TechCrunch is reporting that Twitter is down due to an attack by someone claiming to be part of the ‘Iranian Cyber Army’. Since Twitter is now down, we can’t show a screen shot, but Techrunch reports that a similar defacement is live at mawjcamp.org.

    Iranian Cyber Army
        THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY
        iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM
    
        U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By
        Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage
        Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation
        Iranian Peoples To….
    
        NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA?
        WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST  
    
        Take Care.
    

The foaf:mbox property is very useful since it is ‘inverse functional’ and can thus serve as an ID for a foaf individual. This lets us infer that two foaf profiles with the same mbox refer to the same person.

Since publishing your email address invites spam, many people use the foaf:mbox_sha1sum property instead of mbox. mbox_sha1sum is also inverse functional but doesn’t reveal your private information (i.e., email address).

Abell on developer.it has an interesting post, Gravatars: why publishing your email’s hash is not a good idea, that shows how to crack an MD5 hash of a person’s email address given a little information about the person. (note: The gravitar service supports globally recognized avatars.)

The idea exploits the fact that a few free email services (e.g., gmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol) account for a large fraction of email addresses and using a person’s full name, one can generate likely ‘username’ possibilities. Given an email hash and a persons first and last name, one can generate hashes of likely email addresses until a match is found.

Abell was able (!) to crack 10% of the email addresses for 80,871 stackoverflow.com users in an hour with a simple Haskell program.

The same attack can be used on foaf:mbox_sha1sum properties, especially since a foaf profile will very handily provide the other useful information about the person. Given the extra information available in many foaf profile (e.g., nick, school homepage) one might even expect better results.

As vulnerabilities go, this doesn’t seem like a very dangerous one. The use of mbox_sha1sum is usually justified as a way to avoid having your email address harvested by spambots. I doubt that spammers would think it productive to spend an hour of computing time to get 1000 email addresses.

iTunes Connect users with the Admin or Finance roles can now make changes to the banking information that is used to deposit App Store payments. This means that banking updates will now be processed within 24 hours after you have submitted them. To make changes, log in to iTunes Connect and click on the Contracts, Tax and Banking Information module.

iTunes Connect users with the Admin or Finance roles can now make changes to the banking information that is used to deposit App Store payments. This means that banking updates will now be processed within 24 hours after you have submitted them. To make changes, log in to iTunes Connect and click on the Contracts, Tax and Banking Information module.

In this core course for the MA program for Intercultural Communication in the Fall 2009 semester, the students worked with undergraduate students in Visual Arts 395 to develop stories about an intercultural incident or encounter that was a crucial factor in motivating them to study intercultural communication. Accompanying a final paper, in which this incident was the framework for an analysis of intercultural competency, sensitivity, and awareness, the stories tell of very personal encounters of US students either in the US or abroad, or international students in the US. They relate some of the painful and embarrassing, but also enjoyable and stimulating difficulties they have had adjusting and adapting to cultures that were other than their own.

Hey all,

After some recent questions regarding Daedalus’ recent post on the new athletics logo, I asked around and was put in touch with Miriam Tillman, Assistant Vice President of Marketing and Creative Services for UMBC. Ms. Tillman took the time to answer a few questions I sent her via email. Here are my questions followed by her answers.

1) When did your office and Athletics decide to implement a new logo, and what led to this decision? Why change it now, as opposed to last year, or next year, or some other time?

The germ for this started back in April 08 when Jim Lord, UMBC’s Creative Services design director (and a UMBC Visual Arts alum), was watching the NCAA game and was bothered by how our mascot logo looked on the scoreboard next to Georgetown’s. He began sketching some new ideas and looking into what other schools–both in our division and in our region–were doing with their logos. He found that the style had changed a lot (see his paragraph about mascot logo design trends), and as our teams were getting more attention, he wanted the logo to look as good as it could. (He’d actually done the final design on the current mascot logo a number of years back, but since he’d inherited the design from someone else at the end of the process, he wasn’t able to give it the attention he’d wanted.) Last spring Jim approached Athletics to see if they’d be interested in a new mascot logo, and they were. With regard to your question, the only timing consideration was to start soon enough to have one ready for the bookstore’s annual order in January (see #3).

2) Students were able to vote on one of three choices listed on myumbc. Where did these choices originate? Were they finalists among a bigger sample, or were they the only choices from the beginning?

The choices came from a series that evolved over time as Jim spent the summer testing a number of variations with student athletes, coaches and Athletics staff, and adapting them as he got feedback. He also displayed some options in The Commons at Homecoming, where students, faculty, staff and alums voted on their favorites and gave him direct feedback. During the course of all these meetings and conversations, some folks were interested in a realistic dog, others in something more cartoon-like. Some wanted a fierce dog, others wanted one that evoked loyalty. So he created options that responded to the range of perspectives.

3) Where did the funding for this project come from? Strictly Athletics’ budget, or more out of general marketing for UMBC as a whole?

There’s no extra funding involved, since we’re phasing this in. We deliberately timed the process to coincide with the annual order that the bookstore places in January for the next fall. In other words, this will give the bookstore designs for their vendors but not create any new expense. As Athletics buys new uniforms or orders letterhead, they’ll roll this in, but not expend additional resources any time soon.

4) Is there an expectation of the revenue generated from sales incorporating the new mascot to negate the initial cost?

Not an issue, since there’s no additional expense.

5) What affect did/does this have on student fees or athletic fees?

Ditto.

tl;dr: Jim Lord, the UMBC Creative Services guy behind this, wanted our mascot to look good since we’ve been getting more national attention. Initial options were displayed and voted on during homecoming. No additional cost because the new design will be implemented with the bookstore’s scheduled merchandise order.

Thanks again to Miriam Tillman for providing this information.

The BookScrooge staff sent in a little end-of-semester update today…