Category: Cyberinfrastructure

Categories
Cyberinfrastructure Education Globalization Network

Zoom out

How quickly the ground shifted on Zoom. Since March 30th the video conferencing app has been exposed by gaping security and privacy vulnerabilities. The impact on higher education is immense and must be addressed swiftly.

Zoom’s security and privacy vulnerabilities are deal breakers for higher education. Why? The online journal Inside Higher Ed shared shocking news: Dissertation Defense on Zoom Interrupted by Racist Attack. Yes, the ’N word’ was zoombombed at Cal State Long Beach during a dissertation defense. Educause links to multiple zoombombing articles.

Stunningly, multiple campus zoombombings quickly followed prompting the FBI to issue this warning: Teleconferencing and Online Classroom Hijacking During COVID-19 Pandemic addressing concerns across higher education. Yet, The Chronicle of Higher Education returns NO articles about Zoombombing.

These two events instantly change any campus conversation that all is well using Zoom. A Zoom cool factor was going viral just as Coronavirus closed down all higher education colleges. Students can sway easily via online trends.

Look at Zoom’s March 18th Collection of your Personal Data privacy statement:

Zoom gathers and sells to data brokers very personal information of your students and colleagues. Add the orange hi-lighted scraping of your campus network data and asset information.

Remember when an app is free many times you become the product. Zoom (NASDAQ) has been operating for nine years.

I know what you are thinking — how did this happened?
Many colleges had no idea Zoom was reckless with the data security and privacy of our students. Prior to coronavirus Zoom had about 12 million users. By late March this jumped to over 100 million. Instant capacity issues.

Continue reading “Zoom out”
Categories
Cyberinfrastructure Education Globalization Innovation Network Reading Technology

Latest Read: The Perfect Weapon

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger is an amazing read. To be frank this book is very quite unnerving, yet should be certainly mandatory reading. We have been at war for a couple of years on an electronic battlefield. This seems to be acting as a deterrent to actual war on a global scale.

Above all, we live today in a more complex world now regarding COVID-19. Recent cyber attacks and the flattening of attack tools is unquestionably changing the world right in-front of our eyes.

Sanger’s book will help you see it even more clearly: today a perfect storm is forming across the internet.

Therefore, The Perfect Weapon reveals so much in the opening chapters regarding successful Russian attacks upon US military and government networks.

On the contrary, the previous generation was driven by nuclear mutually assured destruction. In contrast, cyberwar or ‘cyber conflict’ is very different.

Russia’s penetration of the Pentagon’s secret network in 2008 in fact, is very upsetting reading. Sanger recalls how NSA’s Debora Plunkett discovered rogue USB sticks, left scattered across a US military base parking lot in the Middle East provided Moscow’s entry into the Pentagon networks.

WannaCry ransomware

North Korea is the boldest example of this book’s theme: A backwards third world country hacking Sony? Yes. In addition, North Korea launched the devastating WannaCry ransomware attack. On the other hand, their ransomware was unleashed across global hospitals and schools. Can you imagine WannaCry 3.0 locking down hospitals in the mist of stopping coronavirus?

Continue reading “Latest Read: The Perfect Weapon”
Categories
Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Education Flat World Globalization Google Innovation Internet2 Network Reading Technology WiscNet

Latest Read: The Shallows

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr remains a powerful book (published 2011) regarding how our brains have re-wired in the age of the internet. I began reading just as COVID-19 began taking hold. How will our brains react to this pandemic?

the shallows by by Nicholas Carr

Over the course of Carr’s chapters the world instantly became remote workers.

According to Carr’s conclusions, our brains will re-wire again adjusting to our new global working environments. Actually this will occur within a very short period of time.

The source for his book originated from an article Carr actually wrote for The New Yorker called “is google making us stupid” back in 2008. There is a chapter dedicated to Google Search.

Does The Shallows reveal new internet changes to human behavior? No, Carr shows that history’s ‘drastic changes’ regarding access to new technology dates even beyond Nietzsche and Freud. Their technology change? The typewriter was a very dynamic change from Gutenberg’s printing press. Approaches to cognitive thought was drastically changed by the technology available to Freud’s era: powerful microscopes.

Continue reading “Latest Read: The Shallows”
Categories
Cyberinfrastructure Education Flat World Globalization Innovation Network OpenSource Reading Technology

Latest Read: Countdown to Zero Day

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter is an amazing story. The NSA and Mossad worked to derail the nuclear weapons program of Iran. This begins an amazing story regarding stuxnet. In the end this is a wonderful story about imagination.

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

The history Kim traces is deeper than anyone could first imagine. Think about your favorite spy movie and technology. Countdown to Zero Day is going to shake you up as I found this book difficult to put down.

The International Atomic Energy Agency learned that centrifuges at an enrichment plant in Natanz were failing at an unprecedented rate. The US and Israel were able to deploy Stuxnet to Siemens industrial control systems in Iran.

Zetter opens this story in Belarus. A computer security firm with customers in Iran found what they initially thought was a rootkit. The virus was causing systems to repeatedly crash and reboot. When they could not resolve the issue they called Sergey Ulasen.

Continue reading “Latest Read: Countdown to Zero Day”
Categories
Cyberinfrastructure Education Flat World Globalization Innovation Network OpenSource Reading Technology

Latest Read: Everybody Lies

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz wrote Everybody Lies Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. Seth holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. He is a former quantitative analyst at Google. Seth also writes for the NYTimes. The stories are similar to Freakonomics but are based upon much larger datasets.

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

Everybody Lies is able to utilize Google search data that reveals in the opening chapter that we live in a very racist society.

Seth reviews search results from the 2016 Presidential election. Data mining via Google Search revealed hard truths that most would not say in mixed company.

Search at at work or home, Google data clearly indicated racists supported Trump in the 2016 Presidential election.

The outcomes of data mining Google search, Wikipedia, Facebook, Pornhub and Stormfront. The results are somewhat surprising if you simply follow analog driven surveys popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Clearly the mobile revolution and search provides real insights to the sway of the country or just specific sets of groups.

Everybody Lies tackles some interesting topics with vast amounts of data sets:

  • How much sex do people really have?
  • How many Americans are actually racist?
  • What should you say on a first date if you want a second?
  • Is America experiencing a hidden back-alley abortion crisis?
  • Where is the best place to raise kids?
  • Can you game the stock market?
  • Do parents treat sons differently from daughters?
  • How many men are gay?
  • Do violent movies increase violent crime?
  • How many people actually read the books they buy?

Like Freakonomics, the results will surprise you.

One of the more interesting data sets is within chapter three: Bodies as Data and involved a great story of American Pharoah. What makes a great racehorse? Actually the percentile of the left ventricle. Jeff Seder found the way to measure success of a racehorse. A great story is here. Seder, a Harvard trained lawyer took his hedge fund experience and applied it to his love of champion racehorses.