http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/024905.html
August 09, 2010
DOE Estimates 10 Million Cyberattacks Daily
Forbes: "The U.S. Department of Energy is in a class by itself, though. The agency receives more than 10 million attacks every day, according to Tom Pyke, the DOE's former CIO. That includes everything from simple scans all the way up to phishing attacks that attempt to use malicious code to take over. And it can be as sophisticated as any attacker--think government--can make it."
(Related)
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=12735
Germany bans BlackBerrys and iPhones on snooping fears
Should be an interesting read...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/08/10/1221229/Google-Secret-Privacy-Document-Leaked?from=rss
Google Secret Privacy Document Leaked
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday August 10, @08:50AM
"A confidential, seven-page Google Inc. 'vision statement' shows the information-age giant in a deep round of soul-searching over a basic question: How far should it go in profiting from its crown jewels—the vast trove of data it possesses about people's activities? Should it tap more of what it knows about Gmail users? Should it build a vast 'trading platform' for buying and selling Web data? Should it let people pay to not see any ads at all?"
[This is an interesting Interactive Graphic:
The economics of e-crime. Yes, I do share these little tidbits with my Ethical Hackers.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/08/09/204223/FTC-Busts-Domain-Name-Scammers?from=rss
FTC Busts Domain Name Scammers
Posted by Soulskill on Monday August 09, @05:08PM
"The Federal Trade Commission said today it had permanently killed the operations of a group that it said posed as domain name registrars and convinced thousands of US consumers, small businesses and non-profit organizations to pay bogus bills by leading them to believe they would lose their Web site addresses if they didn't. As with so many of these cases however, the defendants get off paying back very little compared to what they took. With today's settlement order, entered against defendants Isaac Benlolo, Kirk Mulveney, Pearl Keslassy, and 1646153 Ontario Inc., includes a suspended judgment of $4,261,876, the total amount of consumer injury caused by the illegal activities. Based on what the FTC called the inability of the settling defendants to pay, they will turn over $10,000 to satisfy the judgment."
As it becomes ever more difficult to eek out that next percent of increased productivity, your efforts shift from the tactical (technology) to the strategic (law)
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/024912.html
August 09, 2010
Google and Verizon offer joint policy proposal for an open Internet
Official Google Blog: "The original architects of the Internet got the big things right. By making the network open, they enabled the greatest exchange of ideas in history. By making the Internet scalable, they enabled explosive innovation in the infrastructure. It is imperative that we find ways to protect the future openness of the Internet and encourage the rapid deployment of broadband. Verizon and Google are pleased to discuss the principled compromise, Verizon-Google Legislative Framework Proposal, our companies have developed over the last year concerning the thorny issue of “network neutrality."
New York Times: Web Plan From Google and Verizon Is Criticized
[From the NYT article:
The proposal, however, carves out exceptions for Internet access over cellphone networks, and for potential new services that broadband providers could offer. In a joint blog post, the companies said these could include things like health care monitoring, “advanced educational services, or new entertainment and gaming options.”
Define your criteria creatively enough (e.g. Best party school) and anyone can be ranked in the top ten.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/024907.html
August 09, 2010
ABA Report Examines U.S. News & World Reports Law School Rankings
"On February 17, 2010, ABA President Carolyn Lamm asked the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar to examine rankings of law schools. She did so to follow through on a Resolution of the ABA House of Delegates that the ABA “examine any efforts to publish national, state, territorial, and local rankings of law firms and law schools.”... We commissioned a professional law librarian, Dorie Bertram of the Washington University School of Law, to prepare a comprehensive annotated bibliography on the ranking of law schools. We attach a copy of that extensive bibliography to this report to assist the ABA in considering this subject. As a review of that document shows, there is now a wide array of rankings of law schools in the United States. Each rankings scheme employs idiosyncratic criteria and methodology to compare law schools. No law school performs at the top or bottom of all rankings schemes. Nevertheless, the scholarship indicates that the U.S. News and World Report’s annual ranking of law schools overwhelmingly dominates the public discourse on how law schools compare to one another. As a result, U.S. News rankings have assumed ever increasing importance to any law school that wishes to attract students and faculty and to retain support from alumni and university leaders. The criteria U.S. News uses for rankings now has a powerful influence over the management and design of American legal education. That influence is not entirely benign, as is indicated in the scholarship."
[From the report:
J. Robert Brown, Of Empires, Independents, and Captives: Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings (Univ. of Denver, Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-04, 2008), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1094806.
Suggests that blogs can be useful in improving faculty reputations. [Told ya! Bob]
Who is in charge? What was their strategy? What senior manager was unable to put things in strategic context? “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
Discovery Threatens Fan Site It Also Promotes
Posted by Soulskill on Monday August 09, @03:33PM
"It seems the lawyers and the marketing people at The Discovery Channel don't talk to each other much. The marketing people behind the show 'The Deadliest Catch' have been supporting a fan community called DeadliestCatchTV.com for a while now. They've regularly sent the site info, free clips, previews and information about the show. On top of that, they link to it from the official site, including it in a list of 'fan sites' as a part of the 'Discovery Network,' and even will frame the site with the show's own dashboard for those who click through. Discovery's lawyers, on the other hand, have threatened to sue the site out of existence and have demanded that the owner hand over the domain name — which he is going to do, because he doesn't have the money to fight this. While there may be a trademark issue (which could be easily resolved with a free license), the lawyers are also making the ridiculous argument that posting the videos Discovery sent him to post are copyright infringement. They're also claiming that embedding the official Discovery Channel YouTube videos (which have embedding turned on) is copyright infringement. This is exactly how you turn lots of fans into people who hate your entire channel."
(Related) In that here's another contradictory management of technology.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/08/10/0213234/MP-Wants-Official-Email-Address-Kept-Private?from=rss
MP Wants Official Email Address Kept Private
Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday August 10, @01:42AM
"An MP in the UK has had his official email address removed from the parliamentary website, because he's tired of getting 'nuisance' emails via online campaign websites. MP Dominic Raab's parliamentary.uk email is currently not listed on the House of Commons' website following a spat with online campaigners 38 Degrees. 'Just processing the emails from your website absorbs a disproportionate amount of time and effort, which we may wish to spend on higher priorities, such as helping constituents in real need or other local or Parliamentary business,' he said, threatening to report the group to the government's data and privacy watchdog if they didn't remove the details from their own website. 38 Degrees says Raab gave them his personal email address during the election: 'it's only since he became a member of parliament with a taxpayer funded email address that he's now said he doesn't want to hear from people,' unless they're willing to shell out for a stamp to write him a letter. The lobby group said Raab likely averaged fewer than two emails from their site each day."
An interesting idea.
http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/walnote-com-a-simple-way-to-store-notes-online
Walnote.com - A Simple Way To Store Notes Online
Walnote is a free Internet tool that lets you store any quick note that you have taken but that has a certain sensitivity or personal poignancy, and that you can’t just leave lying in any old site that could be freely accessed by others.
Walnote guarantees the privacy of what you store by the use of state-of-the-art encryption coupled with the entire absence of names or emails in order to sign up. And the fact that the data is hosted at Amazon gives you the assurance that what you have written won’t be wiped out accidentally.
What are the main uses something like this will be put to? Well, that obviously depends. But I daresay that people who need to keep an online copy of all their usernames and passwords might give it a try. So will people who want to store sensitive information such as credit card details. These are two uses that spring immediately to mind, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people came up with others that are every bit as vital themselves.
Sounds like they found a niche... Since I'm unaware of a way to run this on a PC, it also suggests that a PC clone would find an instant market (as would an iPad emulator!)
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/07/when-you-are-the-editor.html
When You Are the Editor
This tiny company (19 employees) launched its first iPad app in July, and so many people wanted to download it that within 20 minutes Flipboard’s servers were maxed out. Engineers scurried around trying to fix the problem, but after 36 hours, the only thing Flipboard could do was put people on a waiting list.
… What’s the big deal? Flipboard has found a way to take the news feeds that you get from friends on Facebook and Twitter and turn them into what McCue calls “the world’s first social magazine.” Instead of the ugly little links to articles you have on Twitter, on Flipboard you get a glimpse of the original articles and photos, laid out the way they might be in a magazine. To browse, you just flip with your fingertip, the way you would turn the pages of a magazine. I follow film critic Roger Ebert’s Twitter feed, for example. Ebert sends out a stream of links to eclectic articles and photos. Reading him on Twitter is a pain because you have to click on each link. But reading Ebert on Flipboard is amazing—suddenly you’ve subscribed to this wonderful little magazine run by a really smart, funny editor.
I think this has wider application than mere teachers...
Monday, August 9, 2010
11 Techy Things for Teachers to Try This Year
If you've set the goal of trying something new in your classroom this year (shouldn't that always be one of our goals), here are eleven techy things teachers should try this year.
4. Create Videos Without Purchasing any Equipment
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