Events take place across the region to mark the armistice at the end of World War One.

Bedworth has marked 11 November on the actual day every year for more than 100 years.

The IOPC is looking into previous contact with the victim up to seven weeks before her killing.

The iPhone could finally show you how long it’ll take to finish charging. Code spotted in the second iOS 18.2 beta by 9to5Mac shows a new “BatteryIntelligence” feature that will let you […]

The post Apple to roll out ‘Battery Intelligence’ for iPhone, Amazon slashes price of 43inch Hisense smart TV to £228 appeared first on Tech Digest.

Since Microsoft first introduced Office for the iPad last March, it’s been downloaded some 40 million times, even with the restrictions of needing an Office 365 subscription to use it. Today, Microsoft announced that Office will soon be coming to …

Live Drive, SDrive, Project M, Folders, FolderShare, Windows Live Sync, Live Mesh, SkyDrive, OneDrive. Yes, Microsoft has been at this file syncing game for a long time. The company bought FolderShare back in November of 2005, and has been …

Mitchell Curtis 'refused to admit what he had done' to colleagues despite a 'wealth of evidence'.

Let anesthesiology assistants work for themselves

There has been a set of discussions about lock-in around Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Joe McKendrick and Lori MacVittie in particular bring out some of the real challenges here.

Lori brings out the difference between portability and mobility. While I'm not in 100% agreement with Lori's definitions, there is a key point here: its not just code, its the services that the code relies on that buy lock-in into a cloud.

So for example, if you use Amazon SQS, Force.com Chatter Collaboration, Google App Engine's bigtable data store, all of these tie you into the cloud you are deployed onto. Amazon isn't really a PaaS yet, so the tie-in is minimal, but Google App Engine (GAE) is based on Authentication, Logging, Data, Cache and other core services. Its almost impossible to imagine building an app without these, and they all tie you into GAE. Similarly, VMForce relies on a set of services from force.com.

But its not just about mobility between force.com and Google: between two PaaSes. The typical enterprise needs a private cloud as much as public cloud. So there is a bigger question:

Can you move your application from a private PaaS to a public Paas and back again?

In other words, even if Google and Force got together and defined a mobility layer, can I then take an app I built and run it internally? Neither Google nor Force is offering a private PaaS.

The second key question is this:

How can I leverage standard Enterprise Architecture in a PaaS?

What I'm getting at here is that as the world starts to implement PaaS, does this fit with existing models? Force.com and Google App Engine have effectively designed their own world view. VMForce and the recent Spring/Google App Engine announcement address one aspect of that - what Lori calls portability. By using Spring as an application model, there is at least a passing similarity to current programming models in Enterprises. But Enterprise Architectures are not just about Java code: what about an ESB? What about a Business Process engine (BPMS)? What about a standard XACML-based entitlement engine? So far PaaS has generally only addressed the most basic requirements of Enterprise core services: databases and a identity model.

So my contention is this: you need a PaaS that supports the same core services that a modern Enterprise architecture has: ESB, BPMS, Authentication/Authorization, Portal, Data, Cache, etc. And you need a PaaS that works inside your organization as well as in a public Cloud. And if you really don't want any lock-in.... hadn't that PaaS better be Open Source as well? And yes, this is a hint of things coming very soon!

Yesterday we announced something I believe is a game-changer: WSO2 Stratos. What is Stratos?

WSO2 Stratos is a complete SOA and developer platform offered as a self-service, multi-tenant, elastic runtime for private and public cloud infrastructures.

What that means is that our complete SOA platform - now enhanced with Tomcat and Webapp support - is available as a  "cloud native" runtime that you can either use on the Web (yes - you can try it out right now), on Amazon VPC, or on your own internal private cloud based on Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Eucalyptus and (coming soon) vmWare vSphere. It is a complete Platform-as-a-Service for private and public clouds.

I'll be writing more about Stratos over the coming weeks and months, and I'll also provide links and tweets to other Stratos blogs, but in this blog I want to simply answer three questions:

1. I'm already talking to {vmWare, Eucalyptus, Ubuntu, Savvis, Joyent} about private cloud - what does WSO2 add that they don't have?
2. What is the difference between Stratos and the Cloud Images that WSO2 already ships?
3. Why would I choose WSO2 over the other vendors offering Platform-as-a-Service?

In order to answer the first question, lets look at the cloud computing space, which is most easily divided up into:

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): this is where Amazon, Eucalyptus, vmWare, Saavis and Joyent play
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Google App Engine, vmForce, Tibco Silver and now WSO2 Stratos play in this space.
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Google Apps, Google Mail, Microsoft Office Live, Salesforce, SugarOnDemand - these and many more make up the SaaS category.

To generalize wildly, most people talking about public cloud today are talking about SaaS. And most people talking about private cloud today are talking about IaaS.

SaaS is fantastic for quick productivity and low cost. WSO2 uses Google Apps, Sugar on Demand and several other SaaS apps. But SaaS doesn't create competitive advantage. Mule also uses Google Apps. They may well use Salesforce. SaaS cannot produce competitive advantage because your competitors get access to exactly the same low-cost services you do. In order to create competitive advantage you need to build as well as buy. For example, we use our Mashup Server together with our Sugar Business Messaging Adapter to provide insight and management of our pipeline that goes beyond what Sugar offers.

IaaS is of course a great basis to build apps. But it's just infrastructure. Yes - you get your VM hosted quicker. But someone has to create a useful VM. And that is where PaaS comes in. PaaS is how to speed up cloud development.

What does Stratos give you on top of an IaaS? It gives you an Application Server, Registry, Identity Server, Portal, ESB, Business Activity Monitor and Mashup Server. And it gives you these as-a-Service: completely self-service, elasticly scalable, and granularly metered and monitored. Someone in your team needs an ESB - they can provision one for themselves instantly. And because it's multi-tenant, it costs nothing to run until it gets used. How do you know how it's used? The metering and monitoring tells you exactly how much each tenant uses.

2. What is the difference between Stratos and the existing WSO2 Cloud Images?

The cloud images we started shipping in December are not Cloud Native. Stratos is Cloud Native. In practice, this means that when you log into Stratos (go on try it now) you can instantly provision your own domain, together with a set of Stratos services. This saves memory - instead of allocating a new VM and minimum half a gigabyte of memory to each new server you get a new ESB with zero extra memory cost. And it's much easier. The new ESB will automatically be governed and monitored. It's automatically elastically clustered.

3. Why would I choose WSO2 over other PaaS vendors?

Firstly, if you look at PaaS as a whole there is a huge divide between Public PaaS and Private PaaS. The public PaaS vendors simply don't offer private options. You can't run force.com or Google App Engine applications internally, even if you want to. WSO2 bridges that gap with a PaaS you can use in the public Web, on a virtual private cloud, or on premises.

The second big differentiator between WSO2 and the existing PaaS offerings is the architecture. Mostly PaaS is a way of building webapps. WSO2 offers a complete enterprise architecture - governance, business process, integration, portal, identity and mashups. And we support the common Enterprise Programming Model (not just Java, WebApp, JAX-WS, but also BPEL, XSLT, XPath, Google Gadgets, WSDL, etc). The only other PaaS that I know of that offers a full Enterprise architecture is Tibco Silver.

The third and most important differentiator is about lock-in. Software vendors love lock-in - and Cloud vendors love it even more. So if you code to Google App Engine, you are tied into Google's identity model, Google's Bigtable, etc. If you code to force.com or vmForce - you are tied to force's infrastructure services. If you code to Tibco Silver, you are tied to Tibco. WSO2 fights this in three ways:

• No code lock-in: we use standards-based coding (WAR, JAX-WS, POJO) and Stratos is 100% Apache License Open Source.
• No model lock-in: we use standards-based services: 
• Identity is based on OpenID, OAuth, XACML, WS-Trust
• Registry is based on AtomPub and REST
• Business Process is based on BPEL, etc
• No hosting lock-in: you can take you apps and data from our public PaaS and re-deploy internally or on your own virtual private cloud anytime you like.

I hope you found this a useful introduction to Stratos. If you want more information, contact me paul@wso2.com, or check out the Stratos website or code.

ENQUETE. Comment le club de foot parisien, propriete du Qatar, a laisse prosperer en son sein des Ultras << antisionistes >>.

In this paper, we propose a novel dexterous technique for fast and accurate recognition of online handwritten Kannada and Tamil characters. Based on the primary classifier output and prior knowledge, the best classifier is chosen from set of three classifiers for second stage classification. Prior knowledge is obtained through analysis of the confusion matrix of primary classifier which helped in identifying the multiple sets of confused characters. Further, studies were carried out to check the performance of secondary classifiers in disambiguating among the confusion sets. Using this technique we have achieved an average accuracy of 92.6% for Kannada characters on the MILE lab dataset and 90.2% for Tamil characters on the HP Labs dataset.

Advances in mobile technologies are opening new possibilities to support collaborative activities through mobile devices. Unfortunately, mobile collaborative systems have been difficult to conceive, design and implement. These difficulties are caused in part by their unclear requirements and developers' lack of experience with this type of systems. However, several requirements involved in the collaborative back-end of these products are recurrent and should be considered in every development. This paper introduces a characterization of mobile collaboration and a framework that specifies a list of general requirements to be considered during the conception and design of a system in order to increase its probability of success. This framework was used in the development of two mobile collaborative systems, providing developers with a base of back-end requirements to aid system design and implementation. The systems were positively evaluated by their users.

Computer Supported Collaborative Learning could highly impact education around the world if the proper Collaborative Learning tools are set in place. In this paper we describe the design of a collaborative learning activity for teaching Chemistry to Chilean students. We describe a PDA-based software tool that allows teachers to create workgroups in their classrooms in order to work on the activity. The developed software tool has three modules: one module for teachers, which runs on a PC and lets them create the required pedagogical material; second, there is a PDA module for students which lets them execute the activity; finally, a third module allows the teacher set workgroups and monitor each workgroup during the activity.

Knowledge, innovations and their implementation in effective practices are essential for development in all fields of societal action, e.g. policy, business, health, education, and everyday life. However, managing the interrelations between knowledge, innovation and practice is complicated. Facilitation by suitable knowledge services is needed. This paper explores the theory of converging knowledge, innovation, and practice, discusses some advances in information systems development, and identifies general requirements for pragmatic knowledge services. A trialogical approach to knowledge creation and learning is adopted as a viable theoretical basis. Also three examples of novel knowledge services Opasnet, Innovillage, and Knowledge Practices Environment (KPE), are presented. Eventually, it is concluded that pragmatic knowledge services, as hybrid systems of information technology and its users, are not only means for creation of practical knowledge, but vehicles of a cultural change from individualistic perceptions of knowledge work towards mediated collaboration.

One of the challenges in Dynamic Software Product Line (DSPL) is how to support the coordination of multiple instances of a service feature. In particular, there is a need for a decentralized decision-making capability that will be able to seamlessly integrate new instances of a service feature without an omniscient central controller. Because of the need for decentralization, we are investigating principles from self-organization in biological organisms. As an initial proof of concept, we have applied three bio-inspired techniques to a simple smart home scenario: quorum sensing based service activation, a firefly algorithm for synchronization, and a gossiping (epidemic) protocol for information dissemination. In this paper, we first explain why we selected those techniques using a set of motivating scenarios of a smart home and then describe our experiences in adopting them.

Web Services have become a standard for integration of systems in distributed environments. By using a set of open interoperability standards, they allow computer-computer interaction, regardless the programming languages and operating systems used. The Semantic Web Services, by its turn, make use of ontologies to describe their functionality in a more structural manner, allowing computers to reason about the information required and provided by them. Such a description also allows dynamic composition of several Web Services, when only one is not able to provide the desired functionality. There are scenarios, however, in which only the functional correctness is not enough to fulfill the user requirements, and a minimum level of quality should be guaranteed by their providers. In this context, this work presents an approach for dynamic Web Service composition that takes into account the composition overall quality. The proposed approach relies on a heuristics to efficiently perform the composition. In order to show the feasibility of the proposed approach, a Web Service composition application prototype was developed and experimented with public test sets, along with another approach that does not consider quality in the composition process. The results have shown that the proposed approach in general finds compositions with more quality, within a reasonable processing time.

Service composition is an effective approach for large-scale multimedia delivery. In previous works, user requirement is represented as one fixed functional path which is composed of several functional components in a certain order. Actually, there may be several functional paths (deliver different quality level multimedia data, e.g., image pixel, frame rate) that can meet one request. And due to the diversity of devices and connections in pervasive environment, system should choose a suitable media quality delivery path in accordance with context, instead of one fixed functional path. This paper presents a deep study of multimedia delivery problem and proposes an on-line algorithm LDPath and an off-line centralized algorithm LD/RPath respectively. LDPath aims at delivering multimedia data to end user with lowest delay by choosing services to build delivery paths hop-by-hop, which is adapted to the unstable open environment. And LD/RPath is developed for a relatively stable environment, which generates delivery paths according to the trade-off between delay and reliability metrics, because the service reliability is also an important fact in such scenario. Experimental results show that both algorithms have good performance with low overhead to the system.

Vehicular Networks, including Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs) and Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSNs), stimulate a brand new variety of services, ranging from driver safety services, traffic information and warnings regarding traffic jams and accidents, to providing weather or road condition, parking availability, and advertisement. 3G networks and sophisticated Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), including deploying costly roadside base stations, can indeed be used to offer such services, but these come with a cost, both at network and hardware levels. In this paper we introduce Cooperation as a service (CaaS): A novel architecture that will allow providing a set of services for free and without any additional infrastructure, by taking advantage of Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications. CaaS uses a hybrid publish/subscribe mechanism where the driver (or subscriber) expresses his interests regarding a service (or a set of services) and where cars having subscribed to the same service will cooperate to provide the subscriber with the necessary information regarding the service he subscribed to, by publishing this information in the network. CaaS structures the network into clusters, and uses Content Based Routing (CBR) for intra-cluster communications and geographic routing for inter-cluster communications.

La police arrête des dizaines de personnes à Amsterdam après l'interdiction de manifestations

No Comment : commémoration du 106e anniversaire de l'Armistice 

No Comment : l'Antarctica Ice Ultra ou la course de l'extrême 

Climat : la justice néerlandaise donne raison à Shell face aux ONG

This research explores vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and their extensive applications, such as enhancing traffic efficiency, infotainment, and passenger safety. Despite significant study, widespread deployment of VANETs has been hindered by security and privacy concerns. Challenges in implementation, including scalability, flexibility, poor connection, and insufficient intelligence, have further complicated VANETs. This study proposes leveraging cloud computing to address these challenges, marking a paradigm shift. Cloud computing, recognised for its cost-efficiency and virtualisation, is integrated with VANETs. The paper details the nomenclature, architecture, models, services, applications, and challenges of VANET-based cloud computing. Three architectures for VANET clouds - vehicular clouds (VCs), vehicles utilising clouds (VuCs), and hybrid vehicular clouds (HVCs) - are discussed in detail. The research provides an overview, delves into related work, and explores VANET cloud computing's architectural frameworks, models, and cloud services. It concludes with insights into future work and a comprehensive conclusion.

DeFog is an innovative microservice placement and load balancing approach for distributed multi-cluster cloud-fog-edge architectures to minimise application response times. The architecture is modelled as a three-layered hierarchy. Each layer consists of one or more clusters of machines, with resource constraints increasing towards lower layers. Applications are modelled as service oriented architectures (SOA) comprising multiple interconnected microservices. As many applications can be run simultaneously, and as the resources of the edge and the fog are limited, choosing among services to run on the edge or the fog is the problem this work is dealing with. DeFog focuses on dynamic (i.e., adaptive) decentralised service placement within each cluster with zero downtime, eliminating the need for coordination between clusters. To assess the effectiveness of DeFog, two realistic applications based on microservices are deployed, and several placement policies are tested to select the one that reduces application latency. Least frequently used (LFU) is the reference service placement strategy. The experimental results reveal that a replacement policy that uses individual microservice latency as the crucial factor affecting service placement outperformed LFU by at least 10% in application response time.

1. Affaire Squarcini-LVMH : que reproche la justice à l'ancien patron du renseignement intérieur ?  franceinfo
2. Comment LVMH a échappé à un procès malgré l’espionnage de François Ruffin  Le HuffPost
3. Bernard Squarcini devant la justice pour « trafic d’influence »  Le Monde
4. Affaire Squarcini : le « Squale », comme un poisson à LVMH  Sud Ouest
5. Espionnage sur le tournage de "Merci patron" de François Ruffin, le député réclame un euro symbolique  France 3 Régions

1. Management of opioid use disorder: 2024 update to the national clinical practice guideline  CMAJ
2. New set of guidelines set to combat opioid usage  CTV News Toronto

Special counsel Jack Smith looking at stepping down before Trump takes office and is discussing how to end prosecutions  CNN

1. Bear encounter recorded in Whistler Village prompts conservation officer warning  CTV News Vancouver
2. Tourists 'shocked' to see man approach black bear in Whistler  Pique Newsmagazine

(Belga) Quatre membres de la milice d'extrême droite "Oath Keepers" ont été reconnus coupables lundi de sédition pour leur rôle dans l'assaut du Capitole, à l'issue du second procès organisé sur ce chef d'accusation extrêmement rare.

Depuis l'attaque du 6 janvier 2021, plus de 950 partisans de l'ex-président républicain Donald Trump ont été arrêtés et inculpés pour avoir semé le chaos dans le siège de la démocratie américaine. Parmi eux, seuls 14 militants de groupuscules d'extrême droite - neuf membres des "Oath Keepers" et cinq "Proud Boys" - ont été accusés de "sédition", un chef passible de 20 ans de prison qui implique d'avoir planifié l'usage de la force pour s'opposer au gouvernement. Faute de place suffisante dans le tribunal fédéral de Washington, la justice a organisé le procès des Oath Keepers, accusés de s'être entraînés et armés pour l'occasion, en deux temps. Un premier procès s'est conclu fin novembre par un verdict mitigé: le fondateur de cette milice, Stewart Rhodes, et un responsable local ont été déclarés coupables de sédition, mais leurs trois co-accusés ont été acquittés sur ce chef. Lundi, à l'issue du second procès, les jurés ont jugé coupables les quatre derniers Oath Keepers, des hommes âgés de 38 à 64 ans décrits comme de dangereux "traîtres" par l'accusation, mais comme des "fanfarons" par leurs avocats. Le procès des Proud Boys, dont leur leader Enrique Tarrio, s'est ouvert en décembre et était toujours en cours lundi, dans le même tribunal. (Belga)

Hasard du calendrier ou volontￜ de prￜserver le nouveau Premier ministre ? Selon Mediapart, une enquￜte judiciaire ouverte par le parquet de Perpignan, potentiellement gￜnante pour Jean Castex, a ￜtￜ...

Voilￜ un "petit oubli" bien embￜtant. Selon Mediapart, "le garde des Sceaux, Eric Dupont-Moretti, a oubliￜ de dￜclarer au fisc et ￜ la Haute Autoritￜ pour la transparence de la vie publique...

La crise ? Quelle crise ? Alors que le gouvernement prￜpare l'opinion ￜ une longue pￜriode d'inflation et de hausse des prix de l'ￜnergie en raison de la guerre en Ukraine, tout ne va pas si mal sur le plan...

Smart cities research is growing all over the world seeking to understand the effect of smart cities from different angles, domains and countries. The aim of this study is to analyse how the smart city ICTs (e.g., big data analytics, AI, IoT, cloud computing, smart grids, wireless communication, intelligent transportation system, smart building, e-governance, smart health, smart education and cyber security) are related to government. services and society welfare from the perspective of China. This research confirmed a positive correlation of smart city ICTs to e-Govt. Services (e-GS). On the other hand, the research showed a positive influence of smart city ICTs on society's welfare. These findings about smart cities and ICTs inform us how the thought paradigm to smart technologies can cause the improvement of e-GS through economic development, job creation and social welfare. The study offers different applications of the theoretical perspectives and the management perspective which are significant to building a society during recent technologised era.

This study investigates the effects of social media marketing efforts (SMME) on smartphone brand identification, attachment, association, and willingness to pay premium prices. A survey of 320 smartphone users who followed official social media handles managed by smartphone companies was conducted for this purpose. PLS-SEM was used to analyse the collected data. The findings demonstrated importance of SMME dimensions. According to the study's findings, the smartphone brand's SMMEs had significant impact on brand identification, brand association, and brand attachment. The results revealed that SMMEs had significant impact on willingness to pay the premium price. The findings also show that brand identification, attachment, and association mediated the relationship between SMMEs and willingness to pay a premium price. The findings of this study will be useful in developing social media marketing strategies for smartphones. This study demonstrates the use of social media marketing to promote mobile phones, particularly in emerging markets.

Drawing on the MOA framework, this study establishes a research model that explains the usage intention of robo-advisors. In the model, three predictors that consist of technology relative advantage, technology herding, and technology familiarity influence usage intention of robo-advisors directly and indirectly via the partial mediation of trust. At the same time, the effects of the three predictors on trust are hypothetically moderated by learning goal orientation and perceived performance risk respectively. Statistical analyses are provided using the data of working professionals from the insurance industry in Taiwan. Based on its empirical findings, this study discusses important theoretical and practical implications.

E-government serves as a vital channel for citizen interactions with the public sector, where user enjoyment is of paramount importance. To date, few studies have comprehensively examined the determinants of citizen enjoyment in e-government. To address this research gap, we administered a survey and gathered data from 363 Australian residents using myGov for tax filing. Our analysis revealed a pronounced discrepancy between reported enjoyment and the intention to continue using the services. Although users demonstrated a strong intent to use e-government services, this intent did not uniformly align with enjoyment. Additionally, informed by self-determination theory, we developed and tested an e-government service enjoyment model to study the impacts of effort expectancy, technophilia, technology humanness, and engagement in fostering user enjoyment. Unexpectedly, the results showed that information privacy concerns, commonly seen as a deterrent in e-government adoption, did not significantly affect enjoyment. Our findings advance the discourse on e-government service improvement.

Physical and social aspects each make up a separate part of servicescape. Together, these make up the servicescape. Although previous research has frequently investigated these aspects separately, the purpose of this study is to simultaneously find out the impact of both aspects within the casual dining restaurants' context. In total, 462 customers in Delhi were polled for this study, and structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data. According to the results, both the social and physical parts of the servicescape have the ability to affect how satisfied customers are, which in turn can affect how they behave in the future.

Work-life balance (WLB) is a widely explored topic in the academic discourse. The researchers are trying to find strategies to effectively balance their work and home responsibilities for women in management. This study aims to analyse how gender roles and inequalities shape the strategies of female academics in higher education institutions. Eighteen faculty members participated in the semi-structured interviews. The trustworthiness of qualitative inquiry was ascertained by using triangulation, thick descriptions, and peer reviews. Three major themes emerged from the analysis: emotional, religious and social strategies. Despite available support, faculty noted challenges in managing work and family roles and fighting with gender stereotypes. This research adds to the emerging concept of WLB literature from the developed countries' viewpoint. It also shows how WLB discourse varies from Western sensibilities and collaborates with the previously established strategies that female academics formulate in WLB.

As both the frequency and the severity of network breaches have increased in recent years, it is essential that cybersecurity is incorporated into the core of business operations. Evidence from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012) indicates that there is, and will continue to be, a severe shortage of cybersecurity professionals nationwide throughout the next decade. To fill this job shortage we need a workforce with strong hands-on experience in the latest technologies and software tools to catch up with the rapid evolution of network technologies. It is vital that the IT professionals possess up-to-date technical skills and think and act one step ahead of the cyber criminals who are constantly probing and exploring system vulnerabilities. There is no perfect security mechanism that can defeat all the cyber-attacks; the traditional defensive security mechanism will eventually fail to the pervasive zero-day attacks. However, there are steps to follow to reduce an organization’s vulnerability to cyber-attacks and to mitigate damages. Active security tests of the network from a cyber-criminal’s perspective can identify system vulnerabilities that may lead to future breaches. “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. But if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of hundred battles” (Sun, 2013). Penetration testing is a discipline within cybersecurity that focuses on identifying and exploiting the vulnerabilities of a network, eventually obtaining access to the critical business information. The pentesters, the security professionals who perform penetration testing, or ethical hackers, break the triad of information security - Confidentiality, Integrity, and Accountability (CIA) - as if they were a cyber-criminal. The purpose of ethical hacking or penetration testing is to know what the “enemy” can do and then generate a report for the management team to aid in strengthening the system, never to cause any real damages. This paper introduces the development of a penetration testing curriculum as a core class in an undergraduate cybersecurity track in Information Technology. The teaching modules are developed based on the professional penetration testing life cycle. The concepts taught in the class are enforced by hands-on lab exercises. This paper also shares the resources that are available to institutions looking for teaching materials and grant opportunities to support efforts when creating a similar curriculum in cybersecurity.

This paper reports on the outcomes from a pilot study targeted at mothers of school children in Melbourne, Australia. The aim of the study was to engender a positive view of technology in the participants and to introduce the concept of Information Technology (IT) as a potential career. Mothers were given the opportunity to develop basic IT skills and learn about different IT career pathways for their children with an emphasis on their daughters’ choices. Mothers were offered an evening course over a four week period that was designed to introduce them to a range of social media and Web 2.0 tools. Their opinions were documented using both questionnaires and informal discussions. It explored whether their attitudes towards IT can be changed by up-skilling and introducing them to the technologies their children commonly use. The findings of the pilot study suggest that addressing this demographic has the potential to make the participants question their pre-conceptions about IT careers for women.