Global Emissions Sources

Global emmission culprits.  Also check out this related graphic.

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The Economist : Climate Change Buffoonery

Our children’s future is in the hands of wily wordsmithers and politicians.  Plenty of inspriring speeches to fill the history books though. 

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Unfortunate Cookie

Hilarious -

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HP’s Solution Suite For Schools

…..The new SchoolCloud allows educators and students to access their files and applications from any computer via a virtual desktop.  It combines “infrastructure, software and professional development tools designed specifically for education,” according to HP, including onsite professional development designed to help educators teach with the tools.  It also provides reports that allow teachers and administrators to correlate grades and other data with software and system usage.  According to HP, the system will also help school and district IT departments consolidate hundreds or thousands of desktop computers onto far fewer servers.  One district already using SchoolCloud for this is New York’s Hudson Falls Central School District, which has been able to reduce its desktop management burden considerably by using the system, according to the district’s director of information technology, Greg Partch.  “We went from managing 1,400 computers to 10 servers,” Partch said in a statement released today.  “We’re seeing a huge savings in help desk support, maintenance time and costs.”

…..MultiSeat is a thin client solution that runs off Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010.  Using the system, up to 10 students can share a single host computer with their own monitors and input devices.  The HP MultiSeat t100, expected to debut in 2010, is about the size of a pack of playing cards and is designed to allow schools to provide computer access for students at a lower ongoing cost per student, with a power consumption of 2.5 watts……TeachNow is a software tool designed to help educators create and distribute lesson plans.  Using a drag and drop interface, TeachNow lets teachers create lessons by dragging files and other elements onto a lesson topic then push materials out to students’ computers.  “Teachers also can share digital lesson plans across schools or even districts,” according to HP.  “All the materials for a lesson on biology or history could be prepackaged and passed from a veteran to a first-year teacher.”…..

Reference : http://thejournal.com/articles/2009/11/17/hp-launches-education-cloud-service.aspx

“Injection Attacks” Tops Web App Security Threats List

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) today released a new top 10 list at its conference in Washington, D.C., that focuses on Web application security risks rather than the way its previous lists highlighted the most common weaknesses found in Websites…..Injection attacks top the 2010 OWASP Top 10 list of Web application security threats, including SQL, OS, and LDAP injection, followed by cross-site scripting (XSS), broken authentication and session management, insecure direct object references, cross-site request forgery (CSRF), security misconfiguration, failure to restrict URL access, unvalidated redirects and forwards, insecure cryptographic storage, and insufficient transport layer protection.  The list is considered a “release candidate” that will be published in its final form in 2010.  New to the list are security misconfiguration and unvalidated redirects and forwards…..Web redirects typically steer users to other pages and sites, and when the data for the destination pages isn’t properly validated, users can be redirected to phishing or malware sites by attackers.

Malicious file execution and information leakage/improper error-handling are no longer on the top 10 list.  OWASP says that while malicious file execution is still a big problem in many environments and was especially high in 2007 with PHP vulnerabilities, now that PHP ships with default security, it’s less of a problem.  While information leakage/improper error-handling are rampant vulnerabilities, the impact of them isn’t usually as critical.  The OWASP report also includes how to assess the possibility that your Web application would be at risk of these types of Web attacks, as well as mitigation tips…..The top 10 comes on the heels of WhiteHat Security’s report yesterday of the most common vulnerabilities discovered in its clients’ Websites.  In that list, XSS was No. 1 and SQL injection No 5.  But Jeremiah Grossman, founder and CTO of WhiteHat, says SQL injection flaw finds were likely underreported.  SQL injection flaws can be difficult to detect in scans because developers who disable verbose error messages as a way to protect against SQL injection attack can also inadvertently make it difficult to find SQL injection flaws, according to Grossman.

Reference : http://www.darkreading.com/security/vulnerabilities/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221700095