Fortnightly Mailing

TrueCrypt compromised? [Was: Using TrueCrypt instead of EFS to encrypt data on a laptop]

Note - May/June 2014. This 28 May 2014 report in The Register indicates that TrueCrypt, certainly in its latest version 7.2, may have been compromised. Security company Sophos has more, as have Runa Sandvik in Forbes, James Lyne in Forbes, David Meyer in Gigaom, Cory Doctorow, Dan Goodin in Ars Technica#1, Dan Goodin in Ars Technica#2, Bruce Schneier, and Steve Gibson (recommended). There are also:

1. TCnextSwiss-based continuation of TrueCrypt;
2. VeraCrypt, based on TrueCrypt version 7.1a, but with several of its vulnerabilities resolved.

[Last updated 24/10/2016]

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28 October 2012

For the last several years I've used Microsoft XP's built-in EFS encryption system for the data directory on my Windows laptop, making it less likely that someone could access my data if I lost my laptop or if someone stole it.

A problem with EFS is that it works behind the scenes: unless you take special steps to save a couple of files that are needed for decryption purposes (away from the device that is encrypted), there is always the nasty and real possibility that you could lose access to all your data. [I know this from a friend who learned it the hard way.]

Last week, on the recommendation of someone I trust, I finally got round to stopping using EFS, switching instead to an almost Open Source product called TrueCrypt, which is available for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. It took me less than five minutes get TrueCrypt installed and running, and less than an hour to use it to encrypt a new data directory and to move my data across.

TrueCrypt's user documentation is exemplary, and TrueCrypt works sufficiently "in the foreground" for you to know that it is there. You can also use it quickly and easily to encrypt removable media like USB sticks or drives. I have also had no trouble getting Carbonite (the remote back-up service that I use) to back the data up from the TrueCrypt encrypted drive. Unlike with EFS, the data once backed up is only encrypted by Carbonite's system, rather than retaining the local encryption as well. That means that when I restore a file from Carbonite it is unencrypted, unless I restore it to an encrypted drive. This was not the case with EFS encrypted files.

I should emphasise here that I am a self-taught amateur on matters such as this. Caveat reader, therefore.

How users switch between screens, or use more than one screen at the same time

Dick Moore sent me an email marked "low priority" about a study by Google that is presented in 46 screens below. As is usually the case, the "low priority" piqued my interest. The study goes a long way to explain my own and others' "device behaviour" as we move between situations and contexts. I am sure that it will provide you with several "ahah" moments. (In my case it was to discover that emailing myself a URL from my phone so that I could look at it later in a proper format is a not in the least bit an odd thing to do. Pierre Gorissen reacted similarly [Google Translation from the Dutch] ...... )

Worth spreading - short narrated animation explaining Open Access

Within only a few days this impressive and incisive 8 minute explanatory animation about Open Access had had about 20,000 views. This is good going for an explanation concerning something that deserves mass attention but rarely gets dealt with in a broad enough way to get it.

The video is narrated by microbiologist Jonathan Eisen (brother of Michael Eisen, who co-founded Public Library of Science) and SPARC's Nick Shockey, and it has been elegantly animated by Panamanian Jorg Cham.

A humanities and social sciences oriented equivalent of this animation is sorely needed.

The Finnish school system: many jaw-dropping moments in this interview with Pasi Sahlberg by John Hattie

Via @EvaHartell I came across this 26 September 2012 interview with Pasi Sahlberg by John Hattie (author of the useful and very influential Visible Learning, himself interviewed - 28/8/2014 update - by the BBC's Sarah Montague, here) .

You would have to have been asleep in recent months to have missed the discussion about what is special about the Finnish education system, but there is a big difference between reading about it, and hearing Sahlberg's highly nuanced responses to Hattie's questions.

Particularly striking for me are the following.

1. It has taken 40 years for Finland to transform its school system.
2. Finland places a very great emphasis on preschool and primary education.
3. Parental/pupil choice about school only starts at and beyond age sixteen.
4. Pupils are given/take responsibility for their own learning rather than being "taught to the test".

Note, in particular, Sahlberg's favourable comparison of those working in pre-school and primary education with other high status, collectively run/regulated hard-to-get-into professions like law and medicine, and what Sahlberg says about the large proportion of pupils for whom expensive (but, he explains, cost effective) "special" interventions of various kinds are made at some point in their school education.

Above all, note how the policy aim of equity supported by an internal ethos that is collaborative rather than competitive is so central to the success and effectiveness of the Finnish system.

Why Open Access matters - an illuminating discussion between Peter Suber and David Weinberger

Next week is the sixth Open Access Week, the aim of which is to "help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research".

Philosopher Peter Suber has had an enormous and critical "founding" influence on the Open Access movement. Above is an 80 minute recording of the recent launch of Peter Suber's outstanding MIT Press book "Open Access", chaired/mediated by David Weinberger, also a philosopher.

If you want a steady, convincing, personal and "discussive" account of why Open Access matters, and what motivates people to push for it, your time will be well spent. (Someone mentioned that Suber has past "form" as a comedian; and did I read that Weinberger has been a joke-writer? This somehow comes through in the discussion.)

New survey report into learning technologies in FE and 6th form colleges

Source: AoC Learning Technology Survey Report, September 2012

The AoC has published a broad and interesting Learning Technology Survey report, based on responses from mainly 3rd tier managers in about one third of AoC's 294 further education and sixth form college members in England. Here is an archived copy of the report [2MB PDF].

The report would have benefited from a discussion about the extent to which responses came from large or small colleges (what proportion of the sector was actually covered by the responses?); and it struck me as being a bit too focused on specific named technologies, and disappointingly silent on, say, e-books or open educational resources, approaches to innovation, or on collaborative provision to achieve really big scale-economies.

However the report gives very useful insights into, say, the market share of different systems (VLEs - Moodle 81%, Blackboard/WebCT 15%; Student Record Systems - Tribal EBS 36%, Capita 28%, Agresso in 15%); and it contains interesting tabulations of respondents' self-assessments of, for example, how well their college is getting on with system integration, or how confident they are that their college is able to use technology to meet policy objectives such as personalisation.

If I were a college - and in a sense, as college Governor, I am one - would I want to benchmark the college against this data? The short answer is "yes, but with caution". This is because I am left with a nagging doubt about the meaning of some of the data. For example, picking up on personalisation, 81.6% of respondent colleges are "confident" or "very confident" that their college is able to use its current technology base to meet the personalisation policy objective (whatever that is). The old cynic in me thinks that hardly any colleges in the country can be doing a good job on personalisation, because it is objectively a very hard not to say nebulous thing to achieve, and that therefore if so many respondents think that their college is managing personalisation properly, there must be something wrong with their collective judgement.

But this kind of criticism is not intended to negate the considerable value of AoC's report. It deserves to be widely used, and kudos to Matt Dean and colleagues for getting it done.

Teaching as a design science

Here is the recording of a talk given at LSE on 10 October by Diana Laurillard along with the ensuing discussion, the title and thrust of which is "teaching as a design science", which is also the title of a book by Laurillard. Archived PDF of the slides from the talk.

Brewster Kahle and the love of books - physical and digital

Engaging six minute piece in which Alan Yentob talks to Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle about the archive, and its mission to archive books as objects as well as to digitise them systematically. [No cloud based infrastructure yet for the the archive, by the look of things.]

See also this 2007 TED talk by Khale.

Regularly updated snippets, with RSS feed

I bookmark things I find using a service called FriendFeed. This page updates itself automatically with the last five items. You can subscribe to these snippets by RSS, or on Twitter; and you can review the last 30 of them here.

Aaron Sloman's "What is computational thinking?"

Updated 16 November 2012

On 11 September Aaron Sloman gave an invited talk at the 2012 ALT Conference entitled "What is computational thinking? Who needs it? Why? How can it be learnt? (Can it be taught?)". Above is a very comprehensive Slideshare version of the talk, which is best viewed "full-screen". A video of the talk is available on the ALT YouTube channel, and I've embedded it below.