“Can't we all just get along?”
Rodney King
"Father of the web Sir Tim
Berners-Lee called for Americans to protest SOPA and PIPA, laws he
says violate
human rights and are unfit
for a democratic country.
Sir Tim's condemnation came on the day an editorial in Australia's
leading broadsheet newspapers pointed out that although the laws
ostensibly applied to U.S. interests they
could overreach
to impact those in other countries."
(Related) Is this the future under
SOPA? (But, why do we need SOPA if we can shut down websites based
in other countries ?)
Feds
Shutter Megaupload, Arrest Executives
… Seven individuals connected to
the Hong Kong-based site were
indicted on a variety of charges, including criminal copyright
infringement and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Four of the
members of what the authorities called a five-year “racketeering
conspiracy” were arrested Thursday in Auckland, New
Zealand, the authorities said.
… Unsealed Thursday, the five-count
indictment
from the Eastern District of Virginia came as the Justice Department
said it seized 18 domains in all connected to Megaupload. The agency
said it executed more than 20 search warrants in the United States
and eight countries, seizing $50 million
in assets.
(Related) This is going to be one for
the textbooks...
Megaupload
assembles worldwide criminal defense
… In an interview with CNET, Ira
Rothken, an attorney well known in the tech sector for defending
Web sites accused of copyright violations, said that his clients
are assembling a team of crack copyright, criminal and technology
attorneys to defend them in courts across the globe.
"There are significant issues of
due process," Rothken said early this morning. "The
government has taken down one of the world's largest storage
providers and have done so without giving Megaupload an opportunity
to be heard in court."
Rothken dismissed the government's
attempt to file criminal charges against his clients. "Many of
the allegations made are similar to those in the copyright case filed
against YouTube and that was a civil case....and YouTube won."
(Related) At least, according to
Anonymous...
"Shortly after a federal raid
today brought
down the file sharing service Megaupload, hackers aligned with
the online collective Anonymous have shut
down sites for the Department of Justice, Universal Music Group and
the RIAA. 'It was in retaliation for Megaupload, as was the
concurrent attack on Justice.org,' Anonymous operative Barrett Brown
tells RT on Thursday afternoon."
It is probably too much to expect
Industry to react quickly, but is it too much to ask them to employ
basic security practices and techniques that have been around for
decades? Why didn't DHS sound this warning?
Hoping
to Teach a Lesson, Researchers Release Exploits for Critical
Infrastructure Software
A group of researchers has discovered
serious security holes in six top industrial control systems used in
critical infrastructure and manufacturing facilities and, thanks to
exploit modules they released on Thursday, have also made it easy for
hackers to attack the systems before they’re patched or taken
offline.
… The vulnerabilities, which vary
among the products examined, include backdoors, lack
of authentication and encryption, and weak password storage
that would allow attackers to gain access to the systems. The
security weaknesses also make it possible to send malicious commands
to the devices in order to crash or halt them, and to interfere with
specific critical processes controlled by them, such as the opening
and closing of valves.
As part of the project, the researchers
worked with Rapid7 to release
Metasploit exploit modules to attack some of the vulnerabilities.
Metasploit is a tool used by computer security professionals to test
if their networks contain specific vulnerabilities. But hackers also
use the same exploit tool to find and gain access to vulnerable
systems.
Peterson, speaking Thursday at the
annual S4
conference that he runs, said he hoped the presentation would
serve as a “Firesheep moment” for the SCADA community.
Firesheep refers to a Wi-Fi hacking
tool that was released by a security researcher last year to call
attention to how easy it is to hijack accounts on social networking
sites like Facebook and Twitter and web e-mail services. The release
of Firesheep forced some companies to begin encrypting customer
sessions by default so that attackers on a Wi-Fi network couldn’t
sniff their credentials and hijack their accounts.
Once more the government demonstrates
that they can't manage their own projects...
$356
Million Later, the Justice Department’s Wireless Network Still
Sucks
After 9/11, three federal law
enforcement agencies planned a massive project to replace a mishmash
of aging and obsolete radios used by thousands of federal agents. A
decade and $356 million later, the program has made “minimal
progress” and the Department of Homeland Security, one of the
project’s key partners, wants little to do with it.
Gosh, I'm sure it sounded like a good
idea at the time...
Damning
Evidence Emerges In Google-Apple “No Poach” Antitrust Lawsuit
Next week a class-action civil lawsuit
will be heard in San Jose to determine if Google, Apple, Pixar,
Lucasfilm, Adobe, Intel, and Intuit conspired to eliminate
competition for skilled labor. In anticipation of the hearing,
TechCrunch has attained evidence from the Department
of Justice’s investigation in 2010 which was made public this
evening for the first time. It appears to support the plaintiff’s
case that the defendant companies tried to suppress employee
compensation by entering into “no poach” agreements.
Because free is good!
In the tech world, some of the most
useful books available are from the O’Reilly collection. So, what
could be better for your ebook collection than getting some of these
great O’Reilly ebooks for
free?
Attention Geeks: Another technology to
master...
Amazon
Goes Back to the Future With ‘NoSQL’ Database
Amazon helped start the “NoSQL”
movement. And now it’s giving the cause another shot in the arm.
NoSQL is a widespread effort to build a
new kind of database for “unstructured” information — the sort
of information that comes spilling off the internet with each passing
second. Five years ago, Amazon introduced a NoSQL database service
called SimpleDB, and now, it’s offering what you might think of as
Amazon NoSQL Mark II. It’s called DynamoDB.
As part of AWS’s
Free Usage Tier, AWS customers can get started with Amazon
DynamoDB for free. DynamoDB customers get 100 MB of free storage, as
well 5 writes/second and 10 reads/second of ongoing throughput
capacity.
Developer
Guide
Research/Data gathering tool?
Services like
Citelighter
(which let you highlight web content and have it all indexed) are
certainly powerful and flexible, but just in case you need an easier
alternative to saving and retrieving online information then this new
application will do. Hopper
lets you save content such as texts, images and links by copying and
pasting it (using Ctrl + V),
or just by dragging it into the webpage. That will let you get the
content back whenever you need it later on. Any
device that can access the Internet will let you get it back again,
right as if it were on your HD or ZIP drive.
And in addition
to being incredible easy to use, Hopper has got the great plus of
working without
registration. Accounts can
be created if you want to organize your data and have it tidied up,
but the service can be used without having to sign up for it first.
Which turns it into a great tool for capturing content on the fly, of
course. You see something you like, you open Hopper on a separate
tab and then drag the images or texts there. End of the story.
For all my Math students!
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Wolfram Alpha has offered free
lesson plans for a couple of years now. Today, Wolfram announced
the launch of the new Wolfram
Education Portal. The Wolfram Education Portal is an
etextbook for Algebra and Calculus. The etextbook
includes interactive demonstrations built using Wolfram Mathematica.
In the Wolfram Education Portal teachers will have access to lesson
plans. While not terribly detailed, the lesson plans do have clear
objectives as well as all of the resources a teacher needs to conduct
the lesson.
To access all of features of the
Wolfram
Education Portal you do have to register for a Wolfram account
(it's free) and download the Wolfram CDF Player for
your computer. Registering and installing the player
takes just a couple of minutes.
Applications
for Education
The Wolfram Education Portal could be
an excellent resource for middle school and high school Algebra and
Calculus teachers. The aspect of the Wolfram Education Portal that I
find most appealing is the interactive demonstrations accompanying
the text.
[From Wolfram
Education:
Once you install CDF Player, you'll be
able to...
- View all course materials from the Education Portal
- Interact with sliders and controls in Demonstrations
- Manipulate 2D and 3D graphics in Demonstrations
This time next year I'll be using an
iPad? (I'll also need a Mac to create the iBooks) I do see a number
of possible businesses being spun from this model...
Apple’s
iPad Textbooks: Everything You Need to Know About iBooks 2
… iBooks 2 is great, especially if
you have the iPad 2 (on the iPad 1 they can get slow sometimes).
Apple's new iBooks are as impressive as
they said in the presentation. They are beautifully crafted. Their
use of videos, timelines, animations, embedded presentations,
integrated review questions and quizzes and their highlighting and
study card system are extremely good. They work and they are
enjoyable.
Unfortunately, they are not perfect.
The lack of sharing features is a major killer with actual school
work, in which collaboration is a must.
… Apple's biggest strength in the
whole iBooks 2 proposition is not the book themselves. It is how
easily they are created using their iBook Author application. This
development tool is free and it's so drag-and-drop easy that it can
be used by anyone. It has the potential of truly democratizing the
publication of advanced books which, in a way, act like applications.
… And while getting into the iBooks
store isn't as easy as hitting submit, some people have raised an
important concern: with greater accessibility come bad teaching.
Will the iPad textbook landscape be a wasteland of absurd teaching?
Who filters through all these books?
[Also see:
Apple
in Education
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