Thursday, November 08, 2012

How big is “lots?” Even if this was a trivial hack, the size of the user base suggests that Twitter should provide all the details it can to reduce the level of anxiety.
You Might Have Gotten An Email From Twitter About Your Account Being Compromised, It’s Real
Keep your eyes peeled, Twitter users: Twitter is sending out emails to some of its users telling them it has reset their password and asking them to create a new one. If you can’t log into your account that may be why. Lots of users are affected judging by the amount of people tweeting about password problems.
… The cause of the compromise is not described in detail in Twitter’s email — it just says “Twitter believes that your account may have been compromised by a website or service not associated with Twitter”. A blog by TweetSmarter notes that such emails tend to go out after a lot of accounts are hacked.


For my Disaster Recovery students: A series of articles describing how the NY data centers that survived Sandy did it.
"When Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, the combination of high winds, rain, and storm surges wreaked havoc on homes and businesses alike. With a data center on the Avenue of the Americas, CoreSite Realty escaped the worst the storm had to offer. But was it coincidence or careful planning? Slashdot sat down for an interview with Billie Haggard, CoreSite's senior vice president of data centers. He's responsible for the design, construction, maintenance, facilities staffing and uptime, reliability and energy efficiency of CoreSite's data centers. He described what it took to weather the worst weather to hit New York City in decades."


Is this the equivalent of creating a new branch of the military or a new Intelligence/Assassination Agency? I fear it is the later and the rules are whatever “they” want.
4 More Drones! Robot Attacks Are on Deck for Obama’s Next Term
When Barack Obama took office, drone strikes were a once-in-a-while thing, with an attack every week or two. Now, they’re the centerpiece of a global U.S. counterterrorism campaign. Obama institutionalized the strikes to the point where he could hand off to the next president an efficient bureaucratic process for delivering death-by-robot practically on autopilot. Only now he’s the next president. Welcome to Obama’s second-term agenda for dealing with the world. As the Ramones sang: second verse, same as the first.


Imagine each card with its own one-time password... A simple card swipr just got a whole lot more complicated. (I expect smartphones will replace these cards)
MasterCard rolls out credit card with display and keypad
Next time you get a new card from your bank, don't be surprised if it has a keypad and an LCD on it.
Meet MasterCard's new "Display Card," which basically combines the usual credit/debit or ATM card with an authentication token. The authentication portion features a touch-sensitive keypad and LCD display -- hence the name "Display Card" -- for reflecting a one-time password (OTP).


“There is no law that says we have to keep data easily accessible.”
"In Britain, where it is custom and practice to charge around £10 for a copy of your medical results, a patient has discovered that his copy will cost him £2,000 because the records are stored on an obsolete system that the current IT systems cannot access. Can this be good for patient care if no-one can access records dating back from a previous filing system? Perhaps we need to require all current systems to store data in a way that is vendor independent, and DRM-free, too?"


If we're going to monitor every sex offender until they go to the grave, perhaps we should hasten that departure and just execute them on the spot? This is in “Liberal” California, imagine Texas!
"The EFF sued to block portions of the approved Prop 35 today. Prop 35 requires sex offenders (including indecent exposure and non-internet offenses) to provide all of their online aliases to law enforcement. This would include e-mail addresses, screen and user names, and other identifiers used on the internet. The heart of the matter as the EFF sees it, would be not only the chilling effect it would have on free speech, but also the propensity of these kind of laws to be applied to other (non-sex offending) people as well."


Resources for my Statistics class...
November 07, 2012
2012 Presidential Election Results - State Maps and Inauguration Updates
USA.gov: "President Barack Obama won the 2012 Presidential election. According to major news outlets, he captured 303 electoral college votes, and won important battleground states like Ohio and Virginia.

(Related) Just in case you thought the government wanted all that data for “National Security” purposes...
concealment sends in a story at Time that goes behind the scenes with the team of data crunchers that powered many of the Obama campaign's decisions in the lead-up to the election. From the article:
"For all the praise Obama's team won in 2008 for its high-tech wizardry, its success masked a huge weakness: too many databases. Back then, volunteers making phone calls through the Obama website were working off lists that differed from the lists used by callers in the campaign office. Get-out-the-vote lists were never reconciled with fundraising lists. It was like the FBI and the CIA before 9/11: the two camps never shared data. ... So over the first 18 months, the campaign started over, creating a single massive system that could merge the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states. The new megafile didn't just tell the campaign how to find voters and get their attention; it also allowed the number crunchers to run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals. [Behavioral Advertising Bob] Call lists in field offices, for instance, didn't just list names and numbers; they also ranked names in order of their persuadability, [Gullibility Index? How can I get that data to target my Viagra ads? Bob] with the campaign's most important priorities first. About 75% of the determining factors were basics like age, sex, race, neighborhood and voting record. Consumer data about voters helped round out the picture. 'We could [predict] people who were going to give online. We could model people who were going to give through mail. We could model volunteers,' said one of the senior advisers about the predictive profiles built by the data. 'In the end, modeling became something way bigger for us in '12 than in '08 because it made our time more efficient.'"


Perspective (But how does this make us money?)
Web radio growing faster than on-demand services (study)
… For the quarter ending in June, the audience for Internet radio services in the United States, which include companies such as Pandora Media, grew 27 percent from the same period a year earlier, NPD reported. In comparison, on-demand services such as Spotify, YouTube and Rhapsody, grew 18 percent over the same period.


Freebies is good!
… I’m happy to report that the range of magazines using Newsstand for distribution has improved massively over the last 12 months. There are also signs of more sensible pricing, and even some completely free publications to sink your teeth into. Perhaps the most high-profile example of this happening came last year when The Huffington Post dropped its 99¢ cost per issue and instead offered long-form features, reviews, snippets of news and some interactive gubbins to the masses for free. You can download it here and enjoy, if HuffPo is your kind of thing.
[Big list of free magazines follows Bob]
[Don't have an iPad? Try: iPadian 0.2 http://www.downloadcrew.com/article/25587-ipadian


Sometimes I'm a Nerd, asometimes I'm a Geek (Sometimes a NEEK sometimes a GERD) no matter how hard I try, I still fall short of “Philosopher King.”
According to our infographic today, there are certain tell-tale signs to watch out for if you are trying to decide whether someone is a nerd or a geek.

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