Your government at
work.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/exclusive-documents-state-department-lacks-basic-cybersecuri
President Obama has
called cybersecurity a top priority, but the State Department cable
and messaging system, built and maintained — like the troubled
ObamaCare system — mainly by large IT contractors, has routinely
failed to meet basic security standards, according to internal
documents obtained by BuzzFeed.
Emails and other
documents suggest security has been a standing problem in State
Department systems, handling both classified and unclassified
material, since at least 2009. Earlier this month, BuzzFeed
reported on the department’s systemic and severe lack of security,
including unsecured servers, workstations, unencrypted transfer of
secret material, and the intermixing of classified and nonclassified
information.
These newly obtained
documents add to the picture, revealing that the
department lacks even a basic monitoring system to
determine unauthorized access or modification of files. Security on
the unclassified systems appears problematic, as there is potential
access to classified information, even inadvertently, and back-door
access to servers.
No doubt this will
solve everything!
Katharine Goodloe
writes:
Under
a new self-regulatory code released earlier this week,
brick-and-mortar retailers that track customer in-store movements
using mobile phone WiFi signals must disclose the practice to
customers and allow them to opt out.
The
code was created by the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) and a group of
mobile analytics companies. It was announced jointly by the FPF and
by Sen. Charles Schumer, who in July called on the Federal Trade
Commission to require retailers to allow customers to opt-out of the
tracking. Sen. Schumer praised the code as a significant step
forward, but noted there is “still much more work to be done.”
Read more on Covington
& Burling Inside
Privacy.
They're here. Learn to
use them.
Open
Access, Megajournals, and MOOCs
Open
Access, Megajournals, and MOOCs – On the Political Economy of
Academic Unbundling – by Richard Wellen. SAGE Open
October-December 2013 vol. 3 no. 4 2158244013507271. The online
version of this article can be found at: DOI:
10.1177/2158244013507271.
“The development of
“open” academic content has been strongly embraced and promoted
by many advocates, analysts, stakeholders, and reformers in the
sector of higher education and academic publishing. The two most
well-known developments are open access scholarly publishing and
Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), each of which are connected to
disruptive innovations enabled by new technologies. Support for
these new modes of exchanging knowledge is linked to the expectation
that they will promote a number of public interest benefits,
including widening the impact, productivity, and format of academic
work; reforming higher education and scholarly publishing markets;
and relieving some of the cost pressures in academia. This article
examines the rapid emergence of policy initiatives in the United
Kingdom and the United States to promote open content and to bring
about a new relationship between the market and the academic commons.
In doing so, I examine controversial forms of academic unbundling
such as open access megajournals and MOOCs and place each in the
context of the heightened emphasis on productivity and impact in new
regulatory regimes in the area of higher education.”
(Related) Also cutting
edge.
How
to get the most out of library e-books via the right gadget, text to
speech, and otherwise
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on October 27, 2013
Via LLRX.com
– Want to hear text to speech from free library books on your
50-mile commute? Even if you own an Android machine and the usual
app can’t do “read-aloud” unless audiobooks count? A new,
expert and insightful report by David
Rothman focuses on the new Kindle Fire HDXes. He recommends them
to be among the top choices if you care more about reading than about
tech and can accept Amazon’s proprietary requirements. His
article is written for both library staffers and patrons who are
passionate about e-books.
I've
been trying to get my students thinking about retirement. Well,
“Life, the Universe and Everything,” actually...
Research
Brief – Social Security’s Real Retirement Age Is 70
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on October 27, 2013
Center for Retirement
Research, Boston College – IB#13-15 by Alicia
H. Munnell
“The brief’s
key findings are:
- Due to increases in Social Security’s Delayed Retirement Credit, the effective retirement age is now 70, with monthly benefits reduced for earlier claiming.
- Benefit levels at 70 appear appropriate given that rising deductions for Medicare and greater benefit taxation have reduced Social Security’s net replacement rates.
- The shift to 70 should be feasible for many workers given increases in lifespans, health, and education.
- But vulnerable workers forced to claim early will have low benefits and will be particularly harmed by any further cuts.
- Policymakers need to inform those who can work that 70 is the new retirement age and devise ways to protect those who cannot work.”
A
look at a bunch of books, some of which might be useful?
New
York Review of Books – The fast pace of change on the information
superhighway
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on October 27, 2013
Are
We Puppets in a Wired World? - Sue
Halpern highlights new books on a range of issues including
privacy, big data, social media and predictive analysis in
relationship to e-commerce.
“In the first five
years of the new millennium, Internet use grew 160 percent; by 2005
there were nearly a billion people on the Internet. By 2005, too,
the Internet auction site eBay was up and running, Amazon was in the
black, business-to-business e-commerce accounted for $1.5 trillion,
while online consumer purchases were estimated to be between $142 and
$772 billion and the average Internet shopper was looking more and
more like the average shopper. Meanwhile, entire libraries were
digitized and made available to all comers; music was shared, not
always legally; videos were made, many by amateurs, and uploaded to
an upstart site (launched in 2005) called YouTube; the online,
open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia had already begun to harness
collective knowledge; medical researchers had used the Internet for
randomized, controlled clinical trials; and people did seem to have a
lot to say to each other—or at least had a lot to say. There
were 14.5 million blogs in July 2005 with 1.3 billion links, double
the number from March of that year. The social networking site
Facebook, which came online in 2004 for Ivy Leaguers, was opened to
anyone over thirteen in 2006. It now has 850 million members and is
worth approximately $80 billion. The odd thing about writing even a
cursory reprise of the events attendant to the birth of the Internet
is that those events are so recent that most of us have lived through
and with them. While familiar—who doesn’t remember their first
PC? who can forget the fuzzy hiss and chime of the dial-up
modem?—they are also new enough that we can remember a time before
global online connectivity was ubiquitous, a time before the stunning
flurry of creativity and ingenuity the Internet unleashed. Though we
know better, we seem to think that the Internet arrived, quite
literally, deus ex machina, and that it is, from here on out, both a
permanent feature of civilization and a defining feature of human
advancement.”
Worth a peek?
Bulb
- Create and Share Collections of Educational Media
Bulb
is a new service through which you can create, share, and browse
through collections of educational materials. On Bulb you can create
your own collections of text, images, and videos. You could create
collections of materials about an academic topic or about a skill
that you want to help others learn.
You can browse Bulb
and view the collections without registering on the site. To
create your own collections you will have to create an account.
Once your account is created you can develop collections of
materials. Each of your collections can have multiple chapters. For
example, this
collection of materials about digital literacy has seven
chapters. As you create your collections on Bulb you can write text,
upload or link to pictures, and upload or link to YouTube videos.
All collections can be shared via email and through popular social
networks like Twitter and Google+.
The basic idea of
creating collections of educational materials could be accomplished
on any number of wiki and website services. The appeal of Bulb
is that you and your students wouldn't have to worry about managing
layouts, controlling editor permissions, or any technical work. The
other nice aspect of Bulb is that you and your students can browse
through the collections created by others.
For my Ethical Hackers.
When you leave no footprints, you are ready, Grasshoppers.
Mozilla
Introduces Lightbeam To Help Users Visualize How They Are Tracked
Mozilla has announced a
new add-on for Firefox called Lightbeam
that allows users to see exactly how they are being tracked while
they surf the Web. The add-on works by recording what websites you
visit and what third-parties are connected to those websites, and
then displaying that information in a visually appealing and
digestible format.
An Infographic for my
website students! (not really)
Flowchart:
Executing Your Killer Idea For A Website
So
my students can (remote) control the world!
Forget
Phone Calls – Your Android Can Remote Control Everything
Thou
shalt not “get even” with thy Professor (at least until your
grades are turned in)
Here's
How You Can Create Those Personalized Comic Strips That Are Popping
Up All Over Facebook
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