<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>
[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.

<Karen>

1)
Article at TheAtlantic.com on China's control of the Internet for Chinese users:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall

Learn to surf anonymously and help others to do it to.


2)
Appeals Court Weighs Teen's Web Speech
http://www.courant.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-student-speech,0,2344917.story
NEW YORK - A teen who used vulgar slang in an Internet blog to complain
about school administrators shouldn't have been punished by the school, her
lawyer told a federal appeals court.
But a lawyer for the Burlington, Conn., school told the 2nd U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals on Tuesday that administrators should be allowed to act if
such comments are made on the Web.
Avery Doninger, 17, claims officials at Lewis S. Mills High School violated
her free speech rights when they barred her from serving on the student
council because of what she wrote from her home computer.
<snipped>

Courts Track Record when it comes to schools and what schools can expect

This is far from the first time schools have attempted to treat online
speech the same as on-campus speech.
I believe the first case is O'Brien v. Westlake City Schools Board of
Education. In that case, Sean O'Brien (RIP) created a website,
raymondsucks.org, to make fun of his band teacher. He was predictably
suspended over the incident. A federal judge overturned the suspension.
The school settled the suit for $30,000.
http://www.freedomforum.org/packages/first/censorshipinternetspeech/part3.htm
It looks like earlier this year another student was expelled for their
online doings, and a slashdot commenter did the work of collecting up
the relevent case law for me:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=416450&cid=22028428
What concerns me most about this case is that in more than 10 years of
court cases about these issues, schools still treat students as if they
don't have any rights. What message is that sending to our youth?
-Zach


I recall them doing the exact same thing with respect to dead-tree
publications by students in the 1960's, with the same results (courts
said that the Constitution applied to high school students).  The
lesson is that teachers and administrators fail to exhibit learning
behavior.

Seth

3)
G1G1 - XO LAPTOP - I've Got One <Karen>

Alabama city eyes developing-world laptops

If $200 laptop computers are good for kids in Peru and Mongolia, why 
not Alabama?
Birmingham's City Council has approved a $3.5 million plan to provide 
schoolchildren with 15,000 computers produced by the nonprofit One 
Laptop Per Child Foundation, which aims to spread laptops to poor 
children in developing countries.
The foundation says the deal marks the first time a U.S. city has 
agreed to buy the machines, which also are headed to such countries as 
Rwanda, Thailand, Brazil and Mexico in addition to Peru and Mongolia.
Birmingham's school board still must agree to the deal, and some 
members have reservations. They want more evidence that computers 
designed for the African bush or the mountains of South America would 
be a good fit for an American city.

4)
Key Figure in Wiretapping Suit Goes Public
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87938069
Morning Edition, March 6, 2008 · The lead plaintiff (Tash Hepting)
in a warrantless wiretapping lawsuit against AT&T is talking publicly
about the case. Congress may grant AT&T and other firms retroactive
legal immunity. That could end a flurry of lawsuits opposing the Bush
administration's post-Sept. 11 eavesdropping program.

Hepting v. AT&T
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT&T

The origin of the "State  Secrets Privilege" is based upon the U.S. Government (Executive Branch) 
committing a Fraud on the United States Supreme Court.
"Supreme Court recognition in U.S. v. Reynolds"
"The privilege was first officially recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1953 decision, United States v. Reynolds (345 U.S. 1). A military airplane,  a B-29 Superfortress bomber, crashed. The widows of three civilian crew   members sought accident reports on the crash but were told that to release such details would threaten national security by revealing the bomber's top-secret mission.[1][2][3][4][5][7][6][8] The court held that only the   government can claim or waive the privilege, and it “is not to be lightly invoked”, and   last there “must be a formal claim of privilege, lodged by the head of the department  which has control over the matter, after actual personal consideration by that   officer.”[1]
The court stressed that the decision to withhold evidence is to be  made by the presiding judge and not the executive.[1] "As a footnote to the founding case establishing the privilege, in  2000, the accident reports were declassified and released, and it was found that 
the argument was fraudulent, and there was no secret information. The reports did,   however, contain information about the poor state of condition of the aircraft   itself, which would have been very compromising to the Air Force's case. Many   commentators have alleged government misuse of secrecy in the landmark case.[9]
"Despite this ruling, a case might still be subject to judicial review  since the privilege was intended to prevent certain, but not all, information to  be precluded.[1]"


5)
ISPs have been doing this for more than 10 years.
 ISPs can measure interaction parameters, such as time between queries, and the cross-queries, to model the person at the keyboard, thus establishing different user profiles for each account, and then use these profiles to match the user at the keyboard within a class of customers (child, teen, health care professional., etc.). And even if your ISP doesn't do this, another one in the food chain can do, and they all can do it too. The Internet does not have "space" to separate users, as would think of a cyberspace. The Internet is a point. We are all at the same point. There are no dividers.

6)
The great homeowner equity depression
As economic catastrophe looms, the mortgage industry, with the help of
Republicans, fights to stop the government from making a real difference
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2008/03/06/homeowner_equity/index.html
Mar. 06, 2008 | One in ten American homeowners has no equity in their
family home. That's the worst percentage since 1945, according to data
released Thursday by the Federal Reserve.
Commenting at Credit Slips, Harvard law professor and bankruptcy
specialist Elizabeth Warren contributes some absolutely must-read
analysis of this disaster in the making that should be read in its
entirety. But here are the high points:
The data show that about 15 percent [of homeowners] will be below
water if prices continue to slide, owing more than their homes are
worth.

Iraq war 'caused slowdown in the US'
Peter Wilson, Europe correspondent | February 28, 2008
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23286149-2703,00.html
THE Iraq war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush 
administration predicted and was a central cause of the sub-prime 
banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to Nobel Prize- winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.


7)
Feds Have a High-Speed Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/whistleblower-f.html
"A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.
"What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment," Babak Pasdar, now CEO of New York-based Bat Blue told Threat Level. "I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that."
Pasdar won't name the wireless carrier in question, but his claims are nearly identical to unsourced allegations made in a federal lawsuit filed in 2006 against four phone companies and the U.S. government for alleged privacy violations. That suit names Verizon Wireless as the culprit. "

The affidavit from the whistleblower, mentioned (and linked) in that story:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/files/Affidavit-BP-Final.pdf


8)
Publisher Ziff Davis files for bankruptcy protection
Some bad financial news on the magazine side: Ziff Davis Media has filed for bankruptcy protection. The PC Magazine publisher went to court yesterday, saying revenue declines stemming from print advertising and subscription losses have led to debt of $500 million to $1 billion. The company cited assets of just $100 million to $500 million, and it admitted to owing $225 million to senior creditors. The company’s plan is to reorganize over the next few months and drop its court protection this summer. Though these days Ziff Davis is more web-centric, with 16 web sites in addition to its three print magazines and direct marketing business, it has deep roots in magazines. Nearly a century ago, William B. Ziff Sr. and Bernard G. Davis founded Popular Electronics and Popular Aviation.

9)
YouTube Hijacking: A RIPE NCC RIS case study
http://www.ripe.net/news/study-youtube-hijacking.html
Introduction
On Sunday, 24 February 2008, Pakistan Telecom (AS17557) started an unauthorised announcement of the prefix 208.65.153.0/24. One of Pakistan Telecom's upstream providers, PCCW Global (AS3491) forwarded this announcement to the rest of the Internet, which resulted in the hijacking of YouTube traffic on a global scale.
In this report we show how the events were seen by RIPE NCC's Routing Information Service (RIS) and how, in general, one can use the RIS tools to obtain hard data on network events.


10)
Chinese backdoors "hidden in router firmware"
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/173883/chinese-backdoors-hidden-in-router-firmware.html
The UK's communication networks could be at risk from Chinese backdoors
hidden in firmware, according to a security company.
SecureTest believes spyware could be easily built into
Asian-manufactured devices such as switches and routers, providing a
simple backdoor for companies or governments in the Far East to listen
in on communications.
"Organisations should change their security policies and procedures
immediately," says Ken Munro, managing director of SecureTest. "This is
a very real loophole that needs closing. The government needs to act
fast."
"Would they buy a missile from China, then deploy it untested into a
Western missile silo and expect it to function when directed at the Far
East? That's essentially what they're doing by installing network
infrastructure produced in the Far East, such as switches and routers,
untested into government and corporate networks."

11)
Hack into a Windows PC - no password needed
"But now that a couple of years have passed and the issue has not
resolved, Boileau decided to release the tool on his website."
http://storm.net.nz/projects/16

12)
IT leaders ignorant of WEEE
http://www.itweek.co.uk/itweek/news/2211426/leaders-ignorant-weee
British IT leaders are struggling to get to grips with regulations
governing the disposal of electrical equipment, with nearly
three-quarters admitting they had no idea that legislation was in force.
According to a study by data recovery vendor Kroll Ontrack, 73 per cent
of IT professionals were unaware of the Waste Electrical and Electronic
Equipment (WEEE) regulations which finally came into force in the UK in
January 2007.
The fact that so many companies still havent got to grips with the WEEE
directive could spell danger, said Phil Bridge, managing director of
Kroll Ontrack. In addition to failing to comply with regulations,
companies could also be putting sensitive data at risk.


Will It Blend? That is the Question. Let's Find Out.


<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>
Educational CyberPlayGround NetHappenings  ©1989
NetHappenings: the largest and oldest K-12 Education Mailing List
Email Preferences -- Subscribe - Unsubscribe - Digest
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community/NetHappenings.html

Copyright FAIR USE Statements to be included when reproducing
annotations from NetHappenings.

The single phrase below is the copyright notice to be used when
reproducing any portion of this report, in any format:


> EDUCATIONAL CYBERPLAYGROUND
> http://www.edu-cyberpg.com
> Educational CyberPlayGround NetHappenings ©1989
> http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community/Nethappenings.html

Advertise on NetHappenings
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community/Subguidelines.html
<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>