Thursday, May 19, 2016

This (very brief) article sounds to me like a practice terror attack.  Without details, how do we tell the difference?  They can’t take off but landing is no problem?  Don’t they communicate with planes attempting to land? 
Planes grounded at Stockholm airports due to communication problem
No planes are allowed to take off from Stockholm airports and those in the air are being called down due to a network communication problem, the Air Traffic Authority said on Thursday.
"No planes are allowed to take off at the moment and we're taking down the planes in the air," said spokesman Per Froberg. "It's a network communications problem."
He declined to give further details.


Why do you think I’m teaching two sections of Computer Security every quarter?
SEC says cyber security biggest risk to financial system
Cyber security is the biggest risk facing the financial system, the chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said on Tuesday, in one of the frankest assessments yet of the threat to Wall Street from digital attacks.
Banks around the world have been rattled by a $81 million cyber theft from the Bangladesh central bank that was funneled through SWIFT, a member-owned industry cooperative that handles the bulk of cross-border payment instructions between banks.
The SEC, which regulates securities markets, has found some major exchanges, dark pools and clearing houses did not have cyber policies in place that matched the sort of risks they faced, SEC Chair Mary Jo White told the Reuters Financial Regulation Summit in Washington D.C.


The speed with which the industry is adopting encryption has accelerated since the FBI started pushing for access and demanding backdoors.  Bad strategy, FBI. 
New Google messaging app to offer optional end-to-end encryption
Google on Wednesday announced that its new messaging service, Allo, will offer end-to-end encryption.
That means that not even Google will be able to access the content of users’ messages, a position that echoes the robust privacy posture of Apple’s iMessage and Facebook’s WhatsApp.
In fact, Allo will use the same encryption protocol that WhatsApp uses — as well as the private messaging app Signal.


Looking at this as an IT manager, this is almost impossible to believe.  You would have to make a real effort to eliminate all copies and then the original.
Looking at this as political a** covering, it was the plan from the beginning.
CIA allegedly destroyed sole copy of Senate torture report
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on
The Independent: “The CIA inspector general’s office has said it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despite lawyers for the Justice Department assuring a federal judge that copies of the documents were being preserved.  The erasure of the document by the spy agency’s internal watchdog was deemed an “inadvertent” foul-up by the inspector general, according to Yahoo News.  One intelligence community source told Yahoo News, which first reported the development, that last summer CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document.  The 6,700-page report contains thousands of secret files about the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation methods, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other aggressive interrogation techniques at “black site” prisons overseas.  The full version of the report remains classified, but a 500-page executive summary was released to the public in 2014…”


Local. 
Valerie Strauss reports:
Schools have become “soft targets” for companies trying to gather data and market to children because of the push in education to adopt new technology and in part because of the rise of computer-administered Common Core tests, according to a new annual report. 
The report, titled “Learning to be Watched: Surveillance Culture at School” and published Tuesday by the National Center for Education Policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the 18th annual report about schoolhouse commercialism trends.


Think of it as a license plate reader for your face.  I’m surprised that Facebook hasn’t already released one here.  (I bet the FBI already has one that works on multiple social networks.) 
Face recognition app taking Russia by storm may bring end to public anonymity
If the founders of a new face recognition app get their way, anonymity in public could soon be a thing of the past.  FindFace, launched two months ago and currently taking Russia by storm, allows users to photograph people in a crowd and work out their identities, with 70% reliability.
It works by comparing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte, a social network popular in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with more than 200 million accounts.  In future, the designers imagine a world where people walking past you on the street could find your social network profile by sneaking a photograph of you, and shops, advertisers and the police could pick your face out of crowds and track you down via social networks.  
   Unlike other face recognition technology, their algorithm allows quick searches in big data sets.  “Three million searches in a database of nearly 1bn photographs: that’s hundreds of trillions of comparisons, and all on four normal servers.  With this algorithm, you can search through a billion photographs in less than a second from a normal computer,” said Kabakov, during an interview at the company’s modest central Moscow office.  The app will give you the most likely match to the face that is uploaded, as well as 10 people it thinks look similar.


Perspective.  Is this because Uber and Lyft are so good or because traditional taxis are so bad?
Uber and Lyft have built loyal following, survey finds
Americans who use ride-hailing apps believe the services are a positive force in the economy, and they should not be regulated like traditional taxis, according to a survey conducted by an independent research group.
The survey, released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center, suggests that companies operating in the sharing economy have created a loyal following among the relatively small slice of Americans who do business with them.


Re-architecting a legacy business model.
John Deere is plowing IoT into its farm equipment
John Deere is taking the Internet of Things out into the field by developing new technologies and embracing existing ones to boost the efficiency of prepping, planting, feeding and harvesting with the goal of improving per-acre crop yields.
These technologies include IoT sensors, wireless communications, cloud apps and even a steering-wheel replacement that guides precision passes across arable land, says Ron Zink, director of On-Board Applications in the company’s Intelligent Solutions Group.
   For example, iPads are a part of John Deere’s technology arsenal.  The company created an iPad app with nine mapping layers that track what’s happening in the field.  Users can set, for example, how many seeds are planted per acre, and precisely how far apart they are planted.
One mapping layer called singulation shows a groups of up to 10 seeds (the number distributed in 20 millisec) and shows on the iPad exactly where they are located and whether they are spaced properly, seed-by-seed, he says.


I see some very interesting homework in my student’s future. 
Make Stunning Video Presentations with Spark Video from Adobe
   All you have to do import your photos, type some text, add your own voice narration and a stunning video is ready for uploading on to YouTube or Facebook.
   Adobe has quietly launched a new suite of web apps that, among other things, will let you use Adobe Voice inside your desktop browser. The suite, known as Adobe Spark, includes tools for creating video stories, magazine-style web pages and typography posters (think of Typorama but for the web).
And the price is just right. $0.
To get started, go to spark.adobe.com and sign-in with your Facebook or Google Account.  This is mandatory because all your work will be auto-saved under this account and will also be accessible on your iPad and iPhone.


I’ve heard of one of those.
Want to boost your salary? Learn Scala, Golang, or Python
   PayScale used its pay-tracking database to determine which job skills provide the largest average boost in pay, and presented the results in its 2016 Workforce-Skills Preparedness Report, "Leveling Up: How to Win in the Skills Economy."

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