Monday, October 05, 2015

Could it happen to the DC subway?
The Korea Herald reports:
The computer server of one of Seoul City’s subway operators was found to have been hacked last year, allegedly by North Korea, though little damage has been confirmed, officials said Monday.
According to Saenuri Party Rep. Ha Tae-keung quoting the National Intelligence Service’s report, two servers in charge of managing the PCs of Seoul Metro were hacked in July last year, allowing unauthorized access to 213 company computers. Of them, 58 were found have to been infected with a malicious code, resulting in the leak of 12 work documents.
Read more on Korea Herald.
[From the article:
The NIS, however, said it could not find the first point of hacking and the source of the code, citing insufficient log files, officials said.
… Seoul Metro also stressed that the hacking did not affect subway safety as the central control system is run separately in an enclosed type of network server. [Do we do the same? Bob]
As part of the efforts to improve the server safety, Seoul Metro formatted all PCs last year and strengthened the security measures.
Seoul Metro has seen a rise in cyberattacks in recent years. As of last month, over 350,000 cases were confirmed this year, which is nearly equivalent to last year’s total figure, Seoul officials said.




Understand the freemium model or live in the last century. (Like in “1989.”)
Spotify CEO Explains How Ticking Off Taylor Swift Was Big For Business, Still Wants Her Back
Taylor Swift once said of the streaming music scene, and Spotify in particular, that it feels like a "grand experiment," one in which she's not willing to contribute her life's work to because it doesn't fairly compensate the artists, song writers, and everyone else who contributes to the creation of music. She ended up pulling her library of songs from Spotify, though looking back on the situation. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says the high profile breakup actually benefited the company.
… "The middle of America found out what Spotify was, so we had a big success," Ek said through a video feed at the IAB Mixx interactive advertising conference in New York, according to CNET. "I wish we could have gotten that attention in a better way than pissing off Taylor Swift."
Swift's point of contention with Spotify was that users of the service's ad-supported tier could listen to her music at no cost. Even though Swift was still being compensated for her tunes streamed to non-subscribing music listeners, she felt strongly that it created a culture in which consumers would view music as being worthless.




I think it's because government understands financial firms, but not individuals. They can follow a trail of evidence that explains what the firm did. There is less evidence of management failures, dysfunctional corporate cultures and other soft factors. Big fines sound impressive but rarely have a lasting impact on these firms.
Ben Bernanke: More bankers deserved to be jailed for financial crisis
Don’t expect Ben Bernanke to have a lot of nice things to say about Wall Street bankers in his upcoming memoir, which comes out this week. In a wide ranging interview with USA Today, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve says more of the bankers and corporate executives who helped cause the financial crisis should be in jail.
He says the Department of Justice focused too much, in the wake of the meltdown, on sanctioning financial firms, and getting large fines. He said there wasn’t enough effort put into punishing individuals.




It might be useful to teach our Criminal Justice students a bit more about existing technologies. An App similar to this one could locate witnesses who might have taken photos or video of crimes.
How to Use Twitter API and PHP to Locate Eyewitnesses
Geotagging is the process of embedding latitude, longitude, and even altitude coordinates in some type of media, such as a photo, video or promotional offer. Many people don’t realise it, but modern mobile phones are constantly recording our movements and making that information available to network providers, and sometimes even third-parties willing to pay for the data.
As the second installment in a two-part Tuts+ series on harnessing location data from social media, Jeff Reifman discussed using the Twitter API to find eyewitnesses to a public event.


(Related)
See Where You’ve Been with Google Maps’ New Timeline Feature
… If you think that Google logging everywhere you go and then displaying that information on a map/timeline is creepy, you’re probably right. In fact, we’d absolutely hate it — if it wasn’t so damn cool!
… your timeline will show you where it thinks you’ve been, when you arrived at and left each place, and how you travelled between places.
It’ll also automatically attach any photos you took while at said destination, log events about each “trip” into town (such as time/route taken), and make lists of the places you frequent the most, offering tips and recommendations for other similar nearby places.




Is there a cure? An interesting application of statistics.
Supreme Court Justices Get More Liberal As They Get Older
… There’s an old saw, often mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill, that goes something like this: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re 35, you have no brain.” A person should start left and drift right, and not the other way around, the adage suggests.1
But when it comes to Supreme Court justices, growing older appears to incite a trend in the opposite ideological direction. One prominent measure of judicial ideology — the Martin-Quinn score — illustrates this tendency. These scores, as DW-Nominate does for legislators, use the justices’ votes to quantify their position on a left-right spectrum. A more negative score means a justice is further left; a more positive score means she’s further right. The scores are based on data from the Supreme Court Database and are calculated back to 1937.
… Why might this happen? What forces act upon a justice as he or she ages on the bench? Here are a few theories that emerged after I poked around and talked to some experts:




We used to call this stuff “Targeting Information.” Immediately after 9/11, the government was paying local police to monitor dams – in case terrorists agreed. What has changed?
National Inventory of Dams
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on Oct 4, 2015
Via IRE – “The National Inventory of Dams (NID) contains records on dams in all 50 states, kept by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Dams are included if they meet at least one of the following criteria:
— High hazard classification – loss of one human life is likely if the dam fails,
— Significant hazard classification – possible loss of human life and likely significant property or environmental destruction,
— Equal or exceed 25 feet in height and exceed 15 acre-feet in storage,
— Equal or exceed 50 acre-feet storage and exceed 6 feet in height.”




Collections by obsessive/compulsives always amuse me. If my website students used these I have to give those pages a ZERO.
An Insane Collection of 1990s GIFs
People of the Internet, join me, as we travel back to the year 1997. It was an era of yowling modems, AOL chatrooms, and websites under construction.
And you knew they were under construction because they told you. With GIFs. Glorious, blinking, yellow and black GIFS.
… “It represents this utterly different philosophy that you need to know that this site is under construction, it's not done yet,” said Jason Scott, a historian at the Internet Archive. “Now, we know all sites are not done. If your site is done, something is wrong. It’s bad. You’re either out of money or your boring.”
Scott has given this matter a good deal of thought, in part because he’s spent time collecting these lost GIFs from across the web, saving them from total obscurity. “It's a ridiculously massive collection,” he said. And it’s worth perusing his page devoted to “under construction” GIFs, in all their frenetic 1990s glory, for yourself. (The dizzying effect you get when the page is loading was intended.)




Could be handy for those points I have to repeat endlessly for my students. (Late policy. APA formatting. “I” before “E.”)
Record your Presentations with Present.me
Present.me is a great tool that you can use to record your presentations. You can create a video recording of yourself, a voice over, or simply a looping slideshow!
The process is quite simple. Just create a free account on the Present.me education website (you are limited to three videos a month and and are limited to live recordings, no uploaded video). You can upload your presentation directly or via Google Drive as a .ppt, .pptx, .pdf, Google Doc, and even a Prezi! Next, you select whether you want to record your presentation with a video, a voice over, or just the presentation itself. You can even stop, go back, and trim if you make a mistake.
When you finish, your video is published on the Present.me site, Social Media platform of your choosing, or even via email; you can also get the embed code and publish it to a blog or website. This is a great tool if you are interested in flipping your lessons, teaching an online course, or want students to create their own content.


No comments: