I don't hold out much hope...
Feds
Ordered to Disclose Data About Wiretap Backdoors
A federal judge is ordering the Justice
Department to disclose more information about its so-called “Going
Dark” program, an initiative to extend its ability to wiretap
virtually all forms of electronic communications.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge
Richard Seeborg of San Francisco concerns the Communications
Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA.
Passed in 1994, the law initially ordered phone companies to make
their systems conform to a wiretap standard for real-time
surveillance. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA
in 2005 to apply to broadband providers like ISPs and colleges, but
services like Google Talk, Skype or Facebook and encrypted
enterprise Blackberry communications are not covered.
The FBI has long clamored that these
other communication services would become havens for criminals and
that the feds would be left unable to surveil them, even though
documents acquired by Wired shows that the FBI’s wiretapping system
is robust
and advanced.
Little is known about the “Going
Dark” program, though the FBI’s 2011 proposal to require
backdoors in encryption found no backers in the White House. The
FBI has never publicly reported a single instance in the last five
years where encryption has prevented them from getting at the
plaintext of messages.
Interesting. What else could we
crowdsource? Perhaps how to make voting machines tamper proof? (But
not until after my election) What would Judges like to know more
about?
EFF:
Calling All Geeks – Help Explain To Judges Hearing Oracle v. Google
Appeal Why Copyrighting APIs Is Such A Bad Idea
The Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF) is asking
for help in explaining to the federal circuit why copyrighting
APIs is such a bad idea.
The EFF’s request comes after a
victory earlier this year when U.S.District
Court Judge William Alsup ruled in the Oracle
v. Google case that an API cannot be copyrighted. The ruling
drew a sigh of relief from the tech community, but the victory was
short-lived. Oracle has since appealed and now a three-judge panel
will decide if Alsup’s ruling should stand.
Alsup was that rare judge who actually
learned how to do computer programming. It’s doubtful that the
three judges will share such a deep knowledge of how applications
work and integrate with APIs.
Internet Economics... How would you
stucture these payments? So much per “click through?”
The
Skirmish That Could Threaten Google News
What if Google had to start paying for
each link that shows up when you do a search? It would totally wreck
the company's business model, right? And maybe change the nature of
search engines too?
An insurrection may be coming, and it
is starting with Google News. Here's the timeline. A couple of
weeks ago, a group of 154 Brazilian news websites comprising 90% of
the country's market share made a pact to jump
out of Google News. The websites, which are part of Brazil's
National Association of Newspapers (Associação
Nacional do Jornais, or ANJ), had been negotiating with the
search engine. They wanted it to pay a fee for linking to their
content.
… So far, maybe not a big deal.
Brazil is an important emerging market, but it's only one country.
Here's what's really a problem for Google: This week, it has been
reported that news sites in France, Germany, and Italy are close to
pulling the plug on Google News too. They're asking for the same
kind of "Google tax," and --
like their Brazilian counterparts -- threatening to ban Google News
if the search giant won't comply. The latest reports come after a
tense-sounding
meeting between French prime minister Francois Hollande and Google
executive Eric Schmidt. Google has denied reports that the French
government also slapped it with a one
billion dollar tax claim.
… The consequence: If enough
countries' media opt out of Google News, they will either destroy the
service or leave the search giant with no choice but to acquiesce to
their demands for a "Google tax." In other words, this
time, it looks like it could be serious.
To my Ethical Hackers. Something in
Facebook worth hacking at last? Of course we will never use our own
names. I know a Professor at the DU Law School whose name I already
use for other loyalty programs...
Why
Facebook Might Get Into the Free Wi-Fi Racket
For all its success as a broad-based
social network, Facebook has struggled to get mobile users to
register their locations, as tens of millions of people gleefully do
throughout the day on rival Foursquare. Now Facebook is testing a
new incentive: Free Wi-Fi for users who “check in” with their
location.
Facebook confirms it is running a test
in which it supplies free Wi-Fi routers to local businesses and the
businesses, in turn, offer their customers free wireless internet to
users who check in on Facebook from the business location. After
checking in, the user is shown the business’ Facebook page.
(Business owners also have the option of giving passcodes to certain
customers who they want to exempt from the Facebook check-in
requirement, according
to Inside Facebook.)
Do I read this correctly?
As of today, new
Facebook members will now be offered a virtual privacy
education tour, which offers step-by-step instructions on Facebook’s
various security settings and tools. This move comes after a variety
of criticism over Facebook’s constantly changing settings, some of
which are difficult to locate. Also contributing was an audit by the
Irish Data Protection Commissioner’s Office.
I'm sure there will be problems going
both ways, but as Napoleon said, "Never ascribe to malice that
which is adequately explained by incompetence"
More
Electronic Voting Machines Changing Romney Votes to Obama: We Looked
Into It and Here’s What a Vendor Told Us
Last week, TheBlaze brought
you a story from a North Carolina voting precinct using
electronic voting machines that was already experiencing issues where
votes for GOP candidate Mitt Romney were being changed to Democratic
candidate Barack Obama. Now, it’s allegedly happening again, this
time in both Kansas and Ohio — and we talked to a vendor supporting
the machines about the issue.
… Nancy explained that while her
husband was casting a vote for Romney, the touchscreen highlighted
Obama.
“He played around with the field a
little and realized that in order to vote for Romney, his finger had
to be exactly on the mark,” Nancy wrote in an email. She said “the
invisible Obama field came down about 1/4 [of an inch]” into what
should technically have been the Romney area. In a phone interview
with TheBlaze, she explained further that her husband said he felt
the area on the touchscreen that could be pushed to vote for Obama
was larger than that for Romney.
Could be an interesting resource...
November 02, 2012
EFF
Launches New Transparency Project
News
release: "From cell
phone location tracking to the use of surveillance
drones, from secret
interpretations of electronic surveillance law to the expanding
use of biometrics, EFF has long been at the forefront of the push
for greater transparency on the government’s increasingly secretive
use of new technologies. With the launch of our new Transparency
Project, we’ve made the information we’ve received easier to
access and added new tools to help you learn about the government and
file your own requests for information. The new name—Transparency
Project—reflects the fact that EFF’s work has expanded far beyond
filing and litigating federal Freedom of Information Act requests.
While that work still makes up a solid core of what our Transparency
Team does, we also seek information from state and local governments,
regularly report on transparency issue more broadly, and provide
tools to help you find out more about our government and what it’s
up to."
Now I have a new fear. It's not bad
enough that I fear people texting while driving, now I have to worry
about texting while orbiting!
When
the International Space Station Passes Over Your House, NASA Will
Send You a Text Message
I teach all my classes in “computer
labs” (classrooms with a computer on every desktop) This article
should allow students to find software that works for them...
Have you ever just wanted to jot
something down real quick, but couldn’t find a pen? Or maybe you
could, but later lost the note with a bunch of other notes which were
used for the same purpose. It would be nice to just quickly get
something from your head to a place in front of your eyes without a
whole lot of effort.
I want to emphasize the word quickly.
There are a lot of excellent note-taking applications out there,
many of them mentioned
on here on MakeUseOf as being “quick” to use. And I use many
of them such as Evernote and Google Docs (Drive). However, there
is something to be said for being able to use a note-taking service,
without signing in (or up), having to learn how the service works or
needing or install a browser extension. That, to me, is
quick note-taking.
For my Math students...
Friday, November 2, 2012
Desmos,
the free online graphing calculator, recently announced
some useful new features that mathematics teachers will like. Under
the surface Desmos updated their infrastructure to make the
calculator run up to fifteen times faster than before. On
the exterior Desmos now has a share button that allows you to email
your graphs and or embed them into blog posts. Desmos
has added a textbox option in your graphs to help you explain what is
happening in your graph. Learn more about the Desmos
updates in the video below.
Applications
for Education
The option to embed your graphs into a
blog post could be useful when you're writing explanatory blog posts
for your class. The sharing option could be used by students to send
homework responses to their teachers. Students could also use the
share option to ask for help from teachers, tutors, and peers when
they get stuck on a problem.
Free and paid (cheap) Apps and websites
Friday, November 2, 2012
Later this month I am running a public
webinar (registration details coming next week) with Marygrove
College. One of the things that we'll be discussing during the
webinar is sourcing and evaluating apps and websites for classroom
use. As a something of a primer on that topic Marygrove College has
published Surfing
for Substance.
Surfing
for Substance is a free PDF that provides an overview of fifty
apps and websites for teachers. The overview includes
some tools for the logistical aspects of teaching (they recommend Fax
Zero for faxing without a fax machine) as well as for instructional
purposes. You can download the guide here
or here
(this link will start a PDF download).
Videos worth stealing
sharing with students...
Technology,
Entertainment, and Design (TED) videos are being increasingly
shared online as friends share their positive messages with one
another. Here to help download the TED videos directly to your hard
drive is a desktop application called The TEDinator.
You know, I think I'm beginning to
consider teaching a professions rather than a hobby...
Coursera
and Antioch University have struck a deal — the first of its kind,
says
Inside Higher Ed — in which the university would license
courses from Coursera and offer them for credit. “Antioch will pay
Coursera an undisclosed amount for permission to use several courses,
including ones from Duke University and the University of
Pennsylvania. The company will share that revenue with the
universities, which own intellectual property rights for their
courses as part of their contracts with Coursera.” [The
“money” waits for anyone who can grant real college credit for
online courses... Bob]
… Fast
Company’s Anya Kamenetz reports on a study by researchers at
the University of Toronto and Yale that found that Internet-based
sex education was effective for teens in Colombia. “While
the lack of personal contact is often seen as a drawback in online
education,” writes Kamenetz “in the case of awkward topics like
sex ed, it could actually be a benefit. The researchers noted teens
can experience the computer as an anonymous, private, and
nonjudgmental place to get information.”
… According to Business
Insider, Google’s biggest advertiser is the University
of Phoenix, which spent $155,000 a day on ads in the third
quarter of 2012. Wow, the Web is totally revolutionizing education,
huh. [You have to find “customers” if you are a
“for profit” Bob]
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