November 5th, 2009, by Tim Finin, posted in CS, GENERAL
This post on the CACM Blog caught my eye and shows that we still have a long way to go before computing is taken seriously in US secondary education, let alone K-12.
“Up until September, Georgia and Texas were the (only) two states in the US that accepted a computer science course as fulfilling high school graduation requirements. In Texas, the Advanced Placement Computer Science (AP CS) course fulfilled a mathematics requirement. In Georgia, it fulfilled a fourth science course requirement. As of October, however, Georgia has rescinded that decision. … ”
I wonder how other countries treat computing and informatics in primary and secondary education.
Yesterday was the first time a truly voter verifiable voting system was used in any binding government election, thanks in part to work being carried out at UMBC’s Cyber Defense Lab under the direction of Alan Sherman.
“Before trying Scantegrity in an official election, the city held a mock vote in April to work out kinks in the system. In that test, she says, about 30 percent of participants went home and used the system to verify their votes. Sergeant says that Scantegrity representatives talked extensively with voters and election officials after the April test and have improved their system accordingly. “I hope we can provide an experience where people walk away and say, ‘That was awesome,’” she says. “It’s a goal to which we aspire.”
The Scantegrity system was created by a group of universities, including UMBC. A voter uses a paper ballot marked with invisible ink, which is exposed with a special marker. That marker reveals a code, which the voter can then use to check online whether their vote was tabulated correctly.
Ben Adida has been auditing the election and documenting the process on his blog.
“First published last year in Greece (where it became a surprise best seller), the comic book — er, graphic novel? — is the brainchild of Apostolos Doxiadis, previously the author of a not-bad mathematical fiction called “Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture.” For expert assistance on logic, Doxiadis called on his friend Christos Papadimitriou, a professor of computer science at Berkeley and the author of a novel about Alan Turing.”
It looks great. Amazon is out of stock for the harccover version, but there are other online sources that have copies and I’ve ordered one for the ebiquity lab. The paperback version will be released on Monday.
“Covering a span of sixty years, the graphic novel Logicomix was inspired by the epic story of the quest for the Foundations of Mathematics.
This was a heroic intellectual adventure most of whose protagonists paid the price of knowledge with extreme personal suffering and even insanity. The book tells its tale in an engaging way, at the same time complex and accessible. It grounds the philosophical struggles on the undercurrent of personal emotional turmoil, as well as the momentous historical events and ideological battles which gave rise to them.
The role of narrator is given to the most eloquent and spirited of the story’s protagonists, the great logician, philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell. It is through his eyes that the plights of such great thinkers as Frege, Hilbert, Poincaré, Wittgenstein and Gödel come to life, and through his own passionate involvement in the quest that the various narrative strands come together.”
Martin Roesch, a respected authority on intrusion prevention and detection technology and forensics, will discuss why today’s network security isn’t getting the job done. He will also share his vision on where network security is heading in the future. Why must network security be intelligent to be effective? Why must it provide full network visibility, relevant context, and automated impact assessment and IPS tuning? How can network security adapt to dynamic networks and threats in real time?
Roesch is the founder and CTO of Sourcefire, a network security company based in Columbia MD. Roesch is also well known as the creator of the widely used Snort network intrusion detection and prevention system.
The breakfast meeting is free and open to the public, but registration is required. It will take place at the Westin BWI hotel (map, 1110 Old Elkridge Landing Road, Linthicum, MD 21090, (443) 577-2300) 7:30am – 9:00am on Wednesday 30 September 2009.
September 1st, 2009, by Tim Finin, posted in CS, GENERAL
Yesterday’s Chronicle of Education had an article on 5 College Majors On the Rise. It’s gratifying to see that three of them are relevant to IT and computing: service science, health informatics, and computational science. Of course, now is a difficult time for universities and Departments to mount new majors or even tracks. Most schools in the US have had two years of budget cuts due to the recession and/or decline in their endowments. But this is a positive sign for the computing disciplines, which had suffered declines in enrollments after the dot com bubble burst seven years ago.
The Department of Defense remains conflicted about their position on social media.
This past Sunday the US Marine Corps announced an immediate ban of Internet social networking sites on their NIPRNET network due to potential security risks. Specific examples of the sites now banned included facebook, myspace, and twitter.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tweeted yesterday.
“Obviously we need to find right balance between security and transparency. We are working on that. But am I still going to tweet? You bet.”
While it’s tempting to poke fun at the apparent contradictions involved, it’s easy to see a difference. Its well known that there are many vulnerabilities on the Web that can result in compromising a computer and that they are more likely to be encountered in open, popular environments, like social media systems. So it’s prudent to limit access to some of these from networks like NIPRNET that are used for sensitive information. On the other hand, we assume that the computer used by Admiral Mullen and his staff for public announcements and PR are on conventional networks, so the risks asscociated with security problems are greatly reduced.
Elinor Mills of cnet reports that the DOS against twitter, facebook, livejournal and blogger were focused on a single Russian blogger using the name Cyxymu (??????).
A pro-Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google’s Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial of service attack that led to the site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive.
The blogger, who uses the account name “Cyxymu,” (the name of a town in the former Soviet Republic) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.
“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,” Kelly said. “We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”
According to the Register, Researcher: Twitter attack targeted anti-Russian blogger, the DOS attack was driven by spam rather than a botnet. Spam messages enticed their recipients to click on a link to one of Cyxymu’s many social media accounts.
It will be interesting to see what comes from today’s DDOS attacks on twitter, facebook and liveJournal. It is certainly a show of strength from whoever controls the botnets that launched the attacks. We can only assume that three three are from the same source or at lease related sources. Some sources:
FaceBook is changing how it manages privacy starting today. After reading last week’s post on the FaceBook blog, More Ways to Share in the Publisher, and a followup note on ReadWriteWeb, A Closer Look at Facebook’s New Privacy Options, I thought I understood: Facebook was sharing more but only for people who have made their profiles public. From the official FaceBook post:
“We’ve received some questions in the comments about default privacy settings for this beta. Nothing has changed with your default privacy settings. The beta is only open to people who already chose to set their profile and status privacy to “Everyone.” For those people, the default for sharing from the Publisher will be the same. If you have your default privacy set to anything else—such as “Friends and Networks” or “Friends Only”—you are not part of this beta.”
“By default, all your messages on Facebook will soon be naked visible to the world. The company is starting by rolling out the feature to people who had already set their profiles as public, but it will come to everyone soon. You’ll be able each time you publish a message to change that message’s privacy setting and from that drop down there’s a link to change your default setting.
But most people will not change the setting. Facebook messages are about to be publicly visible. A whole lot of people are going to hate it. When ex-lovers, bosses, moms, stalkers, cops, creeps and others find out what people have been posting on Facebook – the reprimand that “well, you could have changed your default setting” is not going to sit well with people.”
But it will come to everyone soon! That’s a big change if true. There will be blood.
I hope that there is come clarification soon from FaceBook. I, for one, am left confused.
Should the nations of the world work toward a treaty banning or at least limiting cyberwars? If we don’t, might we fall into an arms race that could be bad for everyone? Would A war in cyberspace be less dangerous for people than traditional wars? Or maybe worse?
“The United States and Russia are locked in a fundamental dispute over how to counter the growing threat of cyberwar attacks that could wreak havoc on computer systems and the Internet. Both nations agree that cyberspace is an emerging battleground. … But there the agreement ends. Russia favors an international treaty along the lines of those negotiated for chemical weapons and has pushed for that approach at a series of meetings this year and in public statements by a high-ranking official.
The United States argues that a treaty is unnecessary. It instead advocates improved cooperation among international law enforcement groups. If these groups cooperate to make cyberspace more secure against criminal intrusions, their work will also make cyberspace more secure against military campaigns, American officials say. “We really believe it’s defense, defense, defense,” said the State Department official, who asked not to be identified because authorization had not been given to speak on the record. “They want to constrain offense. We needed to be able to criminalize these horrible 50,000 attacks we were getting a day.”
Russia has some specific proposals that it would like to have considered. But there are complications that arise due to cybercrime and Internet censorship.
“In a speech on March 18, Vladislav P. Sherstyuk, a deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council, a powerful body advising the president on national security, laid out what he described as Russia’s bedrock positions on disarmament in cyberspace. Russia’s proposed treaty would ban a country from secretly embedding malicious codes or circuitry that could be later activated from afar in the event of war. Other Russian proposals include the application of humanitarian laws banning attacks on noncombatants and a ban on deception in operations in cyberspace — an attempt to deal with the challenge of anonymous attacks.
…
But American officials are particularly resistant to agreements that would allow governments to censor the Internet, saying they would provide cover for totalitarian regimes. These officials also worry that a treaty would be ineffective because it can be almost impossible to determine if an Internet attack originated from a government, a hacker loyal to that government, or a rogue acting independently.”
The article makes the interesting revelation that this is not the first time that cyberspace arms control have been discussed between the US and Russia.
“In 1996, at the dawn of commercial cyberspace, American and Russian military delegations met secretly in Moscow to discuss the subject. The American delegation was led by an academic military strategist, and the Russian delegation by a four-star admiral. No agreement emerged from the meeting, which has not previously been reported. Later, the Russian government repeatedly introduced resolutions calling for cyberspace disarmament treaties before the United Nations. The United States consistently opposed the idea.
… John Arquilla, an expert in military strategy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who led the American delegation at the 1996 talks, said he had received almost no interest from within the American military after those initial meetings. “It was a great opportunity lost,” he said.
This week the BBC had a story about the UK’s cyber security programs, UK ‘has cyber attack capability’, with this video interview with Gordon Brown.
The article leads with this surprising discussion of the UK’s offensive capabilities.
“The UK has the ability to launch cyber attacks but does not use it for industrial espionage like some other countries, minister Lord West has said. He refused to be drawn on whether it was used for military purposes.
…
He told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme the UK faced coordinated Huber attacks “on a regular basis” from other countries including Russia and China. And he confirmed that the British government had approached the Russian and Chinese governments to ask them to stop the attacks. “We have had a dialogue with them in the past and I wouldn’t want to go into what goes on in terms of debate at the moment,” he told the BBC.
…
Pressed on whether Britain used cyber attacks itself, he said: “We do not go and attack other nations to try and find from them their industrial secrets.” But he added: “I think it would be very silly of any nation not to have an ability to use cyber space for the safety and security of its nation.” Pressed further on Britain’s cyber warfare capabilities, he said: “We have an ability to do things and we have got very good and very talented people who have worked on this.”
The article also quotes Lord West, the UK’s first cyber security minister, as saying that they had recruited “a team of former hackers for its new Cyber Security Operations Centre” at GCHQ.
“They had not employed any “ultra, ultra criminals” but needed the expertise of former “naughty boys”, he added. “You need youngsters who are deep into this stuff… If they have been slightly naughty boys, very often they really enjoy stopping other naughty boys,” he said.
The NYT reports in New Military Command for Cyberspace that the DoD has put NSA in charge of a unified U.S. Cyber Command to oversee the protection of military networks against cyber threats.
“Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Tuesday ordered the creation of the military’s first headquarters designed to coordinate Pentagon efforts in the emerging battlefield of cyberspace and computer-network security, officials said. Pentagon officials said Mr. Gates intends to nominate Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, currently director of the National Security Agency, for a fourth star and to take on the top job at the new organization, to be called Cybercom. The new command’s mission will be to coordinate the day-to-day operation — and protection — of military and Pentagon computer networks.”
CYBERCOM will be a subordinate unified command under the US Strategic Command.
Yesterday was the first time a truly voter verifiable voting system was used in any binding government election, thanks in part to work being carried out at UMBC’s 
The NYT reviewed 
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