Something unusual here. No indication that a
change went wrong? Everything worked fine up until it didn't? Not
the way things really work. Perhaps we should ask Hillary to reboot
her servers?
The State Department is suffering technical
troubles preventing the agency from issuing visas and passports at
its overseas postings.
In a notice on Friday, the department’s Bureau
of Consular Affairs said that the glitches were affecting people
from all over the globe, and ruled out a cyber attack as the cause.
“We are working as quickly as possible to
pinpoint the root cause of our technical issues,” the department
said.
… Because of the “technical difficulties”
affecting systems that perform national security checks, the
department cannot print out visas, passports or other travel
documents at its foreign diplomatic missions, it claimed.
People applying for a passport from within the
U.S. should not have a problem, however, nor
should those applying for emergency passports for urgent travel.
[Because there
is no security check if it's an “emergency?” Bob]
(Related) Remember, these are the same folks who
didn't notice that they had no access to Hillary's email and can't
figure out why their passport system won't work. I'm less than
confident that their assurances are trustworthy. (Then again, maybe
they are using Hillary's super secure computers?)
US Says
Confident No Security Breach in Iran Talks
The US State Department ... said Thursday it was
confident there had been no security breach, after Swiss and Austrian
investigators launched probes into alleged cyber-spying.
Spokesman Jeff Rathke told reporters that the US
government was aware of the investigations that had been opened, and
that Washington had "close working relationships" with both
countries.
… Swiss
and Austrian investigators are separately looking into possible
spying
at the hotels. The Swiss attorney general's office said it had
seized computer equipment on "suspicion of illegal intelligence
services operating in Switzerland."
Israel,
which is vehemently opposed to any nuclear deal with Iran, has denied
its secret services were involved.
The
probes come after Russian-based security firm Kaspersky Lab said
a computer worm widely linked to Israel was used to spy on the
negotiations.
I'm surprised they noticed.
… The Federal Communications Commission’s
enforcement bureau sent a warning to the payment processing company
Thursday that its terms of service slated to take effect next month
might violate the law.
As a condition of signing the users agreement,
Paypal customers would be giving their consent to receive robocalls
and texts from the company on any number it obtains.
Just
in case I need to declare war...
The last time the U.S. Department of Defense
published a comprehensive manual on the law of war was in 1956, when
Richard Baxter set
the standard. Much has happened since then–the U.S., in
particular, has engaged in many armed conflicts and other military
endeavors — and yet the 1956 Manual, although slightly amended, has
never been superseded. In 1990 — that is to say, a quarter of a
century ago — esteemed Department of Defense lawyer Hays Parks
published a law review article in which he wrote that “the United
States has undertaken a two-track program to ensure and enhance
continued respect for the law of war. [A] comprehensive military
review identified a need to update and significantly expand American
military law of war manuals. A new Navy manual was published in
1987, and the new Army law
of war manual will be completed in 1990.”
Well, here we are 25 years later and, believe it
or not, the Department of Defense today published the long-awaited
revised Manual,
on behalf of the Department as a whole. (An Army-specific manual
reportedly will follow shortly.)
Will this start another round of CIA-bashing?
CIA
Releases Declassified Documents Related to 9/11 Attacks
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jun 12, 2015
“Today, CIA has released to the public
declassified versions of five internal documents related to the
Agency’s performance in the lead-up to the attacks of September 11,
2001. The documents can be found at CIA’s Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) online reading room at
http://www.foia.cia.gov/collection/declassified-documents-related-911-attacks.
The first of these documents is a redacted version of the 2005 CIA
Office of Inspector General (OIG) Report on Central Intelligence
Agency Accountability Regarding Findings and Conclusions of the
Report of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities
Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. In
2005, then-CIA Director Porter Goss issued a public
statement on the OIG report. In 2007, CIA publicly released a
redacted executive summary of the report along with a statement
from then-Director Michael Hayden. In response to FOIA requests for
the full 2005 OIG report, CIA and other agencies conducted an
extensive review of the nearly 500-page document in order to release
information that no longer needed to be protected in the interests of
national security. To further contribute to the public record on
these events, CIA has also released today redacted versions of four
other documents that relate to the 2005 OIG report and provide
alternate views on the Agency’s performance prior to 9/11.
Perspective. Facebook does not rule the social
networking world. They just think they do.
Facebook
Now Cares About How Long You Look At Stuff In Your News Feed
… Facebook is tweaking its algorithms to
account for a new metric: the amount of time you spend looking at
things in your feed, regardless of whether or not you actively
interact with it.
Scroll past something without stopping for long,
and Facebook’s algorithms will slowly learn that you don’t
particularly care for that sort of content.
Camp out on a post for a bit, though, and Facebook
starts the timer behind the scenes. If you spend more time on this
story than you spend on most things in your feed — studying a
picture, perusing the comment thread — they’ll take that as a
signal that it’s something you care about.
… It’ll be interesting/a little terrifying
to see how this actually impacts what shows up in feeds, if only
because it’s all so passive. Facebooks algorithm’s have thus far
been largely tuned by what you’re liking/sharing/commenting on —
actions that all require at least a modicum of conscious effort.
Once things shift toward passive behavior analysis, Facebook’s News
Feed begins to understand what you care about more than you
ever could.
(Related) “A few seconds” is much too long to
be competitive.
Facebook's
Messenger App Hits 700 Million Users
Facebook’s standalone messenger app now has 700
million users, up from 600 million in late March. Announced by CEO
Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday during Facebook’s
annual investor meeting, the milestone represents a major win for
the company—particularly considering the initial user push-back and
outrage when the company first announced its decision to separate
messaging from the main Facebook app last summer.
As Forbes
reported in November of last year when Messenger hit 500 million
users, the decision to split the messaging feature from the nucleus
of the Facebook app was driven by a desire to simplify the messaging
process for users. Zuckerberg laid out the rationale behind the
Messenger app at a Facebook town hall meeting, where he said: “There
are more than 10 billion messages sent every day on Facebook, but in
order to get to your messages, you had to open up the app—which
could take a few seconds—and
then go to a separate tab. And what we saw was that all of the
messaging apps that people were using and they relied on the most
were—kind of—these dedicated, focused experiences.”
Perhaps my students could use these in the website
class.
Smithsonian
Digitizes For Download 40,000 Works of Asian and American Art
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jun 12, 2015
Via OpenCulture:
“Like many major museums all over the world—including the
National
Gallery, the Rijksmuseum,
The
British Library, and over
200 others—the Freer/Sackler has
made its collection, all of it, available to view online. You
can also download much of it. See delicate 16th century Iranian
watercolors like “Woman with a spray of flowers” (top), powerful
Edo period Japanese ink on paper drawings like “Thunder god”
(above), and astonishingly intricate 15th century Tibetan designs
like the “Four Mandala Vajravali Thangka” (below). And so, so
much more. As Freer/Sackler director Julian Raby describes the
initiative, “We strive to promote the love and study of Asian art,
and the best way we can do so is to free our unmatched resources for
inspiration, appreciation, academic study, and artistic creation.”
There are, writes
the galleries’ website, Bento, “thousands of works now ready
for you to download, modify, and share for noncommercial purposes.”
More
than 40,000, to be fairly precise.”
Because my students don't
have enough distractions.
5 More
Sites for Watching TV Online
TV is, in 2015, not a particular gadget anymore:
it’s a category of entertainment. Some people watch “TV” on
what’s called a “TV set”, but others watch it online.
If you’re in the latter category, Cool Websites
and Tools is once again rounding up alternative sites to watch TV on.
We aim to discover the sites you probably haven’t heard of yet.
Last time we showed you 5
never ending video sites, which brought the channel surfing feel
to the web. Today we’ve got a few sites like that for mobile and
the desktop, along with a few general sites for finding things to
watch.
For my biking and running students.
Plan and
Share Biking and Walking Routes on Google's My Maps
… To create a biking or walking route map on
My
Maps first sign into your Google account then open My Maps.
After signing into My Maps select the "draw a line" tool
then choose "add biking route." To draw your biking route
click on a starting location on the map then drag the line along a
road. My Maps tries to predict where you are going to draw your
route. The prediction feature can be handy when you're trying to
make short biking routes. When you're making longer routes you will
have to draw over the predicted lines if you don't want to use the
suggested routes.
Once again, it's humor time!
Hack
Education Weekly News
… “The Education Department is beefing up
its oversight over the hundreds of different companies that colleges
hire for a wide range of services that it says are somehow related to
federal student aid dollars and therefore subject to regulation,”
according
to Inside Higher Ed. [This
is likely to be a mess. Outsourcing is not in their skill set. Bob]
… “Oakton Community College (OCC) is
insisting that a one-sentence ‘May Day’ email referencing the
Haymarket Riot sent by a faculty member to several colleagues
constituted a ‘true threat’ to the college president,” FIRE
reports.
… Kennesaw State University has apologized
to a student after a video of him attempting to meet with an academic
advisor (and being accused of harassment for doing so) went viral.
… “Jott,
a messaging app that works without a data plan or WiFi connection,
has caught on among junior high and high school students,” says
Techcrunch.
… The cost of developing an open textbook,
according
to Tony Bates: $80,000 - $130,000. [I
use free student labor! Bob]
… Education Week has released a report called
“Tech
Counts 2015: Learning the Digital Way.” Among the stories:
“Why
Ed-Tech Is Not Transforming How Teachers Teach.”
… “Research” by the Fordham Institute’s
Michael Petrilli on “What
Twitter Says about the Education Policy Debate.”
Sometimes you should believe your technology.
No comments:
Post a Comment