Category Archives: Tech

Bill Gates on “Meeting Students Where They Are”

Posted on by
Reply

Bill Gates writes about two historically Black colleges which take low-income students and students with poor grades. These two schools, Johnson C. Smith University and Delaware State University, give their students the support and remediation that they need in order to succeed in college.

But here’s what struck me:

Both institutions collect and analyze huge amounts of data to track students throughout their college careers. If a student taking a psychology quiz gets a failing grade, it triggers an email or phone call from a counselor to find out what went wrong and how to get that student back on track.

Gates was impressed that both schools are using data analytics to improve the quality of the education that they provide. The other thing he liked is that both schools are innovative.

So we learn what catches Bill Gates’ attention: innovation coupled with rigorous data analysis.

Source: Meeting Students Where They Are | Bill Gates | LinkedIn

Ahmed the Clockmaker

Posted on by
Reply

In the midst of a social media backlash joined by the likes of Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama, police announced Wednesday that the teen’s arrest on Monday resulted from a “naive accident” that doesn’t warrant prosecution.

Young Ahmed Mohamed brought a homemade electronic clock to school. Teachers thought it could be a bomb, police were called, kid was hauled off in handcuffs.

  1. In a world of “If you see something, say something,” I think the school did the right thing by calling the cops.
  2. If the cops didn’t call in the bomb squad — and as far as I can tell, they didn’t — then they didn’t think it was really a bomb. And if they didn’t think it was really a bomb, there was no reason to arrest the kid.
  3. As for the handcuffs, if the local police use them on white students, then they’re ok to use on Ahmed.
  4. Lastly, Obama has invited the kid to the White House and both Bristol and Sarah Palin have weighed in against. Who cares?

Source: Ahmed Mohamed swept up, ‘hoax bomb’ charges swept away as Irving teen’s story floods social media | Dallas Morning News

Time Warner doesn’t just suck — they suck ON PURPOSE!

Posted on by
Reply

You always knew your ISP or broadband provider was slow as shit. Well, a new study by BattlefortheNet revealed that the major Internet providers are intentionally slowing traffic from the Net’s most popular websites.

Why? I don’t know. But I’d guess they want you to “upgrade” to a more expensive tier which will still provide snail-like connectivity.

At least we now know why so many people complain that they’re having trouble reaching the BITEME website.

Source: Major Internet providers slowing traffic speeds for thousands across US

It’s a federal crime to delete incriminating evidence from your computer

Posted on by
Reply

Yup, you can be prosecuted under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for clearing your browser history. In other words, according to the feds, you have an affirmative duty to preserve evidence that could later be used against you.

Unless you have something to hide, this is not a problem. But it would make compliance much easier if the government would just provide cloud storage for all our data.

Source: You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History | The Nation

Cf.: Call the NSA for email backup

Obama won’t let defendants cross-examine the tech used to arrest them

Posted on by
1

The Feds have given your local police department some nifty tech to track where you and your cellphone are at all times. However, the device, called “Hailstorm,” comes with strings attached:

. . . the Obama administration has aggressively tried to keep [details about Hailstorm] secret. Citing security reasons, the government has intervened in routine state public-records cases and criminal trials, and has advised police not to disclose details. . . .

The Hailstorm, made by Florida-based Harris Corp., can sweep up cellphone subscriber-identity data by tricking phones into thinking it’s a cell tower. That data is then transmitted to the police, allowing them to locate a phone without the user even making a call or sending a text message.

All I can say is that I want to get me one of these things! Installed in the BiteCastle’s Security Office, it will enable me to know where every BiteMe employee is 24/7.

Baltimore police use secret cell phone surveillance tech – NY Daily News.

[Edited 12-27-2017 to add:] NB: The first such product on the market was the Stingray from Harris Corporation (Remember Harris-Intertype? Same guys.). But other similar products can be found under names such as Kingfish, Amberjack, and Hailstorm.

Curt Schilling stands up to Internet trolls; one fired, the other suspended from college

Posted on by
1

When the Internet trolls started making rape jokes about his teenage daughter, former baseball player Curt Schilling tracked two of them down. As a result, Adam Nagel has been suspended by Brookdale Community College and Sean MacDonald has been fired from his part-time job selling tickets for the Yankees.

Good for Schilling.

But an even better story is how Australian game reviewer Alanah Pearce responded to rape threats by contacting the mothers of some of the trolls!

The world we live in…Man has it changed. ADDENDUM! | 38 Pitches.

Andrew Cuomo moves state officials from email to Snapchat

Posted on by
3

In an effort to make NY state government more efficient, all state employees will have their email accounts closed and be given new accounts on Snapchat, where their messages will be automatically deleted in 10 seconds.

Cuomo announced, “This will make NY state government more nimble, more responsive, and more transparent, as well as saving hundreds of trees every week.”

Responding to critics who said this would make it harder for prosecutors to track illegal activities of state officials, Cuomo said, “Some people out there are whinny pussies who don’t want us to embrace the latest technological improvements.”

Email scandal shows N.Y. governor is either incompetent or corrupt.

Looking Up Symptoms Online? These Companies Are Tracking You.

Posted on by
Reply

In April 2014, Tim Libert, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, custom-built software called webXray to analyze the top 50 search results for nearly 2,000 common diseases (over 80,000 pages total). He found the results startling: a full 91 percent of the pages made what are known as third-party requests to outside companies. That means when you search for “cold sores,” for instance, and click the highly ranked “Cold Sores Topic Overview WebMD” link, the website is passing your request for information about the disease along to one or more (and often many, many more) other corporations.

Looking Up Symptoms Online? These Companies Are Tracking You | Motherboard.

Facebook will filter out fake news because you’re too stupid to do it yourself

Posted on by
3

According to Snopes, “In recent years, the spread of fake news stories (designed to drive traffic to fake news-generating sites) by inducing social media users to share links has been increasing in a manner that appears almost exponential.”

Here at BITEME, we love fake news. In fact we used to sit around, reading randomly-clipped articles from the Weekly World News, the Onion, and the New York Post, and then try to guess which paper the clipping came from.

But in case you’re not smart enough to do it yourself, Facebook has announced

Today’s update to News Feed reduces the distribution of posts that people have reported as hoaxes and adds an annotation to posts that have received many of these types of reports to warn others on Facebook.

Interestingly, the fake ads that used to abound on Facebook seem to be fewer these days.

snopes.com: Facebook to Rain on Fake News Parade.