Monday, January 25, 2016

An important question because we might want to do it here.
How secure are New York City's new Wi-Fi hubs?
The first of New York City's public Wi-Fi hubs went live yesterday, offering free gigabit-fed Wi-Fi to anyone within 150 feet of the stations on Third Avenue. These are the first of 7,500 such hubs, each equipped with USB charging ports and custom-built tablets for web browsing, spread throughout the five boroughs. As part of the LinkNYC project, these hubs will create the largest public municipal Wi-Fi system in the world once they're completely installed.




Is it a fight or merely a debate? (Moving at the speed of government.)
5 things to watch in Internet privacy fight
Advocates are pressing the Federal Communications Commission to quickly propose strong Internet privacy rules, one of the unfinished parts of last year’s net neutrality order.
The agency is expected to release a proposal any month now. It'll come after nearly a year of meetings with stakeholders about the scope of the commission’s new authority.
… As the clock ticks and pressure mounts, here are five important factors shaping the debate.
Scope of FCC authority
New tracking technologies
Pressure from tech and consumer groups
Data access
Consumer protections




Who vets this stuff? Does no one ask any questions? Just grab a suggested program and run with it?
From the road-to-student-privacy-hell dept., WPXI reports that what was intended as an anti-bullying “kindness” program at West Allegheny Middle School went too far in asking the students personal questions.
According to school officials, a variety of exercises were put together for students to get students to “become aware of others’ experiences and their role of being supporters to one another.”
However, some parents claim the workshop had the opposite effect. “All they did was give the bullies more ammunition,” parent Marie-Noelle Briggs said.
During one of the exercises, the students were given masks and asked a series of questions, including whether they had one or more parent who did not go to college, whether someone close to them had been imprisoned and whether their families ever worried about not having enough money. If the answer was “yes,” students were instructed to move towards the center of the circle.
Read more on WPXI.
[From the article:
“I would never expect a middle school to ask 13-year-old kids if your parents have ever been in jail, if they're same sex, if they're having financial issues. Why would my 13-year-old son know any of this?” Briggs said.
Lippert did not personally look at the questions before the workshop.
“I didn't personally look at the questions ahead of time, I trusted the team,” said Lippert. “It's a national age appropriate model,
School officials said students were given the option to opt out, but parents said they were never informed of the personal nature of what was passed off as a “kindness workshop.”




“'cause we can't compete with good schools?”
Bill Hormann reports:
A school district is wrongly shielding names and addresses of students from an organization that promotes options to traditional public schools, according to a lawsuit before the Ohio Supreme Court attracting interest from several statewide education groups.
Columbus-based School Choice Ohio says it has long obtained the information through public records requests to districts around Ohio. It then uses the data to alert parents to scholarships – sometimes referred to as vouchers – that poor students and others can use to attend private institutions in the state.
After providing the information in the past, Springfield city schools is now refusing to hand over the data.
Read more on ABC13.
[From the article:
"The Court should reject Springfield's cynical attempt to avoid competition and preserve its state funding by keeping its students and their families ignorant of their options under Ohio law," Movius said.
Up to 60,000 scholarships are available this year, worth up to $5,000 for high school students or $4,250 for those in kindergarten through eighth grade. But fewer than a third of the scholarships are actually used.




'cause lobbyists know best?
Drone Lobbying Heats Up on Capitol Hill
The last time Congress weighed in on rules for nonmilitary drones, in 2012, the flying machines were hardly a hit with consumers. And companies said little about using them for commercial purposes.
Now Congress is set to make a stand again. But this time, hundreds of thousands of recreational drones are in use, and companies like Amazon have their hearts set on using drones to deliver packages — and they are taking their case to Capitol Hill.




Perhaps if there was a free public source, like maybe a website?
Clinic Works With Law Scholars to Argue Against Copyright in Legal Codes
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on Jan 24, 2016
Cyberlaw Clinic – Harvard Law School – [January 16, 2016], “the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic, on behalf of a group of esteemed law scholars, filed an amicus brief (pdf) in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) v. Public.Resource.org. Amici argue in the brief that model codes incorporated into law are not, and should not be, copyrightable. Several standards developing organizations (SDOs) – including ASTM, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) – filed the lawsuit against Public Resource back in 2013, alleging copyright and trademark infringement. After a lengthy discovery process, the federal District Court in D.C. is currently considering motions for summary judgment from both parties.”




Perspective.
2016 will be the year of conversational commerce
… Before I begin, I want to clarify that conversational commerce (as I see it) largely pertains to utilizing chat, messaging, or other natural language interfaces (i.e. voice) to interact with people, brands, or services and bots that heretofore have had no real place in the bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context. The net result is that you and I will be talking to brands and companies over Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and elsewhere before year’s end, and will find it normal. Indeed, there are several examples of this phenomenon already, but those examples are few and far between, and fit in a Product Hunt collection rather than demand an entire App Store (wait for it).




Interesting graphics!
Advocacy group documents privatizing of US criminal justice system
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on Jan 24, 2016
Via In the Public Interest – “Today, private companies hold contracts that allow them to profit from all corners of America’s criminal justice system. Consequently, many people charged with crimes are exposed to the profit-seeking of companies every step of the way, from entering the system to being released. These graphics depict the possible paths of people charged with different offenses, revealing the various privatized services provided by the corrections industry…”




Eventually, all that computing in the cloud ties back to brick & mortar data centers.
Facebook Expanding To Ireland With Second European Data Center Coming Near Dublin
… Facebook opened its first European data center in Sweden in 2013.
… According to a press release from Tim Cook's company in February 2015, Apple will open two data centers in Europe, with one of them in Athenry, County Galway, Ireland. Both data centers will span over 166,000 square meters (1,787,000 square feet) and should start functioning in 2017.




For my Data Management class.
What do you do when you need to ensure data can be stored, shared and retrieved not for just the next five years, but for the next one hundred? I recently stumbled across a system called iRODS (integrated rule-oriented data system) that’s currently in use at multiple government and research organizations to solve this long-term data management problem. iRODS, open sourced under the BSD license, consists of four components or features:
  • Storage virtualization, typically through a storage gateway, but JBOD configurations are support.
  • Data discovery using standard and user-defined metadata. Future releases will support discovery on data content via ElasticSearch.
  • Workflow automation through a rules engine microservice supporting event-triggered process automation.
  • Secure collaboration via a data federation capability.
… Today, no vendors offer support for, or a commercial product based on, iRODS.




Einstein said time is relative. Dilbert provides an example.


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