Category: Technology

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?

Twitter intensifies effort to suppress QAnon, now one degree away from Aussie PM

Australia, Government, Main, Politics, Social Issues, Social Media, Technology, Technology News, USA

Twitter is broadening its crackdown on people who post content supportive of the “QAnon” movement. In case you’re not aware, QAnon folks believe that US President Donald Trump is locked into a covert power struggle with a bunch satanic pedophiles who control the world behind the scenes.

In other words, people like Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire financier who raped God knows how many children while hobnobbing with prominent people like Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and, funnily enough, Donald Trump, who has publicly embraced his QAnon followers. Epstein allegedly hanged himself last summer while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

In August it was reported that Twitter had banned over 7,000 QAnon-linked accounts.

“We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm,” the @TwitterSafety account posted 21 July. “In line with this approach, this week we are taking further action on so-called ‘QAnon’ activity across the service.”

This act of censorship led media outlets to question whether Twitter would apply the same standards to accounts held by elected officials or political candidates. There are apparently 15 QAnon supporters running for public office in the US this year—all Republicans, presumably.

Last week Twitter announced that elected officials who promulgate QAnon via their tweets will “will no longer be actively recommended by Twitter.” Which sounds like they’re not quite prepared to drop the ban hammer on politicians yet. Though it’s almost certainly just a matter of time.

QAnon isn’t confined to the US. Far from it. The movement is spreading around the world as if it’s being carried by Fast Courier Australia.

In fact, Twitter just shut down an account belonging to a close friend of our very own Prime Minister Scott Morrison. The Guardian identified him as Tim Stewart, whose wife was and might still be on Morrison’s staff. Twitter said Stewart was “permanently suspended for engaging in coordinated harmful activity.”

Stewart denies that he and Morrison have ever discussed QAnon together. What do you think?

Trump backs down, supports TikTok deal

Asia, Business, China, Countries, Data Management & Networks, Digital Systems Technology, General, Social Media, Technology, USA

TikTok’s US operations got a new lease on life Sunday after President Donald Trump announced that he was supporting a deal between the Chinese app’s parent company ByteDance and American tech company Oracle.

“I have given the deal my blessing,” Trump said. “I approve the deal in concept.”

So much for all of his anti TikTok histrionics. Just a few days ago he stated that, beginning Sunday, he would prohibit Americans from downloading the app. This came after he said he was “conceptually” opposed to a deal that allowed ByteDance to hold onto a majority stake of TikTok.

But Trump has given his “blessing” to a deal that does just that.

As Reuters reports, the deal places TikTok in the hands of a new company called TikTok Global. While headquartered in the US, TikTok Global is majority owned by ByteDance, which has an 80 percent stake. What remains is split between Oracle Corp (12.5 percent) and Walmart (7.5 percent).

Critically, though, all of TikTok’s user data from the US will be hosted by Oracle. The user data question was the main sticking point, as Washington argued that the Chinese Communist Party had access to TikTok’s databases, putting the privacy and security of American users at risk. Indeed, Trump and his lackeys routinely and melodramatically asserted that TikTok posed a grave “national security threat” to the United States.

Again, Trump previously stated that he would not support a deal that resulted in ByteDance retaining a majority stake. But he’s moved the goal posts and is justifying his reversal by pointing to the fact that approximately 40 percent of ByteDance stock is owned by American investors.

Add that 40 percent to Oracle’s 12.5 percent and Walmart’s 7.5 percent, and Americans technically have a majority stake. So goes the new argument, which your average online tutor will tell you is specious at best.

Of course, Trump will approve the deal not because it satisfies his administration’s “national security” concerns, but because it gives him one more thing to boast about in the run up to the presidential election on 3 November.

A new national poll from the Wall Street Journal and NBC News has Democratic nominee Joe Biden up 8 points on Trump.

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.

UK becomes the next country to ban Chinese tech company Huawei

Australia, Big Data, Business, China, Communications, Data Management & Networks, Digital Systems Technology, Europe, Social Issues, Technology, Technology News

Following the ban of Huawei from Australia back in August 2018, the Chinese giant tech firm has been making headlines in the UK recently in a recent controversial battle. The debate stems from a wide range of concerns, with some conspiracy theories ranging from the 5g network it was working on being the cause of the coronavirus, or rumours of it being able to supposedly break down blood cells like acid, to more serious concerns regarding data privacy. 

Similar to the decision from the Australian government back in 2018 to ban Huawei and fellow Chinese firm ZTE from supplying Australia with 5g technology. The ban came over much discussion and investigation into the companies as a security risk. This sentiment has not been successfully dissipated by Huawei, who have continued to face trouble around the world. At the time the responded in a tweet with the following statement: ‘We have been informed by the Govt that Huawei & ZTE have been banned from providing 5G technology to Australia. This is a [sic] extremely disappointing result for consumers. Huawei is a world leader in 5G. Has safely & securely delivered wireless technology in Aust for close to 15 yrs’. 

The most recent trouble comes as Huawei is banned from the UK from taking part in setting up its 5g wireless network for heightened connectivity. With much debate and protest from both sides the decision was made in July 2020 that there would be no more sale of Huawei technology in the UK after December of this year, and removed entirely from Britain’s 5g network by 2027, it was announced by the government. 

The decision has been suggested to be influenced by geopolitical tensions between the USA and China currently, with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declaring last month that “The tide is turning against Huawei as citizens around the world are waking up to the danger of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state.” 

ATTACKING THE ATTACKER

Business, Technology

22 November 2004 by Richard Chirgwin

ForeScout Launches SecuredWire in Oz

A newly-arrived security vendor is taking what I might call the honeypot principle as the basis of a suite of products designed to overcome the “day zero” problem.

ForeScout Technologies’ SecuredWire is, as general manager Richard Galpin told CommsWorld late last week, designed to focus on the attacker rather than the attack.

Here’s the operation which Galpin described: the ForeScout technology creates a weak “ghost” server outside the corporate firewall. Visible to the Internet, this virtual server will be polled and scanned by potential attackers (very much like a honeypot).

Having identified a weak address and port, the attacker will then try to initiate a conversation with that port, at which point the ForeScout server can capture the attacker’s IP address. It then blocks the address at the firewall for a user-configurable time (since most users are on dynamically-allocated addresses, Galpin said, there’s no point in blocking an ‘attack’ address forever).

While the virtual server has a normal IP address, the ‘real’ SecuredWire server does not. The company’s designed the system to communicate over a private Ethernet connection with the secured side of the network, to prevent attackers identifying the presence of the device.

There are, he said, three possible configurations. A SecuredWire server configured with one NIC – really only suitable for evaluation purposes – will be a fully visible member of the IP network it’s attached to. With two NICs, the device can sniff Internet connections without exposure, using a private IP address on the second NIC to communicate on the secured side of the corporate network.

A third, more secure configuration uses three NICs: one for the stealth sniffer, one for the private network, and the third providing a direct connection to the firewall.

The system can also be used to defend corporate networks against attacks such as worms which have already entered the system (for example, through a laptop). By shutting down only the source of malicious internal traffic, the company claims it can keep networks operational even after some machines have suffered virus or worm infection.

If you’re a pessimist like myself, you will have noticed that there is an attack vector which could be used against ForeScout: hit the system with a large number of attacks, apparently from a large number of originating IP addresses. If successfully used against a SecuredWire-defended e-commerce site, this could act as a denial-of-service attack in which ‘real’ users were unable to pass the address blocks.

However, as Galpin pointed out, this sort of attack depends on the assumption that the attacker knows SecuredWire is in use at the target site. In ‘stealth’ mode, with no IP address except that assigned to the ‘honeypot’ virtual server, finding the device wouldn’t be trivial. And the potential for such an attack, he said, is why the ‘time to live’ of the block is adjustable: an e-commerce site would set a comparatively short block time, to avoid the risk that genuine users might inherit an address that’s currently blocked.

SYS SOL GETS INTO IP TEL –

Business, Technology

22 November 2004 by Richard Chirgwin

Revamping Suite with HMP
System Solutions, a long-time supplier of telephony software, has taken the plunge and turned its attention to the world of IP telephony.

According to Ivor Livingstone, the company’s CEO, the move will open its MESSAGEmanager suite – which includes IVR, voice messaging, speech recognition, fax, SMS and other services – into the expanding world of business IP telephony.

Livingstone told CommsWorld that rather than redevelop the product set from scratch to support VoIP, the company decided to use Intel’s Host Media Processor as a gateway between its TDM-based heritage and the emerging IP telephony world.

Call control, he said, is very different in IP telephony, and would have demanded a considerable rewrite of software to support. While TDM switches are highly proprietary, the task of unravelling their behaviour is straightforward, if time-consuming. A third-party vendor like System Solutions would treat the switch as a state machine, and analyse the outputs it produced in response to different inputs.

The presence of competing standards also raised its head as a challenge.

Standards have “started to evolve – for example, SIP is very popular, but not a lot of the existing switch vendors support it. So we had to provide other flavours of IP telephony in our development project; the H.323 protocols, for example.”

Intel’s HMP had its feet in technology with which System Solutions was already familiar, having its own heritage in the acquisition of Dialogic some years ago. As a developer, he said, System Solutions found it relatively easy to use the HMP Global Call API to handle the integration to IP-based environments.

The developer, Livingstone said, uses Global Call to address the HMP hardware, and HMP provides the integration to the IP devices.

However, “validation against each of the switches – the Ciscos, the Alcatels, the Avayas – that’s challenging.”

While traditional TDM environments carry a lot of the features System Solutions is offering as software, Livingstone said by concentrating on its own capabilities, the company has been able to offer competitive features sets.

The more open world of IP telephony gives the company the opportunity to do things that don’t fit easily into traditional telephony systems, he said. “There’s a tremendous opportunity to develop productivity applications on top of telephony. These go beyond cost savings: you can embody IP telephony into all sorts of applications, far further than in traditional telephones.”

Livingstone said the expansion of System Solutions into the IP telephony space will expand its overseas opportunities, and also the scope of partners the company can work with. This is enhanced, he said, by the company’s work with presence servers and its ability to act as a media gateway.

Presence products, Livingstone said, create opportunities to work with companies whose traditional business is in data networking.

As for media gateways, he said, System Solutions is now in its third generation of product while he

TELSTRA VS CRAZY JOHN’S –

Communications, Technology

30 November 2004 by Richard Chirgwin

Are Wholesale Services `Up to Scratch’?

The lawsuit between Crazy John’s and Telstra is, in my mind, just as important to the privatisation debate as the ongoing and pointless discussion about whether services are ‘up to scratch’.

When Australians think of telecommunications services, they’re apt to think of what reaches the retail consumer. However, in a contestable market, with a wholesale-retail split, services are also what reaches the retailer from its upstream wholesaler.

What’s sold at wholesale is quite different from retail, and not just in volume.

The retailer buys a lot of things from wholesalers, but they all add up to this: retailers are buying the ability to make money. They’re buying the services themselves (mobile, fixed, or data); they’re sometimes buying a supply of physical products; they’re buying some level of tech support to keep the services running.

And most of all, they’re buying an income stream.

That income stream depends on accurate record-keeping – a point brought home years ago in the One.Tel collapse – but it’s still one of the most difficult and challenging parts of the wholesale-retail relationship.

In part, that’s because Australia is still relatively new to the wholesale-retail business. The Telecom of old had no need for the kind of wholesale business IT systems it now needs: there was no retail sector.

That changed throughout the 1990s, but we’re still only into perhaps the second or third generation of wholesale business process in this country.

The retail business, however, continues to change much faster than the systems which support it. This is partly because the wholesale market has become so contestable. When Telstra was the only source of wholesale business, products were available in ‘any colour, so long as it’s black’. Wholesale competition has brought with it the need to differentiate products; this, in turn, makes the products and the relationships more complex.

Herein lies the importance of the Telstra-Crazy John’s court case.

It’s possible that Australia’s telecommunications market is too monolithic for true contestability, at least for another decade to come.

Whether or not that’s true, a contestable market demands that the wholesale-retail relationship functions properly.

In trying to determine whether or not Telstra’s services are ‘up to scratch’, the federal government is gazing with a fixed stare at rural and regional services – not even the whole of the carrier’s retail business.

As a result, the government is ignoring whether or not the carrier’s wholesale services – upon which the storefront retailers depend – are also ‘up to scratch’. This seems strange, because most retailers (by number if not by value) are the kind of business which is supposed to be the Liberal Party’s core constituency: the owner-operated, probably franchise-based SME.

The Crazy John’s lawsuit is more important than the industry thinks.

MIDWAY BETWEEN “ACCOUNTING SEPARATION” AND “STRUCTURAL SEPARATION”

Business, Technology

06 December 2004 by Richard Chirgwin

Telstra’s Wholesale-Retail Split

If you wanted evidence of Australians’ mal de tete, run through the Telstra sale process. The population were skinned for half the value of the shares they bought, but they still elected a government committed to skinning them a third time.

This is relevant, given last week’s events. The consensus about Ziggy Switkowski’s successor is that whomever gets the gong, he’ll have to be a salesman. As Kate Askew and Colin Kruger put it in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald, the next CEO will be expected to “beat the drum” to relieve the carrier’s supposedly inadequate share price.

If that doesn’t scare you, it should. Drum-beating will only serve political interests. It won’t change any of Telstra’s value propositions as an investment – the structural limits on its growth.

What the market now expects, and accepts without even breathing hard, is that regardless of Telstra’s real value, the company will get a CEO willing to pump the share price so the government can sell its 51%.

All of this makes the proposed “wholesale-retail” split a fascinating move.

It’s a couple of years now since the federal government swore that such a split was impossible and unfeasible; and since a federal opposition, cowed by lobbying from the money markets, backed away from a Senate inquiry designed to investigate the structural separation of Telstra.

Back then, the market was dead against any notion of a structural separation – and the investment community was the only sector to speak with one voice. Nearly all of the submissions made to the ill-fated structural separation inquiry were in favour of such a move, a trend which froze the government’s blood. Its response was to write to various institutions, asking them to put the investment community’s case, and was rewarded with a unanimous vote against the proposal. At this point, the ALP lost its bottle and the inquiry was canned.

The thrust of the opposition was simple: Telstra, the investors argued, is only valuable as a vertically-integrated business. As a sop to Telstra’s competitors, which were unanimous supporters of structural separation, the government instituted the “accounting separation” regime which the ACCC has been working to implement for the last year.

Last week’s announcement takes Telstra much further down a path which it (and Ziggy) had strenuously resisted. It’s a “best of both worlds” approach that goes further than accounting separation, without sacrificing Telstra’s capacity to act as an integrated carrier.

Exit the ACCC (As If!)

Telstra’s fervent hope is that the move will appease the ACCC – and that might give us some idea of how the carrier plans to approach the job of “drum beating” in the lead-up to the sale.

I predict its most immediate strategy will be to explain to investors that the more Telstra is able to satisfy the ACCC, the more its share price will rise. This message will be put in a simple, but relentless, media placement strategy to the doyens of the dailies.

That also goes part of the way to explaining why the share price had to be personalised to Ziggy: the thorny relationship between Telstra and the ACCC can now be sheeted home to a departing CEO.

The wink-and-nod of the private briefings will be that the wholesale-retail split was impossible to implement sooner, because it was resisted by the soon-to-be former CEO – an explanation which is probably true, but incomplete.

The other side of the wholesale-retail split goes back to the ACCC. It’s spent a year on the job of implementing the accounting separation regime, and last September it issued a new – and much more detailed – set of record keeping rules for the separation process.

You can bet that the RKRs were the subject of much board debate, and I’ll bet that once the RKRs were fully understood, the board decided that the now-approved split was the easiest road to compliance.

The same restructure will, if the weekend reports were accurate, also create a media group which is to inherit the “sick man of Telstra” – the 50% stake in the loss-making Foxtel which commits the carrier to an ongoing subsidy of the pay-TV business.

Telstra’s never going to sell Foxtel, because to do so would create a ready-made competitor with last-mile access; and as anyone who’s read an Optus annual report can tell you, the best way to sell a pay-TV network is to have it carry phone calls as well.

If Foxtel is to stay with Telstra, then the media division will stay with Telstra. But if those assets are rolled up into a separate division, the carrier can probably convince the markets (and the ACCC) that a separate float is possible.

It’s a scenario which fits with the wholesale-retail split: give the appearance of division, without having to put the integrated business at risk.

I don’t think the ACCC will be fooled. And I hope the public isn’t fooled either.


Street Fighter 5 Stop Motion Animation Hand vs. Akuma Fight Scene

Technology

Extremely popular Street Fighter has actually lastly revealed the part two launch to the renowned video game Street Fighter versus Capcom 2. The video game has actually been actually called as Wonder vs. Capcom 3: Future from both planets. The video game is actually being actually established for pair of systems- the Xbox 360 and also PlayStation 3. The video game is because of launch in the spring season from 2011.

New details for “Street Fighter 5” will feature the next wave of DLC characters and the Arcade Mode will be a game mod in the sequel.

Several rumors are making rounds regarding the long speculated “Arcade Mode” within “Street Fighter 5” as game modder Resvgrm posted a video featuring an “Arcade Mode” styled gameplay. The new Arcade Mode is located within the Story sub-menu, where it is listed below the Character Story.

Speaking about individuals, they are actually pre getting their duplicate this video game, which is very important as well. This is actually on call at a lot of primary on the web establishments. Maintain going through for more details on pre purchasing right here, however to begin with permit’s only go over concerning the video game.

A funny video created as a stop motion animation has fight scenes mimicking Akuma’s deadly moves versus a real life HAND.

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1. Repainted 2D haze along with misinterpretation
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