NYT Profiles Ross Ulbricht

From the NYT:

Ross Ulbricht’s last moments as a free man were noisy enough to draw a crowd. Employees at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco library heard a crashing sound and rushed to the s
cience fiction section, expecting to find a patron had hit the floor. Instead, they found a handful of federal agents surrounding a slender 29-year-old man with light brown hair and wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

The goal of the arrest, at 3:15 p.m. on Oct. 1, 2013, was not simply to apprehend Mr. Ulbricht, but also to prevent him from performing the most mundane of tasks: closing his laptop. That computer, according to the F.B.I., was the command center of Silk Road, the world’s largest and most notorious black market for drugs. In just two and a half years, the government says, Silk Road had become a hub for more than $1.2 billion worth of transactions, many of them in cocaine, heroin and LSD. 

50 Python Resources for Beginner and Intermediate Programmers

This is the third post in our recent series for beginning Python programmers.  In the first post, I detailed a self-study time table for beginner Python programmers.  The second post then laid out learning benchmarks for the project on the basis of MIT's Introduction to Computer Science course.  Today's installment provides a categorized list of Python resources for beginner to intermediate programmers.  Add any others you've found helpful in the comments and I'll update the list.  Enjoy!

Textbooks
Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
The Art and Craft of Programming: Python Edition
A Byte of Python
Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python
Python Programming WikiBook
Python Style Guide
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
Building Skills in Python: A Programmer's Introduction to Python

Tutorial Textbooks
Learn Python the Hard Way
Dive Into Python
Hacking Secret Ciphers with Python
Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python
Making Games with Python and Pygame
A Beginner's Python Tutorial: Civilization IV

Intro Web Tutorials
Learn Python in Ten Minutes
Code Academy: Python Track
Python-Course: Intro to Python
Google Developers: Python Introduction
pGuides: Python
New Coder Python Tutorials
Tutorials Point: Python

Video
Python Video Index
43 Short, Targeted Intro Python Video Tutorials 
A Hands-on Introduction to Python for Beginning Programmers 
Python for Programmers: A Project-Based Tutorial
Google Developers' Python Class
Learn Python Through Public Data Hacking
Growing Python with Spreadsheets
Python for Hackers: Networkers Primer

Targeted Web Tutorials
How to Use the Reddit API in Python
Intro to Python Web Scraping
Python Network Programming
Sockets in Python: Into the World of Python Network Programming
Sockets Programming in Python
Python gnupg (GPG) Example

GUI Programming
An Introduction to Tkinter
Getting Started with wxPy
Creating an Application in Kivy 

Web Programming
Hacked Existence Full Django Website Tutorial Series
How to Tango with Django

Targeted Textbooks (Advanced)
Natural Language Processing with Python 
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Python 

Reference
Python Standard Library
Python Package Index
Effbot Guide to the Python Standard Library
Python Module of the Week
Python Cheat Sheet (quick reference guide)
Ivan Idris' Almost a Hundred Python Resources

Projects and Sample Code
Karan's Python Mega Project List
Active State: Popular Python Recipes

Is Your Refrigerator Spying on You?

And here you thought you felt guilty because of what you were eating.  A press release from Proofpoint:

outsideperception.wordpress.com

Proofpoint, Inc, a leading security-as-a-service provider, has uncovered what may be the first proven Internet of Things (IoT)-based cyberattack involving conventional household "smart" appliances
. The global attack campaign involved more than 750,000 malicious email communications coming from more than 100,000 everyday consumer gadgets such as home-networking routers, connected multi-media centers, televisions and at least one refrigerator that had been compromised and used as a platform to launch attacks. As the number of such connected devices is expected to grow to more than four times the number of connected computers in the next few years according to media reports, proof of an IoT-based attack has significant security implications for device owners and Enterprise targets.

Children Easily Bypass UK's Internet Censorship Filters, Parents Still Incompetent

Why won't these children think of the children?! From the BBC:

Filters put in place by parents to stop children viewing inappropriate content are easily bypassed by the youngsters themselves, according to a nreport from regulator Ofcom.

It found that 18% of 12-15-year-olds know how to disable internet filters.
Almost half of children aged 12-15 know how to delete their browsing history and 29% can amend settings to mask their browser activity.   Some 83% of eight to 11 year-olds said they knew how to stay safe online. . . . 

According to the report, many parents feel their computing skills are far inferior to their children's.  Almost half (44%) of parents with children aged between eight and 11 say their child knows more about the internet than they do. That rises to 63% for parents of 12-15-year-olds.

In other words, hysterical helicopter parents and safety fetishists have succeeded only in preventing themselves and their technophobic peers from accessing "objectionable" content online.

Amazon Warehouse Workers to Vote on Unionization

From GigaOM:

A group of Amazon warehouse workers in Delaware will decide Wednesday on whether to create a union. The vote covers just a tiny sub-set of the retail giant’s workforce but has heavy symbolic significance at a time when Amazon faces ongoing criticism over its labor practices.

The vote comes after the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers filed a petition on December 6 on behalf of  30 equipment maintenance and repair technicians in Middletown, Delaware. If a majority of the workers vote in favor, it will be the first Amazon union shop in the U.S.

Firefox: Open Source Security Solutions to Internet Surveillance

From Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla:

Mozilla has one critical advantage over all other browser vendors. Our products are truly open source . . . As Anthony Jones from our New Zealand office pointed out the other month, security researchers can use this fact to verify the executable bits contained in the browsers Mozilla is distributing, by building Firefox from source and comparing the built bits with our official distribution . . .

To ensure that no one can inject undetected surveillance code into Firefox, security researchers and organizations should:

• regularly audit Mozilla source and verified builds by all effective means;
• establish automated systems to verify official Mozilla builds from source;
• raise an alert if the verified bits differ from official bits.

In the best case, we will establish such a verification system at a global scale, with participants from many different geographic regions and political and strategic interests and affiliations.

Security is never “done” — it is a process, not a final rest-state. No silver bullets. All methods have limits. However, open-source auditability cleanly beats the lack of ability to audit source vs. binary.

Through international collaboration of independent entities we can give users the confidence that Firefox cannot be subverted without the world noticing, and offer a browser that verifiably meets users’ privacy expectations.

The Internet Strikes Back: Protest Mass Surveillance

From The Day We Fight Back:

In January 2012 we defeated the SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation with the largest Internet protest in history. A year ago this month one of that movement's leaders, Aaron Swartz, tragically passed away.

Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet, and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance.
If Aaron were alive, he'd be on the front lines, fighting against a world in which governments observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action.

Now, on the eve of the anniversary of Aaron's passing, and in celebration of the win against SOPA and PIPA that he helped make possible, we are announcing a day of protest against mass surveillance, to take place this February 11th.

Press release:

A broad coalition of activist groups, companies, and online platforms will hold a worldwide day of activism in opposition to the NSA's mass spying regime on February 11th. Dubbed "The Day We Fight Back", the day of activism was announced on the eve of the anniversary of the tragic passing of activist and technologist Aaron Swartz. The protest is both in his honor and in celebration of the victory over the Stop Online Piracy Act two years ago this month, which he helped spur.

Participants including Access, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free Press, BoingBoing, Reddit, Mozilla, ThoughtWorks, and more to come, will join potentially millions of Internet users to pressure lawmakers to end mass surveillance -- of both Americans and the citizens of the whole world. . . . 

HOW INTERNET USERS CAN HELP:

1. Visit TheDayWeFightBack.org
2. Sign up to indicate that you'll participate and receive updates.
3. Sign up to install widgets on websites encouraging its visitors to fight back against surveillance. (These are being finalized in coming days.)
4. Use the social media tools on the site to announce your participation.
5. Develop memes, tools, websites, and do whatever else you can to participate -- and encourage others to do the same.