URLs Here (also a request)

If you haven't sent me your url, please put it in the comments to this post.

Don't forget to link to all your classmates blogs (in the add a gadget, blog list feature that Andrew demonstrated). And be sure to comment/engage/discuss. For example, Martin raises some of the questions regarding assessment in his recent post. People could hash out the issue on the blogs over the weekend and maybe come to class with a substantial proposal/suggestion on Tuesday.

Also:  I was thinking about putting some kind of feature on the class blog that is a sort of easily updatable graph or chart, perhaps with each student's name in row and then with columns (boxes) that could be checked (colored in) each time the student has a post or common or contribution or something. It would be a visual representation of activity. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to make this? Or does anyone know where this kind of graph/chart feature/app can be found? Let me/us know!

Reflection on the first group project

Describe your group's process.  Be specific. How did you come up with a plan? How did you distribute  responsibilities? Where did you find your information?

What worked well in this project? What didn't work so well?

Did someone emerge as a leader?  Did everyone contribute?

Would you want to work with the same people again? Why or why not?

Was this a good way to learn? What were some of the benefits? What were some of the drawbacks?

Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More | TorrentFreak

Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More | TorrentFreak:

"It’s taken a while, but Google has finally caved in to pressure from the entertainment industries including the MPAA and RIAA. The search engine now actively censors terms including BitTorrent, torrent, utorrent, RapidShare and Megaupload from its instant and autocomplete services. The reactions from affected companies and services are not mild, with BitTorrent Inc., RapidShare and Vodo all speaking out against this act of commercial censorship.

The entertainment industries’ quest to root out piracy on the Internet has yet again resulted in commercial censorship. A few weeks ago Google announced that it would start filtering “piracy related” terms from its ‘Autocomplete‘ and ‘Instant‘ services and today they quietly rolled out this questionable feature.

Without a public notice Google has compiled a seemingly arbitrary list of keywords for which auto-complete is no longer available. Although the impact of this decision does not currently affect full search results, it does send out a strong signal that Google is willing to censor its services proactively, and to an extent that is far greater than many expected."

ISPs Are the New Secret Police, Says Report - PCWorld Business Center

ISPs Are the New Secret Police, Says Report - PCWorld Business Center:

"Where law enforcement agencies would traditionally have tackled the problem of illegal online content, more powers are being given to ISPs in the name of industry self-regulation, according to a study by the organization European Digital Rights (EDRI). That trend is likely to become stronger with increasing 'extra-judicial sanctions' against consumers, EDRI said.

Proposed legislation and 'non-binding guidelines' have left intermediaries in a precarious position, unsure whether they are liable for the actions of consumers over their networks. So-called 'three strikes' laws, under which alleged copyright infringers receive three warnings before their Internet connection is cut off, put the onus on Internet service providers to police customers. Such laws currently appear in some form in French, Irish and U.K. legislation, where they have met with anger from ISPs. In France, the law can impose a fine and a one-year Internet connection suspension. The U.K.'s Digital Economy Act, adopted last year, provoked concern from the country's two largest ISPs, BT and TalkTalk."

Facebook learns nothing -- notes from the ubiquitous surveillance society

Facebook learns nothing -- notes from the ubiquitous surveillance society:

"Having been strongly criticised over its ‘Places’ feature for its lack of understanding of the concept of ‘consent’ in data protection, and why ‘opt-in’ is better for users than ‘opt-out’ when it comes to new ‘services’ (i.e: ways they can share your data with other organisations), Facebook is doing it again.

Between today and tomorrow, the new Facebook Privacy (sic) setting called “Instant Personalization” goes into effect. The new setting shares your data with non-Facebook sites and it is automatically set to “Enabled”.

To turn it off: Go to Account>Privacy Settings>Apps & Websites>Instant Personalization>edit settings & uncheck “Enable”.

The really important thing is that if your Facebook Friends don’t do this, they will be sharing info about you as well. So, copy this and repost to yours…"

Excerpts from piece on "The Dark Internet"

Excerpts from a post on security and networks (the whole site is interesting):

Bottom line, there are fundamental protocols of the Internet that were not designed to be secure. And there is only so much anyone can do to protect themselves....

Escalating security threats:

Merike led off the presentations. She grouped threats into four categories — Protocol Errors, Software Bugs, Active Attacks and Configuration mistakes. Here's how she charted the evolution of online threats:

In the Past – Deliberate malware was rare, bugs were just bugs, mitigation was trial by fire and the regulatory structure did not exist.

Today – Highly organized criminals are designing specific malware, bugs are now avenues for attack, mitigation is understood but deployment issues remain, and regulations struggle to assess the reach and impact of cybercrime, though global coordination is much better

She also shared some interesting insights into the cyber attacks in Estonia in May of 2007. Merike is Estonian and was in the country at that time. She shared how cyber literate the population is in that country, and how they fended off the attacks far better than media reports indicated.

Rodney titled his presentation "Black Swans and Other Phish," a reference to the Nassim Taleb theory, not the new Natalie Portman movie. His overall message was the miscreant of the distant hacking past became the spammer of yesterday. The spammer became the hardcore online criminal of today, hired by organized crime and nation states alike.

Some other interesting points:
• DDoS attacks first arose to attack anti-spam efforts
• Malware specifically designed to steal personal information and credentials appeared around 2005
• In 2007 nation states got into the dark game
In an effective demonstration, Rodney brought up a false FBI web site by typing in an IP address corresponding to www.fbi.gov. The cache had been poisoned, and that morning a fake web site was announcing to the world it was the real site of the FBI. Many in the room were clearly surprised by how easy it is to poison the cache of such a high profile government site.

This is the web right now - The Oatmeal

This is the web right now - The Oatmeal: "The State of the Web - Winter 2010"

How the Facebook Generation Keeps People Poor

Excerpt from "How the Facebook Generation Keeps People Poor"

The development model pursued in most countries is a highly unequal one, favouring wealthy groups and the aspirant middle class by promoting capital- and knowledge-intensive growth. There are other growth models that favour the poorest more – to combat inequality, economic policy needs to encourage job creation and opportunities for the poorest, including largescale investments in free or affordable basic services. But such policies are unlikely to be chosen if they prejudice the opportunities of the Facebook generation to live like their “peers” in richer countries (which they would do if they led to slower growth in wealth and wages for the already affluent).

You can read as many reports about inequality as you want (and there are lots) but the most important barrier to the introduction of pro-poor economic strategies is quite simple: lack of political will. What are the chances of the Peruvian (4 million users, 13% of the population) or Senegalese (360,000 users, 2.5% of the population) educated classes deciding to forgo the luxuries that their Facebook peers in the west (even the not very educated ones) discuss online? A car. Frequent trips abroad. The latest gadgets. Answer: about as much chance as those of us who already take all these things for granted deciding to give them up.

In the better off “middle income” countries, home to two-thirds of the world’s poorest people, the Facebook generation has done well out of the last 20 years. But their fortunes contrast with the huge numbers of people still living in abject poverty in city slums or further out in the countryside. In 55% of middle-income countries inequality has increased since the 1990s, and in a further 20% it has remained high, decreasing in only a quarter of middle-income countries – according to the World Bank.

Are we witnessing the emergence of a new type of polarisation, not between countries as before, but between international income brackets?

Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US | Media | The Observer

Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US | Media | The Observer:

"The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness, according to a leading American sociologist.

'A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological,' MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.

Turkle's book, published in the UK next month, has caused a sensation in America, which is usually more obsessed with the merits of social networking. She appeared last week on Stephen Colbert's late-night comedy show, The Colbert Report. When Turkle said she had been at funerals where people checked their iPhones, Colbert quipped: 'We all say goodbye in our own way.'

Turkle's thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world."