Educational CyberPlayGround NetHappenings Headlines and Resources 5/30

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Greetings,

This is the last NetHappenings Headlines and Resources
until the school year begins again in September 2006.

Enjoy your summer vacation!!!

<Karen>

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1)
May 26, 2006
Senate confirms Hayden as CIA director
The Senate voted 78-15 Friday to confirm Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden
to serve as the next director of the CIA. Hayden is currently the top deputy
to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and is the former
head of the National Security Agency. "Gen. Hayden is a patriot and a
dedicated public servant whose broad experience, dedication and expertise
make him the right person to lead the CIA at this critical time,"
said President Bush after the Senate vote. At NSA, Hayden presided over
efforts to conduct electronic surveillance of phone calls between the
United States and overseas, and to mine domestic phone call records.
Those efforts have attracted controversy, but Hayden defended them.
"Everything that the agency has done has been lawful," he told reporters
before his confirmation hearings. "It's been briefed to the appropriate members
of Congress. The only purpose of the agency's activities is to preserve the
security and the liberty of the American people. And I think we've done that."


VA chief vows "relentless" exam of data protection polices
http://www.fcw.com/article94649-05-25-06-Web
Jim Nicholson, the Department of Veterans Affairs' secretary.
testifying in Congress about the theft of personally identifiable data
for every living veteran, vowed to enforce existing policies and
procedures and institute new ones to ensure the department protects
sensitive data.


2)
Smithsonian Hands Over TV Contract
http://public.resource.org/smithsonian.html

Lawmakers Get the Details Of a 30-Year Arrangement
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/
AR2006052502242.html
The Smithsonian Institution is locked into its
semi-exclusive television contract with Showtime Networks
Inc. for 30 years, Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small
told a House oversight committee yesterday.
Filmmakers, historians and members of Congress have
criticized the contract, which has never been made public.
Small disclosed several other details about the deal:

3)
AT&T leaks sensitive info in NSA suit
http://tinyurl.com/od5wc

also see:
http://tinyurl.com/laytp

4)
Black Frog hops into spam battle
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,39020369,39271074,00.htm
[... First there was Blue Frog, a community antispam effort that stopped
operating last week after Blue Security, the company that started the
project, came under a withering denial-of-service attack.
Out of the ashes comes Black Frog, part of a project that is
apparently willing to become a flag bearer in the fight against spam.
The project, dubbed Okopipi, is developing the Black Frog antispam
software and service as an open-source project, according to the
group's wiki. "This project aims to become a distributed replacement
of antispam software Blue Frog," the Okopipi wiki states.
"It will be based on a P2P network (the frognet)," according to a
posting on the wiki. "On failure to connect it could still opt out
given email addresses."
Participants will send reports of spam emails to Okopipi, which will
use "handlers", including dedicated servers, to analyse it. To avoid
suffering the same fate as Blue Security, Okopipi's staff will not
disclose information about its servers.

5)
Wireless networks still wide open to attack
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2156945/wireless-networks-open-attack
Almost half of all UK wireless networks are open to attack, according
to research from anti-virus company Kaspersky.
The report found that a shocking 49 per cent of wireless networks in
London were operating without any encryption.
Tests in the business district in London's Canary Wharf found the area
marginally safer, although 40 per cent of wireless networks were still
unencrypted.

6)
[[ I hate symantec and recommend F secure http://www.f-secure.com/ ~ KE]]

Researchers: Antivirus Software Has Flaw
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501081.html
WASHINGTON -- Symantec Corp.'s leading antivirus software, which
protects some of the world's largest corporations and U.S. government
agencies, suffers from a flaw that lets hackers seize control of
computers to steal sensitive data, delete files or implant malicious
programs, researchers said Thursday.
Symantec said it was investigating the issue but could not immediately
corroborate the vulnerability. If confirmed, the threat to computer
users would be severe because the security software is so widely used,
and because no action is required by victims using the latest versions
of Norton Antivirus to suffer a crippling attack over the Internet.
Symantec has boasted its antivirus products are installed on more than
200 million computers. A spokesman, Mike Bradshaw, said the company
was examining the reported flaw but described it as "so new that we
don't have any details."

7)
Red Cross warns blood donors of possible ID thefts in Midwest
<http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9000754>
About 1 million blood donors in the Missouri-Illinois Blood Services
Region of the American Red Cross were warned last week that personal
information about them could have been stolen earlier this year by a
former employee and might have been used in identity thefts.
The former worker had access to 8,000 blood donors in a database she
used in her job, all of whom were notified by mail of possible
identity theft problems on March 17, according to the agency. But
after the original warning letters went out, the Red Cross decided to
expand the identity theft warnings to all 1 million donors in the
Missouri-Illinois region because of concerns that she may have
accidentally accessed other records in the larger group.
The warnings to the 1 million donors are being made through the media
and the agency's Web site, not through individual letters.

8)
Oracle's security chief lambastes faulty coding
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/052506-w3c-oracles-davidson-coding.html
[... The financial cost of faulty code in software is staggering. The
National Institute of Standards and Technology, a U.S. government
agency, estimates computer security problems cost between $22.2
billion to $59.5 billion per year, Davidson said.
The problem of insecure software starts with how software developers
are taught at universities and goes straight through to systemic
vendor attitudes, Davidson said.
Software coders at Oracle often need remedial coding education after
they are hired since they don't consider how "evil" input could affect
their products such as databases, Davidson said. Universities are not
teaching secure coding practices and are reluctant to change their
curriculum, she said.
Vendors are pressured to move products into the market as quickly as
possible, and often lack the tools to build better ones, Davidson
said. As a result, software development is reaching a "tipping point"
where poor security is a board-level issue.
The result of bad code means spiraling patching costs for both clients
and companies such as Oracle. Davidson said the record for fixing one
defect was 78 patches, which cost the company around $1 million.]

9)
The University of Michigan has unveiled an online archive that
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu
offers public access to over 24,000 pieces of research conducted
on campus. The database, called Deep Blue, joins a growing list
of open-access projects that colleges have started to disperse
their research results. Deep Blue already boasts studies on such
diverse topics as architecture, kinesiology, and Judaism, and the
archive is expected to expand as more professors log in to
deposit their own work.


10)
Varsity admins vs. college hackers
High school students prevent online hackers in defense competition
http://tinyurl.com/o325k
College computer-science programs seem to be using every trick in
the book to woo students: When they're not turning their labs
into arcades or getting a promotional boost from popular
video-game characters, they're thinking up new contests
tailor-made for high-school computer whizzes. Iowa State
University, for example, just held the first-ever High School
Cyber Defense Competition, an event that asked teams to design
computer networks that could hold hackers and other bad actors
at bay. To test the networks' stability, a group of graduate
students from the university took on the role of the hackers,
creating security holes that the high-schoolers were then asked
to fix.

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Assessment / Testing
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/testingassessment.html

Graduation Rates
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/standards2.html

Retention - Who Will benefit?
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/newretention.html
Resources and Advice For New Teachers
Retention And Social Promotion
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11)
Coalition of Journalists for Open Government
http://www.cjog.net
Background papers, reports, and links to resources about the
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and journalists' access to
government information. Topics include reporter's privilege and
shield laws, government secrecy, sensitive homeland security
documents, privacy, cameras in the courtroom, and more. The
organization is "an alliance of more than 30 journalism-related
organizations concerned about secrecy in government and the
increasing closure of public records and meetings at all levels of government."

12)
Homefront Confidential
http://www.rcfp.org/homefrontconfidential/
How the War on Terrorism Affects Access to
Information and the Public's Right to Know
Prepared by The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

13)
JUNETEENTH. On June 19 ("Juneteenth"), 1865,
http://tinyurl.com/pny6v
Union general Gordon Granger read the Emancipation Proclamation
in Galveston, thus belatedly bringing about the freeing of 250,000
slaves in Texas. The tidings of freedom reached slaves gradually
as individual plantation owners read the proclamation to their
bondsmen over the months following the end of the war.

14)
The GrayLIT Network
http://graylit.osti.gov/
makes the gray literature of U.S. Federal Agencies easily accessible
over the Internet. It taps into the search engines of distributed gray
literature collections, enabling the user to find information
without first having to know the sponsoring agency.

15)
Special Edition: 2006 Hurricane Season
http://tinyurl.com/qfzo3
U.S. Census Bureau Facts  for the 2006 north Atlantic hurricane
season (June through November), which "comes on the heels
of last year's record-breaker, in which there were 28 named storms,
 including 15 hurricanes." Provides facts and statistics about
past hurricanes, population of states in the Gulf Coast
("the areas that could be most affected by these acts of nature"),
and related topics. From the U.S. Census Bureau.

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Emergency Communication Disaster Plan Check List
Get Your Personal Disaster Plan
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/disaster.html
Is your State Prepared? Does your school have a plan?
Do you have a plan? Have we learned anything yet?
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16)
MPAA accused of hiring a hacker
http://tinyurl.com/rnjd4
The Motion Picture Association of America hired a hacker to steal
information from a company that the MPAA has accused of helping
copyright violators, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday.
The lawsuit (click for PDF [1]), filed Wednesday in U.S. District
Court for the Central District of California by Torrentspy.com parent
Valence Media, doesn't identify the man the company says was
approached by an MPAA executive. But the suit calls the man a former
associate of one of the plaintiffs who was asked to retrieve private
information on Torrentspy.com, a search engine that directs users to
download links.
Among Torrentspy's claims are that the man who the MPAA allegedly paid
$15,000 to steal e-mail correspondence and trade secrets has admitted
his role in the plot and is cooperating with the company.

17)
Free Info Society: Historical Sounds in MP3 Format
http://www.freeinfosociety.com/site.php?postnum=460

18)
Google To Shut Down Violent User Groups in Brazil
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16934
In response to a human-rights commission, the search engine will now
monitor more closely its website communities.
By Associated Press
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- Google Inc. said Wednesday that it has
agreed to shut down some communities on its popular Orkut social
networking site because the Brazilian government says they advocate
violence and human rights violations.
Google agreed to shut down any sites that violate Orkut's terms of
service, which forbid ''any illegal or unauthorized purpose,'' after
the company met Tuesday with a Brazilian human rights commission,
which presented evidence that Brazilians have been using the
invitation-only networking site to promote crimes and violence.

19)
China fielding cyberattack units
http://www.fcw.com/article94650-05-25-06-Web
The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) is developing information
warfare reserve and militia units and has begun incorporating them
into broader exercises and training. Also, China is developing the
ability to launch pre-emptive attacks against enemy computer networks
in a crisis, according to the document, "Annual Report to Congress:
Military Power of the People's Republic of China 2006."

20)
Three Mile Island guard playing video game fails to see
inspector
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2006-05-29-nuclear-guard-game_x.htm
PHILADELPHIA - A security guard at the Three Mile Island nuclear power
plant was so absorbed in playing a hand-held video game that he failed
to see an inspector approach during a surprise inspection, the agency
said.
The employee did not violate any rules as guards are allowed to engage
in mind-stimulating activities, the state Department of Environmental
Protection said.

21)
Serious Games Movement
http://tinyurl.com/q9p4m
Known as the Serious Games Movement, is "about taking
resources of the (video) games industry and applying them
outside of entertainment," says Ben Sawyer, co-founder of Digitalmill Inc.,
and one of the organizers of the Serious Games Summit.
This means creating games that play roles in areas such as
education, health, public policy, science, government and corporate training, he says.

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How does the Brain Work?
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22)
Teen blog watch is on
http://tinyurl.com/qeajh
District 128 addresses MySpace phenomenon
In a move that has drawn national attention to this Lake County
school district, the Community High School District 128 board
unanimously passed rules changes Monday night that will hold
students accountable for what they post on blogs and social-networking Web sites.

23)
Suspensions over MySpace lead to free-speech protests
http://tinyurl.com/nrk4c
Zach Fuller, 18, held up a sign recently in front of Etiwanda
High School proclaiming "We don't need no thought control."
He was protesting the school's decision to suspend five of
his friends for profane online postings made off campus.
The suspensions raised new free-speech concerns for a
generation of social-networking addicts.
Although some contend that online speech is a dangerous
platform for young people, others say that today's postings
are no more threatening than other technological innovations
such as the telephone.

24)
The Future of the Web: Sir Tim Berners-Lee
http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/?view=Webcast&ID=20060314_139

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