Category: Software

16 year old Miami highschool student hacks school system

Big Data, Business, Communications, Data Management & Networks, Digital Systems Technology, Education, Government, North America, Politics, Regulation News, Software, Technology, Technology News

It’s every kids dream for school to be cancelled, but for many students 2020 has already been stressful enough. Students in Florida, USA however were shocked to find themselves locked out of their online classrooms come the first day of term this September. Having to adapt to new online learning environments already, students found themselves rightfully confused by their failed attempts for online access. 

So what happened?

Miami-Dade Schools’ online classes were brought down, a crash of the entire school system that saw students locked out of their online classes for the first three days back to school. Students and teachers alike however were taken a back to find out this was not the result of a complex hacking attack or situation: it was a 16 year student from the same school district. An unlikely teenager to carry out the attack, the result made national and international news headlines.

The 275,000 students in the school’s districts who tried to log on that morning found the system to be overloaded by data. The 16 year old junior in high school – who’s personal details have not been released – was called ‘polite’ and ‘intelligent’ by his neighbours. One neighbour, a Ben Herrera was quoted by the Miami Herald as saying: “He’s an awesome kid, […] What saddens me is how he’s going to be portrayed, and we’ve got to realize with this pandemic that kids are bored, isolated, stuck with too much time on their hands and maybe they do something irresponsible.” 
While neighbours might be showing sympathy for the boy, the school district is persuing their multiple charges of Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks. The boy claims his attack was constituted from a free and easily available free software download, which begs the question: why was the My School Online learning platform so vulnerable to an amateur attack?

Mozilla wants to know about your negative YouTube experiences

General, Info Tech, Main, Social Media, Software, Technology, Technology News, USA

Remember Mozilla’s #YouTubeRegrets survey? Neither do I, but the company has parlayed it into a new browser extension called RegretsReporter, which collects info sent by users to investigate “why YouTube recommends what it does.”

A “YouTube Regret” is a complaint about a video that was recommended to you by YouTube’s algorithm. As Mozilla writes on its website, “With the RegretsReporter extension, you can immediately take action to send us recommended videos that you regret watching—like pseudoscience or anti-LGBTQ+ content.”

This all began last October when Mozilla shared 28 different anecdotes about bad YouTube recommendations, though to be fair the users seem to be at fault most of the time.

One person searched “fail videos” because they wanted to see people “fall or get a little hurt.” They proceeded to click on videos showing “minor” car accidents, which eventually led to videos of severe car accidents. Go figure. There’s a lot to be said for precision in the context of an online search. If I want to find an adwords agency in Sydney, for instance, that’s what I’m going to type in. Vague searches turn up mixed results.

In another #YouTubeRegret, a“10-year-old sweet daughter” who allegedly wanted to watch some tap dancing videos wound up taking a deep dive into “contortionist videos that give her horrible unsafe body-harming and body-image-damaging advice.” Now, this sweet daughter’s guardian says, she is “restricting her eating and drinking” and shouting “Work to eat! Work to drink!”

One guy even blames YouTube’s recommendations for his failed marriage. You see, “YouTube just kept feeding her [his wife] paranoia, fear and anxiety one video after another,” and now “she refuses to even consider professional help because she no longer trusts anyone.” So much for personal responsibility.

Anyhow, Mozilla now has the RegretsReporter, the goal of which, Mozilla says, is to discover the answers to burning questions like:

“What kinds of recommended videos do users regret watching? Are there usage patterns that lead to more regrettable content being recommended? What does a YouTube rabbit hole look like, and at what point does it become something you wish you never clicked on?”

Let’s hope we get the answers soon—the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

THE ONGOING, UNSURPRISING KAZAA SAGA

Software

09 December 2004 Richard Chirgwin

Court Awash With Almost-News

The Kazaa case in Sydney at the moment (had I a couple of weeks free and paid for, I would have loved to be in the courtroom!) has been full of ‘events’, which is great to feed the copy-mills, but in lots of ways there’s been surprisingly little ‘news’.

In the main, the cut and thrust of argument and counter-argument has centred around the issues which have surrounded Kazaa ever since it hit the streets: what is the purpose of this software? Does it have a ‘legitimate and non-infringing’ role, apart from sharing music? Could Sharman Networks do anything to prevent copyright theft? Does Sharman Networks have a greater responsibility than, say, the maker of CD-burning software? And so on.

Oh, there have been one or two surprises – but mostly those have been around the issue of the role, worth, and impartiality of expert witnesses.

Six? Seven? Days into the trial, and all we’ve managed is a lot of argument about the nature of the software, the technical capabilities of the company, what theoretical capabilities exist to ‘filter or not’, whether or not a Kazaa server exists, ever existed, or is possible, and whether an expert witness switched sides.

Stirring stuff, but mostly it’s a reiteration of a debate that has gone on for years.

At the moment, the music industry is feeling pretty cocky. Except for the moment when former dotcom executive Tom Mizzone told the court, to Justice Murray Wilcox’s surprise, that he could spy on Kazaa users, or maybe not, things seem to have gone the industry’s way.

I’d probably bet that on questions of technology, Sharman’s legal goose is cooked.

But, in spite of a pay-to-play expert witness spending lots of expensive expert witness billable hours talking about the economics of Kazaa (and how it was going to kill the music industry), there is going to be a fly in the ointment when the industry tries to prove real, rather than theoretical, damage.

It’s all very well for someone to show charts explaining the impact of free file sharing on the sale of music. But what about the historical impact of Kazaa on sales?

Music sales in 1993 were roughly $460 million, and now they’re nearly $600 million (at wholesale).

Sales dipped after peaks in 1992, 1996, and 2001; and have recovered to a higher level after every dip (except for the current one, for which figures aren’t complete).

Local acts are booming.

The category which shows the most catastrophic sales collapse is DVD singles. It’s a delicious statistic: some idiot made a couple of thousand DVD singles, they flopped, and were returned to the stores – generating negative sales. Oh, and because the ARIA people aren’t overly mathematical, they don’t realise that going from positive to negative isn’t particularly valid as a percentage.

You’d have a real job of it to defend the proposition that “DVD singles don’t sell because of Kazaa”.

Looking chronologically, it’s clear that any impact Kazaa had was more-than-compensated for the emergence of new acts.

If there is a 2004 slump (as I said, it’s too early to tell), it coincides not with the emergence of Kazaa, but with the take-off of iTunes.

Is Aria aware of the weakness of putting forth a “cause and effect” relationship between sales and downloads?

I can’t say. However, having looked regularly at its statistics over the last couple of years, I can say this: Aria has redesigned its site, and has drastically reduced the amount of historical data it offers to the public at large. The only stuff that’s easy to find is the current statistical link; you can no longer access (for example) three-year-old Aria statistics.

After all, if the public were given information, we might form our own conclusions.

And nobody wants public opinion to compete with pay-to-play expert opinion, do they?

While we’re on the topic of informed opinion: music industry data is available and is made public. Anybody at all can read the data for themselves; so why would somebody be so bone-idle as to merely say that “IFPI says sales have collapsed”? Global sales aren’t relevant to the Kazaa case, because this is alleging copyright infringement in Australia; the global number is meaningless given the huge ups-and-downs between different countries; and most of the catastrophe is in America.

You’re only that lazy if you’re Reuters…