand the Internet all too well.
They view it as theirs to plunder, extracting our data and money
from it, thinking that we are the fools. But most dangerous of all
is the third horde: Us. A horde is an undifferentiated mass of
people. But the glory of the Internet is that it lets us connect as
diverse and distinct individuals. We all like mass entertainment.
Heck, TV’s gotten pretty great these days, and the Net lets us
watch it when we want. Terrific. But we need to remember that
delivering mass media is the least of the Net’s powers. The
Net’s super-power is connection without permission. Its
almighty power is that we can make of it whatever we want. It is
therefore not time to lean back and consume the oh-so-tasty junk food
created by Fools and Marauders as if our work were done. It is time
to breathe in the fire of the Net and transform every institution
that would play us for a patsy. An organ-by-organ body
snatch of the Internet is already well underway. Make no
mistake: with a stroke of a pen, a covert handshake, or by allowing
memes to drown out the cries of the afflicted we can lose the
Internet we love. We come to you from the years of the Web’s
beginning. We have grown old together on the Internet. Time is
short. We, the People of the Internet, need to remember the glory of
its revelation so that we reclaim it now in the name of what it truly
is.” David Weinberger, Doc Searls. January 8, 2015.
For
my Statistics students. All you need to do is memorize 24 trillion
possible hands!
Self-taught
computer program finds super poker strategy
…
The program considered 24 trillion simulated poker hands per second
for two months, probably playing more poker than all humanity has
ever experienced, says Michael Bowling, who led the project.
…
The strategy applies specifically to a game called heads-up limit
Texas Hold ‘em.
…
Poker is hard to solve because it involves imperfect information,
where a player doesn’t know everything that has happened in the
game he is playing — specifically, what cards the opponent has been
dealt.
For
my Math students.
A
Couple of Graphing Calculators for Your Chrome Browser
A
few days ago I wrote
about the new graphing calculator Android app offered by Desmos.
In that post I neglected to mention that Desmos
also offers a Chrome
app. The Chrome app version of Desmos works like the web
version. Along with all of the graphing functions Desmos allows you
to share your equations and graphs. Desmos graphs your equations as
you type them and redraws them as you alter your equations.
Graph.tk
is a free online graphing utility that is also available in the
Google
Chrome Web Store. Graph.tk
allows you to plot multiple functions through its dynamically
re-sizing grid. To graph an equation on Graph.tk
just click the "+" symbol to enter a new equation. One
thing that isn't clear the first time you use Graph.tk is that you
need to delete the existing default equations before you start.
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