Monday, March 26, 2012


A couple of issues. First, if someone is re-using their mil.gov passwords on a dating site, they just opened a door for Anonymous (not so cute now are they) Second, I wonder how many companies have a policy that would require them to acknowledge a hack before it gets reported in the newspapers/blogs? What do you think the criteria should be?
MilitarySingles.com hack exposes over 160,000 users’ information
March 25, 2012 by admin
MilitarySingles.com has apparently been hacked.
The hack was announced on Twitter earlier today by Operation Digiturk and a database of 163,792 names, usernames, e-mail addresses, IP addresses, and passwords has been dumped on the Internet. The tweet was accompanied by the hashtags #anonymous #antisec #infosec
I don’t know if the site is aware of the hack and eSingles Inc.’s own web site does not seem to exist any more. I sent a courtesy notification to MilitarySingles.com to alert them to the hack with a request that they let this blog know what steps they will take to protect their users.
In any event, if you know a member of the military who uses or has used the site, do them a favor and suggest they change their password on any site where they may have reused it – including their mil.gov email account.


e-Discovery: Bring your own cops when you raid an ISP? You have to admit it is much faster than training law enforcement personnel to recognize digital evidence, but doesn't it require much greater care to prove the evidence was gathered rather than created?
Microsoft Raids Tackle Net Crime
Microsoft employees, accompanied by United States marshals, raided two nondescript office buildings in Pennsylvania and Illinois on Friday, aiming to disrupt one of the most pernicious forms of online crime today — botnets, or groups of computers that help harvest bank account passwords and other personal information from millions of other computers.
With a warrant in hand from a federal judge authorizing the sweep, the Microsoft lawyers and technical personnel gathered evidence and deactivated Web servers ostensibly used by criminals in a scheme to infect computers and steal personal data. At the same time, Microsoft seized control of hundreds of Web addresses that it says were used as part of the same scheme.


This was inevitable. Social media can't be all “Peace and Love” (Nixon would love it)
'Social-Media Blasphemy'
Mr. Terry, who is director of the emerging-media program at the University of Texas at Dallas, says a major flaw of the popular social network is that it's all sunshine and no rain: The service encourages users to press the "like" button, but offers no way to signal which ideas, products, or people they disagree with. And "friend" is about the only kind of connection you can declare.
… "It's social-media blasphemy, in that we're suggesting that you share differences you have with people and share things that you don't like instead of what you do like," he told me last week. "I think social media needs some disruption. It needs its shot of Johnny Rotten."
Here's what he's done. Last month he and a student released a Facebook plug-in called EnemyGraph, which users can install free and name their enemies, which then show up in their profiles.
… The scholar would have preferred to use "dislike," but the word is literally banned by the service to prevent developers from creating a dislike button. Critics of Facebook say the social network's leaders want to keep the service friendly to advertisers who might object to users publicly scorning their products.
… What's wrong with keeping an online world like Facebook nice?
To Mr. Terry, that's where his role as an educator comes in. "What we all do in the program is help our students think critically about social media," he says, noting that that is the main goal of EnemyGraph.


“When you made it illegal we took immediate action. We renamed it!”
March 25, 2012
EPIC: New Guidelines Expand Datamining Role of National Counterterrorism Center
EPIC: Under revised guidelines [unclassified] for the National Counterterrorism Center, the intelligence agency officials will be able to profile and track American citizens, suspected of no crime, for up to five years. The change represents a dramatic expansion of government surveillance and appears to violate the Privacy Act of 1974, which limits data exchanges across federal agencies and establishes legal rights for US citizens. In 2003, Congress put an end to a similar program. For more information, see EPIC - Total Information Awareness.


Perspective
Report: More Movies Will Be Streamed Than Watched On Disc In 2012
Pop the champagne and up the bandwidth, because 2012 is the year we finally do away with discs. According to a Bloomberg report on IHS Screen Digest, more viewers will stream movies than watch them on disc, an inflection point that can only mean the relatively quick demise of high-density optical media. Streaming will increase to 3.4 billion titles this year, up from 1.4 billion. Blu-ray and DVD consumption will top out at 2.4 billion.
The study also found that Amazon on Netflix accounted for 94% of all paid movie consumption online.


Perspective: So perhaps it is time to start my High-Ed-Not-For-Profit...
March 25, 2012
Commentary - Big Philanthropy's Role in Higher Education
  • "According to a recent Chronicle study, America's top 50 donors gave a total of $10.4-billion in 2011, rebounding from the $3.3-billion of the previous year, with its recession worries. Those numbers reflect the continued growth in the number of private philanthropic foundations in this country — 10,093 were created in the 1990s, and more than 8,500 appeared between 2000 and 2009 (as opposed, for instance, to the 1,264 created in the 1970s). There are now more than 33,000 foundations in the United States. But what grabs my attention is the number with megaresources, almost all of which have emerged over the past two decades. This is truly the era of the megafoundation."


This is a nice addition...
AVG now blocks tracking ads, monitors Wi-Fi connections
Two new features designed to protect your privacy while you browse the Web and guard you against misleading SSIDs come to all three AVG suites in a service pack update.
The Service Pack 1 update for AVG Anti-Virus Free 2012, AVG Anti-Virus 2012, and AVG Internet Security 2012 are available exclusively today from Download.com.
Both of the new features are available to free and paid users, but the tracking ad blocker called AVG Do-Not-Track is the big one. Only available when you agree to install AVG's optional toolbar, it works similarly to Do Not Track Plus.


For my social media using students. An interesting way to “document” your lack of Privacy?
Monday, March 26, 2012
What About Me? is a free infographic generator from Intel. The purpose of What About Me? is to create infographics based on your Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube activities. The infographic created includes parts of your recent Facebook posts, when and what you post about on all three networks, and What About Me? even evaluates the average tone of your messages (mine are neither angry nor overly happy in tone). When your infographic is complete, you can download it from What About Me?
Applications for Education
What About Me? could be a good tool for getting students to look at their social media footprints. This could be particularly important for high school students applying to college as well as for students looking for jobs.


It's Fair Use only if it's Fair Use. Also grabs from Facebook Albums
Grabbing the images off a website manually can take up a lot of your time. Thankfully however there is a tool that helps you get images off websites with ease. This app is called Moya’s OWIDIG.
Moya’s OWIDIG is a free to use tool that lets you quickly grab images from a website. All you have to do is enter the site’s URL in the provided area and tell the site to grab the images. You can choose the option to omit repeated images from the results. In the results you can click on any image to open it in a new tab or to view its dimensional details and share it on other pages.

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