New management means people might think procedures
have changed. Good time to try phishing.
Bryan Clark reports:
A finance executive fell victim to a phishing scam that saw the Los Angeles-based maker of children’s toys wire a cool $3 million to Chinese hackers.
Expertly timed during a period of corporate change, the email hit the inbox of the unnamed executive and requested a new vendor payment in the amount of $3 million to a vendor in China. Mattel, of late, has been in a period of change as new CEO Christopher Sinclair had only officially taken over after Mattel had fired his predecessor — a move that aided the con artists.
Read more on TheNextWeb.
Security is important, but not (yet) a law school
class. So lawyers can tell clients their data is confidential and
extremely well protected, and still admit they are “not aware” of
the data stolen.
Hackers
Breach Law Firms, Including Cravath Swaine and Weil Gotshal
Hackers
broke into the computer networks at some of the country’s most
prestigious law firms, and federal investigators are exploring
whether they stole confidential information for the purpose of
insider trading, according to people familiar with the matter.
… Other law firms also were breached, the
people said, and hackers, in postings on the Internet, are
threatening to attack more.
… Cravath said the incident, which occurred
last summer, involved a “limited breach” of its systems and that
the firm is “not aware
that any of the information that may have been accessed has been used
improperly.” The firm said its client
confidentiality is sacrosanct and that it is working with
law enforcement as well as outside consultants to assess its
security.
… The attacks on law firms appear to show
thieves scouring the digital landscape for more sophisticated types
of information. Law firms are attractive targets because they hold
trade secrets and other sensitive information about corporate
clients, including details about undisclosed mergers and acquisitions
that could be stolen for insider trading.
Clear
implications for Apple? I wonder if (back when telephones were new)
anyone tried to keep wiretap information away from defense lawyers?
FBI Is
Pushing Back Against Judge's Order to Reveal Tor Browser Exploit
Last month,
the FBI
was ordered to reveal the full malware code used to hack visitors
of a dark web child pornography site. The judge behind that
decision, Robert J. Bryan, said
it was a “fair question” to ask how exactly the FBI caught
the defendant.
But the agency is pushing back. On Monday,
lawyers for the Department of Justice filed a sealed motion asking
the judge to reconsider, and also provided a public declaration from
an FBI agent involved in the investigation.
In short, the FBI agent says that revealing the
exploit used to bypass the protections offered by the Tor Browser is
not necessary for the defense and their case. The defense, in
previous filings, has said they want to determine whether the network
investigative technique (NIT)—the FBI's term for a hacking
tool—carried out additional functions beyond those authorised in
the warrant.
Ignorance
is bliss just ignorance. Are we looking an another
political “campaign” meme?
Dark Web’s
Got a Bad Rep: 7 in 10 People Want It Shut Down, Study Shows
Speculation—no
matter how baseless—that online black markets for
weapons helped
make
the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels possible
hasn’t helped the reputation of the dark web’s anonymous corner
of the internet. But one new study shows that even before that
dubious
link between online anonymity and terror attacks, global opinion
on the dark web was already overwhelmingly negative.
On Tuesday, the Canadian think tank the Center for
International Governance Innovation released the results of a survey
of more than 24,000 individuals in 24 countries, asking their opinion
of the dark
web—the collection of anonymous web sites that can only be
accessed via tools like the anonymity software Tor. In total, 71
percent of the respondents—and 72 percent of Americans in
particular—said they believed the “dark net” should be shut
down.
Perspective.
Google, the phone company. Soon, the “anything digital”
company?
Google
Fiber Completes Triple Play By Adding Phone Service
People in
cities where Google’s high-speed Fiber Internet service is
available will soon be able to add another Google product to their
homes: Fiber Phone.
Google announced the upcoming Internet phone
service on Tuesday in a blog
post. For an extra $10 per month on top of their Internet bills,
Fiber Phone subscribers will get unlimited local and nationwide
calling. For international calls, Google will use the same rates
charged by its Google
Voice Internet phone service.
Current Fiber customer plans range from free
for basic service (in a limited number of cities) to $130
for TV service and a gigabit-speed Internet connection.
… Further piggybacking off of Google Voice,
Fiber Phone will transcribe voicemails and send the text via email or
as a text message. Users will also have the option to forward
incoming calls from a Fiber Phone number to their cellphones when
away from home.
Will the next government in China eventually look
back at this as a really bad move?
China Seeks
More Legal Muscle to Block Foreign Websites
China is
considering new Internet rules that would pressure service providers
to cut off access to foreign websites, adding to the government’s
growing legal framework bolstering its control of cyberspace.
… If fully implemented, the regulations would
effectively wall off the world’s most populous country from vast
swaths of the Internet. Other, similar rules have been weakly
enforced in the past, but with Chinese President Xi
Jinping dramatically tightening political controls, it is unclear
how meaningful the changes would be, analysts said.
Perspective.
It should be interesting to see if my students agree.
What’s
trending in the IoT space
… we decided to create an easy to read
overview for others to get up to speed on this trending space of IoT.
Here
is our full report; the following is a summary of what we
learned.
Our view is
that there are five major battlegrounds for IoT and hardware
innovation and market growth in the consumer space: connected homes,
wearables, healthcare, robotics and drones and transportation.
For history
geeks? Try searching for “computer”
A Mapped &
Searchable Archive of American Newspapers
The U.S.
News Map is a great resource produced by Georgia Tech and the
University of Georgia. The U.S. New Map is an archive of American
newspapers printed between
1836 and 1925. You can search the archive by entering a
keyword or phrase. The results of your search will be displayed on
an interactive map. Click on any of the markers on the map and
you'll be shown a list of newspaper articles related to your search
term. Click on a listed article to read it on the Library of
Congress' Chronicling America website.
The U.S.
News Map has a neat playback feature that you can use to see the
frequency with which a term or topic appeared in newspapers between
1836 and 1925. That playback feature could be a nice way to show
students developments in technology. For example, search the term
"telephone" and you'll see peaks and valleys in the
frequency with which articles were written about telephones.
Shakespeare
2.0?
An AI's
Novella Passes First Round of Japanese Literary Contest
… The novella, The Day a Computer Writes a
Novel, was co-written and edited by a team of humans. The story
itself follows a computer program as it recognizes its talent for
writing and leaves behind its preprogrammed duties.
Perhaps the
university could become more “social?”
The Social
Intranet Insights on Managing and Sharing Knowledge Internally
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Mar 29, 2016
IBM Center for the Business of Government – The
Social Intranet: Insights on Managing and Sharing Knowledge
Internally, March 2016: “Corporate America increasingly relies
on social intranets to leverage employees’ knowledge and foster
collaboration in ways that speed up work and reduce costs. While
much of the federal government lags behind, some agencies are
pioneers in the internal use of social media tools. What lessons and
effective practices do they have to offer other agencies? “Social
intranets,” Dr. Mergel writes, “are in-house social networks that
use technologies—such as automated newsfeeds, wikis, chats, or
blogs—to create engagement opportunities among employees.” They
also include the use of internal profile pages that help people
identify expertise and interest (similar to Facebook or LinkedIn
profiles), and those that are used in combination with other social
intranet tools such as online communities or newsfeeds. The report
documents four case studies of government use of social intranets—two
federal government agencies (the Department of State and the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration) and two cross-agency networks
(the U.S. Intelligence Community and the Government of Canada.”
Smarter
than the cellphone that looks like a gun.
Man invents
gun that looks exactly like a cell phone
Kirk
Kjellberg from Minnesota says he came up with the "Ideal
Conceal" pocket gun, designed to look identical to a smartphone,
after a little boy pointed out Kjellberg's own larger,
not-so-concealed gun at a restaurant.
… It hasn't even hit the market yet, and
already the double barrelled .380 derringer-style cell phone
look-alike is triggering a lot of debate on social media.
While Kjellberg says he already has 4,000 orders
for "Ideal Conceal," a lot of people are calling the
smartphone weapon a dumb idea.
Could be
something I'll sic my students on.
Zaption
Expands Free Options for Creating Flipped Lessons
Zaption
is a popular tool for creating video-based lessons and quizzes. The
service operates on a freemium model in which they offer a mix of
free and paid options. Last week Zaption
announced that the free options have been expanded. Teachers can
now utilize all of the video lesson creation tools that Zaption
offers. Those tools include adding required questions that students
must answer before moving forward in a video lesson. The other
enhancement to the free version of Zaption is the removal of the
limitation on the number of viewers your lessons can have.
To create a
quiz on Zaption
you start by creating a "tour" in your account. A tour is
a combination of videos, images, and text arranged into a sequence.
To add a video to a tour you can search and select one within
Zaption. Zaption pulls videos from YouTube, Vimeo, PBS, or National
Geographic. After choosing your video, start watching it then pause
it when you want to add a question. You can add questions in the
form of multiple choice, open response, or check box response. When
students watch the video they will see your questions appear in the
context in which you set them.
Zaption
can be a great tool for creating flipped lessons to share with your
students. Students do not
have to have Zaption accounts in order to use the tours that you
create. The free version of the service used to only
allow only one video per tour/ lesson, but it now allows you to
include multiple videos within a lesson/ tour.
My students
need something to help with citations.
By Search
Request - Bibliography Tools for Students
Over the
weekend I was looking at the Google
Analytics for FreeTech4Teachers.com
and noticed that last week one of the most frequently searched terms
that directed people to this blog is "bibliography generators."
I took that as a clue that more than a few people are interested in
that topic. To that end, here are the tools that I frequently
recommend for creating bibliographies. As with any tool that
automates a process, teach your students to check the accuracy of the
citations created by any of these tools.
For Google
Docs users the EasyBib Bibliography Creator is my go-to tool for
creating bibliographies. The EasyBib Bibliography Creator makes it
easy to properly cite resources and format a bibliography in APA,
MLA, or Chicago style. Click
here for directions for the process of using this add-on.
RefMe
is currently my favorite tool for creating bibliographies outside of
the Google Docs environment. RefMe offers browser extensions, a free
Android, and a free iPad app for saving resources and generating
bibliographies from your collection of resources. Watch my video
embedded below to learn more about how to use RefMe in your web
browser.
Also for my
students.
Tap to
Learn Grammar
Tap
to Learn produces a bunch of educational apps for Android and
iOS. The Tap
to Learn Grammar app for Android offers more than 200 self-paced
grammar lessons. The lessons don't have videos embedded in them, but
there are links to external videos hosted on YouTube. After working
through a lesson students can test their new skills in a series of
quizzes. Instant feedback is provided in the skills quizzes within
Tap to Learn Grammar. The free app records and tracks students'
progress for them.
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