!Cool Resources

From sexual harassment to the glass ceiling, the challenges women face in the workplace are suddenly front and center in the educational technology world.

Jake Appelbaum et al., are reporting on XKEYSCORE selection rules that target users—and people who just visit the websites of—Tor, Tails, and other sites. This isn’t just metadata; this is “full take” content that’s stored forever. This code demonstrates the ease with which an XKeyscore rule can analyze the full content of intercepted connections. The fingerprint first checks every message using the “email_address” function to see if the message is to or from “bridges@torproject.org”. Next, if the address matched, it uses the “email_body” function to search the full content of the email for a particular piece of text – in this case, “https://bridges.torproject.org/”. If the “email_body” function finds what it is looking for, it passes the full email text to a C++ program which extracts the bridge addresses and stores them in a database. ...

Encryption is hard. When NSA leaker Edward Snowden wanted to communicate with journalist Glenn Greenwald via encrypted email, Greenwald couldn’t figure out the venerable crypto program PGP even after Snowden made a 12-minute tutorial video. Nadim Kobeissi wants to bulldoze that steep learning curve.

The only progress you can make in emotionally charged situations is dealing with emotions.

Businesses that do not encrypt their information risk losing it. Legal professionals risk private and confidential client information when they do not take steps to secure it properly. Your operating system has encryption built in, through Windows Bitlocker or Mac File Vault II. If you are one of those lawyers on an older version of […]

Coming soon to a protest near you: drones that fire pepper spray bullets. Desert Wolf’s website states that its Skunk octacopter drone is fitted with four high-capacity paintball barrels, each capable of firing up to 20 bullets per second. In addition to pepper-spray ammunition, the firm says it can also be armed with dye-marker balls and solid plastic balls. The machine can carry up to 4,000 bullets at a time as well as “blinding lasers” and on-board speakers that can communicate warnings to a crowd.

Hacking Team is an Italian malware company that sells exploit tools to governments. Both Kaspersky Lab and Citizen Lab have published detailed reports on its capabilities against Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry smart phones. They allow, for example, for covert collection of emails, text messages, call history and address books, and they can be used to log keystrokes and obtain search history data. They can take screenshots, record audio from the phones to monitor calls or ambient conversations, hijack the phone’s camera to snap pictures or piggyback on the phone’s GPS system to monitor the user’s location. The Android version can also enable the phone’s Wi-Fi function to siphon data from the phone wirelessly instead of using the cell network to transmit it. The latter would incur data charges and raise the phone owner’s suspicion...

As a writing teacher, I know that I must write – and I do: blog posts, book reviews, a Slice of Life every Tuesday, letters to my students in the reading journals and writer’s notebooks,  les…

A small software app called Onionshare offers the most secure file sharing available. So why hasn't anyone heard of it? Well, mostly because it was

The A.V. Club digs deep into film, TV, music, games, books and more.

Anti-surveillance activists flew a blimp above the National Security Agency’s massive, $1.5 billion data center in Bluffdale, Utah on Friday as an act of protest against the NSA’s contentious collection of vast amounts of the world’s digital data.

Telegram Web App. More info & source code here: https://github.com/zhukov/webogram

Flash-drafting helps get thoughts down on the page quickly so writers are open to large-scale revisions.

Experience Telegram on your computer in a swift and seamless way.

Fast. Secure. Powerful.

The local name for the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington is “the Badlands,” and with good reason. Pockmarked with empty lots and burned-out row...

The U.S. was far and away the most popular hacking target in the world.

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the vast amount of data contained on modern cellphones must be protected from routine inspection.

We find Everything.

Newly uncovered components of a digital surveillance tool used by more than 60 governments worldwide provide a rare glimpse at the extensive ways law enforcement and intelligence agencies use the tool to surreptitiously record and steal data from mobile phones. The modules, made by the Italian company Hacking Team, were uncovered by researchers working independently \[…\]

What technology does what? This edtech chart collects examples of edtech tools in a range of categories for teaching and learning.

Thoughts, ideas, and comments on educational technology by author and speaker John Sowash