Zcash (ZEC), the new digital currency lauded for its privacy features, is launching today amidst some massive hype. But until enough tokens become available on exchanges, Zcash enthusiasts are poised to acquire their ZEC first-hand by mining for it, either by setting up a home rig or by signing up for a cloud mining contract.
The report, “Securing Our Future: Closing the Cybersecurity Talent Gap,” surveyed 3,779 adults aged 18 to 26, from 12 countries around the world, including the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
a high-paying career as a cyber security professional requires skills millennials value, such as problem solving, analytical thinking and communication — and employment opportunities are available across a wide variety of sectors, including start-ups, government and hospitals.
Key findings from the report:
64 percent of young adults in the U.S. heard about cyberattacks in the news last year, up from 36 percent the previous year, and compared to 48 percent of young adults worldwide;
70 percent of millennials in the U.S. said cyber security programs or activities are available to them, up from 46 percent the previous year, and compared to 68 percent worldwide;
21 percent of young men expressed interest in cyber competitions, compared to 15 percent of women;
48 percent or respondents said more information about the specifics of cyber security jobs would help increase interest;
59 percent of young men and 51 percent of young women received formal cyber safety lessons in school, up from 43 percent and 40 percent respectively last year; and
40 percent of respondents said parents are the most influential people helping them with career advice, and 19 percent said no one was influential in helping them with career advice.
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more on cybersecurity in this blog
4-week eCourse Beginning Monday, September 12, 2016
E-government tools and resources bring many people to your library for such activities as filing and paying taxes online, locating Medicare/Medicaid providers and reviews, checking student loan status, tracking regulatory changes for industries, monitoring ongoing legislation as well as codified law and court rulings, and much more. This hands-on eCourse also explores the information published online by the U. S. federal government through the Government Printing Office and specific agencies and government branches.
Experienced online instructor and consultant Diane Kovacs covers the best sites to begin researching for government information in general and specifically for business, healthcare, genealogy, history, current government, legal, regulatory, taxes, retirement, insurance, and state and local government information.
Since developing his theory of liquid modernity in the late 1990s – which describes our age as one in which “all agreements are temporary, fleeting, and valid only until further notice” – he has become a leading figure in the field of sociology.
Q. You are skeptical of the way people protest through social media, of so-called “armchair activism,” and say that the internet is dumbing us down with cheap entertainment. So would you say that the social networks are the new opium of the people?
A. The question of identity has changed from being something you are born with to a task: you have to create your own community. But communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What the social networks can create is a substitute. The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age. But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is a great man, gave his first interview after being elected to Eugenio Scalfari, an Italian journalist who is also a self-proclaimed atheist. It was a sign: real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you.Social media don’t teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy… But most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only things they see are the reflections of their own face. Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap.
The proposed social media privacy law, scheduled to be considered by the state Senate Wednesday, bars any institution from asking or requiring an applicant or enrolled student to disclose a user name or password for a personal social media account.
Under the bill, a student could also not be prevented from participating in extracurricular activities if they refuse to disclose social media accounts or provide a list of contacts associated with those accounts.
Yochai Benklerexplains: “The various formats of the networked public sphere provide anyone with an outlet to speak, to inquire, to investigate, without need to access the resources of a major media organization.”
Democratic bodies are typically elected in periods of three to five years, yet citizen opinions seem to fluctuate daily and sometimes these mood swings grow to enormous proportions. When thousands of people all start tweeting about the same subject on the same day, you know that something is up. With so much dynamic and salient political diversity in the electorate, how can policy-makers ever reach a consensus that could satisfy everyone?
At the same time, it would be a grave mistake to discount the voices of the internet as something that has no connection to real political situations.
What happened in the UK was not only a political disaster, but also a vivid example of what happens when you combine the uncontrollable power of the internet with a lingering visceral feeling that ordinary people have lost control of the politics that shape their lives.
Polarization as a driver of populism
People who have long entertained right-wing populist ideas, but were never confident enough to voice them openly, are now in a position to connect to like-minded others online and use the internet as a megaphone for their opinions.
The resulting echo chambers tend to amplify and reinforce our existing opinions, which is dysfunctional for a healthy democratic discourse. And while social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter generally have the power to expose us to politically diverse opinions, research suggests that the filter bubbles they sometimes create are, in fact, exacerbated by the platforms’ personalization algorithms, which are based on our social networks and our previously expressed ideas. This means that instead of creating an ideal type of a digitally mediated “public agora”, which would allow citizens to voice their concerns and share their hopes, the internet has actually increased conflict and ideological segregation between opposing views, granting a disproportionate amount of clout to the most extreme opinions.
The disintegration of the general will
In political philosophy, the very idea of democracy is based on the principal of the general will, which was proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century. Rousseau envisioned that a society needs to be governed by a democratic body that acts according to the imperative will of the people as a whole.
There can be no doubt that a new form of digitally mediated politics is a crucial component of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: the internet is already used for bottom-up agenda-setting, empowering citizens to speak up in a networked public sphere, and pushing the boundaries of the size, sophistication and scope of collective action. In particular, social media has changed the nature of political campaigning and will continue to play an important role in future elections and political campaigns around the world.
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more on the impact of technology on democracy in this IMS blog:
