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.”
Read more on Statesville
Record & Landmark.
You have got to be kidding me.
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.
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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