Bitcoin Blows Past $600

From CNBC:

Bitcoin touched a fresh all-time high on Monday as the digital currency continued to gain favor with investors.  The virtual currency rose to just under $619 on Mt. Gox exchange Monday afternoon in Asia, up by over 25 percent from the same time on Sunday.

Its latest gains come as the potential for regulation hangs over the market. The U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC) is set to begin a hearing at 3.00 p.m. Washington time on Monday. The event will bring representatives from different federal agencies and representatives from the bitcoin community to discuss virtual currencies.

Executive Computer Illiteracy a Threat to Consumer Data Security

Here's an interesting new study from Threat Track Security, a "blind survey of 200 security professionals dealing with malware analysis within U.S. enterprises."  From the release:

ThreatTrack Security today published a study that reveals mounting cybersecurity challenges within U.S. enterprises. Nearly 6 in 10 malware analysts reported they have investigated or addressed a data breach that was never disclosed by their company.

These results suggest that the data breach epidemic - totaling 621 confirmed data breaches in 2012, according to Verizon's 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report - may be significantly underreported, leaving enterprises' customers and data-sharing partners unaware of a wide array of potential security risks associated with the loss of personal or proprietary information. Moreover, the largest companies, those with more than 500 employees, are even more likely to have had an unreported breach, with 66% of malware analysts with enterprises of that size reporting undisclosed data breaches. 

Despite their gravity, the reasons behind these breaches are rather funny:

malware analysts revealed a device used by a member of their senior leadership team had become infected with malware due to executives:

• Visiting a pornographic website (40%)
• Clicking on a malicious link in a phishing email (56%)
• Allowing a family member to use a company-owned device (45%)
• Installing a malicious mobile app (33%)

Wikileaks Obtains Draft Text of TPP Copyright Agreement

From the Guardian:

WikiLeaks has released the draft text of a chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, a multilateral free-trade treaty currently being negotiated in secret by 12 Pacific Rim nations.

The full agreement covers a number of areas, but the chapter published by WikiLeaks focuses on intellectual property rights, an area of law which has effects in areas as diverse as pharmaceuticals and civil liberties.

Negotiations for the TPP have included representatives from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, and Brunei, but have been conducted behind closed doors. Even members of the US Congress were only allowed to view selected portions of the documents under supervision.

HTTPS: Toward a Secure Internet

From W3.org:

There seems to be strong consensus to increase the use of encryption on the Web, but there is less agreement about how to go about this. The most relevant proposals were: 

A. Opportunistic encryption for http:// URIs without server authentication -- a.k.a. "TLS Relaxed" as per draft-nottingham-http2-encryption.

B. Opportunistic encryption for http:// URIs with server authentication -- the same mechanism, but not "relaxed", along with some form of downgrade protection.

 C. HTTP/2 to only be used with https:// URIs on the "open" Internet. http:// URIs would continue to use HTTP/1 (and of course it would still be possible for older HTTP/1 clients to still interoperate with https:// URIs).

In subsequent discussion, there seems to be agreement that (C) is preferable to (B), since it is more straightforward; no new mechanism needs to be specified, and HSTS can be used for downgrade protection. (C) also has this advantage over (A), and furthermore provides stronger protection against active attacks. The strongest objections against (A) seemed to be about creating confusion about security and discouraging use of "full" TLS, whereas those against (C) were about limiting deployment of better security.

Keen observers have noted that we can deploy (C) and judge adoption of the new protocol, later adding (A) if neccessary. The reverse is not necessarily true.

Shielding Yourself from Prying Eyes and Algorithms on Google, Facebook and Twitter

A quick how-to on shielding yourself from online tracking by Google, Facebook and Twitter, from Mashable:

Many sites, apps and browsers are using your information in ways you might not entirely comply with if you'd take the time to read their privacy policies. Often, opting out is only a click away, though it may be difficult to find out where exactly to click. We've compiled this list of ways various Internet companies are tracking and using your data — plus, given you the tools to opt out, if you wish . . .

Sunday US Mail Delivery for Amazon

From the Washington Post:

Amazon is teaming up with the U.S. Postal Service to deliver packages on Sundays.  The Seattle company says Sunday delivery will be available this week to customers in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. Amazon and the Postal Service plan to roll out service to “a large portion of the U.S. population” next year, including the cities of Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Phoenix.

Mail on Sunday?!

Online Learning: Three Free Intro to PHP Video Lecture Series

Learning your first programming language, or jumping in to a completely new programming language, can seem like a daunting task.  Where does one even begin?  The first step, of course, is to see what materials are freely available online.  There are a plethora of sites like Code Academy and Tutorials Point which offer text-based coding tutorials for free, but these can only take one so far, and may not provide answers to seemingly obvious questions a beginner may have.  In addition, there are many people whose learning style simply does not jive with a purely text-based format.  Fortunately, there is no lack of free online video series.  But even then the same question arises, where does one even begin, given the sheer quantity of such video lectures and tutorials?  In this post, we'll take a look at three free online video series devoted to beginning PHP programming . . . 

Harvard CS 75: Building Dynamic Websites
This course is from Harvard University's Computer Science curriculum, and provides all course materials for free online, including video of all lectures and discussion sections.  From the course description:

This course teaches students how to build dynamic websites with Ajax and with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP), one of today's most popular frameworks. Students learn how to set up domain names with DNS, how to structure pages with XHTML and CSS, how to program in JavaScript and PHP, how to configure Apache and MySQL, how to design and query databases with SQL, how to use Ajax with both XML and JSON, and how to build mashups. The course discusses issues of security, scalability, and cross-browser support and also discusses enterprise-level deployments of websites, including third-party hosting, virtualization, colocation in data centers, firewalling, and load-balancing. 

The list of lectures can be found here.  Ironically, the course video lectures do not always load properly in Firefox or Safari, but there appear to be few problems when using Chrome.  

Carl Herold's Live Stream Programming Sessions
Carl Herold is the operator of Computer Science for Everyone, which provides programming lessons and tutorials on the C programming language with a beginner audience in mind.  On his Youtube Channel, however, Carl provides video from two different series of live programming sessions where he builds a PHP-based web app from scratch using a Model-View-Controller type framework.  These video tutorials demystify numerous aspects of the programming process that may confuse the beginner.  Afterwards, you may find yourself wondering what you found so confusing to begin with.  This is the first video from a four part series on Building a PHP MVC Web Application Framework:



See also his related video series, LiveStream Startup, in which he programs "a real-world web application from scratch" in real time.

Eli the Computer Guy's PHP Programming Video Lectures
While the Harvard course and Carl Herold's live streams mentioned above provide an overview of the web app programming process – and thus touch upon XML, MYSQL, and so on –, Eli the Computer Guy's series of videos on PHP programming is much more targeted toward the nitty gritty of beginning programming in PHP itself.  This 11 part series covers basic syntax, form handling, flow control, and redirection.  His site also offers introductory video tutorials on a variety of other tech topics, from computer repair to networking and data security.  Well worth a view.