Tuesday, October 06, 2015

I'm sure they'll claim that this is not a problem 99.9% of the time. I'm telling you it certainly is. The password allows changes to the student's laptop. Apparently they use the same password for all students. (The link is bad and I can't find the article on the newspaper website.)
It’s nice that the district followed up by publicly disclosing what went wrong.
Preston Spencer reports:
The Lake Norman High student who obtained an administrative password last week did so by using more sophisticated methods than just simply guessing.
Dr. David Blattner, chief technology officer for Iredell-Statesville Schools, said the password, which was spread to six other students who used it to access other students’ computers, was acquired after “a file that was intended to give students the ability to add printers at home did not delete as intended.”
We have a script that we send out that runs on the computers that does contain the admin password,” Blattner said in an email. “It runs and then deletes itself…. The file was made invisible and the script to delete the file was provided by the software manufacturer, but it did not work as designed.”




You have got to be kidding me.
Many 911 calls coming from butt dials
Pocket dials accounted for about 20 percent of all 911 calls in San Francisco last year, according to a study conducted by Google.
The city does not specifically track accidental 911 calls made from mobile phones, but the study found most of the unknown or miscellaneous 911 calls logged were from pocket dials — sometimes known as butt dials.
… “As smartphone ownership increases, accidental dials to 9-1-1 increase,” the study’s authors concluded. “Based on the data collected, the majority of callbacks by 9-1-1 dispatchers are made to wireless phones.”




This “looks” like a clear (simple) problem. I wonder how difficult the solution will be?
Europe's biggest airline is attacking Google over its 'misleading' search ads
Ryanair, Europe's biggest airline, is attacking Google for its "misleading" search ads and is calling on the search giant to enforce advertising transparency."
In a press release, Ryanair points to a search for "Ryanair," which returns an ad from what appears to be the official airline itself.
In fact, Ryanair says this ad is from an unaffiliated "screenscraper" website called eDreams, which is "masquerading" as Ryanair and "unlawfully" selling its flights.
… Ryanair says it has taken legal action against several screenscraper websites across Europe. The Court of Hamburg ruled in January that eDreams had been using an unlawful subdomain and was misleading customers into thinking it had an official partnership with Ryanair.
But Ryanair is demanding Google works harder to prevent these issues from occurring in the first place.




Registration required.
Annual Study Reveals Average Cost of Cyber Crime per Organization Escalates to $15 Million
HP today unveiled the results from its sixth annual study in partnership with the Ponemon Institute detailing the economic impact of cyber attacks across both the private and public sectors. The findings reveal a dramatic increase in the overall cost of cyber crime, while providing insight to the most costly cyber crimes and the approaches organizations can take to minimize the impact.
-- Cost to resolve cyber attack escalates: The average time to resolve a cyber attack was 46 days, with an average cost to participating organizations of more than $1.9 million during this 46-day period.(1) This represents a 22 percent increase from last year's estimated average cost of approximately $1.5 million, which was based upon a similar 45-day resolution period.(2)
… For more information on country-specific findings of the Cost of Cyber Crime Study or copies of the full reports, along with an interactive assessment tool, visit www.hp.com/go/Ponemon.




Far below estimates... What did we miss?
BP's Record Oil Spill Settlement Rises to More Than $20 Billion
The value of BP Plc’s settlement with the U.S. government and five Gulf states over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill rose to $20.8 billion in the latest tally of costs from the U.S. Department of Justice.
… BP’s total settlement cost of $18.7 billion announced in July didn’t include some reimbursements, interest payments and committed expenditures for early restoration of damages to natural resources. The London-based company has set aside a total of $53.7 billion to pay for the disaster in 2010, when an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico resulted in the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.




For my Data Management students.
Google Takes Stake in Messaging Startup Symphony Communication Services
Google Inc. plans to invest in a new round of funding for Symphony Communication Services LLC that values the Wall Street-backed messaging company at about $650 million, people familiar with the matter said.
… Symphony was created as an alternative to Bloomberg LP’s terminals, which have long been a hallmark of trading floors but are viewed as a major cost center for financial firms.
The startup platform initially made its encryption technology a selling point, but attracted regulatory attention from the New York State Department of Financial Services, which was concerned about record-keeping. The agency, New York’s top banking watchdog, reached a deal last month with the four banks it regulates that invested in Symphony over how to keep their records.
The agency said at the time that the agreement with Goldman, Deutsche Bank AG , Credit Suisse Group AG and Bank of New York Mellon Corp. was “to help ensure the banks’ responsible use” of Symphony. The deal requires the platform to keep copies of all electronic communications sent to or from the four banks through Symphony for seven years.
… Symphony launched its service on Sept. 15. It charges a monthly fee of $15 per user for organizations with 50 users or more, according to its website, and is free for individuals. The company hasn’t disclosed how many users it has accumulated.




For my statistics students (and football fans)
How Microsoft got so good at predicting who will win NFL games
Bing Predicts, a statistical modeling tool from Microsoft, s run by a team of about a half dozen people out of Microsoft's Redmond, Washington headquarters. It uses machine learning and analyses big data on the web to predict the outcomes of reality TV shows, elections, sporting events, and more.
And it's gotten pretty good at it.
For the 2014 World Cup, Bing correctly predicted the outcomes for all of the 15 games in the knockout round. And it was more than 67% accurate when it came the outcome of the 2014 NFL season, correctly predicting around Thanksgiving that the New England Patriots would win the Super Bowl.




Something for my students to play with.
How to Build a Facebook "Hello World" Web App in Python
In our continuing “Hello World of APIs” tutorial series we look at Facebook; what a developer needs to know to understand the Facebook API and build an application that integrates with it. As with our first tutorial that used Twitter as an example, we have chosen Facebook for obvious reasons: Its huge presence as a social networking service and the fact that an enormous number of apps and websites integrate with the Facebook API to add features that include social updates and interaction, in-game purchasing and social sign-on.




Is Dilbert commenting on Artificial Intelligence or just what passes for intelligence?


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