You have got to be kidding!
http://heartbeat.skype.com/2007/08/what_happened_on_august_16.html
What happened on August 16
By My status Villu Arak on August 20, 2007. (Posted at 5:35 AM GMT, updated first two paragraphs at 11:45 AM GMT)
On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.
The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.
How many ways can we screw up e-voting?
E-voting predicament: Not-so-secret ballots
By Declan McCullagh Story last modified Mon Aug 20 04:00:07 PDT 2007
Ohio's method of conducting elections with electronic voting machines appears to have created a true privacy nightmare for state residents: revealing who voted for which candidates.
Two Ohio activists have discovered that e-voting machines made by Election Systems and Software and used across the country produce time-stamped paper trails that permit the reconstruction of an election's results--including allowing voter names to be matched to their actual votes.
... Ohio law permits anyone to walk into a county election office and obtain two crucial documents: a list of voters in the order they voted, and a time-stamped list of the actual votes. "We simply take the two pieces of paper together, merge them, and then we have which voter voted and in which way," said James Moyer, a longtime privacy activist and poll worker who lives in Columbus, Ohio.
... An ES&S spokeswoman at the Fleishman-Hillard public relations firm downplayed concerns about vote linking. "It's very difficult to make a direct correlation between the order of the sign-in and the timestamp in the unit," said Jill Friedman-Wilson. (ES&S iVotronic machines are used in 10 Ohio counties, mostly in the center of the state, according to a map on the BlackBoxVoting.org watchdog site.)
... One explanation is ES&S had never expected that the paper with the time stamps, known as a voter verified paper audit trail, or VVPAT, would be made public under state open records laws.
A report evaluating ES&S security prepared by Compuware auditors two years for the Ohio secretary of state--marked "Confidential" but available on the Internet (PDF)--does warn about keeping electronic time stamps. It says that the electronic representation of votes, called the Cast Vote Records, "should not have time stamp associated with it" and must be randomized to protect privacy.
... Computer scientists and security experts say restricting the public's access to e-voting paper trails by tinkering with open records laws is insufficient--it doesn't protect against, for instance, an insider perusing the ballots and reconstructing them.
They do say paper trails are necessary to provide a physical check on what could be a buggy or maliciously programmed machine. But they offer three suggestions: deleting the time stamp, not keeping a list showing in which order people vote, and adding a paper slicer and shuffler to randomize how the physical audit trail is recorded.
... "Audit trails are really important, but so is privacy," she said. "Many of the vendors of (e-voting machines) have actually put ID numbers on the paper records, which also could be used to reconstruct which voter is associated with a vote."
Moyer and Cropcho have posted a summary of their findings on their Web site, ThePublicBallot.org.
For its part, ES&S claims that printing out time stamps is recommended by standards adopted in 2002 by the Federal Election Commission.
A new task for Security managers?
Companies clamping down on messaging
By Brian Bergstein, AP Technology Writer August 19, 2007
Whenever a doctor, nurse or administrator in Georgia's DeKalb Medical Center sends an e-mail, the message detours through a special box in the three-hospital system's computing cluster. The box analyzes the e-mail, scanning for sensitive information like patient names, prescription histories and Social Security numbers.
More than 1,200 times a month, the box finds such private data and automatically routes the message to a server that encrypts it for secrecy before sending it to its original destination. Sometimes, though, the box is unsure what to do, so it asks Sharon Finney.
Finney is the information security administrator, which makes her responsible for keeping the hospital in tune with medical privacy laws. Several times a week, the messaging-control system, set up by Proofpoint Inc., alerts Finney to e-mails awaiting her review.
"What I'm looking for is not so much someone sending out something intentional or volumes of info" inappropriately leaving the hospital, she says. "I'm looking at, is this a legitimate recipient?" Maybe an e-mail address was mistyped, for example, or one too many people was copied in on a spreadsheet with patient account numbers.
Such careful oversight is becoming more common. Many organizations, fearful that inside information can slip out through innumerable digital avenues, now govern precisely what employees can or cannot put into e-mails, instant messages, Web postings and even offline documents. But employers can't hold their workers' hands all the time -- so they're increasingly turning to software that tries to do it for them.
... This fine-grained, automated monitoring is moving beyond highly regulated industries like health care and financial services thanks to a spate of new rules from government and the credit-card industry. Organizations also fear customer-account data breaches, insider thefts and other public-relations nightmares.
"The driver is ethics and reputation," says Joe Fantuzzi, CEO of Workshare Inc., whose software analyzes data-leakage risks. "Whether I'm regulated or not, I need to be seen as an ethical corporation. That affects my stock price, that affects whether customers are retained -- whether there's a leak or not."
... That presages the rise of a powerful new slot in the corporate hierarchy -- the information compliance officer, who can outrank the CEO when it comes to setting rules for who in an organization can send what kind of data where.
... That brings up an ironic element of these technologies. To a large degree they are being deployed to protect the privacy of patients or consumers. Yet they do so at the expense of employee privacy, putting monitoring into overdrive.
Strange that Internet companies haven't planned for the increased volume they have been tracking for the last 20 years!
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/19/133241&from=rss
Will Internet TV Crash the Internet?
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday August 19, @10:02AM from the or-just-jack-the-rates dept. The Internet
Stony Stevenson writes "Analyst groups and Cisco have come out saying that the internet is heading for a crash unless it increases its bandwidth capabilities which are being strangled by the increased use of Web TV. Stan Schatt, research director at ABI said: "Uploading bandwidth is going to have to increase, and the cable providers are going to get killed on bandwidth as HD programming becomes more commonplace." He added that the solution to the problem is to change to digital switching and move to IPTV. "They will be brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century," he said. Cisco weighed into the argument, adding that it had found American video websites currently transmit more data per month than the entire amount of traffic sent over the internet in 2000."
Perhaps I could use this idea to allow my students to explain what they meant to say/thought they said in their papers?
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/19/1328253&from=rss
YouTube for Science?
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday August 19, @11:08AM from the blinded-me-with dept. Science
Shipud writes "The National Science Foundation, Public Library of Science and the San Diego Supercomputing Center have partnered to set up what can best be described as a "YouTube for scientists", SciVee". Scientists can upload their research papers, accompanied by a video where they describe the work in the form of a short lecture, accompanied by a presentation. The formulaic, technical style of scientific writing, the heavy jargonization and the need for careful elaboration often renders reading papers a laborious effort. SciVee's creators hope that that the appeal of a video or audio explanation of paper will make it easier for others to more quickly grasp the concepts of a paper and make it more digestible both to colleagues and to the general public."
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9762002-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
Neuroscience for kids, on the web
Posted by Amy Tiemann August 18, 2007 2:31 PM PDT
... So when I come across a high-quality resource for students, I like to share it. The Neuroscience for Kids website, put together by the University of Washington, is really well done. As a former high school student, scientist, and high school teacher myself, I appreciate this professionally-sourced treasure-trove of information for teachers and students. Neuroscience for Kids offers facts, lesson plans, experiments, and links to quality reports such as Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling the World, by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
I recommend that you bookmark these sites for a future science project, or for a day when you just want to satisfy your curiosity about questions such as "How does chocolate affect my brain?" or "Why can't I tickle myself?"
It's all in the choice of language...
No comments:
Post a Comment