Don't bank on your phone...
"A new piece of Android malware
has been discovered that can
intercept your incoming text messages and forward them on to
criminals. Once installed, the trojan can be used to steal
sensitive messages for blackmailing purposes or more directly, codes
which are used to confirm online banking transactions. The malware
in question, detected as "Android.Pincer.2.origin" by
Russian security firm Doctor Web,
is the second iteration of the Android.Pincer
family according
to the company. Both threats spread as security certificates,
meaning they must be deliberately installed onto an Android device by
a careless user."
I don't recall them using the term
“surge” in relation to drones.
Obama
Swears Drone Surge Is Done
Drones will play a big role in U.S.
counterterrorism for the foreseeable future. But the frenetic pace
of drone strikes that have come to define President Obama’s war on
terrorism is at an end, Obama declared today.
In the months and years ahead, drone
strikes once conducted by the CIA will become more of a U.S. military
responsibility. The rules for launching the strikes will become
stricter — there must be a “near certainty” that no civilians
will be killed, for instance — and they’ll become less frequent.
It's okay to have the printer and it's
okay to have the template for a gun, so how will they know you
haven't actually used them to make a gun?
"'Untraceable, undetectable,
cheap and freely available.' That's how Australian police have
described the 3D-printable gun known as The Liberator today as they
announce that they will be seeking
to make the download, construction and possession of these weapons
illegal. In their tests, Police printed the 15 parts required to
assemble The Liberator in 27 hours and assembled it within 60 seconds
with a firing pin fashioned out of a steel nail. The two guns were
test fired into a block of resin designed to simulate human muscle,
and the first bullet penetrated the resin block up to 17 centimeters.
[That's 6.69291
inches – what caliber weapon did they print? That seems low, even
for a .38 Bob] NSW Police Ballistics division
confirm that it would be a fatal wound if pointed at someone."
[From the article:
“[3D-printed weapons] are truly
undetectable, truly untraceable, cheap, easy to make. [This] weapon
cost us $35 to make. We made that on a base entry level 3D printer.
That printer cost us $1700. It truly is a home printer for so many
people to make untraceable weapons. It is an emerging threat.
I guess I'll have to live with the fact
that I'll never understand bureaucracies – which is probably easier
than suddenly realizing I do understand them.
The
Declassification Engine: Your One-Stop Shop for Government Secrets
The CIA offers an electronic search
engine that lets you mine about 11 million agency documents that have
been declassified over the years. It’s called CREST, short for CIA
Records Search Tool. But this represents only a portion the CIA’s
declassified materials, and if you want unfettered access to the
search engine, you’ll have to physically visit the National
Archives at College Park, Maryland.
Using the Freedom of Information Act,
historians and researchers have urged the CIA to provide them with
their own copy of the CREST electronic database, so that they can
seek greater insight into U.S. history and even build up additional
checks and balances against the government’s approach to official
secrecy. But the agency won’t
do it. “Basically, the CIA
is saying that the database of declassified documents is itself
classified,” explains Steve Aftergood, a senior research
analyst with the Federation
of American Scientists, who oversees the
federation’s government secrecy project.
… “The state of the declassified
archives is really stuck in the middle of the 20th Century,” says
Aftergood. He calls it a “fairly dismal picture,” but he also
says there’s an enormous opportunity to improve the way we research
declassified materials — and improve it very quickly — through
the use of modern technology.
That’s the aim of a new project
launched by a team of historians, mathematicians, and computer
scientists at Columbia University in New York City. Led by Matthew
Connelly — a Columbia professor trained in diplomatic history —
the project is known as The
Declassification Engine, and it seeks to
provide a single online database for declassified documents from
across the federal government, including the CIA, the State
Department, and potentially any other agency.
This on the other hand, is easy to
understand.
"The Wall Street Journal is
reporting that AT&T Mobility, the second-largest wireless
carrier in the U.S., has added a
new monthly administrative fee of 61 cents to the bills of all of its
contract wireless lines as of May 1, a move that could bring in
more than a half-billion dollars in annual revenue to the telecom
giant. An AT&T spokeswoman said the fee covers 'certain
expenses, such as interconnection and cell-site rents and
maintenance.' The increased cost to consumers comes even though
AT&T's growth in wireless revenue last year outpaced the costs to
operate and support its wireless business. The company has talked of
continuing to improve wireless profitability. Citigroup analyst
Michael Rollins noted that the new administrative fee is a key
component for accelerating revenue growth for the rest of the year.
He said the fee should add 0.30 of a percentage point to AT&T's
2013 revenue growth; he predicts total top-line growth of about 1.5%.
Normally, consumers could vote
with their wallets by taking their business elsewhere. AT&T
would be required to let customers out of their contracts without an
early termination fee if it raised prices, but it is avoiding this by
simply calling the increase a 'surcharge,' effectively forcing
millions of people to either pay more money per month or pay the
ETF."
Perspective ...and this is just so
kids can play games! (and Microsoft can make a few more billions)
Xbox
One: Our Servers Will Have More Power Than All the Computers in 1999!
Us: Really?! Expert: Almost.
Watching the
reveal of the Xbox One this week, one particular claim about
Microsoft's new console caught my ear. Marc Whitten, the executive
in charge of Xbox Live, the company's online gaming network, charted
its historical progression.
"When we launched Xbox Live in
2002, it was powered by 500 severs. With the advent of the 360, that
had grown to over 3,000," Whitten said. "Today, 15,000
servers power the modern Xbox Live experience."
Then Whitten said something
extraordinary, "This year, we will have more than
300,000 servers for Xbox One, more than the entire world's computing
power in 1999."
Amazing to me that my students (who
write Apps all the time) were not aware of this.
Meet
the Man Who Sold a Month-Old App to Dropbox for $100M
When Mailbox sold itself to Dropbox for
a reported $100 million or so this March, the month-old iPhone app
wasn’t even available to the public. People could download the
email organizer, but using it required joining a mailing list that
stretched to nearly 800,000 names at
one point.
Mailbox was popular because it provided
innovative new ways to organize and clear an inbox. Users can swipe
a message to the left to “snooze” it, a command that instructs
Mailbox to resurface the email after a set period of time. Other
swipes — hard left, right, or hard right — archive, delete, or
file messages.
What is the “Next Big Thing?” (178
page PDF) Some perspective for my Intro to IT class
May 23, 2013
Disruptive
technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the
global economy
"Disruptive
technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the
global economy, a report from the McKinsey
Global Institute, cuts through the noise and identifies
12 technologies that could drive truly massive economic
transformations and disruptions in the coming years. The
report also looks at exactly how these technologies could change our
world, as well as their benefits and challenges, and offers
guidelines to help leaders from businesses and other institutions
respond. We estimate that, together, applications of the 12
technologies discussed in the report could have a potential economic
impact between $14 trillion and $33 trillion a year in 2025. This
estimate is neither predictive nor comprehensive. It is based on an
in-depth analysis of key potential applications and the value they
could create in a number of ways, including the consumer surplus that
arises from better products, lower prices, a cleaner environment, and
better health."
This may or may not be useful. I can't
get to the URL because it keeps timing out – possibly this report
is in high demand OR they are under a Denial of Service attack
May 23, 2013
Report
- The Condition of Education 2013
"The Condition
of Education 2013 [May 2013] summarizes
important developments and trends in education using the latest
available data. The report presents 42 indicators on the status and
condition of education, in addition to Spotlights that look more
closely at 4 issues of current interest. The indicators represent a
consensus of professional judgment on the most significant national
measures of the condition and progress of education for which
accurate data are available."
This is enough to make my geeks
giggle...
… Where this becomes practical is
if the different operating systems are Live CDs, that is, small
operating systems designed specifically to provide maintenance to a
computer from outside of the computer’s own operating system. This
can be handy if the computer’s own operating system is corrupted
through misuse, poor maintenance, or worse, malware.
MultiBootUSB is available on
SourceForge and appears to be a pretty popular program for just this
kind of task. The MultiBootUSB software is also a portable
application, meaning you simply put the MultiBootUSB-6.4.1.exe file
onto your USB drive and run it all from the USB drive.
One thing that I immediately noticed is
that XBoot has a lot more documentation than MultiBootUSB, which is
to say that it has some documentation.
… Installation of XBoot is really
easy; double-click the executable file and it opens in seconds. From
there it’s quite simple to add your ISOs – just drag and drop
them into the main box.
There seemed to be a lot of
recommendations for YUMI around the web, so I added it to the crop to
be tested
… Once you get to the part where
you are adding distributions to your USB stick, YUMI lays out exactly
which ones are known to work, as well as where to download the
distributions from.
It's kind of a teacher's
in-joke...
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