Sunday, June 11, 2017

Has reasonable caution become excessive paranoia? 
Terror threat on EasyJet UK-bound flight emergency landing was 'false alarm'
An Easyjet flight made an emergency landing in Germany after British passengers were overheard talking about a “bomb”, it has emerged.
   Police have given few details of the investigation, but according to unconfirmed German press reports its is now thought the emergency was a false alarm and the plane was never in danger.
Passengers were evacuated from the aircraft by emergency slides, and one of the three men’s bags was destroyed in a controlled explosion.
But a search of the destroyed bag and aircraft found no trace of an explosive device or other hazardous materials.
   German police have not commented on the content of the conversation beyond saying it had “terrorist content”, but according to details leaked to the German media the men were talking about “a bomb or explosives.”
Concerned passengers alerted the cabin crew.  They told the captain, who decided to divert to Cologne.
   “We searched the plane with sniffer dogs all night,” a police spokesman told Bild newspaper.  “There were no traces of explosives in the aircraft or in the suspects’ luggage.”


Why not just say, “We don’t want to?”
NSA backtracks on sharing number of Americans caught in warrant-less spying
For more than a year, U.S. intelligence officials reassured lawmakers they were working to calculate and reveal roughly how many Americans have their digital communications vacuumed up under a warrant-less surveillance law intended to target foreigners overseas.
This week, the Trump administration backtracked, catching lawmakers off guard and alarming civil liberties advocates who say it is critical to know as Congress weighs changes to a law expiring at the end of the year that permits some of the National Security Agency's most sweeping espionage.
   Coats said "it remains infeasible to generate an exact, accurate, meaningful, and responsive methodology that can count how often a U.S. person's communications may be collected" under the law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
He told the Senate Intelligence Committee that even if he dedicated more resources the NSA would not be able to calculate an estimate, which privacy experts have said could be in the millions.
The statement ran counter to what senior intelligence officials had previously promised both publicly and in private briefings during the previous administration of President Barack Obama, a Democrat, lawmakers and congressional staffers working on drafting reforms to Section 702 said.


Computer Forensics and Ethical Hacking


Perspective.  I wonder if there is someone who can evaluate these programs objectively?
The Silicon Valley Billionaires Remaking America’s Schools
In San Francisco’s public schools, Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, is giving middle school principals $100,000 “innovation grants” and encouraging them to behave more like start-up founders and less like bureaucrats.
In Maryland, Texas, Virginia and other states, Netflix’s chief, Reed Hastings, is championing a popular math-teaching program where Netflix-like algorithms determine which lessons students see.
And in more than 100 schools nationwide, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, is testing one of his latest big ideas: software that puts children in charge of their own learning, recasting their teachers as facilitators and mentors.
In the space of just a few years, technology giants have begun remaking the very nature of schooling on a vast scale, using some of the same techniques that have made their companies linchpins of the American economy.  Through their philanthropy, they are influencing the subjects that schools teach, the classroom tools that teachers choose and fundamental approaches to learning.

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