OP-TEC Free Faculty Course in Fundamentals of Light and Lasers

Hybrid, Online, Self-Paced
Optics and Photonics Faculty Development Course

Fundamentals of Light and Lasers

Self-paced online course opens August 1!
The National Center for Optics and Photonic Education (OP-TEC), is a National Science Foundation (NSF) National Center of Excellence with the mission of promoting photonics education and assisting colleges around the United States in developing and implementing educational programs that support expansion of this critical technology.

OP-TEC offers a hybrid, online faculty development course in optics and photonics. This Open Entry/Open Exit course has been developed for faculty whose schedules demand a more flexible course timeline. It is perfect for busy faculty who might have difficulty keeping up with weekly assignments in a "scheduled" course, but who would have a period or periods of time during the semester or school year that would allow them to complete assignments and exams independently and at their own pace. It is also an excellent opportunity for junior faculty, adjunct faculty, and lab technicians who may need to prepare to teach a college level or dual credit introductory photonics, optics, or lasers course.

This online course is being offered at no charge to U.S. high school, community college and technical college faculty interested in teaching a basic photonics course.

The course will cover OP-TEC's Fundamentals of Light and Lasers, 2nd Ed. (2013) text. Modules Include: Nature and Properties of Light, Optical Handling and Positioning, Light Sources and Laser Safety, Basic Geometrical Optics, Basic Physical Optics, and Principles of Lasers. Supplementary videos and tutorials are available for enrolled instructors.

The course is facilitated by an instructor experienced in teaching photonics concepts at the college level and will require a high level of independent self-paced instruction. The six modules will be completed online and through email with the instructor. Though this course is self-paced, participants must pass all six End of Module tests by May 31, 2016 to be eligible to attend the Capstone Laboratory Experience or receive a certificate of completion.

Hands-on Capstone Laboratory Experience: After successful completion of all six modules by May 31, 2016, participants will be invited to participate in a 3-day hands-on Capstone Laboratory Experience at an OP-TEC partner college. The June 2016 capstone will provide participants the opportunity to conduct most of the laboratory experiments included in the course and discuss with experienced instructors best practices for teaching the materials. Capstone dates and travel information will be provided to enrolled faculty in January 2016.

Certificate of Completion & CEUs: Participants who successfully complete the online course and the 3-day hands-on laboratory session will receive a certificate of completion from OP-TEC and may apply for CEUs from an OP-TEC partner college. Participants who successfully complete the online portion of the course only, will receive a certificate of completion for the online portion.

Cost: No tuition or materials fees! Participants will be responsible for travel, lodging, and some meals to attend the 3-day lab session in June 2016.

Click here for more information and to apply online!

Questions? Click here to e-mail us!

NSF/ATE National Center of Excellence

OP-TEC National Center for Optics and Photonics Education | 316 Kelly Drive | Waco | TX | 76710

More trainings have been added to the TTT schedule:

IT Essentials Train the Trainer
July 13th

Essentials 1 & 2: Firewall Installation, Configuration and Management
July 27th

IT Essentials Train the Trainer
August 3rd

SCADA
August 3rd

Netlabs+ User Community Workshop
August 6th

(ISC) CISSP Course
August 10th

EMC's Coud Infastructure & Services v2 (CIS)
August 10th

Essentials 1 & 2: Firewall Installation, Configuration and Management
August 24th

(ISC) SSCP Course
September 7th

EMC's Information Storage & Management v2 (ISM)
September 14th

Seats are limited so register today!

http://www.cssia.org/cssia-training.cfm

For questions regarding trainings,
contact Lynn Dohm at lynn.dohm@morainevalley.edu.
www.cssia.org

CETF 2015 Annual Survey of California Digital Divide

www.cetfund.org



The California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) is pleased to share with you the results of the
2015 Annual Survey on broadband adoption in California that was released yesterday. The Annual Survey is sponsored by CETF and conducted by the Field Research Corporation in 6 languages with a sample size in excess of 1,600 randomly-selected households (50% by cell phone and a margin of error + 2.6 percentage points at the 95% confidence level). The results show that progress is being made in closing the Digital Divide with 79% of all California households now having high-speed connections at home to the Internet (8% by smart phone only), but there is still much work to be done because unacceptable percentages of disadvantaged populations remain offline—35% of low-income households (below $20,000 annual income); 30% of Latino families (37% Spanish-speaking); and 41% of people with disabilities. It is important to keep in mind that the Digital Divide is just another manifestation of the Opportunity Divide and Economic Divide, and that those who are stuck on the wrong side of the Digital Divide—urban low-income neighborhoods and remote rural communities—are faced with a multitude of challenges in daily life that CETF calls the “wall of poverty” that must be tackled with strategic interventions to improve education coupled with workforce preparation and economic development.

The Annual Survey information is very timely as the Federal Communications Commission takes up tomorrow the issue of a Broadband Lifeline Program, State policymakers continue to explore how best to tackle poverty, and local governments continue to struggle to balance budgets and generate jobs. The data underscores the need to incorporate Digital Inclusion into all major initiatives to promote economic prosperity and quality of life in California.

Please feel free to distribute the results of the 2015 Annual Survey, post it on your own website and/or link to the CETF website http://www.cetfund.org/progress/annualsurvey, and reference the data as you find useful. We look forward to continuing to work together to close the Digital Divide in California. Thank you for your commitment and leadership.

Sunne Wright McPeak
President and CEO
California Emerging Technology Fund

Internet of Things market to triple to $1.7 trillion by 2020 - IDC

Reuters

Visitors are seen at the SIdO, the Connected Business trade show, in Lyon April 7, 2015. The slogan reads 'The four freedom of free software'.
REUTERS/ROBERT PRATTA/FILES


REUTERS - The global market for "Internet of Things", the concept of connecting household devices to the Internet, will nearly triple to $1.7 trillion by 2020, research firm International Data Corp said.

The IoT market, valued at $655.8 billion in 2014, is set to grow at a compounded annual rate of 16.9 percent, IDC said on Tuesday.

"Devices, connectivity, and IT services will make up the majority of the IoT market in 2020," IDC said. "Together, they are estimated to account for over two-thirds of the worldwide IoT market in 2020..."

Technology firms including Google Inc, Intel Corp, Cisco Systems, Samsung Electronics and telecoms majors including Vodafone and Verizon are betting heavily on Internet device-connected homes for future revenue and profit.

Intel said in February it would buy German network chip maker Lantiq to expand its range of chips used in Internet-connected gadgets.

Google bought smart thermostat and smoke alarm-maker Nest Labs Inc for $3.2 billion last year and Samsung Electronics acquired U.S. start-up SmartThings, which makes software that helps control everything from door locks to light switches in homes, for $200 million.

(Reporting by Lehar Maan in Bengaluru; Editing by Kirti Pandey)

BBC: 'Moose' malicious worm targets home routers

28 May 2015 BBC

Medical equipment may also be vulnerable to attacks by the Moose worm, warn security experts
A malicious worm that targets poorly protected home routers has been uncovered by security researchers.
The "moose" malware tries to take over home routers by trying thousands of weak passwords.

Once it has taken over a device, the worm grabs login details when people visit Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other social sites.

These credentials are then used to artificially inflate followers and viewer numbers.

"This threat is all about social network fraud," said researchers Olivier Bilodeau and Thomas Dupuy from security firm Eset in a report detailing their findings.
Aggressive attack

The malicious program got its name because the file containing its attack code is called elan - French for moose.

The malicious worm travels the internet "aggressively" seeking out vulnerable devices. So far, said the pair, some of the routers made by Actiontec, Hik Vision, Netgear, Synology, TP-Link, ZyXEL, and Zhone have been found to be vulnerable to moose.

In their analysis, the two researchers saw the worm being used to set up bogus accounts on social network sites and then use stolen credentials to add fake "likes" and "follows" to those accounts.

Fake likes and follows for Twitter, Vine and Instagram accounts were added via moose
Instagram, Twitter and Vine were the three sites most widely abused by this bogus liking system, said the researchers.

The pair said it was hard to gauge the exact numbers of routers that had been compromised because of the steps moose's creators took to prevent detection. In addition, they said, the company hosting the command-and-control system for moose were very uncooperative.

Despite these problems, the researchers estimate that tens of thousands of routers are potentially vulnerable to moose and many of those devices might already be infected. Moose was first spotted in mid-2014 and has been active ever since, said Mr Bilodeau and Mr Dupuy.

They added that the weak passwords that moose exploited were used on many different devices not just home routers. They warned that medical equipment and smart home systems might also be susceptible to infection by moose.

In their analysis, the researchers gave advice about how to spot moose and said people should update default login systems to avoid its attentions.

HTTPS-crippling attack threatens tens of thousands of Web and mail servers

Diffie-Hellman downgrade weakness allows attackers to intercept encrypted data.


by Dan Goodin - May 19, 2015 10:54pm PDT  Ars Technica


Wikipedia

Tens of thousands of HTTPS-protected websites, mail servers, and other widely used Internet services are vulnerable to a new attack that lets eavesdroppers read and modify data passing through encrypted connections, a team of computer scientists has found.

The vulnerability affects an estimated 8.4 percent of the top one million websites and a slightly bigger percentage of mail servers populating the IPv4 address space, the researchers said. The threat stems from a flaw in the transport layer security protocol that websites and mail servers use to establish encrypted connections with end users. The new attack, which its creators have dubbed Logjam, can be exploited against a subset of servers that support the widely used Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which allows two parties that have never met before to negotiate a secret key even though they're communicating over an unsecured, public channel.

The weakness is the result of export restrictions the US government mandated in the 1990s on US developers who wanted their software to be used abroad. The regime was established by the Clinton administration so the FBI and other agencies could break the encryption used by foreign entities. Attackers with the ability to monitor the connection between an end user and a Diffie-Hellman-enabled server that supports the export cipher can inject a special payload into the traffic that downgrades encrypted connections to use extremely weak 512-bit key material. Using precomputed data prepared ahead of time, the attackers can then deduce the encryption key negotiated between the two parties.

"Logjam shows us once again why it's a terrible idea to deliberately weaken cryptography, as the FBI and some in law enforcement are now calling for," J. Alex Halderman, one of the scientists behind the research, wrote in an e-mail to Ars. "That's exactly what the US did in the 1990s with crypto export restrictions, and today that backdoor is wide open, threatening the security of a large part of the Web."

It wasn't supposed to be this way

FURTHER READING

STOP THE PRESSES: HTTPS-CRIPPLING “FREAK” BUG AFFECTS WINDOWS AFTER ALL
Microsoft advisory dramatically raises the number of vulnerable end-user devices.Ironically, Diffie-Hellman is supposed to provide an additional layer of protection because it allows the two connected parties to constantly refresh the cryptographic key securing Web or e-mail sessions. The so-called perfect forward secrecy that Diffie-Hellman makes possible significantly increases the work of eavesdropping because attackers must obtain the key anew each time it changes, as opposed to only once with other encryption schemes, such as those based on RSA keys. Logjam is significant because it shows that ephemeral Diffie-Hellman—or DHE—can be fatal to TLS when the export-grade ciphers are supported. Logjam is reminiscent of the FREAK attack that also allowed attackers to downgrade HTTPS connections to 512-bit cryptography.

According to this informational site established by the researchers, only Internet Explorer has been updated to protect end users against Logjam attacks. The researchers said they have been working with developers of major browsers and that Chrome, Firefox, and Safari are also expected to implement a fix that rejects encrypted connections unless the key material contains a minimum of 1024 bits. Updates are expected to be available in the next day or two, and possibly much sooner. Information on vulnerable end-user e-mail programs wasn't available at the time this post was being prepared.

According to the researchers, an estimated 8.4 percent of the top 1 million Web domains are vulnerable, and 3.4 percent of HTTPS-supported websites overall are susceptible. E-mail servers that support simple mail transfer protocol with StartTLS, secure POP3, and IMAP are estimated to be vulnerable in 14.8 percent, 8.9 percent, and 8.4 percent of the cases respectively.

To exploit vulnerable connections, attackers must use the number field sieve algorithm to precompute data. Once they have completed that task, they can use it to perform man-in-the-middle attacks against vulnerable connections in real time. Using academic-level hardware, the researchers required just two weeks to generate data needed to attack the two most commonly called prime numbers 512-bit Diffie-Hellman uses to negotiate ephemeral keys. Those two data sets allow the attackers to compromise about 92 percent of sites supporting the export cipher. It wouldn't require much additional work to generate data needed to attack the remaining sites.
Snowden revelations revisited

The work required to precompute data needed to attack 768- and 1024-bit primes is orders of magnitude harder, but the researchers said the load is nonetheless within the means of state-sponsored eavesdroppers. In a research paper titled Imperfect Forward Secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice, the researchers speculate the technique may be the means the National Security Agency reportedly uses to routinely break millions of encrypted connections. Documents leaked by former NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden revealed the mass crypto attacks but didn't say how they're carried out. Besides attacking HTTPS-protected Web and e-mail sessions, the researchers said, the same technique may be used to break SSH and VPN connections, too.

"The technical details of our attack have also let us look at some of the leaked NSA documents in a new light, and give an explanation consistent with the documents and our experiments of how the NSA might be breaking certain crypto protocols on a wide scale," Nadia Heninger, a scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of the paper, wrote in an e-mail.

In the short term, the researchers recommend all server administrators disable support for the DHE_EXPORT ciphersuites that allow Diffie-Hellman connections to be downgraded. The researchers have provided a guide with step-by-step instructions for securely deploying Diffie-Hellman in TLS. And of course, they also strongly encourage all end users to install browser and e-mail client patches that enforce minimum restrictions on the primes used to negotiate ephemeral keys. Over the longer term, they say, developers should transition to so-called elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange, since the scheme is less vulnerable to precomputed attacks.

Logjam continues a trend begun a few years ago of using catchy words or phrases to name vulnerabilities or the attacks that exploit them. Thankfully, this vulnerability disclosure wasn't accompanied by a logo, and the dedicated website offers a wealth of important information without any hype. Halderman told Ars the name is a pun on the "discrete log" mathematical operation used to break the weak keys. "But the name is also an allusion to the fact that these '90s-era export ciphers are part of an immense amount of technical debt that's built up in our crypto protocols," he added in an e-mail. "There's just too much dead wood that's accumulated over the years."

’90s-style security flaw puts “millions” of routers at risk

Flawed NetUSB driver found in Netgear, D-Link, TP-Link devices, and more.


by Peter Bright - May 20, 2015 5:10pm PDT Ars Technica

As companies continue to beat the Internet of Things drum, promoting a world when every device is smart, and anything electronic is network connected, we have some news that shows just what a horrible idea this really is. A security firm has found that a Linux kernel driver called NetUSB contains an amateurish error that can be exploited by hackers to remotely compromise any device running the driver. The driver is commonly found in home routers, and while some offer the ability to disable it, others do not appear to do so.

NetUSB is developed by Taiwanese company KCodes. The purpose of the driver is to allow PCs and Macs to connect to USB devices over a network, so that these devices can be shared just by plugging them into a Wi-Fi router or similar. To do this, a driver is needed at each end; a client driver on the PC or Mac, and a server driver on the router itself.

This router-side driver listens to connections on TCP port 20005, and it's this driver that contains a major security flaw. SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab, which publicized the problem, discovered that the Linux driver contains a simple buffer overflow. As part of the communication between client and server, the client sends the name of the client computer; if this name is longer than 64 bytes, the buffer overflows. The company says that this overflow can be exploited to enable both denial of service (crashing the router) and remote code execution.

In its write up of the bug, the researchers described the issue as something of a throwback, writing "the '90s are calling and want their vulns back, stack buffer overflow." Simple stack buffer overflows in widely deployed software are these days relatively unusual, as developers have become somewhat more conscientious of the danger they represent. But clearly not every developer has gotten the message yet.

SEC examined firmware for many SOHO routers, finding the flawed code in products from D-Link, Netgear, TP-Link, Trendnet, and ZyXEL. Ninety-two different products, including many current generation models, were found to include the bad code (a full list is available in the advisory. A further 21 other vendors also appear to ship NetUSB products; SEC did not check those vendors' firmwares, so the dangerous driver is likely to be found in more than just those 92 devices. SEC estimates that millions of devices are affected.

Exposure will vary from device to device, as not all routers will necessarily have the bad driver loaded and running. But many do. Worse, they may have no good way of disabling it; Netgear told SEC that even with NetUSB functionality disabled through the router's configuration UI, the driver is still loaded, and there is no ability either to disable it or to block access to port 20005 in the firewall.

TP-LINK intends to issue firmware updates for most of its affected devices by the end of the month. The response from other vendors appears to be less satisfactory, with no clear timeline for issuing fixes, nor even a commitment to fix the flaw (or create a way to disable the problem driver).

Will Internet of Things devices fare any better than routers? We're not going to hold our breath. It's almost certainly going to suffer the same propensity for sharing code and inadequate upgrade process. The result is unlikely to please anyone other than hackers.



Peter Bright / Peter is Technology Editor at Ars. He covers Microsoft, programming and software development, Web technology and browsers, and security. He is based in Houston, TX.@drpizza on Twitter

CCC Technology Offerings Through CollegeBuys

WRITTEN BY ALLAN ALDAYMONDAY, 18 MAY 2015  CCC TechEDge

The Foundation for California Community Colleges, through its CollegeBuys program, continues to support California’s 112 community colleges through technology-focused purchasing agreements, in partnership with community college districts and the Systemwide Architecture Committee.

These agreements ensure that the California Community Colleges (CCC) can continue to access high-quality technology products and services while obtaining competitive pricing and streamlining the procurement experience.

Cisco Network, Server, and Unified Communications Equipment
Last month, in partnership with several colleges, the Foundation issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) focused on Cisco Systems Inc. network, server and unified communications equipment products and services. Through this competitive process, CCC can get Cisco products and services from Cisco-certified resellers. Products under this agreement can be incorporated into existing network infrastructures or used for projects that require a complete infrastructure overhaul.

The scope of the RFP includes nine different product classifications, including routers, switches, network optimization and acceleration, security, storage networking, optical networking, wireless, networking software, and unified communications.

With a focus on total cost of ownership, the RFP defines performance requirements for products and services so that the CCC will have value and long-term cost-savings while reducing future operational expenditures during the life of the products. For example, mandatory performance and service specifications require the vendor to update the participating agency’s current IT infrastructure without being cost or time prohibitive; provide a minimum written product warranty to cover parts and labor 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; respond to warranty service requests within the same day; and provide only those products that are modular, have field-replaceable parts, and allow for easy changeability.

Aside from contract compliance with California’s public contract code, additional benefits of the Foundation contract include Cisco training credits for participating agencies, equipment trade-in, discounting for Cisco SMARTnet services and financing for lease options.

Submitted proposals will be evaluated at the end of May, and any executed contracts are expected to become available to the CCC as early as June.

Symantec SymEd

The Foundation recently secured a partnership with Symantec Corp. and ComputerLand of Silicon Valley to offer discounted Symantec SymEd (ETLA) site licenses to the CCC.

The SymEd site license offers centralized standards to allow colleges to automate the deployment, security, and management of devices. SymEd also provides a secure e-learning environment for physical, virtual and cloud platforms; support for multiple operating systems; and critical data projection with advanced local backup and recovery for Windows.

This new program will be based on full time equivalent (FTE) employee count rather than a per device model and will offer a choice of four packets to best meet the college’s needs. Interested colleges can sign up at any time and prorated pricing is available for colleges already utilizing SymED.

Additional Technology Offerings
From Utelogy’s smart classroom platform for education and collaboration to iContracts, a cloud-based software for managing contracts and associated processes, and Comevo, a market leader in orientation software services, the Foundation continues to develop its technology offerings to meet the growing needs of the CCC. For a complete listing of Foundation contracts, visithttp://www.foundationccc.org/CollegeBuys/OurPartners/tabid/489/Default.aspx.

Allan Alday is a Program Specialist at the Foundation for California Community Colleges.

Cisco WASTC West Coast Academy Conference Schedule Now Available for Review

2015

WASTC West Coast Academy Pre-Conference

&


WASTC Cisco West Coast Academy Conference 

“You cannot put 10 pounds of sugar 

in a 5 pound sack”

“Quote from Dolly Parton’s Dad”

But I think we have done just that!

The WASTC Cisco West Coast Academy Conference Schedule is 

now available for your review J

Also check out the preconference workshops 

You are going to like it!!

So much good stuff.

To register for the conference please go to www.wastc.org and follow the red balls.

Hope to see you there,

  

--

Karen Stanton
Cisco Networking Academy
ASC ITC Ohlone
WASTC Coordinator
Western Academy Support & Training Center-WASTC
www.wastc.org
661 362 5363
karen.stanton@wastc.org

MPICT

www.mpict.org

AOL: 2.1 million people still subscribe to dial-up Internet

BY BRANDON RUSSELL | MAY 9, 2015 TechnoBuffalo



AOL on Friday revealed that 2.1 million people in the U.S. still subscribe to its dial-up service, an astonishing and surprising number in the year 2015. A large majority of Americans have ditched the comatose service as faster broadband has become more accessible. But, either through ignorance, stubbornness, or sheer unavailability in certain areas, people are still clinging to the good old days of the early Internet.

Back in 2010, AOL revealed it had about 4.6 million dial-up users, so usage is on the decline, but it’s a slow, slow process, not unlike the service these people still get.

CNN Money notes that over 70-percent of Americans are connected through faster broadband, with an average speed of 11.4 Mbps, which is lighting quick compared to AOL’s 56k speeds. Compared to what the Internet looked like 20 years ago, 56k connections probably wouldn’t even be able to load a modern day website, much less stream a video on YouTube or Netflix.

Without fast Internet, online tech journalism just wouldn’t exist in the way it does today. And there would be no Twitch or Spotify. It would be a cruel, apocalyptic world.

The most shocking thing of all? Customers are paying AOL $20 a month for dial-up access, which means the company is still making a killing each year from these subscriptions. If you or someone you know is still using dial-up, it might be time for an intervention.

I get it: not everyone can afford broadband Internet, and there’s a minuscule chance they don’t have access to the faster speeds in their remote part of the wilderness. But 2.1 million is a hefty figure, and so long as people subscribe, AOL will continue to be an enduring time capsule of despair.

Warrants not required for police to get your cell phone cell-site records

Mobile callers' cell-tower history is fair game for cops—probable cause unnecessary.

by David Kravets - May 5, 2015 3:25pm PDT  ars technica


Michael Dorausch

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the government does not need a warrant to obtain a suspect's cell-site location data records.

The 9-2 decision (PDF) by the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals said that the records of towers that a mobile phone uses to make calls are considered "business records" maintained by a "third party" and are not protected by the Fourth Amendment. That means the government may obtain these records if it believes they are relevant to an investigation.

The case concerns a Florida man, Quartavious Davis, who was sentenced to life in prison for a string of robberies in a prosecution that was built with the suspect's cell site records.

...Davis can assert neither ownership nor possession of the third-party’s business records he sought to suppress. Instead, those cell tower records were created by MetroPCS, stored on its own premises, and subject to its control. Cell tower location records do not contain private communications of the subscriber. This type of non-content evidence, lawfully created by a third-party telephone company for legitimate business purposes, does not belong to Davis, even if it concerns him. Like the security camera surveillance images introduced into evidence at his trial, MetroPCS’s cell tower records were not Davis’s to withhold. Those surveillance camera images show Davis’s location at the precise location of the robbery, which is far more than MetroPCS’s cell tower location records show.

The majority ruling by Judge Frank Hull is a big boost to the government. Warrantless cell-site tracking has become among the government's preferred methods of electronically tracking suspects in the wake of a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that the authorities generally needed a warrant to attach GPS devices onto vehicles and track their every move.

Meanwhile, the Atlanta-based appeals court had ruled the opposite way last year by a vote of 2-1. But the 11th Circuit revisited the case with a larger panel of 11 judges at the government's request. The outcome brings the number of appellate courts that have ruled for the authorities to four. There are 13 appeals courts nationwide. None have gone the other way. Without conflicting rulings, the US Supreme Court might not take up the issue any time soon.

In all the decisions, the appellate courts cited analog-aged 1979 US Supreme Court precedent, known as Smith v. Maryland, that allows the government's telephone metadata snooping program that Edward Snowden exposed.

Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and a Fourth Amendment expert, said he agreed with the court's ruling—to an extent.

Granted, I want there to be a circuit split to get the case up to the Supremes. That leaves me in an odd position: Although I think a judge should follow Smith, I also kinda want a lower court to not follow precedent in order to tee up the issue for the Supreme Court.
The 11th Circuit originally decided in June that a warrant was required because the public had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their public movements.

"Thus, the exposure of the cell site location information can convert what would otherwise be a private event into a public one. When one’s whereabouts are not public, then one may have a reasonable expectation of privacy in those whereabouts," the court ruled. (PDF)

But what a different a larger panel of judges makes when it comes to deciding the constitutionality of so-called § 2703(d) orders:

The stored telephone records produced in this case, and in many other criminal cases, serve compelling governmental interests. Historical cell tower location records are routinely used to investigate the full gamut of state and federal crimes, including child abductions, bombings, kidnappings, murders, robberies, sex offenses, and terrorism-related offenses.

Such evidence is particularly valuable during the early stages of an investigation, when the police lack probable cause and are confronted with multiple suspects. In such cases, § 2703(d) orders—like other forms of compulsory process not subject to the search warrant procedure—help to build probable cause against the guilty, deflect suspicion from the innocent, aid in the search for truth, and judiciously allocate scarce investigative resources.
For the two-judge dissent, Judge Beverly Martin wrote:

"While I admire the majority’s attempt to cabin its holding to the technology of five years ago, its assurances in this regard seem naïve in practice. As a result of today’s decision, I have little doubt that all government requests for cell site location data will be approved, no matter how specific or invasive the technology."
The MetroPCS records at issue in the case were from August 1, 2010 to October 6, 2010. The defendant, Davis, made roughly 86 calls a day.

The data included the telephone numbers of calls made by and to Davis' mobile phone; whether a call was outgoing or incoming; the date, time and duration of calls. The key dispute in this case concerned other data that was turned over. That included the number assigned to the cell tower that wirelessly connected the calls from and to Davis, and the sector number associated with the tower.

Davis' attorney, Nathan Freed Wessler of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the "dissenting judges recognized outdated legal doctrines from the analog age should not be mechanically extended to undermine our privacy rights in the voluminous digital records that come with modern life."



David Kravets / The senior editor for Ars Technica. Founder of TYDN fake news site. Technologist. Political scientist. Humorist. Dad of two boys. Been doing journalism for so long I remember manual typewriters with real paper.

Connect America Fund Offers Carriers Nearly $1.7 Billion to Expand Broadband to Over 8.5 Million Rural Americans

Carriers Have Four Months to Accept or Decline Offers on State-Level Basis | FCC PressRelease

Cisco WASTC Conference, June 15-19 in Pomona

  

Do you feel like you work in a VACUUM?  

  

Do your Co-Workers think you are Strange?                                                                             

WASTC Academy Conference 2015

is not just about great Professional Development [of course we include that]-It is about getting to spend some time with people like you [and we are the best], so WASTC has scheduled time to do just that!

Breakfast & Lunch Every day

Appreciation Event, Thursday at 5:00 [food, band, industry representatives]

After Hours Networking Room to brush up on your technology or just hang out in the evenings getting some downtime with peers. 

  

Come join the fun -see flyer for the PD part.

Hope to see you there,

  

Karen

--

Karen Stanton
Cisco Networking Academy
ASC ITC Ohlone
WASTC Coordinator
Western Academy Support & Training Center-WASTC
www.wastc.org
661 362 5363
karen.stanton@wastc.org

MPICT

  www.mpict.org

NYT: Google Introduces Wireless Service Called Project Fi

By CONOR DOUGHERTY APRIL 22, 2015  New York Times

Google's new phone service, Project Fi, will be available only to people using Google’s Nexus 6 phone. Credit Google, via Associated Press
Now you can Google a phone call.

On Wednesday, Google unveiled its long-awaited phone service, called Project Fi, putting the search giant in competition with Verizon, AT&T and other wireless service providers. In addition to new turf, the service is an attempt to blend several communication tools and the multiplying ways of calling people — cellular calls, online calls like those offered by Skype — into a single phone number and service.

For now, Project Fi could be considered an experiment. It will be available only to people using Google’s Nexus 6 phone, limiting its reach.

Analysts see the new service as a bid to reimagine phone calls so that they have greater overlap with Google’s expanding world of devices and services.

Unlike your typical cell service, Project Fi will mix traditional wireless technology, where calls are routed through cellular towers, with the wireless Internet service found in Starbucks, airports and elsewhere. Google has teamed with Sprint and T-Mobile to provide the traditional wireless service, and said it had about a million wireless hot spots for the rest.

“Wherever you’re connected to Wi-Fi — whether that’s at home, your favorite coffee shop or your Batcave — you can talk and text like you normally do,” wrote Nick Fox, Google’s vice president of communications products, in a blog post. “If you leave an area of Wi-Fi coverage, your call will seamlessly transition from Wi-Fi to cell networks so your conversation doesn’t skip a beat.”

In addition to changing networks, the service will move users’ phone numbers between screens, so they can talk and text on phones, tablets or laptops. And as with most things Google does, the service is meant to be cheap.

Traditional cellphone carriers like AT&T and Verizon charge customers upward of $100 a month for their services, including phone calls and mobile data. Google’s service will be $20 a month for basic voice and text service, along with a flat $10 per gigabyte of cellular data.

“Since it’s hard to predict your data usage, you’ll get credit for the full value of your unused data,” according to the blog post. “Let’s say you go with 3GB for $30 and only use 1.4GB one month. You’ll get $16 back, so you only pay for what you use.”

In many ways, the wireless service is similar to the Google Fiber Internet service that has been introduced in a handful of American cities, including the Kansas City area and Austin, Tex.

Google is piggybacking on giant physical networks that are owned by other companies, creating a barrier that, for now at least, limits Google’s competitive threat to traditional carriers. But Google has a long history of trying to cut out middlemen — including Internet service providers, online stores and delivery businesses — that stand between the company and users.

With the wireless service, Google will be operating on what is called a mobile virtual network operator, or MVNO, which provides a service on other mobile carriers’ networks.

“It’s always an interesting business because you are dependent on the companies who you are trying to compete with,” said Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research. “And they will only support you if they think you’re targeting a niche they can’t target themselves.”

Over the last few years, Google has been reshaping itself around mobile devices that have become the primary way people use the Internet.

On Tuesday, the company adjusted its bread-and-butter search engine in such a way that websites that are optimized for mobile phone screens will get a boost in mobile search rankings. It also has been working with mobile application developers to create new services that allow mobile users to seamlessly bounce between the traditional web and the apps on their phone.

But Google has remained two steps away from mobile users. Unlike Apple, which makes its own phones and essentially dictates the terms of its service to mobile carriers, Google’s Android mobile software is distributed to phone manufacturers, who adjust it to their liking, and then through wireless carriers, who bundle their own services on top.

Nexus devices, which are made for Google and run a “pure” form of Android, brought the company one step closer to the user, but their sales are much smaller than those of other Android smartphone makers, like Samsung.

The new service gives Google “freedom and more control over the experience, and can offer something like Apple offers, where they control the whole package,” Mr. Dawson said.

Comcast to Launch 2-Gig Broadband in CaliforniaAlso Launching DOCSIS-Based 250-Meg Tier

4/17/2015 4:00 PM Eastern Last updated at 4/17/2015 5:00 PM Multichannel

By: Jeff Baumgartner




Comcast said it will roll out Gigabit Pro, its new residential, fiber-based 2 Gbps service, in California in June, and also introduced a new DOCSIS 3.0-based tier, called Extreme 250, that will pump out downstream speeds of up to 250 Mbps and be delivered via the HFC network.

Also in California, Comcast said it is raising the downstream speeds of the following tiers at no additional cost:

-Performance: From 50 Mbps to 75 Mbps
-Blast: From 105 Mbps to 150 Mbps

Those speed bumps will go into effect starting in May and continue throughout the year, the MSO said.

California is the second area identified by Comcast for Gigabit Pro. The operator will launch that symmetrical 2-Gig service in Atlanta sometime next month.

Gigabit Pro, which Comcast expects to make available to 18 million homes this year, will be deployed on a targeted basis using fiber-to-the-premises technology (fiber and the other requisite premises-facing gear will only be deployed to homes that decide to subscribe to the service). On that note, Comcast has said it will make the symmetrical 2 Gbps service available to residential customers who are within “close proximity” (about one-third of a mile) of Comcast’s fiber network.

In California, Comcast will offer Gigabit Pro in Chico, Fresno, Marysville/Yuba City, Merced, Modesto, Monterey, Sacramento, Salinas, San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Barbara County, Stockton and Visalia metro areas. Comcast has been offering up to 10-Gig fiber-based Ethernet service to businesses in the state since 2011.

Comcast, which is in the process of acquiring Time Warner Cable, also intends to offer residential gigabit speeds on its more widely deployed HFC network using DOCSIS 3.1.

Comcast has not announced pricing on Gigabit Pro. It was not immediately known how the new 250 Mbps D3 service will be priced.

“This is Comcast’s 15th speed increase in 13 years. We are proud to boost our existing speeds and most importantly introduce new Internet tiers like the Extreme 250 and Gigabit Pro that will allow our California customers to do more online, across multiple devices,” said Hank Fore, regional SVP of Comcast Cable’s California Region, in a statement. “We will continue to look for opportunities to increase speeds to not only stay ahead of customer demands, but also to provide a wide range of options that meet customer needs.”

The MSO noted that the new speeds announced today for California won’t launch in the following areas: Arbuckle, Coalinga, Cool, Gustine, Huron, Isleton, Le Grand, Lodi, Maxwell, Planada, Rio Vista, Santa Cruz, Santa Nella, Scotts Valley and Williams.

- See more at: http://www.multichannel.com/news/technology/comcast-roll-2-gig-broadband-california/389868#sthash.v0IuU7CN.DiUaWfTH.dpuf

New CompTIA Network+ Exam now available

As part of CompTIA's continuing commitment to providing the most relevant certifications in IT, the latest Network+ Exam (N10-006) has been released. Recommended as a first professional-level networking certification, Network+ is an ISO-17024 compliant, vendor-neutral certification for individuals who build, manage and protect data networks. Learn about the latest enhancements, and join the 400,000 people worldwide who are CompTIA Network+ certified. And, explore all the available CompTIA certifications that can help you reach your career goals.

Correction: ICT-Digital Media Sector Team Announces Certification Voucher Benefit for CCC Students and Faculty

[This corrected version includes some pricing changes and a different main contact] 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Thousand Oaks, CA│ April 8, 2015

ICT-Digital Media Sector Team Announces Certification Voucher Benefit for CCC Students and Faculty

As you know, the high cost of certification exams can be a barrier for some students pursuing careers in ICT. We are pleased to announce that the ICT-Digital Media Sector has partnered with Genuine Genius Technologies to create a solution. Now your college can provide students a way to save 15-50% on the cost of certification exams. Students simply purchase a voucher through the California Community Colleges XVoucher Website at a discounted price, then use that voucher number when registering for an exam.

There are benefits for faculty, too:

• Each student voucher purchased helps qualify you for free CompTIA exams
• No more searching for your member number; students purchase completely on their own
• Gain insight on which exam vouchers are being purchased
• Students contact the XVoucher technical support team with problems or questions

Vouchers are now available for the following exams at a significant cost savings:

Exam	Retail Price	Voucher Price*	Savings
CompTIA A+	$194	$99.53	50%
CompTIA Network+	$277	$153.21	45%
CompTIA Security+	$302	$213.60	30%
Microsoft MCP Academic Exams	$150	$92.82	40%
Microsoft MCP IT Academy	$150	$82.01	45%
EC-Council CEH Exam	$500	$414	20%
EC-Council Self Study	$600	$518	15%

*Quoted prices subject to change

There is no cost to participate. Just follow these steps:

1.      Complete the XVoucher Registration Form with your college information.

2.      If your college is not yet a member of the CompTIA CAPP Academy Program, complete the online form on the CompTIA website to join at no cost.

3.      If you are interested in the new EC-Council Academic Program, contact our vendor partner, Carrie Shaffer, at Genuine Genius Technologies. She can give you information about the program and assist you in joining.

Once your college is registered, students can purchase vouchers through the California Community Colleges XVoucher Website at any time. Just give them the link and they’ll be ready to order.

And this is just the beginning. As we work to add more vendors, such as Adobe and Cisco, we will continue to strengthen the position of the California Community Colleges as a resource for ICT continuing education. Sign up today to take advantage of these exclusive benefits and give your students more bang for their buck!

Contact:

Steve Linthicum

Deputy Sector Navigator ICT-Digital Media

(916) 300-7602

slinthicum@sierracollege.edu

ICT-Digital Media Sector Team announces Certification Voucher benefit for CCC students and faculty.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Thousand Oaks, CA April 8, 2015

ICT-Digital Media Sector Team announces Certification Voucher benefit for CCC students and faculty.

Certification Exam Vouchers

As you know, the high cost of certification exams can be a barrier for some students pursuing careers in ICT. We are pleased to announce that the ICT-Digital Media Sector has partnered with Genuine Genius Technologies to create a solution. Now your college can provide students a way to save from 20-50% on the cost of certification exams. Students simply purchase a voucher through the California Community Colleges XVoucher Website at a discounted price, then use that voucher number when registering for an exam.

There are benefits for faculty, too:

• Each student voucher purchased helps qualify you for free CompTIA exams
• No more searching for your member number; students purchase completely on their own
• Gain insight on which exam vouchers are being purchased
• Students contact the XVoucher technical support team with problems or questions

Vouchers are now available for the following exams at a significant cost savings:

Exam	Retail Price	Voucher Price	Savings
CompTIA A+	$194	$99.53	50%
CompTIA Network+	$277	$153.21	45%
CompTIA Security+	$302	$209.98	30%
Microsoft MCP Exams	$150	$91.20	40%
EC-Council CEH Exam	$500	$411	20%

There is no cost to participate. Just follow these easy steps:

1.      Complete the XVoucher Registration Form with your college information.

2.      If your college is not yet a member of the CompTIA CAPP Academy Program, complete the online form on the CompTIA website to join at no cost.

3.      If you are interested in the new EC-Council Academic Program, contact our vendor partner, Carrie Shaffer, at Genuine Genius Technologies. She can give you information about the program and assist you in joining.

Once your college is registered, students can purchase vouchers through the California Community Colleges XVoucher Website at any time. Just give them the link and they’ll be ready to order.

And this is just the beginning. As we work to add more vendors, such as Adobe and Cisco, we will continue to strengthen the position of the California Community Colleges as a resource for ICT continuing education. Sign up today to take advantage of these exclusive benefits and give your students more bang for their buck!

Contact:

Steve Wright
Sector Navigator ICT-Digital Media

805 496 8583