Saturday, October 22, 2011


Sounds like a good deed, until you think of all the lost evidence, disrupted investigations and these sickos becoming harder to find.
"According to Security News Daily, Anonymous has taken down more than 40 darknet-based child porn websites over the last week. Details of some of the hacks have been released via pastebin #OpDarknet, including personal details of some users of a site named 'Lolita City,' and DDoS tools that target Hidden Wiki and Freedom Hosting — alleged to be two of the biggest darknet sites hosting child porn."


Keeping up with the “dark side”
"TDL4, a rootkit that helps build a powerful botnet, is pegged by security vendor ESET as one of the most sophisticated pieces of malware in the world. But its creators aren't resting on their laurels; they're rewriting some of the code from the ground up to make it difficult for antimalware to detect it, creating a hidden boot partition that guarantees malware code will be loaded even before the operating system is. It's part of a plan to turn TDL4 into a turnkey product that can be sold to other criminal operations." [Ethical question: Should universities subscribe to criminal tools for their Ethical Hacking students? Bob]

(Related) Thanks to technology, you don't need to drive to Beverly Hills to steal from the folks who live in Beverly Hills, why would anyone think they need to break into boardrooms to steal corporate information?
"Nasdaq's Directors Desk is a program sold to both listed and private companies, whose board members use it to share documents and communicate with executives. Apparently Directors Desk was infected during a breach widely publicized earlier this year. It has now become known that hackers were able to access confidential documents and communications of the corporate directors and board members who received this infected application, said Tom Kellermann, chief technology officer with security technology firm AirPatrol Corp. It is unclear how long the Directors Desk application was infected before the exchange identified the breach, according to Kellermann and another source."


Interesting that the number one 'petition' is to legalize pot. I wonder if this could be replicated on a state or congressional district level. Might actually be useful there...
"Last month the White House created an online petition system through which constituents can directly voice any grievances and concerns to the US government. Any petition that reaches 25,000 signatures (5,000 originally) is promised an official reply. This weekend the first petitions will be closing, and already many have far exceeded the required number of signatures. Is this the way for the voice of the electorate to gain more weight in modern politics, or is it the web version of a placebo button? Will the President's office really consider the top pleas, which include petitions to Legalize and Regulate Marijuana, Forgive Student Loan Debt, and Abolish the TSA?"


Perspective: If we can end a war with a Facebook update, can we start one with a Tweet? “Dude, Bomb this guy!”
On Facebook, NATO Chief Announces End to Libya War
This has to be a first in the annals of social media. The commander of NATO’s Libya war has announced his intent to end hostilities through Facebook.
In a short post on his Wall Friday morning, Adm. James Stavridis told the world, “I will be recommending conclusion of this mission to the North Atlantic Council of NATO in a few hours.”


Geek alert! Can we train our computers? NOTE: I'm assuming that if this works as advertised, I'll be getting an invitation based on this post.
"Virtually overnight, Siri, the personal assistant technology in Apple's new iPhone 4S, has brought state-of-the-art AI to the consumer mainstream. Well, it turns out there's more where that came from. Trapit, a second spinoff of SRI International's groundbreaking CALO project (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes), is preparing for a public beta launch this fall. The Web-based news aggregator lets users set up persistent 'traps' or filters on specific topics. Over time, the traps learn to include more articles that match users' interests and exclude those that don't. Philosophically, it's the exact opposite of social-curation news apps like Flipboard or Pulse, since it uses adaptive learning and sense-making technologies to learn what users like, not what their friends like. 'Just as Siri is revolutionizing the human-computer interaction on the mobile device, Trapit will revolutionize Web search as we know it today,' the company asserts."


Since I create a lot of short “how to” articles for my students, something like this could be quite handy.
Print Edit: Make Web Pages Printer Friendly
Some site developers are considerate enough to provide printer friendly versions of their webpages. Others however overlook this step and have websites that might take up a lot of your printer’s ink if printed as is, with unnecessary images and advertisements. Thankfully, for Firefox users, there is a great tool for this problem: Print Edit.
… Simply install the addon and then enter any webpage in the preview mode. In this mode you can exclude certain elements of the webpage. You can remove ads, images, frames, and any other labels or elements detected by the add-on.
… You can also use the “Delete All Except” option to select the portion you want to keep and delete everything else.

Since I'm teaching the website class this quarter, I have plenty of students to “test” this editor (See, homework can be useful!)
Create Webpages Five Times Faster Using the Bluefish Editor [Cross-Platform]
… When you first setup Bluefish, you’ll see the first reason I like it so much – it is designed to handle a huge assortment of programming languages, from straight HTML and PHP to Java, VB and even ASP. The kind of flexibility is a nice thing to have in a code editor, especially if you often have your hands into many different programming languages.
… When you launch a new document from the file menu, if you choose template you’ll see that Bluefish has a few pre-built program templates available. This is especially useful if you write a lot of web pages, for example, and don’t want to recreate the same generic XHTML or PHP structure. Instead, just launch Bluefish’s template and you can immediately get into creating the content.
… As you can see in the menu bar, there are also pre-built code snippets available under each program language. For example, HTML has standard code for web forms, and PHP has standard code snippets for how to connect to an ODBC or MySQL database.


Beware of degrees that come with fries...
STEM: Science Technology Engineering Mathematics
October 22, 2011 03:27
Source: Center on Education and the Workforce, Georgetown University
A new report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce shows that 65 percent of Bachelor’s degrees in STEM (science, engineering, technology and mathematics) occupations earn more than Master’s degrees in non-STEM occupations. …
… demand for STEM talent is growing even faster outside of traditional STEM occupations.
… while STEM is high-paying, STEM students have access to higher-paying career options.
+ Link to full report (PDF; 3.37 MB)

No comments: