UPEI - BUS442.0

Did anyone secure a job for the summer? I am having a difficult time finding a job in my filed most of the jobs advertised for restaurants and bars (server\bartender). It is frustrating and makes me wonder if any of you (classmates) experiencing\experienced the same problem. Companies expect us to have experience so how if they do not hire us now?

This course was fun and one of few that required the use of technology (Web 2.0)

Thanks Dave and it was nice meeting you all!

TorrentSpy has been shut down permanently by it’s own owner. A note on the home page of TorrentSpy’s Web site said it is shutting down “not due to any court order or agreement,” but because of a team decision.

TorrentSpy has spent the past two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars “defending the rights of our users and ourselves” in a legal climate that was “hostile” to torrent files, according to the note, which is attributed to the TorrentSpy team.

In 2006, the largest Hollywood film studios accused TorrentSpy in a lawsuit of encouraging movie piracy. A federal judge ordered the company last June to provide the studios with user information found in its computer RAM.

TorrentSpy was a search engine that helped visitors find torrent files on the Web. Torrent files are often music or movie files stored in an easily shared file format. The search engine came under legal fire from the entertainment industry, which in general does not want licensed content to be distributed free.

In December, the judge in the case found that TorrentSpy operators intentionally destroyed evidence in the case, making it impossible for the Motion Picture Association of America to get a fair trial. They had earlier been fined $30,000 for violations of discovery orders and were warned of severe sanctions if they continued to ignore the orders. The site lost its case because the court ruled it had tampered with evidence.

Goodbye TorrentSpy!!

A team of security researchers has won $10,000 for hacking a MacBook Air in two minutes using an undisclosed Safari vulnerability.

IDG News Service is camped out at CanSecWest in lovely Vancouver, Canada, and has chronicled the exploits  of Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff, and Mark Daniel of Independent Security Evaluators during the Pwn to Own contest sponsored by TippingPoint. The contest includes three laptops, running the most up to date and patched installations of MacOS X Leopard, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu Linux:

• VAIO VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10
• Fujitsu U810 running Vista Ultimate SP1
• MacBook Air running OSX 10.5.2

The main purpose of this contest is to responsibly unearth new vulnerabilities within these systems so that the affected vendor(s) can address them.The team was able to gain control of a MacBook Air on the second day of the hacking competition, which pitted the Air against Windows Vista and Ubuntu machines.

No one was able to execute code on any of the systems on Wednesday, the first day of the contest, when hacks were limited to over-the-network techniques on the operating systems themselves. But on the second day, the rules changed to allow attacks delivered by tricking someone to visit a maliciously crafted Web site, or open an e-mail. Hackers were also allowed to target “default installed client-side applications,” such as browsers.

The team had attack code already set up on a Web site, and was able to gain access to the MacBook Air and retrieve a file after judges were “tricked” into visiting the site. According to the TippingPoint DVLabs blog, a newly discovered vulnerability in Safari was used to gain control of the Air.

The contest rules stipulated that winners immediately sign a nondisclosure agreement relating to their technique, so that the vulnerability could be disclosed to the vendor, and TippingPoint said Apple has been informed of the vulnerability.

Last year’s contest was won by exploiting a QuickTime vulnerability, which was patched by Apple in less than two weeks. As of the time I posted this, no one had gained control of the Vista or Ubuntu machines, but I’ll update later as the results come in over the rest of the afternoon.

In recent years, Apple has shunned PDAs, but with the rise of the iPod and the iTunes Music Store (iTMS), the company has been positioning itself to become a player in the mobile phone market. Motorola has been planning to release a mobile phone capable of playing songs purchased through the iTMS, but ever since Motorola canceled the phone’s unveiling at the recent CeBit show in Germany there have been questions about when the iTunes phone will come to fruition. Some say that cellular carriers are reluctant to sell the phone because it could cut into ringtone sales. Motorola claims that the delay was because Apple prefers not to announce a product until its available for purchase.

Apple does not want to sit still and wait for the dust to settle between Motorola and the carriers, so it is currently undergoing negotiations to buy PalmOne as an alternate strategy according to a source who calls himself “Juan Abril”. The company will sell Apple smartphones at its retail stores and other channels until carriers get on board. While negotiations with PalmOne are still in the early stages, Apple hopes to be able to announce the purchase at its upcoming developer’s conference in June.

With recent executive shuffling at PalmOne, Apple sees the company as distracted and ripe for the picking. According to sources from within Apple, the hardware portfolio is there, but PalmOne just does not “get it.” A smartphone with the Apple Touch—more intuitive controls, better integration for included applications, etc— could do as well as the cultural icon that is the iPod. Apple would also be more successful in getting PalmSource to move the Palm OS fully into the new age of handheld devices. For most consumers, the PDA is dead—long live the smartphone—and Apple wants to take advantage of that.

The company already is developing a successor to the Treo dubbed “Apollo Fir.” Jonathan Ives, designer of the award-winning iMac, is hard at work on the device. Expected features include the ability to play iTMS songs and buy them directly to the phone so a computer is not needed. Apple will role out iTunes 5 at the same time, enabling ringtone purchases. The company is also undergoing talks with the mobile carriers to allow iTMS purchases to be billed to customers’ mobile phone service.

Based on information from sources inside Apple and PalmOne, TreoCentral has created a conceptual drawing of what the device will look like. Although the device will not be released until late this year, it won’t disappoint.

Paris Hilton party pictures leaked on facebook due a security breach on Facebook allowed a Vancouver computer technician to find photos of Paris Hilton partying and ones of her younger brother in private online albums accessible only by their friends. This is a major embarrassment for Facebook after it launched new group security features last week.

The security update did not cover a flaw that had apparently existed for months. Facebook fixed the breach after being alerted to the problem this week. After the security update last week, computer technician Byron Ng proved that the technique still worked by accessing Paris Hilton’s private photos, including snaps of the socialite at the Emmy awards. Byron Ng, who last July cracked the security behind the then-unreleased novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, discovered the security hole when he was checking out an earlier breach that had been fixed by Facebook.

MySpace has made similar gaffes a story that was reported in January about putting User IDs into the URLs of private photos on MySpace in order to view them. That breach was said to have been discussed around the web for months before MySpace did anything about it.

Dean Turner, director Symantec global intelligence network, said the breach points to a potential lack of privacy once information or photos are posted online.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company’s key contribution to the important movement for Data Portability would be to nail down the privacy angle. He pointed out, and rightly so, that users will feel far more secure sharing their data online and across different sites, if they can do so with the assurance that they have control over who can see that data. According to the privacy policy outlined on Facebook, there is no guarantee content won’t be seen by unauthorized viewers.

The latest “Get a Mac” ad from Apple, looks like PC this time doesn’t like the overhead banner ads that feature quotes pertaining to Vista’s total suckage from the likes of CNET and PC Magazine.

Type the word “FREE” into google search engine and in (0.22) seconds you will have about 3,810,000,000 results for FREE.

FREE = $0

After my reading to Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business By Chris Anderson I think it is a great interesting study, though very long article, or set of articles! Also, Chris Anderson did not mention GNU/Linux in his article!!
Many companies use Gillette’s business model today to create demand for their goods. Clothing shops offer you a free shirt with your purchase of one (Buy 1 and get the 2nd for FREE). Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan take Telus a cellular phone provider as an example they are giving away a Samsung u410 cell phone FREE on a 3 year contract. The phone cost $199.99 with no contract!

Here are some of the points that Chris makes:

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, and bands on MySpace. The fastest growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported online gaming and free trial multi-player online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. The trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

It is now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as weconsumers are concerned. Storage now joins bandwidth YouTube = FREE and processing power Google = FREE in the race to the bottom. Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There’s never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing.

The result:

Two trends driving the spread of free business models across the economy.

1. Technology is giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, allowing them more freedom to give away products or services to one set of customers while selling to another set.

2. Anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs.

Chris goes on to list six business models of the “Free” Business Models:

1. “Freemium” - What’s free: Web software and services, some content. Free to whom: users of the basic version.
2. Advertising - What’s free: content, services, software, and more. Free to whom: everyone.
3. Cross-subsidies - What’s free: any product that entices you to pay for something else. Free to whom: everyone willing to pay eventually, one way or another.
4. Zero marginal cost - What’s free: things that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone. Free to whom: everyone.
5. Labor exchange - What’s free: Web sites and services. Free to whom: all users, since the act of using these sites and services actually creates something of value.
6. Gift economy - What’s free: the whole enchilada, be it open source software or user-generated content. Free to whom: everyone.

The Giveaway of the day project, is a new website in the software distribution world. Everyday they offer a FREE licensed software. The idea behind this initiative is that many sites and publishers offer trial downloads; but only Giveaway of the day offer giveaway downloads. What does that mean? Basically, every day Giveaway of the day nominate one software title that will be a Giveaway title of that day. The software will be available for download for 24 hours (or more, if agreed by software publisher) and that software will be absolutely free registered and legal version for Giveaway of the day visitors. The download link will remain on Giveaway of the day for the agreed period of time, in addition to the review of the software product and the information about other products from the software publisher presenting the giveaway title. Giveaway of the day pay the software publisher for the Giveaway license, and our visitors will only receive those after downloading a special verification program and agreeing to the Terms and Conditions, thus protecting software publishers’ interests and making our initiative beneficial for both clients and publishing companies.

Taxonomy of Free:

• Freemium: Flickr is free, but you pay for Flickr Pro
• Advertising: Google is free, but with ads
• Cross-Subsidies: cell minutes are free, but you pay for voice-mail
• Zero Marginal Cost: online music is free, because cost of distribution is almost zero
• Labor Exchange: like Digg, using the site itself creates value
• Gift-Economy: Wikipedia and parts of craiglist, truly free without ads.
• Skype – basic in network voice is free, out of network calling is a premium service
• Flickr – a handful of pictures a month is free, heavy users convert to Pro
• Trillian – the basic service is free, but there is paid version that is full featured
• Newsgator – the web reader is free. If you want to synch with outlook and your mobile phone, that’s a paid service
• Box.net – you get 1gb of virtual storage for free, but you have to pay for more than that
• Webroot – you can get a free spyware scan, but for full protection you need to pay

A friend of my recently purchase a new car (Volkswagen) where the car dealership sold him the car FREE for the first four months, I was amazed!

That reminds of the ad-wrapped car you drive the car FREE and at the same time you advertsiting or marketing a product for the company. Companies looking for people to drive ad-wrapped cars typically use a special service dealing exclusively with wrapping their vehicles. These businesses manage the list of potential drivers and match these people up with the right companies. For you, that means these ad-wrapped businesses want to know how often you drive in a week, how many miles you generally drive, how many locations your car is parked at and also how many hours your car is parked at these locations.

You can almost can anything for FREE !!

I was interested to know how how Open Source Software like Sun Microsystems? The answer is through training, consulting, and support services.

Question to my classmates and Chris Anderson, will universities ever considering education for FREE?

A Ryerson University student is in danger of being expelled for his role in a study group organized in Facebook. Chris Avenir 18 years old studying computer engineering at Ryerson University.

Chris Avenir

Charges:

Academic misconduct for helping run an online chemistry study group via Facebook last term, where 146 classmates shared tips on homework questions that counted for 10% of their mark. He administrated of the Facebook group “Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions” 146 students from Ryerson’s first year chemistry class. Avenir joined the online chemistry study group “Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions” last fall, then took charge of it as an administrator. The group was named after a study room known by students as the Dungeon. The group page was taken down last week!

The professor who taught the chemistry course gave Avenir a “F” after he found out about the facebook group. Before that, he had given Avenir a “B.” One of the comments posted by a reader to the article on cbc.ca stated that Avenir requested that solutions be posted on the “Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions” facebook group. His intention was to have solutions available to everyone in the group. When solutions are posted it is simple on others to copy\paste the solution then hand-in the assignment. For presenting someone else’s work as your own is plagiarism Avenir should face facing expulsion. He says he never posted any answers on the discussion pages.
I find it useful when I meet with my classmates at the library or Tim Hortons to look over a problem or assignment. In addition, we use instant messaging (MSN) and Facebook a huge benefit for us but now a Ryerson student is being threatened with expulsion for using Facebook in just such a way. This seems like a mistake to me, and not something I would expect from an institution as supposedly progressive as Ryerson. I created a group for my “Organizational Behavior” class and added my group members to communicate and solve case-group projects assigned by our professor NOT to post answers and share them with 100 students. I find facebook helpful when it comes to virtual study-groups especially when one of your group members cannot attend a group meeting because of work or other reasons.

Action:

March 11th, 2008 Avenir appealed the count of academic misconduct for helping run the group and 146 counts, one for each classmate who used the site. Chris Avenir won’t hear for up to 5 days whether he will be expelled for allegedly cheating on a Facebook study group.

Ryerson University is looking into updating the student code, recognizing that there are things like Facebook, YouTube on the web,” said President Sheldon Levy. The proposed changes would also give the school the power to punish students for infractions that happen off campus, if they’re using the Ryerson name at the time. The policy has been presented to Senate, there’s a month until it gets voted on. Some are fighting the policy by getting gangs of students to come to Senate and sign a petition.

The Chemistry professor assigned each student in the course slightly different questions to prevent cheating, she said, and she did not see evidence of students doing complete solutions for each other. Instead, she said, they would brainstorm about techniques.

Sarah Boesveld Published Facebook decision pending March 13th, 2008

Chris Avenir won’t hear for up to 5 days whether he will be expelled for allegedly cheating on a Facebook study group. Avenir is the only member of the Facebook group charged with academic misconduct on the Internet and supporters have started a petition and website www.chrisdidntcheat.com to raise awareness about Avenir’s case and are selling “Chris Didn’t Cheat” T-shirts and hats. He is still attending classes pending his hearing!

Student Support:

Avenir’s friend Leo Chan created a Facebook group called Support Chris Avenir . By press time, the page so far has 1,985 members and 260 wall posts. The group page gained nearly 300 supporters within the first 24 hours of its existence. And Avenir’s lawyer, John Adair, offered to represent him after joining the group himself.

Support for Avenir has gone so far as to include the creation of the website www.chrisdidntcheat.com by Davin Carey, a student at San Diego State University in California. Carey set up his website by linking visitors to a few of the many articles on Avenir’s case, and urges people to buy a T-shirt or button from his online store.

For more updates on the story:

ryersonline.ca

Support Chris Avenir

“Is Avenir guilt? will find-out tomorrow!!”