Think of it as “Target
Identification.” There is no sense wasting a perfectly good cruise
missle on a cafeteria when you could hit the “comms network” or
the server farm.
"In an embarrassing revelation
today it appears as though the blueprints
to the new Australian federal intelligence agency ASIO headquarters
have been stolen, reportedly by a cyber
attack originating from China. Several other
governmental departments have been reported as being breached also.
The blueprints which have been compromised include the security
system, comms network, floor plan and server locations of the new
ASIO headquarters located in the Australian capital city, Canberra."
(Related) It has ever been thus...
Confidential
report lists U.S. weapons system designs compromised by Chinese
cyberspies
Designs for many of the nation’s most
sensitive advanced weapons systems have been compromised by Chinese
hackers, according to a report prepared for the Pentagon
and to officials from government and the defense industry.
Among more than two dozen major weapons
systems whose designs were breached were programs critical to U.S.
missile defenses and combat aircraft and ships, according to a
previously undisclosed section of a confidential report prepared for
Pentagon leaders by the Defense Science Board.
“Those who have not studied The
Streisand Effect are doomed to experience it.” The facts are
true, they don't like people calling them names...
"PETA is incensed over an
article in the Huffington Post that details that organization's
unsettling practice of euthanizing animals in a Virginia facility
that many have assumed is a no kill shelter. According to the New
York Post, PETA wants to sue some of the people who have left
comments on the article. The problem is that, following the practice
of many on the Internet, many of the comments are under assumed names
or are anonymous. PETA is attempting
to discover the true identities of their critics so that it can sue
them for defamation."
This is exactly what I'm worried about.
“So easy, even a caveman can do it,” does not give me that warm
fuzzy feeling...
This
Pentagon Project Makes Cyberwar as Easy as Angry
Birds
The target computer is picked. The
order to strike has been given. All it takes is a finger swipe and a
few taps of the touchscreen, and the cyberattack is prepped to begin.
For the last year, the Pentagon’s top
technologists have been working on a program that will make
cyberwarfare relatively easy. It’s called Plan
X. And if this demo looks like a videogame or sci-fi movie or a
sleek Silicon Valley production, that’s no accident. It was built
by the designers behind some of Apple’s most famous computers —
with assistance from the illustrators who helped bring Transformers
to the silver screen.
… But you can’t expect the
average officer to be able to understand the logical
topology of a global network-of-networks. You can’t expect him
to know whether its better to hook a rootkit into a machine’s
kernel or its firmware. If cyberwar is going to be routine, Darpa
believes, the digital battlefield has to be as easy to navigate as an
iPhone. The attacks have to be as easy to launch as an Angry Bird.
Interesting that there is no indication
in the article that they ever stopped using this tool...
David Fisher reports that the NZ
government is also having its own problems with lack of transparency
over domestic surveillance. More than a decade after
it was allegedly deployed, the public is first finding out
about ThinThread:
A high-tech United
States surveillance tool which sweeps up all
communications without a warrant was sent to New Zealand
for testing on the public, according to an espionage expert.
The tool was
called ThinThread and it worked by automatically intercepting phone,
email and internet information.
ThinThread was
highly valued by those who created it because it could handle massive
amounts of intercepted information.
Read more on New
Zealand Herald.
[From the article:
ThinThread automatically anonymised the
collected data so the identities stayed hidden "until there was
sufficient evidence to obtain a warrant". [I
read this as tool that looks at everything and searches everyone's
communications for “patterns” that indicate you might be a
“Person of Interest.” Bob]
Clearly not perfect. Perhaps they
should have asked the Privacy Foundation for advice...
Joy Pullmann reports:
Oklahoma Gov. Mary
Fallin will consider a student privacy bill Oklahoma lawmakers passed
by large margins this month. Its state-level protections are first
of their kind in the nation, said John Kraman,
executive director of student information at the Oklahoma Department
of Education, and may provide a model for other states as privacy
concerns rise.
House
Bill 1989 passed the House 88-2 on May 16 and the Senate 41-0 on
May 22.
Read more on Heartland.org
[From the article:
HB 1989 requires the state Board of
Education to inventory and publicly post what student-specific
data the state collects, create a detailed data security plan and
student privacy policies, and send no student-specific information
outside the state except for specific circumstances such as
out-of-state student transfers or contracts with testing companies.
And it requires the board to get legislative approval for any new
data it wants to collect.
… “Nothing in the act really
protects children from excessive data collection. It just prevents
it from going across state lines.”
HB 1989 also automatically opts all
students into data collecting, rather than requiring parent consent
beforehand.
“Some districts have told parents
they can't opt out,” White noted.
Gutenberg cubed? 3-D Printing opens an
entirely new can of worms. If Smartphones “enabled” the “Arab
Spring,” what will the ability to “print” your own weapons (or
more smartphones, see the next article) bring to the mix?
An
Insider’s View of the Myths and Truths of the 3-D Printing
‘Phenomenon’
From a major VC firm’s recent $30
million investment
in the industrial-grade 3-D printing space to the news that Staples
will
become the first major U.S. retailer to sell consumer-friendly
3-D printers, it’s clear that 3-D printing has reached
its inflection point.
And perhaps its hype point, too.
… 3-D printing is indeed an
important fabrication technology, because it has the marvelous
ability to make anything regardless
of the complexity of the form.
Other fabrication techniques, honed over decades of
industrialization, struggle with geometric complexity — where 3-D
printers can print either the most intricate shapes or simplest cube
with equal ease.
… Where 3-D printing may be
unfettered by complexity, it is constrained by volume.
Everything from cost and time to amount
of material increases exponentially: specifically, to the third
power.
So if we want something twice as big,
it will cost 8 times as much and take 8 times as long to print. If
we want something three times as big, it will cost about 27 times
more and takes 27 times longer to print. And so on.
… Large industrial printers can now
print metal, rubber, and ceramics in addition to plastic.
(Related)
Your
Smartphone, Made of Cement
… A collective of researchers from
the U.S., Finland, Germany, and Japan, working with the U.S.
Department of Energy, has developed
a way to make metal out of the straw of the contemporary world:
cement. The process they discovered, published yesterday in
Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, transforms liquid cement into a kind of
glass-metal fusion that is exceptionally good at conducting heat and
electricity. The resulting hybrid, the scientists say, can
be used as a semiconductor in electronics: it offers good
conductivity, low energy loss in magnetic fields, better resistance
to corrosion than traditional metal, less brittleness than
traditional glass, and fluidity for ease of processing and molding.
(Related) “For want of a nail the
shoe was lost. ” The 3-D printer may help the Navy avoid the
modern equivalent.
US
Navy looks to 3D printing to turn its city-sized aircraft carriers
into mobile factories
And as long as we are looking at
changing perspectives...
The
Rise of the Mobile-Only User
One of the most persistent
misconceptions about mobile devices is that it's okay if they
offer only a paltry subset of the content available on the desktop.
Decision-makers argue that users only need quick, task-focused tools
on their mobile devices, because the desktop will always be the
preferred choice for more in-depth, information-seeking research.
… The rise of smartphones means
that more and more people are going online from a mobile device.
According
to Pew Internet, 55 percent of Americans said they'd used a
mobile device to access the internet in 2012. A surprisingly large
number — 31 percent — of these mobile internet users say that's
the primary way they access the web.
… But mobile-only usage isn't
limited to these demographics. Amazon, Wikipedia, and Facebook all
see about 20 percent of their traffic from mobile-only users,
according
to comScore. A whopping 46 percent of shoppers reported
they exclusively use their mobile device to conduct pre-purchase
research for local products and services. Internal data from some
finance, healthcare, and travel providers show similar mobile-only
usage.
Is this the not-so-obvious way to go?
Marissa
Mayer Is Bringing Back the Internet Portal. Here’s Why
Since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO of
Yahoo last year, there’s been a lot of talk about how the famously
detail-oriented ex-Googler will “refocus”
the company. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that Mayer is
broadening, not narrowing, Yahoo’s scope, cementing its once passé
reputation as the original internet “portal.”
The latest sign of this trend came just
this past weekend, when multiple
reports had
Mayer in talks to acquire the online television hub Hulu. Less than
one week earlier, Yahoo announced
it would pay $1.1 billion for microblog network Tumblr. Two months
ago, the company paid
a reported $30 million to buy news digest app Summly from a British
teenager. The common thread: Yahoo keeps expanding into new areas,
even though it was already a sprawling internet conglomerate when
Mayer took control, with everything from movie listings to stock
quotes to a photo-sharing social network to a news hub to a search
engine.
Yahoo’s mission creep is a useful
case study in why web companies like Google and Facebook continue to
grow their functionality and why startups keep selling to the
seemingly bloated leviathans, even though tech advances have made it
cheaper and easier than ever for software companies and web services
to go it alone, and despite the fact that consumers are migrating to
highly specialized mobile apps.
For my Ethical Hackers (and most of my
other students)
MightyText … can
be summarized rather succinctly: send and read SMS messages through
your Android phone by using a computer or tablet.
… you can
control many different aspects of your phone: SMS, contacts, call
logs, camera, sensors, file manager, or even direct remote control of
the device. Just be sure to note that remote control requires
your Android
to be rooted.
… lets you
remote control your Android phone through the Android SDK.
Another for my Ethical Hackers: Since
it took him “Hours” (plural) he would have failed miserably.
Anatomy
of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331”
In March, readers followed along as
Nate Anderson,
Ars deputy editor and a self-admitted newbie to password cracking,
downloaded a list of more than 16,000 cryptographically hashed
passcodes. Within a few hours, he
deciphered almost half of them. The moral of the story: if a
reporter with zero training in the ancient art of password cracking
can achieve such results, imagine what more seasoned attackers can
do.
… While Anderson's 47-percent
success rate is impressive, it's miniscule when compared to what real
crackers can do, as Anderson himself made clear.
… Even the least successful cracker
of our trio—who used the least amount of hardware, devoted only one
hour, used a tiny word list, and conducted an interview
throughout the process—was able to decipher 62 percent of the
passwords. Our top cracker snagged 90 percent of them.
This could be handy in the computer
labs...
Generally, when you want to share
your screen with someone, you might turn to a projector or remote
desktop application. Many of the solutions for sharing a screen
are cumbersome and not the easiest thing in the world to get up and
running.
With TiffanyScreens, the process
happens automatically and you can be sharing your screen in a matter
of seconds.
There is absolutely no
configuration since the app automatically detects other devices
running the software on your network.
The app comes with a free option that
lets you share your screen with one other computer … but
for businesses looking to use this in place of a projector, a paid
license is available that lets you share the screen with more
computers.
Find
TiffanyScreens on the Mac
App Store and @ tiffanyscreens.com/download.html
Even my students need to do serious
writing...
… An outline is nothing but a
hierarchical breakdown of what you plan to write or create. Arranged
according to levels of importance and flow, and marked by numbers,
roman numerals, headings-subheadings, indentations, or any other
format.
… Basically
any note-taking application can be set up as an outliner. But using
tools with outlining capabilities gives you more hands-on control,
especially if you use the process regularly.
Microsoft
OneNote
The
MSDN blog has a detailed page on using
OneNote for outlining.
Microsoft
Word
I
had written a detailed post on How
To Create Outlines & Organize Document in MS Word 2007.
WorkFlowy
also has a free
iOS app which works offline. An Android
app is available which works like a proxy for the web app.
Wikipedia
has a page that lists quite a few outliner applications out there.
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