Where's all that tuition money turning college students into debt-slaves going, anyway? Not to their teachers.

An Adjunct Tragedy | The Nation

The proletarianization of higher education, according to the associate general counsel of the United Steel Workers Union, has now claimed a life. In a moving op-ed published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Daniel Kovalik, wrote this week of Margaret Mary Vojtko, a French teacher at Pittsburgh’s Dusquesne University whose tenure there—though it was, of course, a tenure without tenure—lasted twenty-five years, who just died at the age of 83.

...

...“I said that she had just been let go from her job as a professor at Dusquesne, that she was given no severance or retirement benefits”—after twenty-five years of loyal service; something for today’s adjuncts to look forward to, should they decide to stay in the grueling game—“and that the reason she was having trouble taking care of herself was because she was living in extreme poverty. The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, ‘She was a professor?’ I said yes. The caseworker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person for whom she was called in to help.”

Surprising no one with a clue, Apple's much-buzzed-about fingerprint security for the new iPhone has been cracked.

Outside of high-security environments where you can verify that someone is putting their actual finger or eyeball to the scanner rather than a mock-up, biometrics are almost always a bad choice. They actually rely not on "something you are", but "something you have" -- something that matches what the scanner is looking for.

Plus, you can't revoke your finger the way you can a keycard; and what happens when your fingerprint changes? (People do suffer injuries.) You need a password or token as a backup anyway.

CCC | Chaos Computer Club breaks Apple TouchID

The biometrics hacking team of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has successfully bypassed the biometric security of Apple's TouchID using easy everyday means. A fingerprint of the phone user, photographed from a glass surface, was enough to create a fake finger that could unlock an iPhone 5s secured with TouchID. This demonstrates – again – that fingerprint biometrics is unsuitable as access control method and should be avoided.

...

"In reality, Apple's sensor has just a higher resolution compared to the sensors so far. So we only needed to ramp up the resolution of our fake", said the hacker with the nickname Starbug, who performed the critical experiments that led to the successful circumvention of the fingerprint locking. "As we have said now for more than years, fingerprints should not be used to secure anything. You leave them everywhere, and it is far too easy to make fake fingers out of lifted prints."

Are you allowing enough room in your data fields? Or are you expecting that people will change their lives to comply with the limits of your system?

Hawaii can't fit woman's last name on license (Yahoo News)

Janice "Lokelani" Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele is in the midst of a fight with state and local officials to ensure that her full name gets listed on a license or ID card. Her name is pronounced: KAY'-ee-hah-nah-EE'-coo-COW'-ah-KAH'-hee-HOO'-lee-heh-eh-KAH'-how-NAH-eh-leh.

The documents only have room for 35 characters. Her name has 35 letters plus a mark used in the Hawaiian alphabet, called an okina.

So Hawaii County instead issued her driver's license and her state ID with the last letter of her name chopped off. And it omitted her first name.

I've never had an E-ZPass, on the basis that it made tracking my movements just too easy for the powers that be. Sometimes I've wondered if I was being overly paranoid about that.

Nope.

E-ZPasses Get Read All Over New York (Not Just At Toll Booths) (Forbes)

Puking Monkey is an electronics tinkerer, so he hacked his RFID-enabled E-ZPass to set off a light and a “moo cow” every time it was being read. Then he drove around New York. His tag got milked multiple times on the short drive from Times Square to Madison Square Garden in mid-town Manhattan and also on his way out of New York through Lincoln Tunnel, again in a place with no toll plaza.

At Defcon, where he presented his findings, Puking Monkey said he found the reading of the E-ZPass outside of where he thought it would be read when he put it in his car “intrusive and unsettling,” quoting from Sen. Chuck Schumer’s remarks about retailers tracking people who come into their stores using their cell phones.

A spokesperson for the New York Department of Transportation, Scott Gastel, says the E-Z Pass readers are on highways across the city, and on streets in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island, and have been in use for years. The city uses the data from the readers to provide real-time traffic information, as for this tool. The DoT was not forthcoming about what exactly was read from the passes or how long geolocation information from the passes was kept. Notably, the fact that E-ZPasses will be used as a tracking device outside of toll payment, is not disclosed anywhere that I could see in the terms and conditions.

Libraries trashing books? As a bibliophile I find that downright nauseating.

Fairfax County library revamps system, discards books, reduces librarians (Washington Post)

Smyth knew that libraries discard books all the time to make room for new ones. But many libraries have volunteer groups that take the discards and resell them to raise money. Or libraries donate discards to shelters, schools or less fortunate towns and cities.

But as Sam Clay, Fairfax’s longtime library director, launched a plan to revamp the county system, no books were given to the Friends of the Library for seven months this year, and more than 250,000 books were destroyed, Smyth said.

...

Clay, who has been head of the Fairfax library system for 31 years, defended his plan as necessary to deal with declining budgets and to remake libraries in the digital age. The strategic plan lists the first part of its “future direction” as transitioning from “a print environment to a digital environment.”

There's no doubt the Assad regime is terrible, horrible, all around bad. But didn't we learn that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" was bullshit back when we supported the Taliban against the USSR in Afghanistan?

Beyond doubt, these next few days will be the most crucial of the Obama presidency (The Independent)

A good picture, as everybody knows, is worth a thousand words. The one that appeared on the front page of The New York Times last Thursday could also be worth a hundred congressional votes.

Extracted from a video smuggled out of Syria, the frame showed gunmen about to kill seven prostrate and terrified army soldiers, their backs bared and beaten, their hands tied behind their backs, as a rebel commander ranted a bloody oath of revenge. Such are the Islamist extremists that the US would in effect be supporting, the picture declared with a starkness no words could match, if the Obama administration went ahead with its threatened military strikes against the Assad regime.

I'll say it again: gun control keeps guns away from bad guys as well as drug laws keep heroin away from junkies.

Feds cracking down on knockoff NFL jersey operation stunned to find man stockpiling weapons (Yahoo! News)

Federal agents investigating a man suspected of selling knockoff NFL jerseys late last year stumbled upon what the Cleveland Plain Dealer called "one of the most most perplexing seizures of weapons in Ohio" history: an arsenal of 18 guns — including three assault rifles, three 9mm handguns and four shotguns — and more than 40,000 rounds of ammunition.

...

“I can’t tell you how he got all those guns and ammunition,” U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach told the Plain Dealer. “It’s not that I won’t tell you; it’s that I can’t. This is somebody who should never have had one gun, one bullet. But he had an entire arsenal.”

...

Schmidt was found guilty of manslaughter in the shooting death of a 20-year-old, and served 13 years in prison.

The misuse of "assault rifle" aside -- unless he had an actual select-fire rifle -- if we can't keep a guy convicted of manslaughter from getting his hands on as many guns as he wants, explain to me again how we're going to keep guns away from people who want them?

How have I not heard about this before??? Love to get him together with Omar K. Ravenhurst.

George P. Burdell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Burdell is a fictitious student officially enrolled at Georgia Tech in 1927 as a practical joke. Since then, he has supposedly received all undergraduate degrees offered by Georgia Tech, served in the military, gotten married, and served on Mad magazine's Board of Directors, among other accomplishments. Burdell at one point led the online poll for Time's 2001 Person of the Year award. He has evolved into an important and notorious campus tradition; all Georgia Tech students learn about him at orientation.

Facebook can be a useful tool for staying in touch with people. It's an essential part of my campaign of relentless self-promotion. However, you should always keep in mind that you are not Facebook's customer. You are its product, your eyeballs on sale to the black magicians of marketing. So to get benefit from Facebook while not being exploited, takes some awareness and cleverness.

El Reg reports that FB is preparing yet another overhaul of its privacy policy:

Facebook strips away a bit more of your privacy – but won't say why • The Register

It includes simplifying the language it uses to explain what information it receives from users whenever they are using or "running" Facebook. It said it was also clarifying that some of that information reveals details about the device itself such as an IP address, operating system or – surprisingly – a mobile phone number.

...

Facebook has agreed to explain how it uses a name, profile picture, content and information in connection with ads after it got into hot water over its Sponsored Stories function, which – without prior consent – served adverts to Facebookers featuring the faces and names of people who had "Liked" a particular product.

The Mark Zuckerberg-run outfit now states that it will no longer take responsibility for how those ads are served, because users will have agreed to that usage upon signing up to the network. Existing users will also be expected to simply comply with the new terms, or else ditch Facebook in protest against how their data is being re-purposed:

...

Facebook also made it clear that the company can use photo recognition software to correctly identify people on the network.

Here what you can do:

All this surveillance state and police state stuff that people are just starting to wake up to? It predates Obama, predates 9/11. It's become standard operating procedure thanks to the War On (Some) Drugs.

Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s

The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.

The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.

...

Representatives from Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile all declined to comment on Sunday in response to questions about whether their companies were aware of Hemisphere or participated in that program or similar ones. A federal law enforcement official said that the Hemisphere Project was “singular” and that he knew of no comparable program involving other phone companies.