Working Thru the Weekend: the Thursday Round-Up
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This week's news round-up arrives a few days off-schedule: our team spent the weekend in NYC at Personal Democracy Forum 2012. We heard plenty of awesome speakers and great presentations, which we'll be posting about in the coming week.
- Google unveils a new feature that warns Chinese users when a search query contains keywords that might produce blocked websites. Meanwhile, a Chinese official urges the international community to establish rules for cyberspace.
- Stuxnet, Flame, and now pre-emptive cyberwarfare: Britain's armed forces minister says pre-emptive cyber attacks are a "civilised option" when dealing with potential threats to national security.
- Researchers at the University of Cambridge find that people over 55 tend to choose stronger passwords than 20-somethings. Believe it or not, "StudentLoanDebtSucks" serves as a significantly stronger password than "p@$$w0rd".
- TeleGeography has a really cool map of the global Internet. See also: xkcd's map of online communities.
- The 2012 Cyber Attacks Master Index collects information on cyber attacks in a single table, complete with infographics.
- Rural communities in the Congo may soon have mobile coverage, thanks to collaboration between pan-African and UK telecom providers.
- The fax machine still sees regular use in Japan, despite the country's affinity for efficiency and high-tech gadgets.
- A former Pentagon analyst claims that China has the capability of shutting down telecom products sold to the US, thanks to electronic backdoors. But one blogger says that backdoors are common, and rarely malicious.
- Curious how digital threats will likely evolve in the future? McAfee highlights a new publication on the future of cybercrime called Analyzing Trends in Cybercrime: 2011 to 2020.
- The U.S. government is FOIA-ble like the rest of us: The Daily Mail shares a list of words to avoid if you don't want the Department of Homeland Security spying on your Facebook or Twitter account.
- It wouldn't be a round-up without a YouTube video: thoughts on Twitterature from PBS Idea Channel.
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