For my Intro to IT students
http://mashable.com/guidebook/
Guide Books
(Related) There is a downside...
"Facebook and Twitter have made student athletes more accessible than ever, but Tweets that catch the watchful eye of the NCAA could be all that's needed to bring down a successful college athletic program. Among the allegations leveled against the Univ. of North Carolina by the NCAA is a failure to 'adequately and consistently monitor social networking activity,' which the NCAA argues would have caused the school to detect other violations sooner than they did. To cope with the daunting task of monitoring hundreds of accounts on a daily basis, some sports programs are turning to software like UDiligence, while others are opting for a simpler approach, such as having a coach frequently check on posts from the team's players."
Richard Nixon called it his “Enemies List” but the concept is the same. “Fail to bow to my authority and you are forever doomed to feel my wrath!”
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=23754
UK: Councils compile databases of over 9,000 ‘troublemaking’ residents
July 18, 2011 by Dissent
Frank Manning writes:
It has been revealed that council bureaucrats have been keeping secret databases of residents who have been involved in disputes with them.
At least 9,000 people are on the lists, kept by more than 40 councils around England. The reasons for placing people on the databases vary from council to council but many of them are exceedingly trivial, such as arguing with a council official or a dustman.
Read more on Big Brother Watch.
“To err is human, to really screw things up takes a computer” I think we should add, “Humans relying on computers raise “Mistake” to a whole new level.”
"John H. Gass hadn't had a traffic ticket in years, so the Natick resident was surprised this spring when he received a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles informing him to cease driving because his license had been revoked. It turned out Gass was flagged because he looks like another driver, [This would not have been possible without the computer Bob] not because his image was being used to create a fake identity. His driving privileges were returned but, he alleges in a lawsuit, only after 10 days of bureaucratic wrangling to prove he is who he says he is. And apparently, he has company. Last year, the facial recognition system picked out more than 1,000 cases that resulted in State Police investigations, officials say. And some of those people are guilty of nothing more than looking like someone else. Not all go through the long process that Gass says he endured, but each must visit the Registry with proof of their identity. [I don't suppose a drivers license would be sufficient? Bob] Massachusetts began using the software after receiving a $1.5 million grant from the US Department of Homeland Security as part of an effort to prevent terrorism, reduce fraud, and improve the reliability and accuracy of personal identification documents that states issue."
As I tell my Statistics students, half the world is below average and someone has to be way to the left on the curve...
Sydney Has 10,000 Unsecured Wi-Fi Points
"A bunch of researchers have been driving around Sydney, Australia, and scanning for unsecured Wi-Fi networks. You'd think that in this day and age, with all that we've learned about security, that Wi-Fi security would be almost universal ... but the truth is that about 2.6 percent don't even have basic password protection. Extrapolating a little, that adds up to 10,000 unsecured Wi-Fi networks across Sydney alone."
Worth reading for “the power of defaults” alone!
How Online Companies Get You to Share More and Spend More
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