Tuesday, December 04, 2012

If the answer is “So what?” are they asking the wrong question?
Vibrant Seeks Dismissal Of Safari-Hack Lawsuit
December 3, 2012 by Dissent
Wendy Davis reports:
Arguing that consumers weren’t injured “in any legally recognizable way,” Vibrant Media has formally asked a federal judge to throw out a privacy lawsuit stemming from the so-called Safari hack.
Vibrant’s request came in response to a potential class-action lawsuit filed in May by Web users Daniel Mazzone and Michelle Kusanto. They alleged that the company circumvented Safari’s privacy settings, which block third-party tracking cookies by default.
Read more on MediaPost.


Not quite the ultimate training video, but I'll show it to all my classes anyway.
PRIVACY AND SECURITY TRAINING VIDEO


Doesn't “Your” health data give us a clue?
"The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about how the data from Implanted health devices is managed and the limitations patients run into when they want to see the data. Companies like Medtronic plan to sell the data but won't provide it to the person who generated it. From the article: 'The U.S. has strict privacy laws guaranteeing people access to traditional health files. [No need to define “traditional” since everyone knows what that means... Bob] But implants and other new technologies—including smartphone apps and over-the-counter monitors—are testing the very definition of medical records.'"


Currently there ia a requierment to keep certain records (e.g. tax records) for a specified time in support of assertions made to the government. What justifies “keep this in case?”
Cops to Congress: We need logs of Americans’ text messages
December 4, 2012 by Dissent
Declan McCullagh reports:
AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and other wireless providers would be required to record and store information about Americans’ private text messages for at least two years, according to a proposal that police have submitted to the U.S. Congress.
CNET has learned a constellation of law enforcement groups has asked the U.S. Senate to require that wireless companies retain that information, warning that the lack of a current federal requirement “can hinder law enforcement investigations.” [So could the lack of lots of other things, like a complete DNA database, RFID chips implanted at birth, tattooed numbers on wrists... Bob]
Read more on CNET.


Now I can find out what some of those drugs they advertise so heavily on TV are actually for...
December 03, 2012
Look up medications more quickly and easily on Google
Official Google Search Blog: "We get a lot of queries for medicine on Google. So to make it quick and easy for you to learn about medications, we’ll start showing key facts -- side effects, related medications, links to in-depth resources, and more -- right on the search results page. This data comes from the U.S. FDA, the National Library of Medicine, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, among others. It’s part of the Knowledge Graph -- our project to map out billions of real-world things, from famous artists to roller coasters to planets (and now medications). We hope you find this useful, but remember that these results do not act as medical advice."


'cause IP ain't confusing enough? If I hold the copyright on a work, dies Facebook's stripping of the metadata equate to modifying my work and passing it off as Facebook's version?
"Orphaned works legislation promises to open older forgotten works to new uses and audiences. Groups like ASMP think it's inevitable. But it comes with the risk of defanging protection for current work when the creator cannot be located. Photographer Mark Meyer wonders if orphaned works legislation also needs language to compel organizations like Facebook to stop their practice of stripping metadata from user content in order to keep new work from becoming orphans to begin with. Should we have laws to make stripping metadata illegal?"
The author notes that excessive copyright terms may be to blame; if that's the case why lobby for Orphaned Works legislation? On a related note, Rick Falkvinge asks if we should revisit the purpose of the copyright monopoly.


Could be a legitimate try gone bad, or an evil hack that did just what the hacker intended, or anything in between...
In what may end up becoming a legendary moment of public embarrassment, several movie studios have issued DMCA takedown notices to Google for legitimate content, including official Facebook pages, Wikipedia entries, and legal copies of their own movies. This is the by-product of automated takedown requests submitted on behalf of the studios by YesItIs.org, which has since gone offline, indicating that perhaps the issue isn’t as straight-forward as it seems.


Perspective
This week the folks at Nielsen have reported that their most recent findings in studying the web’s usage of social networks has yielded one thing clearer than all else: Facebook takes the cake. They’ve made it clear that in addition to Facebook continuing to bash up the charts by a significant margin, we’ve spent 37% more time this year in the month of July on social networks than we did last year at the same time. In just one year, we’ve tacked on nearly 40% more minutes in a month with Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, and the like.
This study in 2012 shows the top 10 social networks to be Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, and Linedin to start, with Facebook equalling nearly three times the amount of unique PC visits over its first competitor, Blogger.


Toys for students
ThisNext Launches Glossi, Its Free Digital Magazine Builder
Glossi, the digital publishing platform from social commerce company ThisNext, is going into public beta today, which means that a much broader group of people can use Glossi’s tools to build and publish their own online magazines with Glossi’s tools (though you still need an invitation).
… I haven’t created a Zeen or a Glossi of my own, but Edelman did take me through the Glossi building process, and even though he may have skipped over some of the more time-intensive steps, it did seem like a pretty intuitive process. Users upload images from their computer or other website, organize those images (“clippings”) into folders, then use a drag-and-drop interface to lay them out in a magazine format, apply filters as desired, and then add text and video (the latter from YouTube or Vimeo).
To get a sense of how publishers are already using Glossi, here’s a sample from Lucky Magazine highlighting content from its January issue, another from RentTheRunway showcasing New Year’s fashion, and a third from Brit Morin’s Brit & Co. with DIY fashion and tips.


Tools for my website class.
… for a new webmaster, the process of finding the best web tool can be a bit difficult. If you have just started your own website and this is your first webmaster experience, then you will need to quickly find web tools that will help you analyze your website’s performance.
Additionally you will want tools that let you perform site functions easily or add to the features list of your own website. Finding the right tools for these tasks might take a lot of trial and error. But here to make matters much easier is a service called Top Alternatives.
The website basically offers a catalogue of the best online tools that will help you make your webmaster tasks easier. You do not need to register for any new accounts on the site to get started. To use the site, simply browse over to the category that you are interested in, such as SEO. You will find various sub-categories that are targeted at different functions.


For my fellow teachers...
Massive Open Online Courses. MOOCs. This was, without a doubt, the most important and talked-about trend in education technology this year.
… The Technology of xMOOCs
While a lot of the mainstream press’s attention to MOOCs has focused on the content, the class sizes, and the (potential) credentials, the technology that underpins these online courses is incredibly important — and something too that highlights the differences between xMOOCs and cMOOCs.
The cMOOCs rely on tools like Downes’ gRSShopper, which as he describes it, “is a personal web environment that combines resource aggregation, a personal dataspace, and personal publishing. It allows you to organize your online content any way you want to, to import content – your own or others’ – from remote sites, to remix and repurpose it, and to distribute it as RSS, web pages, JSON data, or RSS feeds.”
Rather than driving users to a course website or a learning platform for all their interactions, the users on gRSShopper “are assumed to be outside the system for the most part,” writes Downes, “inhabiting their own spaces, and not mine.” xMOOCs, on the other hand, look an awful lot like an LMS.
… The Pedagogy of MOOCs
The differences between xMOOCs and xMOOCs are also evident in their respective pedagogies. In June, George Siemens outlined the “theories that underpin our MOOCs,” highlighting some of these differences.
… Unbundling (and Rebundling) the University
… Indeed, much of the hullaballoo about MOOCs this year has very little to do with the individual learner and more to do with the future of the university, which according to the doomsayers “will not survive the next 10 to 15 years unless they radically overhaul their current business models.”
But what are the business models for MOOCs? (Other than raising venture capital, of course.) That’s still a little unclear. In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education in July, Jeffrey Young points to a couple of possibilities: selling courses to community colleges, charging tuition, and offering “secure assessments.” Young’s article cites Coursera founder Daphne Koller who says that “Our VC’s keep telling us that if you build a Web site that is changing the lives of millions of people, then the money will follow.”

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