Chaos Computer Club breaks Apple TouchID
frank, Chaos Computer Club, September 23, 2013

The problem with biometrics is that every hacker has a fully-functional development kit to start off with - themselves! So it's no surprise to read that "the biometrics hacking team of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has successfully bypassed the biometric security of Apple's TouchID using easy everyday means. A fingerprint of the phone user, photographed from a glass surface, was enough to create a fake finger that could unlock an iPhone 5s secured with TouchID."

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Diigo
Diigo, September 23, 2013

Diigo has upgraded its service (and its Chrome-only browser extension) and is to my mind becoming a serious player in the learning support system landscape. Basically what it has done is combine it's rich content collection and sharing service to social networking and collaboration applications. "Pronounced as Dee'go, it is an abbreviation for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff." You see, we especially like the "Other stuff" part, which gives us an open mandate to relentlessly innovate and provide better and better value to our users." Regular OLDaily readers are probably familiar with Diigo - we've used it to support our online courses. But it it's new to you, do take a look. See also: Doing More and Learning More with Diigo.

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Consortium offers to buy BlackBerry for $4.7 billion
Larry Dignan, ZD Net, September 23, 2013

I'm wondering whether this might not be the first edge of what might be a very long wedge. No, not the bit about Blackberry having financial difficulties and selling itself. We've been down that road many times. No, instead the bit about taking the company private (saving it, like Blackboard, not wiping it out like Nortel). It's incredibly difficult to develop technology and innovation when you're a publicly held company - it increases risk and defers profits in a way shareholders (who care only about immediate returns) find problematic. Disclosure requirements also make it more difficult to things in stealth mode. And perhaps most of all, publicly traded companies are almost required to be unscrupulous and mercenary; it's almost a legal requirement for them to maximize profits, even if they harm the industry or wider society as a result. Just ask Google.

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Corporate open source
Christopher Newfield, Radical Philosophy, September 23, 2013

Rory McGreal sent me this item, which gets to the heart of the concept of 'open' when it is used by corporations like Coursera. It's worthy of a long slow read. The professors' content is open, and they retain the rights, granting Coursera only a non-exclusive right to publish. Coursera, meanwhile, retains exclusive rights over any enhancements that it provides. The result? "To share IP with the platform owner is to operate in practical subordination to the owners of the platform. This is how Microsoft set up its version of open or at least shared IP – as a way to entangle all potential competitors in alliances that create a Microsoft ecosystem. And such is increasingly the fate of open source in knowledge economies – to be blended with a proprietary platform over which the great majority of the players have no control." This is the sort of thing pre-GPL licenses sought to avoid; as I describe here, "people make a few trivial changes and then decide that it has changed so much that it is effectively something completely new." This phenomenon is called "enclosure." People forget. They shouldn't.

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Articles Categorized
Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, September 23, 2013

Matthias Melcher was kind enough to update the categroized list of my articles, which I have posted to my site. Find them here: new articles, categorized articles.

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The Self-Evident Awards
Doug Johnson, Blue Skunk Blog, September 23, 2013

This post gives us a link to the 2013 IgNobel prizes, a good quote from Alfie Kohn, and the admonition to educators to stop frivolous research and to begin adopting some of the measures we know - and have known for some time - are effective in education. Here's Kohn: "professionals in our field often seem content to work within the constraints of traditional policies and accepted assumptions—even when they don’t make sense. Conversely, too many educators seem to have lost their capacity to be outraged by outrageous things. Handed foolish and destructive mandates, they respond only by requesting guidance on how to implement them."

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The Ontology of the Web (Why I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Learning Standards)
Doug Belshaw, DML Central, September 22, 2013

This is a good article in which, as one commenter points out, "the points about the process of learning being just as, or more important than, the finality of it all." Having concluded in his thesis that digital literacy is a ‘convenient hypocrisy’, and that speaking of a plurality of ‘digital literacies’ makes more sense than endless attempts to define ‘one literacy to rule them all’, Doug Belshaw was asked by Mozilla to develop a digital literacy standard that can be used with the badge infrastructure. He has done so, in what was to my view an open and consultative p[rocess, and he has, as another commenter argued, walked a fine line between the lumpers and the splitters.

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Decentering Syndication or, a Push Away from RSS
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, September 21, 2013

RSS pulls content from other sites into yours (or into your feedreader). Decentering syndication pushes content from your site into other sites. The most common forms of this are cases where the content is pushed into a social network like Twitter or Facebook (you can see an example with the @OLDaily Twitter feed). In this post Jim Groom describes push syndication plugins for WordPress, which use XML-RPC to send content from one WordPress site to another. In  both cases the objective is the same: to reduce dependence on a single site, to distribute content, and to create a network of interactions.

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Just a Reflektor: a virtual projection with Canada's Arcade Fire
Aaron Canada, Official Google Canada Blog, September 21, 2013

It bothers me that this site is for Chrome only but I am nonetheless enthusiastic about the potential for an interactive web it demonstrates. You allow the video to use your camera and you sync it with your mobile phone, and then you control the video (which interweaves video from your camera as well) with your phone (or your mouse, if your phone doesn't work, as mine didn't (it asked for a 'faster web connection' but my phone was on high speed WiFi in my home, so I assume what it really wants is my phone's mobile provider signal, for tracking). There's also a technology page that "lets you create, edit and share your own visual effects using footage from the film."

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