Since you seem to know the internal workings of MS, have they ever issued a patch to remove fraudulent or "defective" root CAs? Is any of those hundreds of OS updates I have on my PC SSL-related?
I'm not a security expert and my crypto knowledge is limited. But from what I can understand, the general principle here is that trusting somebody unknown is considered more dangerous than not trusting somebody you know. In addition, the meaning of "trust" in the SSL context is that "you can trust me that anything that happens between me and you is encrypted, will stay between you and me, and nobody else can hear us". It's not "trust me, visiting my website won't harm your computer or your person". There has to be a way to ensure that your are using your Bank and not a fraudster or zombie system. SSL may not be perfect (considering it's several decades old) but it's a first step.
By the way, accepting a certificate by clicking OK is the equivalent of putting your signature on that site's terms of usage, not the other way around. So we'd better all read and learn more about it, it's not Mozilla's or the operating system's responsibility to teach us about it.
As I write, Turkey has 305,678 FF4 downloads, many more than most EU and ex-USSR countries. Also it is a major US military ally, which adds to the need for trust by default.
If you look at the pending certificates page of Mozilla you'll see that getting that an approval is a slow, painful (due to the bureaucracy needed) and expensive (due to the need for major lawyer firms getting involved) matter. For example, visiting Mozilla headquarters and saying "I am the president of country/corporation X, please add my root CA" does not work.
Could you please clarify whether there are specific laws in the US for "passing the money down to employees" when a company goes titsup? Where I live, this has not ever happened - when a company goes bankrupt the employees never get lost wages or even a single cent.
Sadly, Facebook is the Crack cocaine of the internet.
Wow, I didn't know US had so many illegal users of crack cocaine under the age of 13. Thank god Facebook thinks of the children and allows them to do crack only when reach the age of 13.
I was delighted by the glow.mozilla.org site. However two conflicting observations are puzzling me and make me wonder what role politics will play in the battle of the giant browsers:
On the one hand, in the Mozilla country breakdown list they attempt to list FYROM properly under its UN official name as "Macedonia, F.Y.R. of" (unlike e.g. C.I.A. Internet Usage Reports, Internetworldstats.com, BBC.co.uk etc. who just list "Macedonia").
On the other, Cyprus is totally absent in their country list, although as I write I see actually can see download hits on the map from there. Makes me wonder: is it because Mozilla couldn't decide on which continent to situate Cyprus, is it because they can't decide whether it belongs to Turkey or not, or is it because it is divided in two parts recognised by two countries and they didn't want to get in the middle?
If there are any Cypriots here, I'd like to hear their comments!
I was and still am mesmerised by it too. When I first saw it, it stroke me as an epiphany, for several reasons:
First, you get a concrete perception of the "global village": every minute, thousands of people on the globe download it, and you actually see it in real time. It's not the same thing as e.g. Panoramio on google maps, where you just see that somebody, sometime went somewhere and took a picture. It happens as you see it.
Second, the demonstration of the law of large numbers: Despite night and day differences, despite continent separation, despite the wild variation of locations (North, South, East, West, mainland and small islands), you get to see in the histogram that the rate of downloads is approximately constant. Yesterday it was about 50 dls/sec and as I write it's about 100 dls/sec.
Third, it makes you wonder where it all will settle. I tried to find current stats on the total number of FF users, and it must be above 270 million (which was the 2010 figure). If we plot the total FF4 downloads vs time, we should see a nice sigmoid curve.
I totally agree. Browsing for Amazon books with FF 3.6.x used to bring my 6-year old laptop to its knees, requiring ~90% cpu usage. FF4 seems to need only half of the cpu resources for the same results. Definitely a huge improvement.
After 175 comments and relatively very few online pointers (given the 20+ years of the use of ICT in Education), my guess is that the OP is somehow disappointed. Lemme provide some comforting thoughts:
1. There are literally thousands of online resource indexes related to the OP's question. There's not lack of online information and resources, but a painful and blinding abundance of it. Hence, the problem is how to distill all these resources into something useful (especially for a novice like a student teacher).
2. There is a lot of material online, but very few well-documented and research-based instructional and learning models pertaining to the use of computers in education. In the age of computers, smartphones and tablets, there's much more available information about what to learn with them and how to use them, but very few pointers to why an experiment should be done on computers instead in the real world.
3. The theories of learning and perception are shifting themselves, because the new generations grow up with computers and use them as a new, independent sensory input for an emerging new IT-related human sense. Just watch some of the videos featuring the use of XO laptops in third-world countries (or even toddlers' use of computers on youtube) and you'll realize that these kids do develop an additional sense, a kind of a "third eye". I don't think educational theory will ever catch with that evolutionary trend.
4. "Science" is a blanket term that tends to encompass a wild variety of subject matters. Unfortunately, there are no recipes in teaching "science". You cannot blindly transfer the same teaching/learning models and strategies from e.g. classical mechanics to optics and then to cell biology. This is one of the reasons teaching is and IMHO will remain partly a science, partly a craft and partly an art.
Therefore, dear OP, a list of "online resources" won't help much. Double-blinded studies will not teach us much. We need first to understand the emerging child-computer ecology (which is tantamount to approaching an alien language) and then slowly, step by step, largely by trial and error, devise new strategies able to exploit the ever-developing man-machine interaction into the 21st century. However, the technologies themselves change too fast for a carefully planned research. Therefore, the utilitarian argument will always prevail: we must use computers in schools, although we don't really understand why, because the world the kids will grow up into depends on them and because they'll probably be required as a professional background skill. Many Computer Science Departments already got the message and have turned their curricula into apps user training (Office, Autocad, Matlab etc).
To sum up, the first question to be addressed is "what do you want your children to learn and why". When you've figured that out, there are hundreds of options regarding "how" and "what means, including software". Will it work? To my knowledge, there are no guarantees.
Contrary to some comments here, I am all about learning new FB horror stories. These stories provide me useful real-life evidence that I use when advising my friends (and my students) why they shouldn't ever post things that might get used against them. Think 10 times before hitting 'submit'.
I hope some sane guy realizes that no location data (trajectories-stops) should be recorded for trucks making home deliveries. Delivery locations can be correlated with home locations and then in turn with sensitive information about who gets parcels and how many of them per month.
Personally, I would not welcome a three-lettered agency visit just because I make frequent eBay purchases of obscure 18th century books.
Information itself may not be dangerous, but I still insist the Internet is a dangerous place, just because such a small percentage of it is useful information. And when I say "useful" I mean useful for one's cognitive development.
Unfortunately it's impossible to teach children to "think before you click". Or "think while watching TV". Any visual stimulus is a thunderstorm to the brain and does affect its development.
Al you can do is provide counter-motives so that children learn to avoid becoming passive consumers of information, wherever it comes from. Give them a camcorder and help them make films instead of letting them watch endlessly YouTube videos. This is what "intellectual autonomy" is about, becoming producers instead of consumers of knowledge/information/entertainment.
(1) a book establishes one as a recognized thought leader in the industry, it (2) helps one to organize one's thoughts about something, and (3) it serves as a "calling card" when one does consulting
I'd agree with reasons 2 and 3, but IMHO (1) requires your book has been published by a major house like Springer, Elsevier, CRC etc. Everybody can publish himself and unfortunately the general audience won't be easily convinced such a book is "trustworthy" (mainly in the sense of "correctness"). For example, if someone buys your book and finds one mistake, he'll probably think to himself "what'd you expect from a freelance publisher?" It's the same line of thought used to discredit Wikipedia.
To my poor understanding of english as a second language, an "illegal Internet café" is a café that operates without a licence, and not a café that violates its licence terms (not serving minors). Am I wrong?
Unfortunately, nobody can enforce and continually audit that a.kids site won't ever post inappropriate content. The.kids registrar is only able to check that a client has e.g. a clean criminal record and such. This fact alone can't possibly guarantee that a random web forum user under said domain someone won't eventually post a nasty picture or provide instructions for a happy and successful school bombing attack. Unless everything is moderated, which won't happen because it costs an awful lot of money.
I was tempted to mod you up, but "free speech" and "free read" are not the same thing. In this case "free speech" would be to be allowed to post one's nude or xxx pictures, which to my knowledge is still not illegal (except in Facebook and other sterilized environments).
a) Breaking into a password-protected router requires bypassing a security mechanism implemented by the owner of said router. It's the same as forcing the lock to my home's door, which last time I checked is 100% illegal (even if the burglar doesn't enter my premises).
b) Bypassing security mechanisms is the key idea behind the DMCA line of argumentation. Why is copying a DVD an illegal act and breaking into a router is not?
c) I spent considerable amount of time composing and testing a secure WPA key, which I keep to myself like my social security number or my ID card. Therefore, my WEP key is my private sensitive personal data that should be protected by law.
d) If I remember well, the contract and TOS of my ISP, who installed for me their ADSL wireless modem/router, specifically prohibits non-contractors (e.g. neighbours) accessing my router without my knowledge. In addition, in some countries, which escape me now (Germany?), it's quite illegal to operate an open (not password-protected) router.
e) If this type of activity (hacking routers) is declared legal (or at least not illegal), then everybody will be doing it and the security of ANY type of wireless networks will be seriously challenged. The incentive is huge and new idiot-proof hacking tools will no doubt be developed that will allow kiddies to effortlessly access their neighborhood's WiFi spots which have not blacklisted the.xxx TLD yet.
IANAL, but the only way I can explain how this horrendous ruling came about is by the combination of a very good defence lawyer and a 70 years old judge.
Unfortunately, Facebook is becoming the 21st Century Global Scout system. Soon it will become a crime not having a FB account just like not having an ID card. The FB scouting program will develop character (due to sophisticated self-regulating punishment systems under development), citizenship (all dangerous activities or individuals can be identified, traced and pinpointed within hours) thus fostering ethical and moral choices (don't ever do or say something that your mom wouldn't approve).
In addition, real-life scouting programs allow remote real-life interactions like field trips which cannot be easily monitored or recorded for future reference. Don't get me started....
I can stand punishment, even when I consider myself as innocent, but my problem is that there are many 'big guys' out there that should be punished but are instead protected. For them "it's all rewards and no punishment". That hurts me the most.
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Since you seem to know the internal workings of MS, have they ever issued a patch to remove fraudulent or "defective" root CAs? Is any of those hundreds of OS updates I have on my PC SSL-related?
I'm not a security expert and my crypto knowledge is limited. But from what I can understand, the general principle here is that trusting somebody unknown is considered more dangerous than not trusting somebody you know. In addition, the meaning of "trust" in the SSL context is that "you can trust me that anything that happens between me and you is encrypted, will stay between you and me, and nobody else can hear us". It's not "trust me, visiting my website won't harm your computer or your person". There has to be a way to ensure that your are using your Bank and not a fraudster or zombie system. SSL may not be perfect (considering it's several decades old) but it's a first step.
By the way, accepting a certificate by clicking OK is the equivalent of putting your signature on that site's terms of usage, not the other way around. So we'd better all read and learn more about it, it's not Mozilla's or the operating system's responsibility to teach us about it.
As I write, Turkey has 305,678 FF4 downloads, many more than most EU and ex-USSR countries. Also it is a major US military ally, which adds to the need for trust by default.
If you look at the pending certificates page of Mozilla you'll see that getting that an approval is a slow, painful (due to the bureaucracy needed) and expensive (due to the need for major lawyer firms getting involved) matter. For example, visiting Mozilla headquarters and saying "I am the president of country/corporation X, please add my root CA" does not work.
Do you really imply that an OS made by a Corporation is more trustworthy than an .org like Mozilla? Are you perhaps living behind The Walled Garden?
Could you please clarify whether there are specific laws in the US for "passing the money down to employees" when a company goes titsup? Where I live, this has not ever happened - when a company goes bankrupt the employees never get lost wages or even a single cent.
Mystery solved, just located Cyprus in Asia !!! Therefore they consider it part of the Middle East?
Another interesting fact is that in Asia there is an entry for "Occupied Palestinian Territory". Way to go...
Not a little feat! Thanks to modern IT and FB it only took us seven years to establish global digital slavery.
Sadly, Facebook is the Crack cocaine of the internet.
Wow, I didn't know US had so many illegal users of crack cocaine under the age of 13. Thank god Facebook thinks of the children and allows them to do crack only when reach the age of 13.
I was delighted by the glow.mozilla.org site. However two conflicting observations are puzzling me and make me wonder what role politics will play in the battle of the giant browsers:
On the one hand, in the Mozilla country breakdown list they attempt to list FYROM properly under its UN official name as "Macedonia, F.Y.R. of" (unlike e.g. C.I.A. Internet Usage Reports, Internetworldstats.com, BBC.co.uk etc. who just list "Macedonia").
On the other, Cyprus is totally absent in their country list, although as I write I see actually can see download hits on the map from there. Makes me wonder: is it because Mozilla couldn't decide on which continent to situate Cyprus, is it because they can't decide whether it belongs to Turkey or not, or is it because it is divided in two parts recognised by two countries and they didn't want to get in the middle?
If there are any Cypriots here, I'd like to hear their comments!
I was and still am mesmerised by it too. When I first saw it, it stroke me as an epiphany, for several reasons:
First, you get a concrete perception of the "global village": every minute, thousands of people on the globe download it, and you actually see it in real time. It's not the same thing as e.g. Panoramio on google maps, where you just see that somebody, sometime went somewhere and took a picture. It happens as you see it.
Second, the demonstration of the law of large numbers: Despite night and day differences, despite continent separation, despite the wild variation of locations (North, South, East, West, mainland and small islands), you get to see in the histogram that the rate of downloads is approximately constant. Yesterday it was about 50 dls/sec and as I write it's about 100 dls/sec.
Third, it makes you wonder where it all will settle. I tried to find current stats on the total number of FF users, and it must be above 270 million (which was the 2010 figure). If we plot the total FF4 downloads vs time, we should see a nice sigmoid curve.
I totally agree. Browsing for Amazon books with FF 3.6.x used to bring my 6-year old laptop to its knees, requiring ~90% cpu usage. FF4 seems to need only half of the cpu resources for the same results. Definitely a huge improvement.
After 175 comments and relatively very few online pointers (given the 20+ years of the use of ICT in Education), my guess is that the OP is somehow disappointed. Lemme provide some comforting thoughts:
1. There are literally thousands of online resource indexes related to the OP's question. There's not lack of online information and resources, but a painful and blinding abundance of it. Hence, the problem is how to distill all these resources into something useful (especially for a novice like a student teacher).
2. There is a lot of material online, but very few well-documented and research-based instructional and learning models pertaining to the use of computers in education. In the age of computers, smartphones and tablets, there's much more available information about what to learn with them and how to use them, but very few pointers to why an experiment should be done on computers instead in the real world.
3. The theories of learning and perception are shifting themselves, because the new generations grow up with computers and use them as a new, independent sensory input for an emerging new IT-related human sense. Just watch some of the videos featuring the use of XO laptops in third-world countries (or even toddlers' use of computers on youtube) and you'll realize that these kids do develop an additional sense, a kind of a "third eye". I don't think educational theory will ever catch with that evolutionary trend.
4. "Science" is a blanket term that tends to encompass a wild variety of subject matters. Unfortunately, there are no recipes in teaching "science". You cannot blindly transfer the same teaching/learning models and strategies from e.g. classical mechanics to optics and then to cell biology. This is one of the reasons teaching is and IMHO will remain partly a science, partly a craft and partly an art.
Therefore, dear OP, a list of "online resources" won't help much. Double-blinded studies will not teach us much. We need first to understand the emerging child-computer ecology (which is tantamount to approaching an alien language) and then slowly, step by step, largely by trial and error, devise new strategies able to exploit the ever-developing man-machine interaction into the 21st century. However, the technologies themselves change too fast for a carefully planned research. Therefore, the utilitarian argument will always prevail: we must use computers in schools, although we don't really understand why, because the world the kids will grow up into depends on them and because they'll probably be required as a professional background skill. Many Computer Science Departments already got the message and have turned their curricula into apps user training (Office, Autocad, Matlab etc).
To sum up, the first question to be addressed is "what do you want your children to learn and why". When you've figured that out, there are hundreds of options regarding "how" and "what means, including software". Will it work? To my knowledge, there are no guarantees.
Contrary to some comments here, I am all about learning new FB horror stories. These stories provide me useful real-life evidence that I use when advising my friends (and my students) why they shouldn't ever post things that might get used against them. Think 10 times before hitting 'submit'.
I hope some sane guy realizes that no location data (trajectories-stops) should be recorded for trucks making home deliveries. Delivery locations can be correlated with home locations and then in turn with sensitive information about who gets parcels and how many of them per month.
Personally, I would not welcome a three-lettered agency visit just because I make frequent eBay purchases of obscure 18th century books.
Information itself may not be dangerous, but I still insist the Internet is a dangerous place, just because such a small percentage of it is useful information. And when I say "useful" I mean useful for one's cognitive development.
Unfortunately it's impossible to teach children to "think before you click". Or "think while watching TV". Any visual stimulus is a thunderstorm to the brain and does affect its development.
Al you can do is provide counter-motives so that children learn to avoid becoming passive consumers of information, wherever it comes from. Give them a camcorder and help them make films instead of letting them watch endlessly YouTube videos. This is what "intellectual autonomy" is about, becoming producers instead of consumers of knowledge/information/entertainment.
(1) a book establishes one as a recognized thought leader in the industry, it (2) helps one to organize one's thoughts about something, and (3) it serves as a "calling card" when one does consulting
I'd agree with reasons 2 and 3, but IMHO (1) requires your book has been published by a major house like Springer, Elsevier, CRC etc. Everybody can publish himself and unfortunately the general audience won't be easily convinced such a book is "trustworthy" (mainly in the sense of "correctness"). For example, if someone buys your book and finds one mistake, he'll probably think to himself "what'd you expect from a freelance publisher?" It's the same line of thought used to discredit Wikipedia.
To my poor understanding of english as a second language, an "illegal Internet café" is a café that operates without a licence, and not a café that violates its licence terms (not serving minors). Am I wrong?
Unfortunately there's no joke to be made... the internet is a dangerous place. Pretending it's not makes it even more dangerous.
Unfortunately, nobody can enforce and continually audit that a .kids site won't ever post inappropriate content. The .kids registrar is only able to check that a client has e.g. a clean criminal record and such. This fact alone can't possibly guarantee that a random web forum user under said domain someone won't eventually post a nasty picture or provide instructions for a happy and successful school bombing attack. Unless everything is moderated, which won't happen because it costs an awful lot of money.
This brings a whole new meaning to "Yes, I can"...
It will become illegal as soon as major sites (cnn, bbc, zdnet) start using it to attract clicks :-)
I was tempted to mod you up, but "free speech" and "free read" are not the same thing. In this case "free speech" would be to be allowed to post one's nude or xxx pictures, which to my knowledge is still not illegal (except in Facebook and other sterilized environments).
a) Breaking into a password-protected router requires bypassing a security mechanism implemented by the owner of said router. It's the same as forcing the lock to my home's door, which last time I checked is 100% illegal (even if the burglar doesn't enter my premises).
b) Bypassing security mechanisms is the key idea behind the DMCA line of argumentation. Why is copying a DVD an illegal act and breaking into a router is not?
c) I spent considerable amount of time composing and testing a secure WPA key, which I keep to myself like my social security number or my ID card. Therefore, my WEP key is my private sensitive personal data that should be protected by law.
d) If I remember well, the contract and TOS of my ISP, who installed for me their ADSL wireless modem/router, specifically prohibits non-contractors (e.g. neighbours) accessing my router without my knowledge. In addition, in some countries, which escape me now (Germany?), it's quite illegal to operate an open (not password-protected) router.
e) If this type of activity (hacking routers) is declared legal (or at least not illegal), then everybody will be doing it and the security of ANY type of wireless networks will be seriously challenged. The incentive is huge and new idiot-proof hacking tools will no doubt be developed that will allow kiddies to effortlessly access their neighborhood's WiFi spots which have not blacklisted the .xxx TLD yet.
IANAL, but the only way I can explain how this horrendous ruling came about is by the combination of a very good defence lawyer and a 70 years old judge.
Unfortunately, Facebook is becoming the 21st Century Global Scout system. Soon it will become a crime not having a FB account just like not having an ID card. The FB scouting program will develop character (due to sophisticated self-regulating punishment systems under development), citizenship (all dangerous activities or individuals can be identified, traced and pinpointed within hours) thus fostering ethical and moral choices (don't ever do or say something that your mom wouldn't approve).
In addition, real-life scouting programs allow remote real-life interactions like field trips which cannot be easily monitored or recorded for future reference. Don't get me started....
I can stand punishment, even when I consider myself as innocent, but my problem is that there are many 'big guys' out there that should be punished but are instead protected. For them "it's all rewards and no punishment". That hurts me the most.