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Happy Reading For Today

<Karen>


1)
Teacher's strike in the UK
Read this surprisingly hard critic of the strike in The Times:
Here is an article from the Independent where you can find, in a comment to the article,
the key words of modern teaching : 'enablers of learning', Key Skills, Key Skills folder.
from the BBC
from the Press Association

2)
Israeli jailed for Facebook photo
Israel has sentenced a soldier to 19 days in jail for uploading a
photograph taken on his military base to the social networking website,
Facebook.
The Israeli military declined to comment on the nature of the image, but
said the soldier was serving with an elite intelligence unit.
Local media say it is the first such conviction for an Israeli soldier.


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PLEASE ADD YOUR K12 SCHOOL OR SCHOOL DISTRICT
TO THE  MASTER DIRECTORY OF SCHOOLS ONLINE
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/schools/

The registry is organized by state and by grade level.
The registry also includes sites for charter Schools, virtual schools,
school districts, state and regional education organizations, state
departments of education, state standards and state administrators.
***************************************************

3)
USENIX Security '08 Registration Now Open
Whether you're a researcher, a system administrator, or a policy wonk,
come to the 17th USENIX Security Symposium to find out how changes in
computer security are going to affect you. Please see


4)
China continues to face a severe problem with botnets, networks of
computers infected with software that allows them to be controlled
remotely for denial-of-service attacks and to send spam, according to a
report by China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical
Team (CNCERT).


5)
West Point cadets battle NSA hackers in Cyber Defense Exercise


6)
Three students at the Rochester Institute of Technology
took the top software prize this week in a college technology competition sponsored by Microsoft, called Imagine Cup. The students developed a network of sensors that allow people to monitor how much energy their homes or communities consume. The sensors capture readings about temperature, humidity, lights, sound, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and motion -- all of which can alert people to appliances and lights they may have left on inadvertently or that don't work efficiently. The students who were part of the project are, from left to right: Joe Zhou, a junior, Adam Risi, a sophomore, and Zachery Shivers, a sophomore. The students each won $12,000 for their creation and will travel to Paris in July to compete for the Imagine Cup international prize. The theme for this year's Imagine Cup was using technology for environmental sustainability. About 16,000 students from more than 125 colleges competed in the event. The finals were held in Los Angeles this week and the winners -- a full list of whom is available here -- were announced on Tuesday, Earth Day.

7)
Trojan Horses Still Kicking After All These Years

*************************************************************
MUSIC MAKES YOU SMARTER
Are you interested in the research that shows how
and why music education makes your smarter?
Help teachers integrate music into the classroom.

*************************************************************

8)
University of Washington and Microsoft automatically chooses chords to fit a vocal melody,
allowing amateur singers to become song-writers. Here's how the new program, MySong, works:
A user (who needs no musical training) sings into a microphone, and the software generates chords to fit her melody.
She can then adjust the "jazz factor" and "happy factor" of the accompaniment,
and step back and listen to her fully-produced musical creation. She can also pass the
automated chords through Band-in-a-Box, a commercial software program, to add a more
sophisticated-sounding musical arrangement. Check out some of the audio clips on the
MySong site, which feature musically-untrained singers singing snippets of pop songs and original melodies
as well as accompanied versions of those songs.--Catherine Rampell


9)
Critical infrastructure central to cyber threat
The United States is increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks that could
have catastrophic effects on critical physical infrastructure, and
severely damage the country's economic, military and strategic
interests, cybersecurity specialists said today.


10)
IT lawyers missing a trick
Lawyers relying on the disclosure of computer evidence are losing out on
valuable clues, experts warned today.
When documents or emails are requested as part of a court case, many
legal firms accept CDs with the requested material burned on.
However, a computer forensics firm has warned that this misses crucial
evidence contained on the rest of the hard drive.
"If you take a burned CD you just have a lot of documents," said Alan
Philips, chief executive at 7safe.
"What you lose is information on the documents themselves and where they
have been. If you image the hard drive you do not have to trust what
they give you."

11)
Put pressure on vendors says SANS
Companies are having more success in pressuring software vendors into
including security into their products, a trend that vendors are
resisting less, according to one security expert.
Before granting a contract, companies now are requiring that vendors
also test software patches on systems with the same configurations as
users are running, said Alan Paller of SANS, an IT training
organisation.
Another new trend is groups of companies agreeing on base security
standards for applications and then passing those requirements onto
vendors.
"It's using the contracts to shift the responsibility for security
upstream to the vendor where the economies of scale make it [security]
cost effective," Paller said.
The US Air Force was one of the first organisations that tried a new
approach when contracting IT systems with Microsoft and other
application vendors about two years ago to enable speedier patching,
Paller said.
The Air Force's CIO at the time, John M. Gilligan, consolidated 38
different IT contracts into one and ordered all new systems to be
delivered in the same, secure configuration. Then, he ordered that
application vendors certify that their applications would work on the
secure configurations, Paller said.
Then Gilligan took his case to Microsoft. At the time, it took the Air
Force about 57 days between the time a patch was released until their
450,000 systems were up-to-date. Gilligan wanted Microsoft to test its
patches on machines with the same configuration as the Air Force's,
shifting the cumbersome testing process back to the vendor.
The negotiations, which didn't start off well, culminated with a meeting
with CEO Steve Ballmer. "The story is that he [Gilligan] used a
four-letter word in the meeting," Paller said. "You know what the
four-letter word was? Unix."
Heavyweight IT companies are warning universities that they don't want
to have to send new hires to remedial security training. Mary Ann
Davidson, chief security officer at Oracle, wrote earlier this month
that she contacted the top 10 universities the company recruits from,
saying only those with security training would get preference in hiring.
That's an embarrassment to universities, which will now likely modify
their curriculum accordingly. Interestingly, developers want security
training. "The programmers want to know what they don't know," Paller
said.


12)
Mexican Embassy: Official Fired After Getting Caught With White House BlackBerries
Whether he was up to no good or simply desperate to play BrickBreaker, a
Mexican press attach was caught on camera pocketing several White House
BlackBerries during a recent meeting in New Orleans and has since been
fired, FOX News has learned.
Sources with knowledge of the incident said the official, Rafael
Quintero Curiel, served as the lead press advance person for the Mexican
Delegation and was responsible for handling logistics and guiding the
Mexican media around at the conference.
Mexican Embassy spokesman Ricardo Alday said Thursday he was asked to
tender his resignation once he arrived back in Mexico City.

13)
Students Against Professors Who Don't Utilize Technology: Part of this group's mission statement:
"DON'T LECTURE NONSTOP FOR AN HOUR, especially in a class of 400+ people."
So far 65 people have joined the group, which was started by students at the University of Texas at Austin.

World Of Warcraft Is Ruining My Academic Life: Many students play the online game World of Warcraft,
and the fact that 135 signed onto this group shows that the game can get in the way of school work.

Guitar Hero Has Ruined My Academic Career, and I Am OK With It, has 61 members

I Learn More From Wikipedia Than My Professors: This group is one of many student groups expressing
support for the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Its description points out that members
"feel as if they should pay tuition to Wikipedia rather than their college."

14)
Congress is revisiting the longstanding problem of orphan works.
These are books, films, photographs, music, and other creative works that cannot be reused by scholars and archivists because they are unable to find the works' owners. Those who make use of the material risk incurring penalties for copyright infringement. Experts estimate that as much as 22 percent of an academic library’s books are orphaned.  Lawmakers who lead committees on intellectual-property issues on Thursday introduced legislation that would exempt scholars and others from facing excessive copyright-infringement penalties for using orphan works. PDF They would need to first diligently try to locate the works' owners. Should the owners surface after a work has been reused they would receive some compensation, but could not stop the derivative creation from being distributed. The bills, the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008, S. 2913, in the Senate; and the Orphan Works Act of 2008, H.R. 5889, in the U.S. House of Representatives, are supported by the Association of Research Libraries, the Internet Archive, and the Recording Industry Association of America, among other groups. Lawmakers introduced similar legislation two years ago after the U.S. Copyright Office offered its own solution. But the bills stalled, largely because of opposition from groups representing photographers, illustrators, and textile designers. They said the bills failed to adequately compensate copyright owners. The recent bills have tried to address their concerns but it's unclear whether the groups will find them acceptable. --Andrea L. Foster

15)
Hackers warn high street chains
High street chains will be the next victims of cyber terrorism, some of
the world's elite hackers have warned.
They claim it is only a "matter of time" before the likes of Tesco and
Marks & Spencer are targeted.
Criminals could use the kind of tactics which crippled Estonia's
government and some firms last year, they warned.
The experts were members of the infamous "Hackers Panel" which convened
in London this week at the InfoSecurity Europe conference.
The panel includes penetration testers and so-called "white hat"
hackers, who help companies tighten up their digital security by
searching for flaws in their defences.

16)
Laptop security lapse at BoI shines a light on data safety
LOSING a laptop can be attributed to just plain bad luck, two can be put
down to carelessness, however, three and four would send anybody's alarm
bells ringing.
But this was not the case at Bank of Ireland earlier this week when it
emerged that four laptops had been stolen from the institution's
investment arm between June and October of last year.
The bank said it was only told six weeks ago that three of its
unencrypted laptops were stolen from cars and another from the branch.
And when it emerged that the laptops had the personal data of 10,000
customers, which were only protected by a password system, a number of
questions were raised about the safety of customer information as well
as the regulation of security systems.

17)
Hacker in Murdoch Trial Acknowledges Receiving Money from Murdoch Firm
See also: Rupert Murdoch Firm Goes on Trial for Alleged Tech Sabotage
An American hacker who is at the core of a piracy trial against a Rupert
Murdoch subsidiary, testified this week that he created pirating
software for the company but did not use it to sabotage the company's
rivals.
Earlier this week I laid out the case against NDS Group, a UK-Israeli
firm and a majority-owned subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corporation. The
company is accused of reverse-engineering access cards created by
competitor NagraStar in order to provide pirates with counterfeit cards.
EchoStar's Dish Net used the NagraStar cards, and the counterfeit cards
allegedly allowed pirates to access Dish Network pay-TV content for
free.
Christopher Tarnovsky, who acknowledged receiving cash payments of more
than $20,000 concealed in CD and DVD players, said he regularly received
payments from the HarperCollins publishing company for ten years.
HarperCollins is also owned by Murdoch's News Corporation. But he says
he was paid to develop a pirating program to make DirecTV more secure,
not to sabotage rival systems. DirecTV used access cards made by NDS
Group. Its cards had been hacked and pirated since 1997.
EchoStar and NagraStar contend that after NDS's cards were cracked, the
company reverse-engineered NagraStar's card, then hired hackers and
pirates to create cards that circumvented the access controls in
EchoStar's pay-TV system. The company claims it lost $900 million as a
result of the pirating.
NDS has acknowledged that it reverse-engineered NagraStar's cards but
denies it released any information or cards to pirates.

18)
FBI concerned about Chinese counterfeiting Cisco routers
Washington DC - An unclassified government PowerPoint presentation
documenting Chinese counterfeiting of Cisco routers has been published
on the net.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation document was produced
on January 11, 2008 and discusses how counterfeit routers, switches and
interface cards make it inside of American companies and government
organizations.
While contractors are supposed to use genuine Cisco parts, the low price
of counterfeits ­ in some cases one-fifth the price of a genuine Ciisco
part ­ is just too irresistible to many companies.  The FBI says thhe
government procurement process which uses layers of contractors and
subcontractors adds to the problem.
The bureau says it has raided several companies around the nation which
sold and installed counterfeit Cisco gear.  In many cases, the equipment
can cause network failures because of shoddy wiring and workmanship,
according to the FBI.  The power point presentation outlines several
cases where the counterfeit networking gear caused duplicate MAC
addresses and one case where a router caught fire because of a faulty
power supply.

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