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The Telecom Digest for August 23, 2013
Volume 32 : Issue 179 : "text" Format
====== 32 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
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Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 04:24:22 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Master's Degree Is New Frontier of Study Online
Message-ID: <p0624080ece38d0296579@[10.0.1.3]>
Master's Degree Is New Frontier of Study Online
By TAMAR LEWIN
August 17, 2013
Next January, the Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a
master's degree in computer science through massive open online
courses for a fraction of the on-campus cost, a first for an elite
institution. If it even approaches its goal of drawing thousands of
students, it could signal a change to the landscape of higher
education.
>From their start two years ago, when a free artificial intelligence
course from Stanford enrolled 170,000 students, free massive open
online courses, or MOOCs, have drawn millions and yielded results
like the perfect scores of Battushig, a 15-year-old Mongolian boy, in
a tough electronics course offered by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
But the courses have not yet produced profound change, partly because
they offer no credit and do not lead to a degree. The disruption may
be approaching, though, as Georgia Tech, which has one of the
country's top computer science programs, plans to offer a MOOC-based
online master's degree in computer science for $6,600 - far less than
the $45,000 on-campus price.
Zvi Galil, the dean of the university's College of Computing, expects
that in the coming years, the program could attract up to 10,000
students annually, many from outside the United States and some who
would not complete the full master's degree. "Online, there's no visa
problem," he said.
The program rests on an unusual partnership forged by Dr. Galil and
Sebastian Thrun, a founder of Udacity, a Silicon Valley provider of
the open online courses.
Although it is just one degree at one university, the prospect of a
prestigious low-cost degree program has generated great interest.
Some educators think the leap from individual noncredit courses to
full degree programs could signal the next phase in the evolution of
MOOCs - and bring real change to higher education.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/education/masters-degree-is-new-frontier-of-study-online.html
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 13:52:19 +0200
From: Gilles <anonymous@anonymous.telecom-digest.org>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Play voice message after answering phone?
Message-ID: <6nub19dfh2ahkqgvmgkk9pvjju741ql63c@4ax.com>
Hello
Using the AT commands, I'd like to know if it's possible for a voice
modem to play a message *after I answered a call by picking up the
handset*, with the handset and the modem plugged into the same analog
line.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_modem_command_set
Or is it only possible if the modem takes the call first?
Thank you.
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 04:24:22 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets
Message-ID: <p06240810ce38d103988d@[10.0.1.3]>
How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets
By PETER MAASS
August 13, 2013
This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an
anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost
two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about
surveillance, and she occasionally received queries from strangers.
She replied to this one and sent her public key - allowing him or her
to send an encrypted e-mail that only Poitras could open, with her
private key - but she didn't think much would come of it.
The stranger responded with instructions for creating an even more
secure system to protect their exchanges. Promising sensitive
information, the stranger told Poitras to select long pass phrases
that could withstand a brute-force attack by networked computers.
"Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per
second," the stranger wrote.
Before long, Poitras received an encrypted message that outlined a
number of secret surveillance programs run by the government. She had
heard of one of them but not the others. After describing each
program, the stranger wrote some version of the phrase, "This I can
prove."
Seconds after she decrypted and read the e-mail, Poitras disconnected
from the Internet and removed the message from her computer. "I
thought, O.K., if this is true, my life just changed," she told me
last month. "It was staggering, what he claimed to know and be able
to provide. I just knew that I had to change everything."
Poitras remained wary of whoever it was she was communicating with.
She worried especially that a government agent might be trying to
trick her into disclosing information about the people she
interviewed for her documentary, including Julian Assange, the editor
of WikiLeaks. "I called him out," Poitras recalled. "I said either
you have this information and you are taking huge risks or you are
trying to entrap me and the people I know, or you're crazy."
The answers were reassuring but not definitive. Poitras did not know
the stranger's name, sex, age or employer (C.I.A.? N.S.A.?
Pentagon?). In early June, she finally got the answers. Along with
her reporting partner, Glenn Greenwald, a former lawyer and a
columnist for The Guardian, Poitras flew to Hong Kong and met the
N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, who gave them thousands of
classified documents, setting off a major controversy over the extent
and legality of government surveillance. Poitras was right that,
among other things, her life would never be the same.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-snowden.html
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