The digital attack that brought Estonia to a standstill 10 years ago was the first shot in a cyberwar that has been raging between Moscow and the west ever since
It began at exactly 10pm on 26 April, 2007, when a Russian-speaking mob began rioting in the streets of Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, killing one person and wounding dozens of others. That incident resonates powerfully in some of the recent conflicts in the US. In 2007, the Estonian government had announced that a bronze statue of a heroic second world war Soviet soldier was to be removed from a central city square. For ethnic Estonians, the statue had less to do with the war than with the Soviet occupation that followed it, which lasted until independence in 1991. For the country’s Russian-speaking minority – 25% of Estonia’s 1.3 million people – the removal of the memorial was another sign of ethnic discrimination.
That evening, Jaan Priisalu – a former risk manager for Estonia’s largest bank, Hansabank, who was working closely with the government on its cybersecurity infrastructure – was at home in Tallinn with his girlfriend when his phone rang. On the line was Hillar Aarelaid, the chief of Estonia’s cybercrime police.
“It’s going down,” Aarelaid declared. Alongside the street fighting, reports of digital attacks were beginning to filter in. The websites of the parliament, major universities, and national newspapers were crashing. Priisalu and Aarelaid had suspected something like this could happen one day. A digital attack on Estoniahad begun.
“The Russian theory of war allows you to defeat the enemy without ever having to touch him,” says Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. “Estonia was an early experiment in that theory.”
Since then, Russia has only developed, and codified, these strategies. The techniques pioneered in Estonia are known as the “Gerasimov doctrine,” named after Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian military. In 2013, Gerasimov published an article in the Russian journal Military-Industrial Courier, articulating the strategy of what is now called “hybrid” or “nonlinear” warfare. “The lines between war and peace are blurred,” he wrote. New forms of antagonism, as seen in 2010’s Arab spring and the “colour revolutions” of the early 2000s, could transform a “perfectly thriving state, in a matter of months, and even days, into an arena of fierce armed conflict”.
Russia has deployed these strategies around the globe. Its 2008 war with Georgia, another former Soviet republic, relied on a mix of both conventional and cyber-attacks, as did the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Both began with civil unrest sparked via digital and social media – followed by tanks. Finland and Sweden have experienced near-constant Russian information operations. Russian hacks and social media operations have also occurred during recent elections in Holland, Germany, and France. Most recently, Spain’s leading daily, El País, reported on Russian meddling in the Catalonian independence referendum. Russian-supported hackers had allegedly worked with separatist groups, presumably with a mind to further undermining the EU in the wake of the Brexit vote.
The Kremlin has used the same strategies against its own people. Domestically, history books, school lessons, and media are manipulated, while laws are passed blocking foreign access to the Russian population’s online data from foreign companies – an essential resource in today’s global information-sharing culture. According to British military researcher Keir Giles, author of Nato’s Handbook of Russian Information Warfare, the Russian government, or actors that it supports, has even captured the social media accounts of celebrities in order to spread provocative messages under their names but without their knowledge. The goal, both at home and abroad, is to sever outside lines of communication so that people get their information only through controlled channels.
According to its detractors, RT is Vladimir Putin’s global disinformation service, countering one version of the truth with another in a bid to undermine the whole notion of empirical truth. And yet influential people from all walks of public life appear on it, or take its money. You can’t criticise RT’s standards, they say, if you don’t watch it. So I watched it. For a week.
My note; so this is why Oliver Stone in his “documentary” went gentle on Putin, so his son can have a job. #Nepotism #FakeNews
RT’s stated mission is to offer an “alternative perspective on major global events”, but the world according to RT is often downright surreal.
Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, about Putin’s Russia, and now a senior visiting fellow in global affairs at the London School of Economics, was in Moscow working in television when Russia Today first started hiring graduates from Britain and the US. “The people were really bright, they were being paid well,” he says. But they soon found they were being ordered to change their copy, or instructed how to cover certain stories to reflect well on the Kremlin. “Everyone had their own moment when they first twigged that this wasn’t like the BBC,” he says. “That, actually, this is being dictated from above.” The coverage of Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008 was a lightbulb moment for many, he says. They quit.
Research from the Yale Center of Teaching and Learning highlights the ups and downs of classroom tech use, including the juxtaposition of increased engagement from using familiar platforms for assignments and decreased motivation and grades from limitless internet exposure, eSchool News reports.
Educators must ensure a cautious approach to tech use that doesn’t make students overly reliant upon it to complete tasks and solve problems, using social networking and collaborative platforms as a means to an end rather than the be-all solution.
Before adopting and implementing it, educators should consider how any given piece of classroom technology will improve studying, what the possible pitfalls are and how to avoid them, how it will help meet goals or close gaps, and how it will improve workflow, according to eSchool News.
Sir Jon Cunliffe, the Bank’s deputy governor for financial stability, told the BBC on Wednesday: “People need to be clear this is not an official currency. No central bank stands behind it, no government stands behind it.”
US regulators have moved towards treating some of them as currencies, whereas Korean regulators see them as commodities.
A steady stream of about 3,600 new Bitcoins are created a day – with about 16.5 million now in circulation from a maximum limit of 21 million.
Bitcoin’s Price Swings Have Been Especially Crazy in the Last 24 Hours. Here’s Why
To spell out precisely how volatile we’re talking here, it lost $1,000 in value in the space of around 10 minutes.
the IRS just got a court to back it up in its demand that Coinbase hand over details of thousands of accounts that have been high-volume bitcoin traders, so it can collect back-taxes for unreported transactions.
Vitor Constancio, the vice-president of the European Central Bank, warned on Wednesday that people should think twice about buying into bitcoin at this stage in the game.
Minutes from November 29 meeting . (all documents arework in progress)
Consultation groups:
CATT (mixed of collective bargaining and various academic areas), student technology groups, TPR (Technological and Pedagogical Roundtable) – tech issue specific to faculty. not tech admin but broad issues.
Student tech fee commitee, ITS staff, SCSU Divisions (?); Management Team, MN stte system office / CIO; It external review members (?); STCC IT
More on charge of these groups
IT Strategic Planning – Lisa Foss, Phil Thorson, Shelly Mumm, Mike Freer, LaVonne, Joe Ben ueckler
Strategic Planning Team meets in the summer with the Management Team.
System office did the Educause survey w faculty and students. Horizon Report
D2L move to the cloud, domain change.
Lisa Foss; mini swats from SCSU deans . summer shaped a “certain perspectives”
2010 strategic vision for IT (30+ pages) never got off the ground, but the teams are the same. An external 2012 consultant (Koludes COmpany)
IT assessment group (?)
latest discussions: how to consult better campus users (Tom ?)
SCSU Strategic Plan as a template. Using similar/same goals and objectives: 1. engage students. objectives (come from the SCSU plan) a. integrate student learning and support. Strategy and source. This is on the Sharepoint site (Phil Thorson email
SCSU Tech Plan Engaged Students Objectives: what people will be able to do, if the plan is successful. 1.D. change from Engagement to Student Belonging. Analytics and Social Media is in the objectives. the objectives as they are too broad. I understand the need to keep them broad, but as they are they are too broad, which poses the danger of each stakeholder to interpret differently.
training and instruction what is the state and what is the plan. instead of department, can we build a network of people spread across departments. nationally 92% ecar survey https://www.educause.edu/ecar
engaged campus strategic priority. comprehensive technology training (?). the text reads as it is pertaining to IT staff only. Is it? if it is the entire campus, why does not mention it. so it is IT only at this point and needs to be reworded to be clear that included the entire campus. 2010 plan did not think about all different issues of technology in each department. one size fit the entire campus.
Engaged Communities: four campuses – Alnwick, Plymouth, SC and online
technology consortia: how to partner, lead etc
serving community members as community patrons.
what are the tactics comes late. aspirational
what the roadblocks. innovation
efficiencies, automation.
Tom (the faculty from the School of Health and Human Services – telemedicine) Janet Tilstred Communication Disorders
Phil Thorson: how is risk management fit in the complex issues.
Next step: what is this plan mean for COSE, for the other schools?
PALS is housed in Mankato, 40+ years, shared by all MnSCU institutions. smaller libraries with smaller staff benefit.
Funding: Centrally from the Chancellor Office and privately.
Ex Libris. Alma (management software) discovery software is Primo. Implementation from Sept 2017 to 2019
value-added services? A value–added service (VAS) is a popular telecommunications industry term for non-coreservices, or, in short, all services beyond standard voice calls and fax transmissions. However, it can be used in any service industry, for services available at little or no cost, to promote their primary business.
one search point; phys + electr; integrated into central system; academic resources available in central index; analytics and reporting; library consortia
EZ Proxy – provides access to library resources off campus
Islandora – open source digital asset management solution tha preserves, manages, and provide access to docs, unique history (photos, publications); research, other resources
Islandora is considered for OER, link to course materials through D2L
Leganto – expensive ExLibris for D2L integration
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Thurs, Nov 30 – continuation from Tues, Nov 28
Islandora. open source digital assessment tool. STCC is using Islandora
Primo is the discovery tool for campus only w subscription. PALS does not fund Primo. PALS does it through state-wide dbases.
ILL of electronic resources among campuses; the new system is making it easier.
your comments about the new system making electronic resources more available : does it mean that I will not have to go through my campus ILL persona can “borrow” directly? or it is too optimistic to expect that?
Stephen Kelly: Tim Anderson has shared with me some thoughts on how Islandora can assist with archiving Open Educational Resources (OERs), but could you comment further on that for the benefit of everyone on the call? Answer: safe place to save OER. Drupal-based front end. Customizable. What is the connection to Primo
Stephen Kelly: Could it facilitate easier sharing of resources between institutions? For instance, if an OER was created at one institution and uploaded to Islandora, could it easily be populated for every other institution to access the materials as well?
Piggybacking on Stephen Kelly: are the account permissions similar to the average social media tool, where faculty can decide how “wide” the permission of h/er OER product is? E.g. a blog or YouTube / Kaltura can have: private / unlisted / public levels. Does Islandora function the same?
he assembled a team of men with a wide range of knowledge, including mathematicians, submarine specialists, and salvage men. Instead of asking them to consult with each other to come up with an answer, he asked each of them to offer his best guess about how likely each of the scenarios was. To keep things interesting, the guesses were in the form of wagers, with bottles of Chivas Regal as prizes.
Needless to say no one of these pieces of information could tell Craven where the Scorpion was. But Craven believed that if he put all the answers together, building a composite picture of how the Scorpion died, he’d end up with a pretty good idea of where it was.
Craven is hard to keep up with. His mind darts from why the Navy should make subs out of glass to the sad end of his long telephone friendship with the late Marlon Brando to the remarkable prodigiousness of his small experimental Hawaiian vineyard.
Craven’s system exploits the dramatic temperature difference between ocean water below 3,000 feet – perpetually just above freezing – and the much warmer water and air above it. That temperature gap can be harnessed to create a nearly unlimited supply of energy. Although the scientific concepts behind cold-water energy have been around for decades, Craven made them real when he founded the state-funded Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii in 1974 on Keahole Point, near Kona.
Jeff Kao Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Language Nerd, Biglaw Refugee. jeffykao.com
More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked
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The Federal Communications Commission released a plan on Tuesday to dismantle landmark regulations that ensure equal access to the internet, clearing the way for internet service companies to charge users more to see certain content and to curb access to some websites.
The proposal, made by the F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, is a sweeping repeal of rules put in place by the Obama administration. The rules prohibit high-speed internet service providers, or I.S.P.s, from stopping or slowing down the delivery of websites. They also prevent the companies from charging customers extra fees for high-quality streaming and other services.
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FCC chairman defends net neutrality repeal plan
An analysis of the millions of comments conducted by the data company Gravwell in October found that just 17.4 percent of the comments to the FCC on the net neutrality rules came from real people.
Because many internet services for mobile devices include limits on data use, the changes will be visible there first. In one dramatic scenario, internet services would begin to resemble cable-TV packages, where subscriptions could be limited to a few dozen sites and services. Or, for big spenders, a few hundred. Fortunately, that’s not a likely scenario. Instead, expect a gradual shift towards subscriptions that provide unlimited access to certain preferred providers while charging extra for everything else.
Even Verizon’s “unlimited” plans impose limits. The company’s cheapest unlimited mobile plan limits video streaming quality to 480p resolution, which is DVD quality, on phones and 720p resolution, the lower tier of HD quality, on tablets. Customers can upgrade to a more expensive plan that enables 720p resolution on phones and 1080p on tablets, but the higher quality 4K video standard is effectively forbidden.
Meanwhile, Comcast customers in 28 states face 1 terabyte data caps. Going over that limit costs subscribers as much as an additional $50 a month. As 4K televisions become more common, more households may hit the limit. That could prompt some to stick with a traditional pay-TV package from Comcast.
Republican FCC Chair Ajit Pai argues that Federal Trade Commission will be able to protect consumers and small business from abuses by internet providers once the agency’s current rules are off the books. But that’s not clear.
The good news is the internet won’t change overnight, if it all. Blake Reid, a clinical professor at Colorado Law, says the big broadband providers will wait to see how the inevitable legal challenges to the new FCC order shakeout. They’ll probably keep an eye on 2018 and even 2020 elections as well.
