What would stop Putin
if he chose to invade? Is anyone other than Russia moving troops?
(We did move some F16s to Poland.)
Russia
ships troops into Ukraine, repeats invasion threat
Russia
shipped more troops and armor into Crimea on Friday and repeated its
threat to invade other parts of Ukraine, showing no sign of listening
to Western pleas to back off from the worst confrontation since the
Cold War.
Russia's stock markets tumbled and the cost of insuring its debt
soared on the last day of trading before pro-Moscow authorities in
Crimea hold a vote to join Russia,
a move all but certain to lead to U.S. and EU sanctions on Monday.
I feel so much better!
But after scanning a dozen articles, I still have a few questions:
Did he actually speak to the President or just a White House
operator? If he did, why would the President waste time talking to
Zuckerberg? (Oh yeah, campaign contributions) Would any of this
have an impact on anything?
Mark
Zuckerberg calls Obama to complain about NSA
Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg on Thursday said he called President Obama to express
frustration about the government's spying and hacking programs.
"When our
engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we're
protecting you against criminals, not our own government,"
Zuckerberg wrote in a
Facebook post Thursday afternoon.
His concerns are based
on the latest reports from investigative reporters at The
Intercept, which reveal that the National
Security Agency has weaponized the Internet, making it possible to
inject bad software into innocent peoples' computers en masse.
The report is based on
documents provided by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Since they are
“completely unregulated” perhaps my Ethical Hackers could
demonstrate what they can do by gathering information on members of
the state legislature... Just a suggestion. (Could we sell it to
local news outlets?)
Lynda Lye writes:
Local
law enforcement agencies across the Bay Area have so-called stingray
devices, a powerful cellphone surveillance tool, and more are
planning to acquire the technology, according to public records
recently obtained by Sacramento
News10. The devices are highly intrusive and completely
unregulated. Although the Wall
Street Journal reported in 2011 that they were being used by the
federal government, the News10 records reveal for the first
time that these devices are also in widespread use by local
authorities stretching from San José to Sacramento. The
revelations are troubling. Once again, we see the proliferation of
powerful new surveillance tools, but without any rules to constrain
their use. The acquisition of these devices is shrouded in secrecy
and driven by federal grant money, which undermines local democratic
oversight. Their actual use by local law enforcement reflects the
all too common phenomenon of mission creep: Although the
justification for acquiring these devices is “fighting terrorism,”
agencies seem to be using them for ordinary criminal law enforcement.
Read more on ACLU
Speaking of regulation,
have we every investigated a regulatory agency for failing to do
their job? (Remember, the SEC was warned about Bernie Madoff several
times.) Only fair if we want to point the finger of shame at Target
for ignoring security warnings.
While South Korea’s
Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) continues to deal
with massive
breaches
in the financial sector, the Board of Audit and Inspection of Korea
will now be investigating them:
The
Board of Audit and Inspection of Korea began an inspection of the
country`s financial watchdog agency Wednesday over a large-scale
theft of customer information from some of local financial
institutions. The state inspectors plan to investigate whether the
Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) properly supervised financial
institutions after some local credit card companies had 140 million
cases of customer information stolen and sold to marketing firms in
the country`s largest-ever data theft case. The move came after
civic groups` petition last month for an inspection.
After
taking office in March last year, Choi Soo-hyun, chairman of the FSS,
failed to take proper follow-up measures after a theft of 140,000
cases of customer data from Citibank Korea and Standard Chartered
Bank Korea, letting a much bigger theft happen. The FSS is
responsible for the latest data theft case because it went no further
than sending a letter of warning to financial companies involved in
the incident. Nevertheless, the FSS rejected a civil petition for an
inspection into the companies last week, saying that there is
“nothing exceptionally new or major” in the case.
Read more on Donga.
(Related) Speaking of
warnings being ignored, what would be the consequences of ignoring
these?
HITRUST
Announces Threat Briefings, Cyber Alerts for Healthcare Industry
The
Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST)
announced on Thursday that it will conduct monthly cyber threat
briefings in partnership with the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, and will warn organizations when HITRUST’s Cyber Threat
Intelligence and Incident Coordination Center (C3) identifies high
probability and impact cyber threats targeted at the healthcare
industry.
The
new efforts are designed to help organizations better understand
current and probable cyber threats relevant to organizations in the
healthcare industry and share best practices for cyber defense and
incident response.
… According
to a recent
survey from the SANS Institute, a staggering 94
percent of all healthcare organizations said they have been victims
of data breaches
at some point. In its “Health Care Cyberthreat Report,” released
Feb. 21, SANS said that despite the high number, organizations that
have been breached but haven't disclosed the incidents, or haven't
discovered it yet, aren't included in the tally.
These are becoming so
common I keep thinking I've reported this case before, but apparently
it was only a bunch of very similar cases..
Erin McAuley reports:
A
high school unconstitutionally suspended a freshman for a harmless
comment he wrote at home on his Facebook page, the boy and his family
claim in court.
R.L.,
a 15-year-old from Manchester, Pa., and his parents, Jill and Michael
Lordan, sued Central York School District, its Superintendent Michael
Snell and Central York High School assistant principal Jeffrey Hamme,
in Federal Court.
The
Lordans say the defendants used “unconstitutionally vague rules as
a basis for discipline” and exceeded their authority by punishing
the boy for conduct that was off-grounds and out-of-school.
Read more on Courthouse
News.
We’ve seen lawsuits
like this before, of course. Anyone care to venture a guess how it
turns out?
Their intent should
have been to write down exactly what they meant to say.
Ralph C. Losey of
Jackson Lewis writes:
The
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”)
is an anti-hacker statute that prohibits unauthorized
access, or the exceeding of authorized access, of computers connected
to interstate commerce. 18 U.S.C. § 1030. Violators are subject to
both criminal and civil liability. Employers have long taken
advantage of the CFAA’s civil remedies to “sue former employees
and their new companies who seek a competitive edge through wrongful
use of information from the former employer’s computer system.”
P.C. Yonkers, Inc. v. Celebrations the Party and Seasonal
Superstore, LLC, 428 F.3d 504, 510 (3d Cir. 2005).
A
majority of courts have to date construed the meaning of
“unauthorized access” in the CFAA to include access for
unauthorized purposes, such as to steal an employer’s
information. They applied the anti-hacker statute even
though the employee was authorized to access the computer system,
just not for purposes of theft. Now a growing number of courts are
stepping back from the expansive construction of what it means to be
a “hacker” under the statute. They are instead limiting the
CFAA to situations where the access to the computer itself was
unauthorized, and disregarding whether or not the access was for
a permitted use.
Read more on National
Law Review.
You have phones owned
by a company, issued to employees (with or without personal data)
Employee owned phones used for the employers benefit (BYOD) And evey
combination or variation you can think of...
Ronald K. L. Collins
writes:
There
has been quite a bit of news lately, along with general commentary on
this blog, about the legality of police searches of the contents of
an arrestee’s cell phone. The issue raised in United
States v. Wurie, which the Court has agreed to review,
is whether the Fourth Amendment permits the police, without obtaining
a warrant, to review the call log of a cellphone found on a person
who has been lawfully arrested. (The Court has also agreed to hear a
companion case out of California: Riley
v. California.) But there is more here than meets the
constitutional eye, or so maintains Robert
Corn-Revere, a noted First Amendment lawyer who is a partner at
the Washington, D.C. office of Davis Wright Tremaine. Yesterday, he
filed an amicus brief on behalf of the National Press Photographers
Association and thirteen media organizations in support of the
Petitioner in the Wurie case. What is interesting about
this brief is the First Amendment argument Mr. Corn-Revere offers up
to buttress the Fourth Amendment claim at stake in these cases.
Read more on Concurring
Opinions.
[From
the article:
Here is the media
interest in all of this: “Of particular concern to
Amici, media outlets increasingly rely on issuing reporters
smart phones to take photographs and to record other story elements.
Cell phone cameras are capable of taking high quality photographs and
audio-visual recordings. And, because smart phones can connect to
the Internet, it is easy for journalists to upload photo, video,
audio, or text files to the Internet to file reports.” So opens
this amicus brief.
Here is the problem
for the media: “These new technologies have greatly expanded
the ability to gather and report news, but the same capabilities that
make them a boon to journalists create a grave threat if they are
subject to unrestricted warrantless searches incident to arrest.
A challenge for my
students: How do you make money on rapidly falling prices?
Google's
Drive SLASH: Can a Cloud BURST be far behind?
Google has slashed its
online Drive storage prices so fast, it undercuts all of its rivals –
and its own products. The Reg suspects the web king will
dramatically lower its infrastructure-as-a-service storage prices as
well in two weeks.
The dramatic price cut
for Google Drive was announced
on Thursday: storing 100GB of data in its systems per month has
fallen from $4.99 to $1.99. Storing a terabyte now costs $9.99 a
month versus $49.99 previously, and 10TB will set you back $99.99 per
month.
… (You can still
pick up a decent 1TB drive for about 60 dollars, working out to the
low price of $5 a month over a year versus Google's $9.99.)
What may get IT admins
rubbing their hands with glee is that this Drive price cut also falls
far below the prices charged by typical infrastructure-as-a-service
providers for barebones storage. Amazon Web Services's S3 service
costs $8.50 per 100GB per month, and Microsoft's Windows Azure
charges $6.80 for 100GB of locally redundant stored data a month.
More intriguingly, the
Drive price cut undercuts the $6.30 Google charges for storing 100GB
in its mainstream infrastructure-as-a-service Google Cloud Storage.
Perhaps so. Best I've
seen anyway.
The
World’s Greatest Azure Demo
… I’m going to
cover 14 discrete topics all stitched up into one superdemo. The
plan was to take about an hour per the title in the website you see
above (this is a real live website I setup in the demo and push out
to worldsgreatestazuredemo.com
by the way), but I got, uh, a bit carried away. Only by another 22
minutes, but sometimes there’s just a story that wants to get out
and it’s hard to hold it in.
For all my students.
You can't write cursive, now you can forget how to type. (Requires
Chrome)
– With Dictation, you
can use the magic of speech recognition to write emails, narrate
essays and long documents in the browser without touching the
keyboard. To get started, just connect the microphone to your
computer and click the Start Dictation button. Dictation uses your
browser’s local Storage to save all the transcribed text
automatically as you speak.
Depressing! $9.99 per
month? With so many free books and free readers available? Still,
if it works it may be worth it.
is an all-you-can-read
eBook service for kids, designed to get kids to love reading.
With Epic!, kids can access thousands of high-quality books,
instantly at their fingertips. All books are carefully selected by
children’s publishing experts, teachers and parents. Well-known
titles, classics, and books from award-winning authors and
illustrators are added weekly.
Students: More for
your toolkit?
Discovery,
Discussion, Demonstration - A Selection of My Favorite Resources
This afternoon at the
Literacy Promise conference in Salt Lake City I gave a presentation
on how I think about educational technology and some of my favorite
resources that can be used in a wide variety of settings. The slides
from that presentation are embedded below.
For my students. See
what you can do without a Smartphone?
Toby
Shapshak: You don't need an app for that
Are the simplest phones
the smartest? While the rest of the world is updating statuses and
playing games on smartphones, Africa is developing useful SMS-based
solutions to everyday needs, says journalist Toby Shapshak. In this
eye-opening talk, Shapshak explores the frontiers of mobile invention
in Africa as he asks us to reconsider our preconceived notions of
innovation.
Students: This is why
we say you have it good, quit complaining!
4
Classic Operating Systems You Can Access In Your Browser
You can try Windows
1.0, Mac System 7, Amiga OS and DOS – along with a few games –
without leaving your browser.
Welcome to the world of
online emulators.
The history
of computers is fascinating, but reading will only get you so
far. If you really want to know what, say, Windows was like in 1985,
you don’t need to find a computer from that age. A variety of
enthusiasts have used existing emulators to offer classic systems on
the Web. Here’s where to find them.
Would
you prefer to see Windows 3.0? That’s the system most people are
familiar with, and there’s an
emulator for that, too.
Want a more recent
nostalgia trip? Head to VirtualDesktop.org.
This site doesn’t offer emulators, but you might not even be able
to tell. You’ll see interactive screenshot tours of Windows and Mac
systems. Everything works as you’d expect: click start, see the
menu.
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