Wednesday, March 06, 2013

Several questions based on poor reporting(?) It is difficult to judge the size (three feet wide) of an object given nothing to compare against. It could have been larger and farther away or smaller and closer. Does the report of “four propellers” suggest one of the “quad helicopters” or an airplane like a B29? But if it was a “black” helicopter, flying at “1750 feet” perhaps wiser pilots “didn't see it” because they saw what it was...
An Alitalia passenger jet pilot said he saw a drone over Brooklyn on Monday. Whether it’s true or not — the Federal Aviation Administration is investigating — we are going to be hearing more and more about drones in American skies.
I predicted two things about drones in an online essay for Stanford Law Review in December 2011. Those predictions turned out to be true. But there was something I didn’t see coming.
Read more on CNN.
[From the first CNN article:
The FBI expanded on the FAA report, saying in a statement that the Alitalia flight from Rome was roughly three miles from runway 31R when the incident occurred at an altitude of approximately 1,750 feet.
The unmanned aircraft, described by the FBI as black and no more than three feet wide with four propellers, came within 200 feet of the Boeing jetliner.

(Related) OR it could have been one of these, bouncing off the windshield...
"If you've ever watched a fly trying to find its way around a house, you might have noticed that it didn't take a particularly graceful approach – it probably bounced off a lot of windows and walls, until by process of elimination, it found a route that was clear. Well, researchers at Switzerland's EPFL Laboratory of Intelligent Systems are taking that same approach with the latest version of their autonomous AirBurr UAV – it's built to run into things, in order to map and navigate its environment."


Good news/bad news If you can predict them, you can suppress them. Good for Computer Security majors, not so good for people living under repressive governments...
This Research Paper Explains How to Predict the Next Arab Spring and Cyber Attacks
“Specific triggers for how and when instability would lead to the collapse of various regimes cannot always be known and predicted … We are not clairvoyant.”
—James Clapper, director of national intelligence, explaining to a congressional committee in February 2011 that he believed U.S. intelligence agencies had done the best they could to track the Arab Spring protests. [Believed or accepted... Bob]
… In a paper (PDF) released late last year, “Proactive Defense for Evolving Cyber Threats,” Sandia researchers Richard Colbaugh and Kristin Glass outline a computer model that they claim can monitor the Internet to identify volatile situations weeks before they go south—with “perfect accuracy.”


… very broad strokes. Why? If it was exactly 2471 requests, what impact would that number have on National Security or any individual investigation?
From Google’s blog today:
.. When conducting national security investigations, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation can issue a National Security Letter (NSL) to obtain identifying information about a subscriber from telephone and Internet companies. The FBI has the authority to prohibit companies from talking about these requests. But we’ve been trying to find a way to provide more information about the NSLs we get—particularly as people have voiced concerns about the increase in their use since 9/11.
Starting today, we’re now including data about NSLs in our Transparency Report. We’re thankful to U.S. government officials for working with us to provide greater insight into the use of NSLs. Visit our page on user data requests in the U.S. and you’ll see, in broad strokes, how many NSLs for user data Google receives, as well as the number of accounts in question. In addition, you can now find answers to some common questions we get asked about NSLs on our Transparency Report FAQ.


Let's hope that at some point we can get ahead of those who want to capture and sell personal information. (No, I don't think so either.)
Facebook users became much more protective about who sees sensitive information about them, even as they were urged to share more about themselves on the social network, according to an unusual seven-year study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.
Read more on New York Times.
The study was published in Journal of Privacy and Condentiality (2012) 4, Number 2, 7-41:
Fred Stutzman, Ralph Gross, Alessandro Acquisti
Abstract. Over the past decade, social network sites have experienced dramatic growth in popularity, reaching most demographics and providing new opportunities for interaction and socialization. Through this growth, users have been challenged to manage novel privacy concerns and balance nuanced trade-offs between disclosing and withholding personal information. To date, however, no study has documented how privacy and disclosure evolved on social network sites over an extended period of time. In this manuscript we use prole data from a longitudinal panel of 5,076 Facebook users to understand how their privacy and disclosure behavior changed between 2005 — the early days of the network — and 2011. Our analysis highlights three contrasting trends. First, over time Facebook users in our dataset exhibited increasingly privacy-seeking behavior, progressively decreasing the amount of personal data shared publicly with unconnected proles in the same network. However, and second, changes implemented by Facebook near the end of the period of time under our observation arrested or in some cases inverted that trend. Third, the amount and scope of personal information that Facebook users revealed privately to other connected proles actually increased over time — and because of that, so did disclosures to “silent listeners” on the network: Facebook itself, third-party apps, and (indirectly) advertisers. These findings highlight the tension between privacy choices as expressions of individual subjective preferences, and the role of the environment in shaping those choices.


Can we extend the Second Amendment to cars or are we doomed to abandon the right to drive into one another at high speed so the government can assume yet more control? I expect this to happen by 2050 – faster if Google's lobbyists are as good as I think they are.
Cars will soon be so linked into wireless networks they will be like giant rolling smartphones — with calling systems, streaming video, cameras and applications capable of harnessing the unprecedented trove of data vehicles will produce about themselves and the humans who drive them.
The battle over who can access all this data is an awkward undercurrent amid recent announcements by car manufacturers touting their new, Internet-capable vehicle systems.
Read more on Star Tribune.


I'll use this example in my classes from now on...
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.
Joseph Heller was writing about crazy times. The setting is World War II and flying dangerous missions over Europe has taken its toll on American pilots. Many are so compromised psychologically that they probably shouldn’t be in the cockpit. And yet none who ask will be grounded: “Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty,” after all, “isn’t really crazy.”
Last week the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Clapper v. Amnesty International, a challenge to the surveillance law that afflicts our crazy times.
Read more on The Atlantic.


Riffs on the Executive Order, but I not sure it “dumbs it down” enough for congress to understand...
March 05, 2013
The 2013 Cybersecurity Executive Order: Overview and Considerations for Congress
  • "The federal role in cybersecurity has been a topic of discussion and debate for over a decade. Despite significant legislative efforts in the 112th Congress, no major legislation on this topic has been enacted since the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) in 2002, which addressed the security of federal information systems. In February 2013, the White House issued an executive order designed to improve the cybersecurity of U.S. critical infrastructure (CI). Citing repeated cyber-intrusions into critical infrastructure and growing cyberthreats, Executive Order 13636, Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, attempts to enhance security and resiliency of CI through voluntary, collaborative efforts involving federal agencies and owners and operators of privately owned CI, as well as use of existing federal regulatory authorities."


OR we could drop all the unwanted phonebooks around our local politician's house! If they can't get to work, they can't screw anything else up...
"Seattle will soon shut down its popular phonebook opt-out website as a result of a costly settlement with Yellow Pages publishers. Going forward, the only way to stop unwanted phonebook deliveries will be to visit the industry's opt out site and provide them with your personal information. They will share it with their clients, most of whom are direct marketing agencies, who in turn commit not to use it improperly. The Federal Court of Appeals ruled in October that The Yellow Pages represent protected free speech of corporations (including Canada's Yellow Media Inc.); defending and settling the lawsuit cost Seattle taxpayers $781,503. The city said the program's popularity led to a reduction of 2 million pounds of paper waste annually."


A pittance...
EU Fines Microsoft $732 Million
BRUSSELS—Microsoft Corp. has been hit with a €561 million ($732.2 million) fine by European Union regulators after it broke its promise to offer millions of users of its Windows system a choice of rival Web browsers.


Think of it as a mini-Infographic...
Find Out If You’re An Average Facebook User With This Image


Potentially useful teaching stuff...
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Four Good Alternatives to Clicker Systems
Socrative is my favorite tool for collecting anonymous feedback from students. Socrative uses cell phones and or laptops (user's choice) for gathering feedback from students. You can post as many questions as you like in a variety of formats.
Poll Everywhere is a service that allows you to collect responses from an audience via text messaging. [Very limited free plan Bob]
Mentimeter allows you to pose a question to your audience and get instant feedback on that question through cell phones, tablets, and any other Internet-connected device.
Infuse Learning is a free student response system that works with any Internet-connected device including iPads and Android tablets.


Collecting several useful Apps on one machine... Don't we all do that already?
The Amplify Tablet: A Device Custom Made For Teachers And Students
Just moments ago at SXSWedu, the edtech startup Amplify unveiled a new tablet.
… the Amplify tablet is specifically built for classrooms. Here are the bullet points to know about:
  • The teacher has the ability to monitor everything happening on the rest of the tablets in the classroom.
  • The tablet features content from Khan Academy, CK-12, Google Apps, EverFi and Desmos, and gives teachers the ability to monitor how students use the device.


Free music... There might even be something good in there...
Get 100 free MP3s from SXSW 2013
… As part of its SXSW: Live from Austin series, NPR is offering The Austin 100 -- a collection of 100 songs by 100 artists, all in MP3 format, all absolutely free.

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