Digital Self-Defense for Palestinian Schoolgirls

Cyber-bullying is a growing phenomenon amongst preteens. Studies have established that nearly 43% of children are victims of cyberbullying and girls are twice as likely to be targeted. Students who experienced cyber attacks suffer drops in school grades and have more suicidal thoughts than those who had never dealt with such forms of peer aggression. A link between cyber harassment victimization and noncompletion of school has been demonstrated resulting in increased risk of poor education and substance abuse in adulthood.

Sadly, the majority of the victims do not report the incidents to adults or authorities due to fear of negative effects and social scandal. The tacit support given to the bullying perpetrators through silence contributes to the escalation of victimization. Banning technology is not the answer. Cyberbullying prevention in schools is crucial to defend students from this new face of violence.

The Internet Society Palestine Chapter is conducting a campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of electronic blackmail and cyber harassment. The project, funded by the Internet Society Beyond the Net, has already reached more than 2250 schoolgirls in 25 Palestinian schools in phase I of the project.

 

Ahmad Alsadeh, assistant professor at Birzeit University and Continue reading

Why NVMe over Fabric matters

In my earlier blog post on SSD storage news from HPE, Hitachi and IBM, I touched on the significance of NVMe over Fabric (NoF). But not wanting to distract from the main storage, I didn’t go into detail. I will do so with this blog post.Hitachi Vantara goes all in on NVMe over Fabric First, though, an update on the news from Hitachi Vantara, which I initially said had not commented yet on NoF. It turns out they are all in.“Hitachi Vantara currently offers, and continues to expand support for, NVMe in our hyperconverged UCP HC line. As NVMe matures over the next year, we see opportunities to introduce NVMe into new software-defined and enterprise storage solutions. More will follow, but it confuses the conversation to pre-announce things that customers cannot implement today,” said Bob Madaio, vice president, Infrastructure Solutions Group at Hitachi Vantara, in an email to me.To read this article in full, please click here

Access management is critical to IoT success

Onboarding devices has always been kind of a pain, but IT has managed to muddle its way through the process.The bring your own device (BYOD) wave hit created some problems. Still, many organizations allowed employees to bring those devices onto the network by shifting the responsibility to the end user. What happens, though, when there are so many new devices that IT can’t keep up? Or when devices are brought in without IT’s knowledge? That’s the trend businesses are about to face as the Internet of Things (IoT) goes mainstream.[ Read also: Network World's Corporate Guide to Addressing IoT Security. ] The IoT era is here, and it’s about to make IT’s life a lot more difficult The IoT era has arrived, and I say this because more and more companies I talk to are connecting non-traditional IT devices, such as lighting systems and point-of-sale devices, to the internet without uttering the phrase “IoT.” It’s no longer this futuristic thing that we ponder and pontificate over.To read this article in full, please click here

Access management is critical to IoT success

Onboarding devices has always been kind of a pain, but IT has managed to muddle its way through the process.The bring your own device (BYOD) wave hit created some problems. Still, many organizations allowed employees to bring those devices onto the network by shifting the responsibility to the end user. What happens, though, when there are so many new devices that IT can’t keep up? Or when devices are brought in without IT’s knowledge? That’s the trend businesses are about to face as the Internet of Things (IoT) goes mainstream.[ Read also: Network World's Corporate Guide to Addressing IoT Security. ] The IoT era is here, and it’s about to make IT’s life a lot more difficult The IoT era has arrived, and I say this because more and more companies I talk to are connecting non-traditional IT devices, such as lighting systems and point-of-sale devices, to the internet without uttering the phrase “IoT.” It’s no longer this futuristic thing that we ponder and pontificate over.To read this article in full, please click here

Cost-savings theme pervades IBM storage news

A flurry of storage announcements from IBM share a common theme: Helping customers achieve greater efficiency and wring cost savings from their multitier, multi-cloud storage environments.Anchoring the news is IBM Storage Insights, a new AI and cloud-based storage management platform that’s designed to give users a fast view of storage capacity and performance, as well as make tiering recommendations to help cut storage costs. A single dashboard shows the status of block storage and captures trend information.[ Check out What is hybrid cloud computing and learn what you need to know about multi-cloud. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] “Imagine you have an up-to-the-second event feed where you can see everything happening, not just on one of your arrays but across your entire environment,” said Sam Werner, vice president of offering management for IBM’s software-defined infrastructure (SDI) and storage software.To read this article in full, please click here

Review: Icinga enterprise-grade, open-source network monitoring that scales

Continuing our quest for robust, enterprise-grade open source network monitoring, we tested Icinga Core 2 (version 2.8.1) and the stand-alone Icinga Web 2 interface. Created in 2009 as a fork of the Nagios network monitoring tool, Icinga has come a long way.We found Icinga to be a powerful monitoring tool with many great features. The Core install is straightforward and basic monitoring is easy with either pre-configured templates or plugins. However, we discovered that the Web install is a bit more complicated and could stand to be streamlined. [ Don’t miss customer reviews of top remote access tools and see the most powerful IoT companies . | Get daily insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Icinga runs on most of the popular Linux distros and the vendor provides detailed installation instructions for Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat (including CentOS and Fedora) and SUSE/SLES. Icinga does not publish specific hardware requirements, but our installation ran well on a quad-core processor with 4 GB RAM and this is probably be a good starting point for a basic installation.To read this article in full, please click here

Review: Icinga enterprise-grade, open-source network monitoring that scales

Continuing our quest for robust, enterprise-grade open source network monitoring, we tested Icinga Core 2 (version 2.8.1) and the stand-alone Icinga Web 2 interface. Created in 2009 as a fork of the Nagios network monitoring tool, Icinga has come a long way.We found Icinga to be a powerful monitoring tool with many great features. The Core install is straightforward and basic monitoring is easy with either pre-configured templates or plugins. However, we discovered that the Web install is a bit more complicated and could stand to be streamlined. [ Don’t miss customer reviews of top remote access tools and see the most powerful IoT companies . | Get daily insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Icinga runs on most of the popular Linux distros and the vendor provides detailed installation instructions for Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat (including CentOS and Fedora) and SUSE/SLES. Icinga does not publish specific hardware requirements, but our installation ran well on a quad-core processor with 4 GB RAM and this is probably be a good starting point for a basic installation.To read this article in full, please click here

Re-coding Black Mirror, Part V

This is the final part of our tour through the papers from the Re-coding Black Mirror workshop exploring future technology scenarios and their social and ethical implications.

(If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, all of the papers in this workshop can be accessed either by following the links above directly from The Morning Paper blog site, or from the WWW 2018 proceedings page).

Towards trust-based decentralized ad-hoc social networks

Koidl argues that we have ‘crisis of trust’ in social media caused which manifests in filter bubbles, fake news, and echo chambers.

  • “Filter bubbles are the result of engagement-based content filtering. The underlying principle is to show the user content that relates to the content the user has previously engaged on. The result is a content stream that lacks diversification of topics and opinions.”
  • “Echo chambers are the result of content recommendations that are based on interests of friends and peers. This results in a content feed that is strongly biased towards grouped opinion (e.g. Group Think).”
  • “Fake news, and related expressions of the same, such as alternative facts, is Continue reading