Thursday, November 29, 2012

Because you don't have enough to worry about...
"Fred Guterl is the executive editor of Scientific American, and in this piece he explores various threats posed by the technology that modern civilization relies on. He discusses West African and Indian monsoons, infectious diseases, and computer hacking. Here's a quote: 'Today the technologies that pose some of the biggest problems are not so much military as commercial. They come from biology, energy production, and the information sciences — and are the very technologies that have fueled our prodigious growth as a species. They are far more seductive than nuclear weapons, and more difficult to extricate ourselves from. The technologies we worry about today form the basis of our global civilization and are essential to our survival.'"


Interesting choice of words. “Can not” is obviously incorrect. “We aren't matching the MAC address to owners YET,” would be a much more accurate statement.
"The City of Calgary, AB has introduced a new traffic congestion/timing information platform for drivers. 'The system collects the publicly available data from Bluetooths to estimate the travel time and congestion between points along those roads and displays the information on overhead message boards to motorists.' Currently only available on the Deerfoot Trail (the city's main highway artery) but will be 'expanded in the future to include sections of Crowchild Trail and Glenmore Trail in the southwest.' As for privacy concerns the city says it cannot connect the MAC address collected to the device owner."


It's like the weather – everyone complains but no one does anything about it.
November 28, 2012
Survey - Americans believe higher education must innovate
"Although a majority of Americans believes higher education remains critical to the nation’s competitiveness and the best way for individuals to achieve the American Dream, 83 percent say that higher education must innovate for the United States to maintain its global leadership, according to a new Northeastern University survey. The national opinion poll, conducted for Northeastern by FTI Consulting, underscores the centrality of higher education to the country’s competitiveness and character, but also illustrates the belief of most Americans — particularly those under 30 — that the world’s preeminent higher education system must change."

(Related) The money is there if you can find the hoops and jump through...
Microsoft Puts $250M More Into Its Ed-Tech Program, Partners In Learning; Wants Provide 20M Teachers With “21st Century Skills”
Microsoft today added another $250 million to its Partners In Learning Project, a global professional development program it has created to equip teachers with the skills they need to teach IT and other future-looking subjects.

(Related) And the tools are there if you can find them and figure out how best to employ them.
1. Creating – In creating, students create projects that involve video editing, storytelling, video casting, podcasting, and animating. Digital tools to allow students to create include: Story Kit, Comic Life, iMovie, and GoAnimate.com, SonicPics, Fotobabble, and Sock Puppet.
2. Evaluating – In evaluating students show their understanding of a topic or participate in evaluating a peers understanding of a topic. Digital tools to allow students to evaluate include: Google Docs, Poll Everywhere, Socrative, BrainPOP, and Today’s Meet.
3. Analyzing – In analyzing students complete tasks that involves structuring, surveying, outlining, and organizing. Digital tools to allow students to analyze include: Corkboard.me, Poll Everywhere, SurveyMonkey.com, Study Blue, Keynote, and Stickyboard.
4. Applying – In applying students illustrate, present, demonstrate, and simulate. Digital tools that allow students to apply include: ScreenChomp, SonicPics, QuickVoice, Fotobabble, Keynote, Podomatic, and Skype.
5. Understanding – In understanding students explain, blog, subscribe, categorize, annotate, and tweet. Digital tools to allow students to understand include: PowerPoint, Google Blogs, Fotobabble, Bit.ly, Twitter, and neu.Annotate.
6. Remembering – In remembering students recall, bookmark, list, search, create mindmaps, and write. Digital tools to allow students to remember include: Pages, Google Docs, Study Blue, Bit.ly, and Wordle.

(Related)
November 28, 2012
Pew - The changing world of libraries
The changing world of libraries, Lee Rainie, November 28, 2012. "Nine takeaways for librarians:
  1. E-reading is taking off because e-reading gadgets are taking off
  2. The gadget doesn’t make the reader, but it may change the reader
  3. E-book readers are reading omnivores (and probably influencers)
  4. E-book readers are not platform snobs AND they like different platforms for different purposes
  5. Library users are not always the same as library fans
  6. E-book borrowing has foothold – and whopping upside
  7. Library users are book buyers
  8. Library borrowing patterns are changing
  9. Collections are changing"

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Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Will Romania send a copy of the credit card data to someone (e.g. the credit card companies?) who can tell breach victims that the actors have been identified?
Romanian authorities dismantle cybercrime ring responsible for $25 million credit card fraud
November 27, 2012 by admin
I wonder how many breaches this bust clears up? For IDG News Service, Lucian Constantin reports:
Romanian law enforcement authorities have dismantled a criminal group that stole credit card data from foreign companies as part of an operation that resulted in fraudulent transactions totaling US$25 million.
[...]
According to DIICOT, the group’s members gained unauthorized access to computer systems belonging to foreign companies that operate gas stations and grocery stores, and installed computer applications designed to intercept credit card transaction data.
The applications were configured to store the captured data locally for later retrieval, upload it automatically to external servers or send it to email addresses controlled by the gang’s members, the agency said. The stolen credit card information was then sold or used to create counterfeit cards.
For example, between December 2011 and October 2012 members of the group sold 68,000 credit cards at $4 each through a specialized online shop, making a profit of $270,000, DIICOT revealed.


I wonder if this information sells for moer that $4? How big is an average refund check?
FL: Broward man pleads guilty in massive identity theft
November 27, 2012 by admin
Wayne K. Roustan reports that a former employee of an unnamed North Miami law firm was involved in an ID theft/tax refund scheme:
Rodney Saintfleur, 28, of West Park, plead to one count of conspiracy to defraud the government, one count of access device fraud, and one count of aggravated identity theft, prosecutors said.
Evidence showed that between April 2009 and July 2012, Saintfleur tapped into to the Lexis/Nexis online proprietary database where he worked.
He accessed the names, birth dates, and social security numbers of more than 26,000 people and gave this sensitive information to co-conspirators to file fraudulent income tax returns seeking refunds, according to court documents.
Read more on the Sun Sentinel. The law firm is not named in the court filings, as far as I can tell.
BrowardNet Online has a copy of the press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
One question: how is that he accessed 26,000 SSN and LexisNexis didn’t flag this? Or did they detect it, but just not in a timely fashion? I’ve sent them an inquiry about that.


Who comes up with this stuff, Alfred E. Newman?
"A new flaw has been discovered in printers manufactured by Samsung whereby a backdoor in the form of an administrator account would enable attackers to not only take control of the flawed device, but will also allow them to attack other systems in the network. According to a warning on US-CERT the administrator account is hard-coded in the device in the form of an SNMP community string with full read-write access. The backdoor is not only present in Samsung printers but also in Dell printers that have been manufactured by Samsung. The administrator account remains active even if SNMP is disabled from the printer's administration interface."


Perhaps a site that offers the plans for “Do It Yourself” surveillance equipment? (I told you 3D printers were going to be fun!)
Want a Flying Drone? These Students 3D-Printed Their Own
… The “Wendy” aircraft — named for Turman and Easter’s mother — is the latest demonstration of the power of 3D prototyping. The project is the brainchild of Michael Balazs and Jonathan Rotner, two scientists at research and engineering firm MITRE’s Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems. Their mission, jointly funded by the Department of Defense and MITRE, is to develop cheaper and faster solutions to expensive government programs, such as building autonomous aircraft.
“[We're] trying to achieve 90 percent capabilities of what the big companies can do, but at 10 percent of the cost,” Balazs says. “So we leverage everything from open technologies to commercial off-the-shelf systems to agile advanced manufacturing, to show the government that they can meet their robotics goals of unmanned systems, whether they’re ground, aerial, underwater or whatever it is.”
Wendy is their best example so far. In addition to its 3D-printed body, it uses a common Android smartphone as the sophisticated on-board brain of the aircraft’s system.

(Related) It's a whole new type of war.
U.S. Buys Yemen a Fleet of Spy Planes for Growing Shadow War
It’s not enough for Yemen’s skies to fill up with armed U.S. drones. Now the Pentagon wants to buy its Yemeni ally small, piloted spy planes. It’s a sign that the U.S. is upgrading the hardware it gives the Yemeni military, and digging in for a long shadow war.

(Related)
China Unveils New Killer Drones, Aims Them at Russia
… This year, Beijing’s most prominent new drone is the dinosaur-named Wing Loong, or Pterodactyl, according to a round-up at Defense News. The drone is reportedly operational — China has previously shown only models of the drone — and closely resembles the U.S. MQ-9 Reaper, which the Pentagon uses to bomb insurgent hideouts in Pakistan. Few foreign journalists were reportedly allowed to see it, but photos and videos that appeared online prompted ace aviation journalist David Cenciotti to remark that the Wing Loong appeared “largely copied from the U.S. version.”
But a lot cheaper. The Wing Loong reportedly comes at a rather incredible bargain price of $1 million, compared to the Reaper’s varying price tags in the $30 million range.


So the next question is: How do you cover your tracks?
Should you cover your tracks from government snooping?
November 27, 2012 by Dissent
Peter Fleischer writes:
[…] Seen from a global perspective, it’s important to realize that most governments around the world are accessing user data. It’s not just one or two governments. I can’t count the number of times privacy advocates in Europe have warned users that the US government could potentially access their data in the cloud, without mentioning the risks that their own governments could do the same thing. In fact, to take the French example, the French government is trying to launch a “French cloud”, explicitly to try to evade US government surveillance, even though this taxpayer-funded initiative is based on “bad assumptions about cloud computing and the Patriot Act“, and even though France’s own anti-terrorism law “has been said to make the Patriot Act look “namby-pamby by comparison”, as reported on ZDNet. I think it’s fair to assume that most people would be far more uncomfortable with foreign governments, rather than their own governments, accessing their data. That points to one of the hardest issues in the cloud, namely, that multiple governments can (and do) have the power to demand access to user data, if they follow appropriate legal procedures.


Porn makes headlines! (Sex sells legal arguments?)
Verizon Sued For Defending Alleged BitTorrent Pirates
November 27, 2012 by Dissent
Ernesto writes:
A group of adult movie companies is suing Verizon for failing to hand over the personal details of alleged BitTorrent pirates. The provider systematically refuses to comply with court-ordered subpoenas and the copyright holders see these actions as more than just an attempt to protect its customers. According to the them, Verizon’s objections are in bad faith as the Internet provider is profiting from BitTorrent infringements at the expense of lower-tier ISPs.
Read more on TorrentFreak.
[From the article:
In many cases the person who pays for the account is not the person who shared the copyrighted material. However, this is the person who gets sued, something that can have all kinds of financial implications.
To shield their customers from this kind of outcome Verizon now objects to subpoenas granted by courts in these cases. Not in one case, but in dozens. One of the arguments cited by Verizon’s attorneys is that the requests breach the privacy rights of its customers.
“[The subpoena] seeks information that is protected from disclosure by third parties’ rights of privacy and protections guaranteed by the first amendment,” their counsel informed the copyright holders.
Verizon further cites arguments that have previously been successful in similar cases, including the notion that mass lawsuits are not proper as the defendants did not act in concert.

(Related) How to win friends and indict people?
"A forensic software company has collected files on a million Canadians who it says have downloaded pirated content. The company, which works for the motion picture and recording industries, says a recent court decision forcing Internet providers to release subscriber names and details is only the first step in a bid to crack down on illegal downloads. 'The door is closing. People should think twice about downloading content they know isn't proper,' said Barry Logan, managing director of Canipre, the Montreal-based forensic software company."


Sometimes. Ignorance is not bliss...
UK: PCC rejects complaint over Facebook injuries photo
November 27, 2012 by Dissent
Helen Lambourne reports:
A complaint against a weekly newspaper which published a story on an assault victim which included a photo of his injuries taken from Facebook has been rejected.
The Press Complaints Commission has published a ruling on a story by the Farnham Herald from 15 June with the headline “Assaulted after night out”.
Once again, it seems, users do not fully understand how their Facebook privacy controls work and how they are usually not as protected as they think they are:
The newspaper said one of its reporters, who had a mutual acquaintance with the complainant, had seen a comment – posted by this shared Facebook friend – identifying the complainant as the victim of the attack.
The reporter had then accessed the complainant’s Facebook page, which had no privacy settings, where the complainant had posted the photograph and had identified himself as the victim of an attack.


Facebook isn't the only one who can change policies without notice...
Ca: LCBO wants personal data of wine club members
November 28, 2012 by Dissent
CBC News reports:
An Ontario wine club says it’s being forced to hand its members’ personal information over to Ontario’s Liquor Control Board in what it calls a breach of privacy.
Warren Porter, the president of the Toronto-based Vin de Garde wine club, said he’s upset the Liquor Control Board of Ontario wants his members’ personal information including names, addresses, as well as the size of each order.
Porter said he has complained to Ann Cavoukian, the province’s privacy commissioner, because he believes the LCBO is breaching his members’ privacy.
Read more on CBC.
[From the article:
Since May, Porter said his members have had to reveal more personal information for each order. That has turned one large order into hundreds of separate orders due to the mandatory release of private information.
That is irritating some of his members, especially clubs, he said, and he worries the wine club could soon be put out of business.
"We have to take all of their data — name, address, quantities ordered — all on separate order forms," Porter said, adding it creates a large administrative burden.
"A member of our wine club should be afforded the same level of anonymity that someone walking into an LCBO is."
… LCBO spokeswoman Heather MacGregor said the policy requiring the release of personal information has been around for decades.
She could not explain why Vin de Garde was only obligated to follow the policy as of six months ago, but MacGregor did say the information prevents fraud, including illegal resale, and helps the LCBO locate any recalled products.


Just a quick review of this “Guidance” but the assumption seems to be that the holder of the data anonymizes and then gives the presumably anonymized dataset to someone else – the end user. This seems backwards. Why not have the analysis done by a trusted entity (business opportunity?) and give the results to the “someone else?” Far less likely to de-anonymize if they don't have individual records.
By Dissent, November 27, 2012
Yesterday, OCR released the guidance on de-identification of PHI:
Now I just need to find time to read it…


Clearly they are not valuable – no one stole them.
concealment writes with news of dissatisfaction with a pilot program for stoplight-monitoring cameras. The program ran for several years in New Jersey, and according to a new report, the number of car crashes actually increased while the cameras were present.
"[The program] appears to be changing drivers’ behavior, state officials said Monday, noting an overall decline in traffic citations and right-angle crashes. The Department of Transportation also said, however, that rear-end crashes have risen by 20 percent and total crashes are up by 0.9 percent at intersections where cameras have operated for at least a year. The agency recommended the program stay in place, calling for 'continued data collection and monitoring' of camera-monitored intersections. The department’s report drew immediate criticism from Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon, R-Monmouth, who wants the cameras removed. He called the program 'a dismal failure,' saying DOT statistics show the net costs of accidents had climbed by more than $1 million at intersections with cameras."
Other cities are considering dumping the monitoring tech as well, citing similar cost and efficacy issues.


Illogic Alert! Let's not anthropomorphize. I will reprogram my car to protect me, not some random school bus that's blocking my way.
"If your driverless car is about to crash into a bus, should it veer off a bridge? NYU Prof. Gary Marcus has a good essay about the need to program ethics and morality into our future machines. Quoting: 'Within two or three decades the difference between automated driving and human driving will be so great you may not be legally allowed to drive your own car, and even if you are allowed, it would immoral of you to drive, because the risk of you hurting yourself or another person will be far greater than if you allowed a machine to do the work. That moment will be significant not just because it will signal the end of one more human niche, but because it will signal the beginning of another: the era in which it will no longer be optional for machines to have ethical systems.'"


I like it! Now I can have an open “Good Bob” system and a seperate, heavily encrypted “Evil Bob” system that I use “only to communicate with my lawyer” that is therefore immune from subpoena!
"Next year, smart phones will begin shipping with the ability to have dual identities: one for private use and the other for corporate. Hypervisor developers, such as VMware and Red Bend, are working with system manufacturers to embed their virtualization software in the phones, while IC makers, such as Intel, are developing more powerful and secure mobile device processors. The combination will enable mobile platforms that afford end users their own user interface, secure from IT's prying eyes, while in turn allowing a company to secure its data using mobile device management software. One of the biggest benefits dual-identity phones will offer is enabling admins to wipe corporate data from phones [That ain't gonna happen Bob] without erasing end users profiles and personal information."


Tools for electronic discovery
Escape From Babel: The Grossman-Cormack Glossary
… A glossary, which I was surprised to learn when researching for this blog is also called an idioticon, provides an alphabetical list of terms in a particular domain of knowledge with definitions for those terms.


Interesting. A tool for podcast fans...
Pod Bay is an online way to listen to your favourite podcasts, eliminating the need for desktop and iOS clients which download each episode. Search the directory to find great new podcasts to listen to.
… If you stop listening to the podcast you can return to the same spot later and pick up where you left off. If you’d like to share a clip of the podcast with friends, you can do so very easily.
Similar tools: Flapcast and Stitcher.

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Tuesday, November 27, 2012

We don't use SCADA in our Ethical Hacker exams, it's too easy.
"It is open season on SCADA software right now. Last week, researchers at ReVuln, an Italian security firm, released a video showing off a number of zero-day vulnerabilities in SCADA applications from manufacturers such as Siemens, GE and Schneider Electric. And now a researcher at Exodus Intelligence says he has discovered more than 20 flaws in SCADA packages from some of the same vendors and other manufacturers, all after just a few hours' work."


I suspect that companies wishing to “punish” whistleblowers must tread carefully. I wonder what pushes them over the line? That's why we teach our Ethical Hackers (wait for it) Ethics!
AT&T iPad Hacker’s Real Crime Was Embarrassing the Wrong People
… How to best disclose a newly discovered vulnerability is a matter of some controversy, and highly dependent on where one happens to be sitting. Vendors want the chance to address problems before they become public. Users want to know immediately about the flaws in the systems they depend on. The security community wants to study and build on new discoveries. Researchers want credit for their discoveries, and worry they might be “scooped” by someone else: publish or perish.
And everyone thinks their moral high ground is superior to all the others’.


Nothing gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling like assurances from the Pentagon.
Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics"
  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Pentagon: A Human Will Always Decide When a Robot Kills You
… Here’s what happened while you were preparing for Thanksgiving: Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter signed, on November 21, a series of instructions to “minimize the probability and consequences of failures” in autonomous or semi-autonomous armed robots “that could lead to unintended engagements,” starting at the design stage (.pdf, thanks to Cryptome.org). Translated from the bureaucrat, the Pentagon wants to make sure that there isn’t a circumstance when one of the military’s many Predators, Reapers, drone-like missiles or other deadly robots effectively automatizes the decision to harm a human being.


It's right there on page 92, paragraph C, line 4, microprint line 29: “...frequently assume the role of village idiot...”
November 26, 2012
CRS - Roles and Duties of a Member of Congress
Roles and Duties of a Member of Congress: Brief Overview, R. Eric Petersen, Specialist in American National Government, November 9, 2012
  • "The duties carried out by a Member of Congress are understood to include representation, legislation, and constituent service and education, as well as political and electoral activities. The expectations and duties of a Member of Congress are extensive, encompassing several roles that could be full-time jobs by themselves. Despite the acceptance of these roles and other activities as facets of the Member’s job, there is no formal set of requirements or official explanation of what roles might be played as Members carry out the duties of their offices. In the absence of formal authorities, many of the responsibilities that Members of Congress have assumed over the years have evolved from the expectations of Members and their constituents."


Note the assumption that the child has a cell phone. Also, there is no explanation of how Mom remotely loads cash into the system.
Palm scanners get thumbs up in schools, hospitals
November 26, 2012 by Dissent
Brian Shane reports:
At schools in Pinellas County, Fla., students aren’t paying for lunch with cash or a card, but with a wave of their hand over a palm scanner.
“It’s so quick that a child could be standing in line, call mom and say, ‘I forgot my lunch money today.’ She’s by her computer, runs her card, and by the time the child is at the front of the line, it’s already recorded,” says Art Dunham, director of food services for Pinellas County Schools.
[...]
A palm scan’s precision record-keeping also avoids possible confusion if patients have the same name. For instance, a hospital system in the Houston area with a database of 3.5 million patients has 2,488 women in it named Maria Garcia – and 231 of them have the same date of birth, Bertrams says.
HT Systems president David Wiener won’t reveal revenue but says that since 2007, they’ve got more than 160 hospitals for clients and have scanned more than 5 million patients.
Read more on USA Today.
I think we can probably all agree that preventing confusion in identifying and treating patients is a good thing. Is there a down side or risk here? If so, what is it?
[From the article, for my Statistics students:
A palm scan's precision record-keeping also avoids possible confusion if patients have the same name. For instance, a hospital system in the Houston area with a database of 3.5 million patients has 2,488 women in it named Maria Garcia – and 231 of them have the same date of birth, Bertrams says. [And all of them in the hospital (and unable to speak) on the same day? Bob]


Beyond cookies...
November 26, 2012
AVG - How to Choose How You’re Tracked
AVG Official Blog: "All the latest versions of the major browsers today include do-not-track user preference controls, but these merely express your wishes. Many third-party sites will honor your request, but many don’t. And they only let you decide whether you want to block online tracking or not. AVG offers a do-not-track feature in its AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition. AVG takes it a step further by allowing you to customize your blocking preferences at a granular level. Permanent Identifiers - One company to be aware of is BlueCava. Unlike cookies, which can be blocked or removed, BlueCava provides tracking technology that allows sites to permanently identify whatever device you’re using to connect to the web. The good news is, you can opt-out by going to http://www.bluecava.com/preferences, but you have to connect using each device you want to remove from their system."


Note the picture of the ultimate Copyright Lawyer in action!
Facebook Debunks Copyright Hoax
A silly copyright notice is sweeping Facebook today, with users attaching pseudo-legalese to their status updates in a misguided effort to prevent Facebook from owning or commercially exploiting their content. Facebook has issued a formal “fact check” statement refuting the legalese.
The viral copyright notice last spread on Facebook in May and June. Now it’s back and garnering lots of attention.

(Related)
Just last week, Facebook decided to make some big changes to how it deals with user feedback on privacy issues, but one of the changes in the updated privacy policy went slightly unnoticed. Facebook says that they can now use the data it has about your likes and dislikes to show you ads outside of Facebook. In other words, the social network giant can display catered ads to you when you’re not even browsing Facebook.


Perspective
We all know by now that Apple earns a lot of money, and the company’s profit margins are insane, but just how insane are they? If you put their fiscal 2012 profit numbers next to other big contenders in the tech industry, all other companies pale in comparison. Apple made more money than Microsoft, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Amazon combined.
Apple just recently wrapped up its fiscal year 2012 with a record profit of $41.7 billion and $156.5 billion in revenue. In comparison, The six companies mentioned above combined for a total profit of $34.4 billion. Furthermore, Dell, Intel, Acer, ASUS, IBM, HP, and Lenovo — nearly the entire PC industry — profited a total of only $19.4 billion combined.


Perspective Interesting that Walmart is number 7 (2.3%)
"A report out this morning pegs Amazon with a whopping 14% share of all daily Internet users — almost twice the nearest competitor (Ebay). And this number does not include all shopping sites absorbed by the growing Amazon empire. The original report has interesting graphics comparing Amazon to other retailers like Best Buy."


For my Website class. Making Google work for you.
November 26, 2012
Google FAQ - Keywords and search queries
"One of the best ways to ensure that your site appears for particular user queries is to make sure that your article naturally contains the words, names, and figures that are central to a particular news story. If you create an information-rich site that clearly and accurately describes your topic, you will improve your chances of appearing in our search results for relevant queries. Our crawler also makes use of a Google-specific metatag to help determine how to best classify your content. By implementing the news_keywords metatag you can specify which keywords are most relevant to your articles."


For my Statistics students – sampling in (almost) real time! Very interesting data display.
US electoral compass: how do political priorities change from state to state?
Social media monitoring experts Brandwatch have designed a radial representation of the variation in US electoral priorities by state. Using data from Twitter and online news websites, Brandwatch measured the proportion of Tweets and press discussions concerning each of 30 policy areas. Every topic was then assigned a percentage score for news articles or Tweets about each presidential candidate, and all 30 were ranked according to the proportion of discussions they featured in. Select a state and date range to filter the data, and move your cursor over a figure for more information. Policy areas are ranked on the right.


If we were to teach this, which school would it be in? Psych? Business? Computer Science?
The Rising Science Of Social Influence — How Predictable Is Your Online Behaviour?
… Recent developments and interest in academic research confirm that the study of social influence is a well-posted scientific problem. As online social networks become mainstream, their data allows scientists and companies to gain previously unprecedented insights into social phenomena. Nine out of ScienceDirect’s top 25 academic papers in Computer Science study human behaviour on online social networks. This summer Science, one of the most prestigious and hardest-to-get-into academic journals featured an article on identifying influential and susceptible members in social networks. And in addition there is a growing number of scientific meetings devoted to the study of online influence.


I have a problem with labeling education materials as K-12 or Elementary School or College level. Should you stop reading Mark Twain when you hit 18?
Monday, November 26, 2012
200+ Free Video Lessons, Apps, and eBooks for K-12
One of my favorite blogs, Open Culture, has long cataloged free and open resources for post-secondary education. Today, they launched a new collection of more than 200 free video lessons, apps, ebooks, and websites for K-12 students and teachers. The collection includes some of the usual suspects like Khan Academy, the Library of Congress, and NASA. The collection also includes some items that were new to me like this Shakespeare app and this Google Earth for science teachers resource.
[Some examples:
Bartleby.com Gives you access to free online classics of reference, literature, and nonfiction, including Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, The World Factbook, The Oxford Shakespeare, and The King James Bible.
CK-12: This non-profit provides “open textbooks” for K-12 students all over the world.
OER Commons: Discover a meta collection of free textbooks that can be sorted by subject and grade level.
iTunesU: Apple provides hundreds of free courses, lectures and academic talks, mostly suitable for older students. The easiest way to access the courses available on iTunesU is to visit our collection of 550 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

(Related)
"When it comes to programming, the classroom is moving online. A new wave of start-ups has burst onto the scene over the last year, bringing interactive lessons and gamification techniques to the subject to make coding trendy again. From Codecademy — and its incredibly successful Code Year initiative — to Khan Academy, Code School and Udacity, online learning is now sophisticated and high-tech — but is it good enough to replace the classroom? 'We are the first five or six chapters in a book,' says Code School's Gregg Pollack in this exploration of online code classes, but with the number of sites and lessons growing by the week that might not be the case for long."

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Monday, November 26, 2012

The article mentions the Oradell Reservoir which isn't large enough to flood New York City but does provide drinking water to about 3/4 million people (two square blocks) Haven't we dismissed the “LSD in the drinking water” threats? We do test the water before sending it through the pipes, don't we?
High-tech surveillance gear raises questions in New Jersey
November 25, 2012 by Dissent
Associated Press reports:
A federal anti-terrorism program has drawn North Jersey deeper into the practice of hidden surveillance, equipping police departments with high-tech cameras, infrared technology and automatic license plate readers to keep tabs on people as they travel to local reservoirs, financial hubs and malls.
[...]
Homeland Security’s representative in New Jersey, citing national security, would not say what information is being gathered, how long it is kept, or to how it is being disseminated.
Read their report on LehighValleyLive.com.


Since I don't have a cell phone (shocking, isn't it) I worry that I'll be accused of “destroying evidence” and strapped to a waterboard until I reveal the secret hiding place...
Courts Divided Over Searches of Cellphones
November 26, 2012 by Dissent
Somini Sengupta reports:
Judges and lawmakers across the country are wrangling over whether and when law enforcement authorities can peer into suspects’ cellphones, and the cornucopia of evidence they provide.
A Rhode Island judge threw out cellphone evidence that led to a man being charged with the murder of a 6-year-old boy, saying the police needed a search warrant. A court in Washington compared text messages to voice mail messages that can be overheard by anyone in a room and are therefore not protected by state privacy laws.
Read more on the New York Times.
Orin Kerr comments on the article:
Unfortunately, the story rather confusingly switches back and forth between considering at least three different legal questions:
  1. What privacy protections the Fourth Amendment or statutes extend to the cell-location records generated by phone companies and stored by them, if the government comes to the phone company and wants the records of where the phone was located.
    2) What privacy protections the Fourth Amendment or statutes extend to copies of text messages or e-mails that providers may have stored, if the government comes to the provider and wants to obtain copies of a suspect’s text messages or e-mails.
    3) Whether the Fourth Amendment permits a warrantless search of the cell phone — and if so, how thoroughly — incident to a valid arrest.
Read more of his commentary on The Volokh Conspiracy.

(Related) For my Statistics students. Notice anything missing from the list of cell phone activities? What have I told you about assumptions?
November 25, 2012
Pew Report - Cell Phone Activities 2012
Cell Phone Activities 2012, by Maeve Duggan, Lee Rainie, Nov 25, 2012
  • "Fully 85% of American adults own a cell phone and now use the devices to do much more than make phone calls. Cell phones have become a portal for an ever-growing list of activities. In nationally representative phone surveys in the spring and summer, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project obtained readings on some of the most popular activities. Read on to see which activities are the most popular, and who does what kind of activity."
[From the report:
Cell Phone Activities
The % of cell phone owners who use their cell phone to…
82
Take a picture
80
Send or receive text messages
56
Access the internet
50
Send or receive email
44
Record Video*
43
Download Apps*
31
Look for health or medical information online
29
Check bank account balance or do any online banking

(Related)


I keep a spreadsheet to record car statistics, this could go quite a bit further
Volt owners will be able to brag about their mileage more easily now thanks to OnStar. "GM rushed work on a new API to get a popular Volt owner site back on road. You probably don't think of your car as a developer platform, but Mike Rosack did. A few days after buying his Chevy Volt, Rosack started slowly mining his driving data. But he eventually revved up his efforts and created a community platform for drivers to track their own efficiency. Today more than 1,800 Volt owners compare stats with each other, jockeying for position on Rosack's Volt Stats leader board."

(Related) Who has your data? Apparently, lots of people.
Inrix Now Collects Traffic Data From 100M Drivers, Shows Black Friday Congestion Up 32.5% Despite Ecommerce
Black Friday online shopping sales were up 26% this year, the number of people driving to brick and mortar stores increased even faster says Inrix. Congestion was up 32.5% this year according to the traffic data Inrix now pulls from over 100 million drivers. This and another report about Thanksgiving traffic show the quiet giant is intent on raising its profile before its planned 2013 IPO.
… Where’s all this data coming from? Actually, where did Inrix come from? The startup spun out of Microsoft’s automotive research lab in 2004. Since then it’s signed deal after deal to sell traffic data to practically anyone…so long as they collect that same data and send it back to Inrix.
This crowdsourced model keeps on snowballing. Now Inrix has data on 1.8 million miles of road in 35 countries. Six of the top eight automakers with built-in navigation systems and eight of the top twelve iOS map apps rely on Inrix. Beyond developers and car manufacturers, it sells data to governments, TV and radio stations for on-air traffic reports, commercial fleets like UPS, and traffic websites. It has its own navigation app, plus a clever partnership with mobile carriers that lets it use data about when phones switch from tower to tower to calculate traffic.


Did the MPAA shoot itself in the foot? Is this evidence that their best customers also pirate their movies? Will they listen?
"We've heard this one before, over and over again: pirates are the biggest spenders. It therefore shouldn't surprise too many people to learn that shutting down Megaupload earlier this year had a negative effect on box office revenues. The latest finding comes from a paper titled: 'Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload.'"


Interesting survey, but I am going to steal their graphic display techniques. Very slick.
November 25, 2012
Summary Results - 2012 Am Law Tech Survey
Highlights from the 2012 Am Law Tech Survey - Topics covered include: Money, Cloud, Social Networking, Smartphones, Tablets, Win8 Purchasing. [99% of survey respondents use iPhone iOS]


Perspective When we say “Big Data” that's exactly what we mean.
Exclusive: Inside Google Spanner, the Largest Single Database on Earth
… Spanner is something that stretches across the globe while behaving as if it’s all in one place. Unveiled this fall after years of hints and rumors, it’s the first worldwide database worthy of the name — a database designed to seamlessly operate across hundreds of data centers and millions of machines and trillions of rows of information.
… Google’s new-age database is already part of the company’s online ad system — the system that makes its millions — and it could signal where the rest of the web is going. Google caused a stir when it published a research paper detailing Spanner in mid-September, and the buzz was palpable among the hard-core computer systems engineers when Wilson Hsieh presented the paper at a conference in Hollywood, California a few weeks later.

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Sunday, November 25, 2012

An interesting “Worst Practice”
Curb your enthusiasm!
November 24, 2012 by admin
Maybe one of the mantras of data protection should be “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” In 2009, Yankees fans enthusiastically threw papers out of the window during the team’s World Series celebratory parade through the Canyon of Heroes. The unshredded papers included files from A.L. Sarroff, Goldman Sachs, and the Bronx Supreme Court, as well as medical test reports, some with identifying information and Social Security numbers.
Now WPIX11 reports that some of the confetti thrown by people in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade had not been sufficiently shredded so as to prevent reconstruction and identification:
That information included social security numbers and banking information for police employees, some of whom are undercover officers.
[...]
“There are phone numbers, addresses, more social security numbers, license plate numbers and then we find all these incident reports from police.”
One confetti strip indicates that it’s from an arrest record, and other strips offer more detail.
A closer look shows that the documents are from the Nassau County Police Department.
[...]
Most significant, the confetti strips identified Nassau County detectives by name. Some of them are apparently undercover. Their social security numbers, dates of birth and other highly sensitive personal information was also printed on the confetti strips
Read more on WPIX11 or watch their news video:


An indication that you have no counter-arguement? (It's not that they're right, it's that you're either a bigot or completely inarticulate.)
"The past week's violence in Gaza has rekindled calls for Twitter to shutter the accounts of U.S.-labeled terror groups such as Hamas. Seven House Republicans asked the FBI in September to demand that Twitter take down the accounts of U.S.-designated terrorist groups, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Somalia's al Shabaab. The letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller was spearheaded by Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), who said Wednesday that the recent events vindicated the request. [“Now we can justify things that were previously unjustifyable?” Bob] 'Allowing foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas to operate on Twitter is enabling the enemy,' [Poe said] 'Failure to block access arms them with the ability to freely spread their violent propaganda and mobilize in their War on Israel.'"


Much more money than I thought.
November 25, 2012
The State of Human Trafficking in California 2012
  • "Human trafficking is an estimated $32 billion-a-year global industry. After drug trafficking, human trafficking is the world’s second most profitable criminal enterprise, a status it shares with illegal arms trafficking. Like drug and arms trafficking, the United States is one of the top destination countries for trafficking in persons. California – a populous border state with
    a significant immigrant population and the world’s ninth largest economy – is one of the nation’s top four destination states for trafficking human beings...72% of human trafficking victims whose country of origin was identified by California’s task forces are American. The public perception is that human trafficking victims are from other countries, but data from California’s task forces indicate that the vast majority are Americans."

(Related)
Flourishing Sex Sites a Boon to Police
… The online sex trade is flourishing despite nationwide campaigns and pressure from government leaders. Two years after public and legal pressure prompted Craigslist.org, the San Francisco-based online classifieds service, to scrap its “erotic services” section, visitors and revenue have soared on other classified websites, according to the Advanced Interactive Media Group, a consulting firm for the classified advertising market.
… Challenging the sites legally has proven difficult. Legal experts said the websites are protected by the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which states that website owners are exempt from responsibility for the content of their users.


Who pays those fees? A large percentage is probably the media. Where does the money go? Clearly not into training journalists to answer my questions.
November 24, 2012
Pacer federal court record fees exceed system costs
Shane Shifflett and Jennifer Gollan: "The federal government has collected millions from the online Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, or PACER – nearly five times what it cost to run the system. Between fiscal years 2006 and 2010, the government collected an average of $77 million a year from PACER fees, according to the most recent federal figures available."


Sounds increasingly like they did not make or sell illegal copies but provided a service infringers used. Could this happen to Google or Amazon?
Dotcom: We've hit the jackpot
A fresh legal bid to throw out the case against Kim Dotcom in the United States is being made after claims of an FBI double-cross.
Evidence has emerged showing the Department of Homeland Security served a search warrant on Mr Dotcom's file-sharing company Megaupload in 2010 which he claims forced it to preserve pirated movies found in an unrelated piracy investigation.
The 39 files were identified during an investigation into the NinjaVideo website, which had used Megaupload's cloud storage to store pirated movies.
When the FBI applied to seize the Megaupload site in 2012, it said the company had failed to delete pirated content and cited the earlier search warrant against the continued existence of 36 of the same 39 files.
… The FBI application to seize the sites said the "Mega Conspiracy" members were told by "criminal search warrant" in June 2010 "that 39 infringing copies of copyrighted motion pictures were present on their leased servers". The application was approved to allow the seizure of the domain names.
However, the application to seize the domain names, made on January 13, 2012, did not state the earlier search warrant was not issued against Megaupload.
… The 39 files were not only used by NinjaVideo, according to the FBI affidavit. The Megaupload system identified files which were already on the system and kept only one copy of each. Unique weblinks were produced for each user providing multiple paths to the same file. The FBI indictment cited an email by Mr Dotcom's co-accused Mathias Ortman in which he said more than 2000 users had uploaded the 39 files. [I would ask, How many of those 2,000 were just making backups of videos they had purchased? What percentage of copyright-thief users would make the entire group criminals? Bob]


Ah ha! That's why they don't ask questions. I've been teaching robots!
"Advances in an artificial intelligence technology that can recognize patterns offer the possibility of machines that perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. ... But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just 'neural nets' for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain. 'There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,' said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. 'The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.' Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. ... But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs. From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent."


I require my Math students to search for alternative tutorials, calculators and definitions. This might help them.
Saturday, November 24, 2012
10 Google Search Tips All Students Can Use
I'm often asked for recommendations on how to help students use Google more effectively. This morning I sat down and thought about the recommendations that I make most frequently when I am asked. I wrote up my list and put it into PDF form for you to download and print if you like.

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