September 3, 2009
After months of planning and skillful script writing, Software Training for Students (STS) delivered 12 “Computing@UW Orientation” sessions to 2200 dazzled incoming freshman Aug 31, Sept 1 and Sept 2. The sessions taught incoming UW freshman about the tools and services that DoIT provides to them during their time at the University; this year they were taught with a twist. A twist that contained a wizard, a tin man, a scarecrow and a lion.
Yep! You guessed it. This fall, STS delivered the orientation sessions in a “Wizard of Wisc” format (a play on the Wizard of Oz), hoping to: keep students engaged in the presentation, make the information easier to remember, and to keep them interested in the topics they were taught.
Candid feedback so far has been very positive. Several students even told us “you were the talk on campus” and that they began using some of the tools right away.
Below are photos from the sessions:
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September 3, 2009
The RIAA has taken action against 30,000+ against individuals who share files, including targeted college students. Joel Tenenbaum, a 25 year old graduate student at Boston University took the RIAA to court and now owes $675,000. But the RIAA fears Joel is still file sharing despite the absurd amount of money he owes for the action.
August 18, 2009
While surfing tech news everywhere today, I came across an article that told me that Yahoo! Mail still is “king” of email, adding 6 digits worth of new accounts monthly, thus, killing Google’s Gmail by about 70K new users per month.
If you would have told me this fact over dinner I would have called you a liar. After spending many a day on the UW Campus it seemed quite clear that Gmail ruled the electronic message delivery system.
Goes to show you that I don’t know everything after all.
The following is from Cnet News:
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August 17, 2009
[ Originally published by Wired Magazine | by Brian X Chen | "First Look: Windows 7 Shapes Up as Microsoft’s Best OS Yet" ]
Good news, everyone! If you’ve been stuck in a time loop using Windows XP, which is nearing eight years old, or Windows Vista, which is just annoying, you can finally break free: Windows 7 is almost here. Microsoft delivers a slickly designed, vastly improved OS that will warp you to the world of today. This upgrade is big, and it’s hugely recommended for Microsoft users.
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August 16, 2009
[ Originally published by the Washington Post, as "Facebook Cornering Market on E-Friends: Fight to Own Social Media Heats Up." | by Chadwick Matlin ]
Facebook just bought the rights to nearly everything you do online. And it cost them only $47.5 million.
Facebook’s purchase of FriendFeed, an obscure social-media platform, is potentially momentous. To understand why, we must understand FriendFeed, a start-up that is ubiquitous among techies and unknown to everybody else. It’s a sleek application that acts as a clearinghouse for all of your social-media activities. Post something to Flickr? That will show up on your FriendFeed page. Digg something? FriendFeed will know. Post to Twitter from your phone? FriendFeed will syndicate your tweets. Once you initially tell it where to look, it will collect everything and tell it to the world.
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August 6, 2009
It’s a sad reality that there are people out there who want nothing more than to make your computing life miserable. Many people are aware that anti-virus software is important, and do their best to keep it installed and updated. However, anti-virus software just isn’t enough. Operating systems release patches, as do many software programs, that need to be installed immediately when they are available. It’s kind of a pain to do it, but it’s more of a pain when your system crashes and your data is lost and/or compromised.
The UW CIO site has a lot of useful information related to securing your computer and online activity. Software Training for Students also offers a Security Health Check Up class to help you get started securing your computer.
You might be saying, “I own a Mac, so it doesn’t matter.” Think again. Read the article below to learn about the increasing number of security vulnerabilities in programs like Adobe Reader and Flash Player.
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[Originally posted on CNET News | August 6, 2009 | by Elinor Mills]
If you’re a criminal and you want to break into a network, a common attack method is to exploit a hole in software that exists on most computers, has its fair share of holes, and isn’t automatically updated.
In 2002, that would have been Windows. Today, it’s likely to be Adobe Reader or Flash Player, whose share of vulnerabilities and exploits are on the rise while Microsoft’s is falling.
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August 5, 2009
Originally posted by Noah Shachtman on Wired.com | Marines Ban Twitter, MySpace, Facebook
The U.S. Marine Corps has banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks, effective immediately.
“These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” reads a Marine Corps order, issued Monday. “The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”
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July 29, 2009
apple informed the US copyright office that jailbreaking an iphone (or modifying the software to get around copyright control features that prohibit using competitor applications) could potentially pose a threat to national security. According to apple “a local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data,” Apple wrote the government. “Taking control of the BBP software would be much the equivalent of getting inside the firewall of a corporate computer — to potentially catastrophic result.” An EFF (http://www.eff.org/) attorney states this is more bull than truth.
jailbroken iphone running cydia
