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A 'Spooks And Suits' Red Team Game Social media apps meet national security Jul 20, 2011 | 12:40 PM | 0 Comments By Kelly Jackson Higgins Dark Reading What if a former Navy SEAL petty officer were a member of Anonymous? Senior members of the U.S. intelligence agency, including Michael Chertoff, the former Secretary of Homeland Security, and a former SEAL officer, will participate in a red-team exercise in September where they'll play the role of Anonymous/LulzSec and APT attackers, as well as the defenders trying to fend off these adversaries. Sure, simulated cyberattack games are nothing new these days. But this one is part and parcel of the upcoming Spooks and Suits summit in Silicon Valley on Sept. 23 and 24, and it throws together intell officials and attendees. It's the brainchild of cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr, who wanted to bring together three-letter agencies, like the CIA, NSA, and DoD, with social media and Web 2.0 developers and start-ups to actually communicate one-on-one with each another and with general attendees. It works like this: Attendees will be randomly assigned to one of four teams of 25 to 30 people: Anarchist hackers (a la Anonymous and LulzSec), APT attackers, or one of two defending organizations. The teams then must observe all of the panel discussions -- which will cover threats against the intell community, as well as demonstrations of new and existing social media applications -- from the perspective of either adversary or defender, depending on which team they are assigned. "If one of the apps presented has to do with a game, the objective for the attendee is to say, 'How can I use that game as an adversary? Or how can I use it to uncover or defend against an adversary?'" says Carr, who is the founder and CEO of Taia Global, an executive cybersecurity firm, and author of "Inside Cyber Warfare." "During breaks, they can play with the apps with an eye to their mission." The teams will have a working lunch period for buildi

An update of Rober Shiller's famous chart showing value of home prices over more than 100 years with predictions extended to guestimate how much further home prices have to fall to get back to the historical average. 

This site provides several tools and how-tos for creating RSS feeds from Twitter now that Twitter has eliminated the ability to do it directly from the site. 

How to force Google to search for creative commons licensed stuff only.  

Google hopes that its slow rollout will encourage a steady momentum, and in the early stages Google+ will provide enough value to keep the early adopters engaged, and that it will motivate them to invite their contacts. No one expects an instant success. But even if this week's launch evokes snark or yawns, Google will keep at it. Google+ is not a product like Buzz or Wave where the company's leaders can chalk off a failure to laudable ambition and then move on. "We're in this for the long run," says Ben-Yair. "This isn't like an experiment. We're betting on this, so if obstacles arise, we'll adapt." "I don't really see what Google's alternative is," says Smarr. "People are going to be a fundamental layer of the internet. There's no going back."

Last Friday was my last day at the White House. As I begin my fellowship at Harvard University, I'd like to share my reflections on public service.  "On a bright February day, the previous morning's dusting of snow melting on the ground, I arrived at a White House that was, as the Washington Post put it, "stuck" in the "Dark Ages of technology." In their words, "If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past." As my team congratulated me on the new job, they handed me a stack of documents with $27 billion worth of technology projects that were years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget. At the time, those documents were what passed for real-time updates on the performance of IT projects. My neighbor's ten year old could look up the latest stats of his favorite baseball player on his phone on the school bus, but I couldn't get an update on how we were spending billions of taxpayer dollars while at my desk in the White House. And at the same time, the President of the United States had to fight tooth and nail to simply get a blackberry.  These were symptoms of a much larger problem.

Major update to Google Maps now includes ability to "Check in" to home and see a history of how much time you've been at home/work/out.  

In this case, there are four key players. Two of them are a couple: a journalist who lives in New York and a social media specialist who lives in London. The other two have roots in Pakistan: a journalist and documentary filmmaker who recently moved to the U.S. and a political commentator in Islamabad. Each of them contributed to a chain of information that turned one man's offhand comments about a helicopter in the middle of the night into an internationally known work of citizen journalism.

GSA's guide to its employees on how to use social media in an official capacity.  

During REM sleep, the respiratory pattern is irregular, with differences in the size of breaths and the spacing between them. Breathing during deep sleep follows an ordered pattern, "like a sine wave," says Bianchi. "And the breath-to-breath differences are very small." The lighter stages of non-REM sleep fall somewhere in between. "The motivation behind the shirt is to allow repeated measurements over time in the home," he adds. Users can log their habits, such as coffee or alcohol intake, exercise, or stress, and look for patterns in how those variables affect their quality of sleep.

A cute way to "play spy" using self-destruct emails.

"Lockheed Martin's approach does include a sort of basic theory of mind, in the sense that the robot makes assumptions about how to act covertly in the presence of humans," says Alan Wagner of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who works on artificial intelligence and robot deception.

This article summarizes some of the issues around the recent study that possibly finds a link between cell phone use and cancer.  The neat thing about the article is that it provides a tool to look up cell phone models to see how they perform on this rating. 

Facebook post bout how to enable a form of two factor authentication via SMS.  This system requires you to have your phone with you if you are accessing facebook from a new machine.  

Chris Anderson, the founder of TED, describes his battles with email and strategies for minimizing its impact on yourself and those to whom you send email.  

Why sharing is the inevitable next stage of the information revolution -- and how it's going to change everything from entertainment to Walmart.

first-ever historical mapping and exploration of the full text contents of the English-language edition of Wikipedia, in time and space, with visualizations of modern history captured in under a day. Loading the entire English language edition of Wikipedia into SGI UV 2000, Mr. Leetaru was able to show how Wikipedia's view of the world unfolded over the past two centuries.

I had just mentioned to a colleague today that there should be a functional stylus for the iPad for art apps. Voila! (or...this is another example of how all my brilliant ideas are already invented)