Saturday, March 10, 2012

How not to win friends and influence people, OR Welcome to the anti-social network! A few Comments suggest this lack of investigation is common. Would it be correct to call it “lying to the AG?”
AT&T Says One Of Its Service Providers Hacked Illegally Into Connecticut Customers’ Accounts
March 9, 2012 by admin
George Gombossy reports:
AT&T is now admitting that one of its service providers hacked illegally into at least five Connecticut customers’ accounts.
The admission, in a letter Thursday to the Connecticut Attorney General’s office, comes after months of denial by AT&T that it could have had anything to do with two security breaches of a Winsted woman’s AT&T account, which was used to purchase five iPhones through fraud.
Read more on CTWatchdog.com. The service provider was not named in the news story.
[From the article:
Not only did AT&T officials – including members of its fraud division – deny that possibility, they attempted to blame Apple employees for the breaches and then treated the customer rudely, telling Denise Jones to stop raising questions about her fraud and to stop asking for copies of its internal investigation report, which had apparently been completed weeks ago.
… MacKinnon told me I would have to write a retraction if I wrote a story insinuating that AT&T was to blame, hinting that it was someone close to Jones who hacked her account.
… Fitzgerald conceded that someone associated with AT&T did access Jones’ account, not only once but even after she had complained about the hacking and had set up a secret password.
“Unfortunately, the misconduct of this service provider’s employee has impacted many more AT&T customers other than Mrs. Jones,” the letter said.
… AT&T has proactively gone into the impacted accounts to reverse any fraudulent charges and to correct account information [Interesting. They have a crystal ball to determine which transactions are fraudulent (or are they just covering up evidence?) Bob]
“To the extent any external credit inquiries were made by AT&T against a customer’s credit report in connection with the misconduct, AT&T is requesting that the credit reporting agencies remove the improper inquiry. [More than an “inquiry”... Bob]


Think of this as a bit more dangerous that starkers or burglars...
Army Warns Of Danger Of Geotagging
… n 2007, geotagged photos of a new fleet of helicopters allowed enemy forces to mortar the base and destroy several of them; it could just as easily have been a field hospital or barracks.


My question: Would you hire this student, give him a scholarship to a Tech school, to ban him for life from ever holding a tech job? (Second question: Is this really bad reporting or a really poor school security system?)
Europe’s ‘youngest app designer’ expelled from school for hacking its IT system
March 9, 2012 by admin
ANI reports:
A “computer whizzkid”, who was crowned Europe’s youngest application designer, has been expelled for hacking into his school’s computer system.
Aaron Bond, 14, was expelled from King Edward VI College in Totnes, Devon for trying to access confidential information about staff and students and even the vice-principal’s financial information.
He managed to access details about his peers and edited the IT room booking system and school newsletter before the security breach came to school management’s knowledge.
Read more on Newstrack India. This is South Devon and The Telegraph provide additional details.
[From the Telegraph:
Using passwords, he managed to look at details about his peers and was able to edit the IT room booking system and school newsletter before the security breach was spotted.
He has now been visited by police, who took DNA samples and fingerprints before giving him a formal reprimand.
His school, King Edward VI College in Totnes, Devon has permanently expelled him and maintains no student should have had access to passwords.
Aaron, who is predicted A*, A and B grades in his GCSEs, said: "I am very sorry and if I had known the consequences I never would have done it."
[From This is South Devon:
Aaron Bond (pictured), 14, is the managing director of his own web design firm and has designed six apps used on smartphones.
He was among hand-picked delegates at the Apple conference last year, and was even being considered for university courses because he is so advanced with computers.
… Aaron said he became curious after a list of passwords was displayed on a white board in the school's IT room.
… The school insists the passwords were 'examples' and that no one has access to passwords within the school.
… The system was locked down when staff realised there had been a breach, but Aaron was still able to access the site when he tried to log in again.


That didn't take long. I blogged about this yesterday!
How to Get Windows on the iPad (With Microsoft’s Blessing)
Microsoft has sicced its lawyers on the OnLive Desktop — an internet service that streams Windows onto the iPad — but this won’t stop another free-thinking startup from sending Microsoft’s flagship operating system onto Apple’s tablet by way of the proverbial cloud.
The Palo Alto-based Nivio offers an internet service — the nDesktop — that streams Windows onto all sorts of machines, including Macs, PCs, and Google Chromebooks as well as the same devices targeted by the OnLive Desktop: iPads and Android tablets. Microsoft just told the world that the OnLive Desktop violates its licensing terms for Windows, but Nivio president and “chief wizard” Sachin Dev Duggal says this isn’t a problem for his company’s service, which delivers Windows in a very different way.


Interesting slide show for explaining the Cloud?
March 09, 2012
SLA Presentation on Cloud Computing
A New Way to Compute or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud - Robert Bohn, NIST, March 7, 2012 - DC/SLA Washington, DC Chapter
"NIST Cloud Computing Program Goal - Accelerate the federal government’s adoption of cloud computing*
  • Build a USG Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap which focuses on the highest priority USG cloud computing security, interoperability and portability requirements
  • Lead efforts to develop standards and guidelines in close consultation and collaboration with standards bodies, the private sector, and other stakeholders"


Warren Buffet does not invest in technology companies. Here's a guy who does...
Where Asia’s richest man is putting his money now
… Of late Li has become particularly fascinated by the sweeping potential of artificial intelligence across all his businesses. In addition to his $7.5-million investment in Siri, the now ubiquitous iPhone virtual assistant, he gave $300,000 last December to a startup that uses AI in its summarization search engine, Summly, run by a 16-year-old. One of the biggest AI impacts, he believes, will come in education, where customized learning will become “closely knitted” to individual devices. “AI has reached an inflection point,” he says. “Combined with the high-speed mobile network, disruption in several industries will be unavoidable.”


A short-term business model? A way to ween users off paper/introduce them to digital?
Marvel Touts New Deal: Buy A Comic Book, Get The Digital Version Free


Perhaps only because I like food, but this looks like an interesting start-up.
Cater2.me May Be Feeding Your Favorite Startup
Startup Cater2.me is trying to answer one of the rarely-discussed challenges facing any company that wants to keep a large workforce happy — feeding them meals that aren’t boring.
… Office managers, or whoever else is in charge of a company’s meals, can just go to the Cater2.me website and enter their needs — for example, if they need to feed 50 people every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and five of them are vegetarians. Then Cater2.me handles all of the logistics, bringing in a rotating menu of food from a network of small restaurants and carts — businesses that probably don’t have the time or resources to do large office catering on their own.


For my Ethical Hackers
Teen Exploits Three Zero-Day Vulns for $60K Win in Google Chrome Hack Contest
Just hours before the end of Google’s $1 million hack challenge, a teenager who once applied to work at Google without getting a response, hacked the company’s Chrome browser using three zero-day vulnerabilities, one of which allowed him to escape the browser’s security sandbox.


For my Management of IT students... In one CTO, data for behavioral advertisers and outsourcing health care to India?
"On Friday, President Barack Obama appointed Todd Park, a 39-year-old former entrepreneur and data scientist, to be the new Chief Technology Officer of the United States. Park takes over for Aneesh Chopra, the first U.S. CTO, who resigned earlier this year. Park was formerly the CTO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services since 2009, where he helped bring 'big data' to healthcare by helping create an open health care data platform similar to the National Weather Service, which could feed data to commercial websites and applications. Before joining the Obama administration, Park helped co-found AthenaHealth and Castlight Health, and also served as a senior adviser to Ashoka, a global incubator for social entrepreneurs. One of his ventures, Healthpoint Services, won the 2011 Sankalp Award for the 'most innovative and promising health-oriented social enterprise in India.'"


Sort of a Meta-Pinterest?


Another Meta application for Social Networks
Storify
Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative. We are building the story layer above social networks, to amplify the voices that matter and create a new media format that is interactive, dynamic and social.
Create your own stories ...search social media networks to find media elements about the topic you want to Storify.
Curate the elements — Drag and drop status updates, photos or videos to bring together the social media elements that will best illustrate your story.
Write your own narrative


This looks cool! This might be just the thing for encouraging (forcing?) student participation. It might also be the tool I'm looking for to have my students write their own textbook!
A Better Live Wiki: HackPad Could Be Your SXSW Backchannel
HackPad has a more serious idea: actually taking notes about the panels and keynotes you go to, with other people who care.
It sounds dangerously productive for the fun-oriented event. And it is — this is one of the better live group word-processing products I’ve seen in a while.
… The interface is nice and simple. You log in with Facebook, or with Google or by creating a new account. Then you can just start creating and editing docs. Participating users appear on the right side of each page, and each person gets a unique color bar on the left side of where they’re typing. Live edits are in real-time, so you can watch other users pounding out their own notes while you’re busy sharing yours.
The top menu includes a simple set of actions for all the main things you need to do. There’s a plus button for creating new docs, a search bar, and basic WYSIWYG commands including a big button for creating links to other docs or the web (something a lot of editors don’t show off well in their interfaces).

(Related) Similar but not as useful for groups?
Magzinr gives you the chance to organize and manage all the links you have stored on sites like Delicious, and split the content within as many different categories as you need. You can also tag this content, and then have everything arranged into a sort of magazine that can be easily accessed online. This magazine (which looks a lot like a RSS feed) can be publicly shared, which means that other people can subscribe to your magazine.


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