cyber attacks

 http://on.mash.to/YEZzxM
The big story behind this attack is the scope of it. The first company that was attacked basically provides a black list to other companies to block them from spamming them. Evidently the Cyberbunker company was upset about that they were on the list and they initiated this distributed denial of service attack. As the article says and as we'll discuss in her in further chapters thousands of computers are harnessed together to flood the website of the attacked company. The interesting thing about this is that a security company was hired by the attack company to help fix the problem. When that occurred the denial of service company attacked the security company. These are vicious and very destructive attacks and can have devastating economic effect on the companies. You may know that recently the North Koreans did a similar thing to the South Korean banking system.

In response to Gina's post; buying decisions.

I think that reference groups reduce the search and evaluation of decisions for myself, if I am looking for a high priced item to buy, I know who I normally go to, and ask their opinion of what products. But I feel like there are types of people that love the evaluation of products making the decisions themselves. They love to do research on products and evaluate how each one compares. In conclusion, it depends on the person.

Robots in classrooms.

The little boy in this news clip has an awful allergy, and is unable to attend school. His mother pleaded with the school board to have them purchase a traveling robot, that is controlled by the boy at home. He has a tutor that helps him side by side with class work, but he is able to interact with other students, instead of being home schooled, and having no interactions.

Do you think this is benefical? How do you think his relationships will be when he goes to highschool? Do you think that we'll see this more over the years?

Check out the clip: http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/02/15/Robot-Attends-School-For-Second-Grader?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+BreitbartFeed+(Breitbart+Feed)

Rebooting Hotmail.

Microsoft is looking for change. The change hasn’t been made for decades. Outlook is still very basic. The use of email has changed, commutation is done through texting, and social media sites. Microsoft is looking to update them to be applicable to more smart devices like tablets. Social media today is more popular than ever. For businesses it is almost a free type of marketing and for people, it’s a way of communication and self expression. Today, many people are using facebook messaging, as email. It is important for Microsoft to keep up with these updates because this innovation will keep progressing. The future could be more popularity of Google plus. Google plus , I feel, is a business version of facebook, circles allow groups of people to commutate with each other, and the option to have chats, are basically like reply-all emails. When Microsoft doesn’t keep up with these updates, that’s when they are forgotten, and get taken out of the picture. The personal repository is important to MS email, because they want to be used. They want their users to have one place to see facebook updates, and other social networks, plus a well managed email database. They want to make it simple for users. By including online storage space, they are changing to make be like other email services.

Would you use a service more if all of your updates were in one place? 

How do you think your use of social media will change when getting to the real world? 

Read the article here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444226904577561050747041874.html?mod=technology_newsreel