<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>
[ECP] Educational CyberPlayGround NetHappenings Mailing List ©1989

*Link to the Educational CyberPlayGround
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com

*Link to the Educational CyberPlayGround Blog:
http://blog.edu-cyberpg.com/

*Subscribe to the ECP Blog Feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/EducationalCyberPlayGround

*Find your School in the ECP K-12 School Directory
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/schools/
<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>

Happy Reading for Today.


SPECIAL FUN for Presidents Day - Learn and teach the President Day Song!


<Karen>


1)
New Rating Model Ranks U.S. tops in IT and Communications Useage
<The United States, Sweden and Japan topped a new ranking that measures
how well countries use telecommunications technologies
-- networks, cell phones and computers -- to boost their social and economic prosperity
Full article from Reuters (Helsinki) at: http://tinyurl.com/2ess3w

2)
OLPC XO-1's in Mongolia/Ulaanbaatar
a ton of pictures, very interesting, cute kidz...
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ulaanbaatar

More:
One Laptop' a hit in Peruvian village
Hardware hacker reviews the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop
Educational CyberPlayGround K-12 Newsletter: Science, News, and Education Resources.
my xo laptop g1g2 tips rumors and update
XO Laptop Review some Disappointments
I got my XO laptop today


3)
 US drafting plan to allow government access to any email or Web search
The New Yorker article is available in HTML now:
 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/21/080121fa_fact_wright

Bruce Schneier has nailed the "security vs. privacy" canard that
McConnell promotes:

 "The debate isn't security versus privacy. It's liberty versus control."

And while people may think that AT&T should worry about losing liability
protection if it filters all traffic, if McConnell's plan goes through
AT&T and other telcos and cablecos will be able to wrap themselves in
the flag while they're doing it:
 http://riskman.typepad.com/peerflow/2008/01/policing-cybers.html



4)
Verizon: We don't want to play copyright cop on our network
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9861402-7.html
WASHINGTON--AT&T may be flirting with filters designed to ferret out pirated material
on its network, but Verizon Communications isn't interested.
That's the message that company Executive Vice President Tom Tauke delivered during a
luncheon discussion at an Internet policy conference here Wednesday.
Verizon Executive Vice President Tom Tauke

It's not that Verizon doesn't believe that it's vitally important to protect intellectual property,
said Tauke, who heads the company's public affairs, policy, and communications department.
Rather, the company is concerned that inspecting individual packets, as
rival AT&T is currently testing, poses potential dangers to consumer privacy and opens
up a host of other potential watchdog duties that Verizon isn't keen on undertaking.


5)
Truth or Terrorism? The Real Story Behind Five Years of High Alerts
The Rolling Stone
http://tinyurl.com/3arg6d
enumerates US terror scares which had no rational
basis in fact but seem to have been conveniently timed so as to distract
the public from politically inconvenient news -- or push that news off the front page.
""Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. There were times when some
people in the administration were really aggressive about raising the threat level, and we said, 'For that?!'"
— Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, May 2005"


6)
"The Rule of Intellectual Property Law in the Internet Economy"
44 Houston Law Review 102 (2007)
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1012604
Abstract:
The adaptation to the Internet economy of intellectual property law in general, and copyright law in particular, is at the center of a profound power struggle for governance that places democratically chosen legal rules against technologist-defined network rules. This essay argues that many of the technological challenges to intellectual property rights such as peer-to-peer software are a movement against democratically chosen intellectual property rules. These challenges reflect a basic defiance of the Rule of Law. In making this argument, the essay first maintains that intellectual property rights have an important public function in democracy marking political, economic and social boundaries. Next, the essay shows that the public law, as enacted by democratic government, has re-allocated intellectual property rights to adapt to the information economy. While many aspects of the new allocation of rights have been controversial such as the scope of copyright's anti-circumvention provisions, these decisions nevertheless emanate from duly constituted public authorities. The essay then analyzes the rejection of those rules by technologists and their fight to take control of rule-making. In essence, the technical community seeks to replace the state's decision on public intellectual property law with the community's own private preferences in subversion of democratic choices. The essay concludes with the normative prediction that public law prevails over network rule-making.

Joel R. Reidenberg
Professor of Law and President of the University Faculty Senate
Founding Director,  Center on Law and Information Policy
Fordham University School of Law
140 West 62nd Street
New York, NY 10023


7)

Digital Ethnography


8) Private detective jailed over shoe boss spying
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,2248306,00.html
A private detective who helped to spy on the Jimmy Choo shoe boss Tamara Mellon was jailed for 21 months today.
David Carroll, 60, from Highgate, north London, played a leading role in a City-based agency operation,
Active Investigation Services (AIS), which specialised in computer hacking and telephone tapping.

9)
Men overconfident about online security

10)
Expedia.com, Rhapsody.com serving up malicious code
Legitimate Web sites are increasingly becoming unwitting sources of
malware. Security experts report that Expedia.com and Rhapsody.com today
have been serving up banner ads that attempt to get visitors to download
fake antispyware, while embassy Web sites in Ukraine and Russia have
also been spewing out attack code this week.


11)
Laptop Stolen With Personal Data On 300,000 Health Insurance Clients


12)
Russian FSB 'protecting' Storm Worm gang

13)
The world of spyware evolves
http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/45763-1.html
The spyware community has polarized, a panel of security experts said
Thursday at a Washington workshop hosted by the Anti-Spyware Coalition.
Adware distributors, under pressure from the Federal Trade Commission
and anti-spyware technology, have mostly quit the business or are going
legit. But the really bad players are getting worse, producing more
stealthy and sophisticated malware.
Nuisance adware is mostly dead, said FTC Commissioner Jonathan
Leibowitz.
Venture capital funding of companies that are paid to deliver annoying
pop-up ads to your Web browser is largely a thing of the past, Leibowitz
said. He pointed to several successful civil actions against major
distributors who have since gone out of business or gone straight.
And reports of spyware infections have gone down, said Jeffrey Fox,
technology editor for Consumer Reports. According to annual surveys,
infections have gone from one in four respondents in 2004 to one in 11
in 2007. In the same time, the estimated cost of spyware has dropped
from $3.5 billion a year to $1.7 billion.
But, to quote Miracle Max in The Princess Bride, there is a big
difference between mostly dead and completely dead.

14)
Hack Attacks: Texas, Swedish Banks Reveal Breaches
http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/articles.php?art_id=687
In the wake of news about insider fraud at French bank Societe Generale,
two different banks in two different countries have acknowledged
information security breaches that underscore the need for increased
vigilance - by financial institutions and their customers.
In Forth Worth, Texas, OmniAmerican Bank announced it had stopped
hackers who had broken into the bank's online banking system and were
taking monies from customer accounts through ATM withdrawals.
OmniAmerican has more than $1 billion in assets and 17 branches and is
one of the largest independent banks in the Forth Worth area.
In Uppland County, Sweden, authorities announced the arrests of seven
cybercriminals who were stopped seconds before their crew made off with
millions from an unidentified Swedish bank. The criminals had
surreptitiously installed equipment on a computer at the bank that would
allow the hackers to divert online funds to other accounts.

15)
Web traffic disruption raises Internet infrastructure vulnerability concerns
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/013108-web-disruption-internet-infrastructure.html
First, the good news: it doesn't look as though the Web traffic
disruption that occurred this week after two underwater cables were
damaged in Mediterranean Sea will have much of an impact on businesses
in America.
The two cables, one operated by Flag Telecom and the other by a
consortium of 15 telecommunications operators, were apparently damaged
early on Jan. 30 by ship anchors that may have severed the cables during
a storm. Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography Research, says
the two cables account for about 75% of the network capacity between
Europe and the Middle East.
But while the damaged cables have caused major service problems in the
Middle East and parts of Asia, both ISPs and experts say the disruptions
are unlikely to greatly affect American businesses. AT&T and Verizon
Business, the two American carriers with the largest international
presence that both have network capacity on the damaged cables, say they
are already rerouting traffic through other cables, and that their
networks throughout the Middle East and Asia are running at their normal
capacity again. Additionally, a Verizon Business spokesman says the
company is buying up additional capacity to take care of any latency
issues that customers might experience as a result of the cable damages.

16)
SSL Gmail Not As Safe As You Thought
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/ssl-gmail-not-a.html
One of the big stories at DefCon last year was a security researcher's
demonstration of wirelessly sniffing users' session cookies while they
accessed their e-mail accounts or conducted e-commerce transactions via
wireless networks. The attack allowed a hacker access to the victim's
Gmail or Hotmail account without needing to decipher the user's
password.
Now the security researcher who presented that info has found that even
using SSL HTTPS to access your Gmail account -- which was touted at the
time as a surefire way to protect Gmail users against such an attack --
is vulnerable to this hack.
Robert Graham of Errata Security says he's been able to grab session
cookies even when users access their account in a presumably secure
manner. He describes the vulnerability on his blog [1]:

17)
Cyber Storm to Hit America for a Second Time
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/1649
The AP described it as a really bad day, but that somewhat understates
the magnitude of it all. It, of course, refers to the Cyber Storm war
game that the US Government held early in 2006, in an attempt to gauge
the necessary reaction and requisite skills of the games participants.
If anyone has seen the 1983 movie War Games starring a very young
Matthew Broderick, then multiply that by 10 and youll begin to get close
to just what it was the US Government sicked on to the willing
participants. The Homeland Security Department ran the exercise to test
the nations hacker defenses, with help from the State Department,
Pentagon, Justice Department, CIA, National Security Agency and others.
Those others, included government officials from the United States,
England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and executives from leading
technology and transportation companies.
The simulated attacks consisted of everything imaginable: Washingtons
metro trains being shut down. New Yorks seaport computers going dark.
Bloggers revealing the locations of secret railcars containing hazardous
materials (its always the bloggers!). Airport control towers disrupted
at Philadelphia and Chicago. A mysterious liquid found on Londons
subway. Planes flying too close to the White House, and more.

18)
Mardi Gras in New Orleans
Material about the celebration of Mardi Gras season in New Orleans, which "officially starts at Twelfth Night,
which occurs 12 days after Christmas on January 6th" and runs through the Tuesday before Lent. Includes a parade schedule,
a list of Mardi Gras events, background about Mardi Gras krewes, details about history and traditions, a glossary,
and related travel and tourism information. From the official tourism site of the city of New Orleans.
http://www.neworleansonline.com/neworleans/mardigras/

19)
2008 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop (EVT '08)
July 28-29, 2008
San Jose, CA, USA
Sponsored by USENIX: The Advanced Computing Systems Association, and
ACCURATE: A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and
Transparent Elections
Refereed paper submissions due: March 28, 2008, 11:59 p.m. PDT
Panel proposals due: May 2, 2008
http://www.usenix.org/evt08/cfpa

Overseas Vote Foundation

Overseas Vote Foundation (OVF) helps overseas and military voters participate in federal elections.
We do this by providing public access to innovative voter registration tools and services. If you are an overseas or military voter, OVF’s goal is to make it easy for you to get your ballot and vote.

Overseas American citizens, State Department employees, and active duty uniformed service members and their accompanying families within and outside of the United States vote under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) and can all register to vote from abroad using OVF’s services.

OVF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan public charity incorporated in Delaware.

Gallup: Election 2008
Collection of polling results related to the 2008 U.S. presidential election, covering candidates, parties, issues, and voting. Survey results include charts and graphs, and an explanation of survey methods. Also provides video reports for selected polls. From Gallup.
http://www.gallup.com/tag/Election%2b2008.aspx

GovGab
This U.S. government blog, started in fall 2007, covers a wide range of topics related to government agencies: elections and voting, finance and investing, consumer topics, holidays, health and safety, and more. Provides links to relevant sources for federal government and other websites. From the Office of Citizen Services and Communications, U.S. General Services Administration.
http://blog.usa.gov/roller/

VoteFromAbroad.org
"From February 5 to 12, 2008, Democrats Abroad will hold a Democratic Global Presidential Primary by Internet, fax, mail and in-person at Voting Centers in 34 countries around the globe. This will be the first global primary ever." Includes instructions for voting and a FAQ. In English and Spanish. From Democrats Abroad, "the official Democratic Party organization for the millions of Americans living outside the United States."
http://www.votefromabroad.org/