Have you ever heard of that phrase, “work-life balance?” Well try “work, life, school, CPA balance” for a little extra challenge! The thought of achieving those three little letters every accountant dreams of- “CPA“- can be quite daunting, especially if you are trying to study while you are in school. But, I am here to … Continue reading "My Three Tips for Work, Life, School, and CPA Balance"

This week marks the last week of the first session of spring semester for most specialized master’s programs’ students, which means that the Graduate Lounge in Gerlach Hall is busier than usual. To offer some insights into our graduate life, below are some ways students often use the lounge for. To have lunch with friends. … Continue reading "Lounging throughout the Semester"

All 50 states and the District of Columbia have applied research results from TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program to policy decisions or used them to introduce or change practice, as a reference source, or for new or additional research. The NCHRP Impact Report 2019 , a follow up to the NCHRP Impact Report 2018 , attempts to document and present the outcomes and impacts of the application of NCHRP research results. Containing data and anecdotes compiled from various sources, the report pr...

In an update on Twitter, Wilson Cruz and Scott Gamzon, Discovery editor, provided an update on the progress of the third season...

Doug Jones will be participating in the InHouse-Con this weekend, and while doing promotion for that, he answered questions in an interview...

Although general aviation airports have historically been funded by federal, state, and local entities, the private sector is increasingly playing a larger role. This involvement has ranged on a continuum from service and management contracts to singular projects at airports that involve leasing mechanisms to long-term leases and the whole-scale private development of general aviation airports. In an era of declining resources and increasingly scrutinized public expenditures, private-sector involvement i...

Airports and the communities they serve view robust air service as an important element for economic well-being and overall quality of life. Incentive programs are often used to encourage airlines to maintain or augment service to a community. Recent airline industry trends, including airline consolidation, use of larger aircraft, the rise of ultra-low-cost airlines, and challenges with pilot supply as well as regulatory and policy developments, have affected the significance of these programs. The TRB A...

Přes čtyři roky uzavřený případ nabral nečekaný spád. Tehdy měl přijít o život fotbalista Hiannick Kamba při autonehodě v rodném Kongu. Německý bulvární deník Bild však v pondělí zveřejnil informace dokazující opak. Bývalého hráče FC Schalke 04 údajně našli v Německu živého a zdravého. Falešnou smrt má patrně na svědomí exmanželka, která se tímto způsobem dostala k penězům z pojistky.

V posledních týdnech se aktivně zapojuji do snah získat podporu pro kreativní průmysly, zasažené koronakrizí. Mailů a diskuzních příspěvků, u nichž mám pocit, že jsou citací z legendárního projevu Miloše Jakeše na Červeném Hrádku, mám plnou schránku.

The EARN IT Act is dangerous. It threatens speech on the internet and tech companies' ability to provide secure communications for their users. There may not be anything about encryption in the dry text of the bill, but the threat is there all the same. No one knows what "best practices" the law will demand from online services, but the bill's focus on child porn strongly suggests any platform that "allows" this information to be transmitted using encrypted communications will be targeted by the government.

Bill Barr and Chris Wray have made it clear encryption is the enemy. Both have advocated for encryption backdoors, even if they're both too cowardly to use that term. No one thinks the government and service providers shouldn't do all they can to prevent the sharing of child porn, but undermining encryption isn't the solution. It may shield some child porn producers and consumers from detection, but the government's efforts in this area show encryption hasn't posed much of a problem to investigators and prosecutors.

Encryption protects people who aren't criminals. As Runa Sundvik explains for TechCrunch, targeting encryption via the EARN IT Act also threatens some of the foremost beneficiaries of the First Amendment: journalists.

[T]echnology experts warn the bill not only fails to meet the challenge, it creates new problems of its own. My job is to enable journalists to do their work securely — to communicate with others, research sensitive stories and publish hard-hitting news. This bill introduces significant harm to journalists’ ability to protect their sources.

Strip communications platforms of their encryption and you make it that much easier to expose journalists' sources and snoop on their communications. This isn't an existential threat. It's an actual threat. The FBI has spied on journalists and several successive presidential administrations have made rooting out leakers a priority.

But it does more than harm journalists. It also harms the people they're trying to reach: readers. Encryption protects readers who visit news sites utilizing HTTPS. That's almost all of them at this point. This ensures their connection is shielded from people trying to snoop on their web activity. More importantly, it ensures the sites they reach are legit and the content originating from the journalists the site says it is.

If EARN IT becomes law, whistleblowers and other sources will see their secure options disappear. Tor, Signal, etc. will be considered nothing more than aiders and abettors of criminal activity. Anything secured by encryption will be treated as a virtual dead drop for criminal content.

Protecting children from exploitation is important. But the tradeoff legislators are demanding isn't actually a tradeoff. The American public will receive no net benefit from this tangential attack on encryption. Very often we're first informed about serious government misconduct by journalists. Destroying this outlet works out well for the government so often exposed as untrustworthy, but it does nothing for the governed.

In Matthew 7:15-19, Jesus tells His disciples how to tell good teachers from bad teachers. He tells them to look at the fruit. Is Jesus telling people to look at the lives of other teachers to see if they have good works? No! Not at all. Listen to the study to see what Jesus IS teaching and why this is important for properly understanding the gospel.

In Matthew 13:22-24, Jesus talk about he fourth soil in the Parable of the Four Soils, and says that only this fourth soil produces good fruit. Does this parable show us how to tell true Christians from false Christians, or how to know who truly has eternal life? No! Not at all. Listen to the study to see what Jesus IS teaching and why this is important for properly understanding the gospel.

I believe it is traditional to apologize when one hasn't been blogging for a while, and I am indeed sorry....

As it says in Ecclesiastes, of the making of books there is no end. And Seneca is (dubiously) said to...

The year 222 BCE saw the Roman Emperor Elagabalus assassinated by the Praetorian Guard, to be replaced by Alexander Severus,...

So now the rest of the world is discovering virtual communities. I'm feeling very hipster; we were doing it before...

In this reboot of the Three Paper Thursdays, back after a hiatus of almost eight years, I consider the many different ways in which programs can be sanitised to detect, or mitigated to prevent the use of, the many programmer errors that can introduce security vulerabilities in low-level languages such as C and C++. We … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Sanitisers and Mitigators →

The platforms, providers, and infrastructures which together make up the contemporary Internet play an increasingly central role in the business of governing human societies. Although the software engineers, administrators, business professionals, and other staff working at these organisations may not have the institutional powers of state organisations such as law enforcement or the civil service, … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: The role of intermediaries, platforms, and infrastructures in governing crime and abuse →

Recent advancements in Machine Learning (ML) have taught us two main lessons: a large proportion of things that humans do can actually be automated, and that a substantial part of this automation can be done with minimal human supervision. One no longer needs to select features for models to use; in many cases people are … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Adversarial Machine Learning, Humans and everything in between →

People have tried to develop many different attack vectors on cryptocurrencies, from codebase flaws, cryptographic algorithms, mining processes, consensus protocols and block propagation mechanisms to the underlying network layer. Most attacks could be patched quickly by modifying the source code, but preventing attacks that exploit the network layer remains a non-trivial problem as the network … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Attacking the Bitcoin Peer-to-Peer Network →

Just as in other types of victimization, victims of cybercrime can experience serious consequences, emotional or not. First of all, a repeat victim of a cyber-attack might face serious financial or emotional hardship. These victims are also more likely to require medical attention as a consequence of online fraud victimization. This means repeat victims have a … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Exploring the Impact of Online Crime Victimization →

Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) represents Intel’s latest foray into trusted computing. Initially intended as a means to secure cloud computation, it has since been employed for DRM and secure key storage in production systems. SGX differs from its competitors such as TrustZone in its focus on reducing the volume of trusted code in its “secure … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: What’s Intel SGX Good For? →

'Seriously sometimes seems Google's moderators are only optimized to respond to social media outrage'

Three weeks after Google removed 49 Chrome extensions from its browser's software store for stealing crypto-wallet credentials, 11 more password-swiping add-ons have been spotted – and some are still available to download.…

Enterprise demand set to soften, offset tier-two cloud, telco sales

Global server shipments reached an industry record-breaking 3.3 million units in the first quarter of 2020, marking a 30 per cent year-on-year growth, Omdia analysts estimated this week.…

It's like three buses showing up at once carrying $8bn

India’s largest mobile carrier, Jio, has just scored a third new investor in three weeks!…