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Windows XP Home uses the Guest account as an integral part of network file and folder sharing. Using Simple File Sharing, when you share out a file or folder it is accessible to anyone who can “see” your computer. If you don’t have other security measures in place such as a firewall that means that users on the public Internet may be able to connect to your share using the Guest account.even if you select “Turn Off The Guest Account” it will only be turned off in terms of its ability to log on directly to Windows. in the background, the account will still be functional because Windows XP Home uses the Guest account to authenticate users connecting remotely to shared resources on that machine. it is virtually impossible to truly disable the Guest account and doing so would cause a number of problems on a Windows XP Home computer.So, in order to protect your system and ensure that not just anybody can connect to your file or folder shares- even when using Simple File Sharing- you need to assign a password to the Guest account. because Windows XP Home offers no “easy” point and click solution to help you, you will have to use the command prompt. Click on start, then All Programs, then Accessories and finally select Command Prompt. Once you have the black command prompt window open you will type the following:· net user guest you will of course replace the brackets and the word “password” with the password you wish to assign.More Computer Articles

Computer Security

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  Brian Foster, senior vice president of consumer product management for McAfee said, “as consumers continue to share more of their lives online through the photos they post to Facebook, they become increasingly vulnerable to the privacy pitfalls associated with not being able to fully control where their photos end up. McAfee Social Protection helps to further underscore our commitment to safeguarding consumer’s safety, data and identities online”.   McAfee Social Protection is available as a Facebook app and browser plug-in for PCs using Internet Explorer 8 or higher and Firefox 8 and higher. as collaboration between Intel and McAfee, the app was developed by Intel's Software and Services Group.   Earlier this year, McAfee pitched its Mobile Security 2.0 in the market. McAfee Mobile Security 2.0 supports Android-enabled smartphones and tablets along with Symbian and BlackBerry devices. The set of new features are inclusive of McAfee App Alert, Call and SMS filtering, and it is also powered by the McAfee Global Threat Intelligence network. The company claims that McAfee Mobile Security software provides a complete anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-phishing protection. it aimed at protecting users from potentially unwanted programs.   The McAfee SiteAdvisor safeguards against web threats by blocking links within SMS, e-mail, and social networking sites that appear to be risky. it also protects against potential phishing sites, browser exploits and malicious quick response (QR) codes.

McAfee introduces app to protect Facebook photos

“we want to be sure that we’re clearing rooms in the same manner, that we’re approaching suspects in the same manner, so there’s no confusion if something does happen.”The officers even made their way, guns drawn, in teams of two through a training building set up with tight hallways and small rooms. they fired their handguns in opposite directions once they reached a room where a simulated threat required them to use deadly force.Security Officer Jay Gibson says these are skills he hopes he’ll never have to put to use, but he’s glad he’s prepared to act.Gibson says training with experts in SWAT is invaluable. “I think it’s great. It builds trust among the departments. It gives us a great opportunity to train with some people that do this very frequently and builds teamwork.”The police department also made training videos of the exercises. They’ll be able to review the training, and make changes if necessary.“at the end of the day, our job is to make sure that the right people go home, and we want to do that by working side by side, each and every day,” Turner added.The school security officers completed KPD’s firearms qualifying program and wrapped up the week-long training Friday by putting all they’ve learned to the test.Source:  WATE

Knox County school security conduct training with police www.privateofficer.com « PRIVATE OFFICER NEWS NETWORK

”It’s fiddly having to connect, agreeing to terms and conditions, just to check an email,” he says. ”Often the effort isn’t really worth it.” Security Is free wi-fi secure? ”There are some risks associated with public access points,” says the head of technology for Asia-Pacific at security software company Sophos, Paul Ducklin. a security adviser at AVG AU/NZ, Michael McKinnon, says: ”The best assumption is you’re not secure.” But both specialists say you can still use public internet if you keep a few things in mind. here are some simple rules to follow to connect safely. 1. No password, no go. Security depends largely on whether the network is open or secure. Basically, does it have a password or not? ”When you are using an access point, you need to be using a secure connection for everything,” Ducklin says. ”If it’s not an encrypted access point, then anybody can see what you’re doing.” If the network doesn’t have a password, find one that does. 2. No sensitive content. ”I certainly wouldn’t be using any sites that required a credit card,” McKinnon says. Even if a public network has a password, it is best to save internet banking or credit card payments for private home or office networks. 3. Browse securely. Wherever possible, use sites that are secured with SSL encryption. this can be achieved by typing ”https” before the website address, rather than just ”http”. Be sure to physically type this into the browser, not click on a link that claims to be secure, as these can often be false. 4. VPN. If you are on the go but need a constant, secure connection, a mobile virtual private network, or VPN, is a good option. the software will encrypt your traffic but maintain your login session as you move across different access points. 5. If all else fails, use 3G. If you do need to conduct sensitive browsing, such as internet banking, while out and about, your safest option is to either find a private network or revert to 3G mobile internet. ”A 3G connection is inherently encrypted by default,” McKinnon says. ”[It] does tend to be a little more secure than an open wireless network.” Beyond this, the general rules of internet security apply. Make sure your software is up to date and use an antivirus program (yes, even Macs can get viruses). ”Nothing’s perfect,” Ducklin says. ”It’s like going to a street market rather than a well-run shopping centre – you can get some great bargains, but sometimes you’re on your own.” With this in mind, you might just be able to save yourself a few bob. Favourite hot spots freewifi.com.aulaptopfriendlycafes.comjiwire.com/iphonewhirlpool.net.au/wiki/free-wifi-hotsposts

With a little help from wi-fi

in this case the router’s WAN port will work as a LAN port. in fact, for the secondary access point scenario, it’s best to use two identical routers, one as the main, and the second as an access point for the far side of the house. this way you don’t have to learn about two different devices.Power line: a power-line adapter basically turns your home’s electrical wiring into network cables; this is more clearly explained in part 1. in the case of the separate access point scenario above, you can use a pair of power-line adapters, such as the D-Link DHP-510AV. Connect one of the adapters to the router and the other to the access point, using network cables. after that, if you want to make your home network seamless, name the Wi-Fi network (or SSID) of the access point the same as that of the existing router. in this case, make sure you use the same security settings (encryption key, method, and so on). Or you can also keep them as two separate Wi-Fi networks for easy management.There are also power-line adapter kits with a built-in access point, called power-line range extenders, such as the Netgear XAVNB2001. in this case, you don’t need to get the second access point/router.In addition to power line, you can also opt for a pair of MoCA adapters. MoCA stands for Multimedia over Coax Alliance, and similar to power line, turns coax cables (those used by cable TV) into network cables. MoCA adapters are great solutions for homes with multiple cable outlets in different rooms. I don’t have a lot of experience with MoCA, however, since it’s not possible to test those at my office.Range extender/repeater: These are wireless devices that can connect to an existing Wi-Fi network and then rebroadcast that same network’s signal farther. most of these devices support Wi-Fi Protected Setup and can connect to the existing router with the push of a button; after that, you can just put one at the edge of the existing network’s Wi-Fi range and have that range increased.I am not a fan of this type of device because of a few reasons: First, it’s hard to gauge their effectiveness; you need to put a range extender/repeater relatively close to the existing router for it to have a good connection with the main network, but at the same time far enough for it to really extend the range. It’s very hard to find the sweet spot for it to be effective both in terms of range and connection quality.Second, the repeater basically duplicates the existing Wi-Fi network with one of its own, and as mentioned above, Wi-Fi signals are broadcast in all directions. this means devices in the area where the two networks overlap have to deal with interference and signal saturation. this is especially bad for the 2.4Ghz band.That said, a range extender/repeater is still the fastest way to relatively extend a Wi-Fi network’s coverage.3. SettingsOne of the problems with Wi-Fi networks is the risk of losing your bandwidth to unauthorized users. this part helps you secure your network and optimize it for speed. Note that it’s slightly more advanced and might seem intimidating to novice users. but you will be a novice no more if you go through with it. this part is only recommended for those interested in learning more about networking.Rule of thumb:Make sure you back up the router’s configuration settings before making changes. this allows you to restore it to previous settings in case something goes wrong.With the exception of networking products from Apple, most, if not all, other routers and access points on the market comes with a Web interface. this means that from a connected computer, you can open up the router’s management Web page by going to its IP address. Unless you have changed it, the default IP address is generally printed on the bottom of the router, or on its user guide, and tends to be in this format: 192.168.x.1. It’s easy to find out your router’s IP address; here are the common steps to get to any home network’s router’s Web interface:Step 1: From a connected computer (runningWindows Vista or 7), click on start button, type “cmd” in the search area, then press Enter. (If you use Windows XP, you can navigate the start Menu and run the Command Prompt item.)Step 2: now in the black command prompt window, type in “ipconfig,” then press Enter. You will see lots of information displayed in the window. Find the string of number after Default Gateway, that’s the router’s IP address.Step 3: Type that IP address in the address bar of a browser, such asFirefox, and press Enter; now you are at the router’s Web interface. You will have to log in with an account. The username is almost always admin; for the password, check the router’s manual or ask the person who first set up the network for you.On the Web interface, the following wireless settings will help your network stay safe:Network name and password: most if not all routers come with a default Wi-Fi network name (or SSID) and password; you won’t want to use those. this is mostly because that reveals to advanced users which router you have and that, well, you don’t know much about networking. Changing the SSID and password to your liking also helps you remember them better. Hide your SSID: by default all routers broadcast the Wi-Fi network name. this makes it convenient since clients can “see” them. Hiding the SSID makes your Wi-Fi network invisible to others. The only drawback is that you have to manually type it in when you want to connect a new client to it. There’s a trick for it: turn the SSID on briefly when you want to connect a new client, once that’s done, hide it again.Use WPA 2: using the WPA 2 encryption method helps both increase the security and the speed of the Wi-Fi signal. The only catch is that WPA 2 might not be compatible with older clients. most new clients released in the past few years support WPA 2, however. You can try using WPA 2 first and if some of your clients are unable to connect, switch it back to WPA.In addition, once you have accessed the router’s Web interface, there are many other settings that you can try. For safety, there are also MAC address filters, Internet filtering, and so on. Note that a router generally takes about a minute to restart to apply new settings.That’s it for now; if you have more questions, put them in the comment section below or send it my way via e-mail or at my Facebook page.

Home networking explained, Part 2: Optimizing your Wi-Fi network

Tap the menu showing the detected network and enter the password. If a connection is made successfully, then a tick mark will appear. If not, then it means the matching security protocol was not setup on the iPod Touch for the network. If you need to change the security protocol tap other. to go to other Network page. Enter the name of the wireless network and select the matching security protocol used by the network. You have a choice of WEP, WPA, WPA2, WPA Enterprise and WPA2 Enterprise. Enter the password for the network and then tap the blue colored Join button on the bottom right of the screen. If the network is successfully found and connected to, then it will appear in the list of WiFi networks with a tick.Connecting to a free WiFi network is straight forward, however connecting to a secure home or business wireless network requires some technical knowledge. You need to know which security protocol is used with the network if it is secured, the network name (or ID) and the password to connect to it. If you didn’t set up the network at home or at the office, then you will need to obtain the details to log-on from the person who set it up, or seek help from the administrator of the network.Make Smarter Devices that Connect AutomaticallyAs the technical standards continue to evolve and consolidate for wireless networks, the challenge of connecting to a WiFi enabled network with portable devices will become a thing of the past when devices become smarter. such devices will be able to automatically detect any wireless standard and network configuration in the local vicinity and connect securely and seamlessly. hopefully we will see these advances in the next generation of the iPod Touch

Discover How to Easily Connect Your iPod Touch to a WiFi Network

by the time Sutherland was a college junior, the site had three million monthly users. now the company is a typical San Francisco start-up with black chairs and MacBook Airs. It makes enough money to rent space and pay salaries by running small ads on the site and by selling a premium version for $15. the ads and subscriptions aren’t expensive, but they don’t have to be when you’ve got millions of users and host everything in the Cloud.To drive home the point of just how cheap it is to be Quizlet, one of its executives asks me how much money the United States spends per year to educate a single student in K-12 education. About $15,000, I say. That’s more than what it costs us per month to host the entire site, serving millions, the executive responds. Quizlet has no sales force, a very small marketing department, and more than seven million monthly unique visitors. (There are about fifty million public school students in the United States.) Quizlet, in its busiest months, during the school year, is among the top 500 most visited sites on the entire Internet. now they’ve expanded beyond flash cards. you can create study groups, convert your content into multiplayer games, and search for cards and games that other people have created. We think we can get to 40 million users, then 100 million, says the executive. the question that drives the company, he says, is this: How can we create amazing learning tools for one billion people? this is the way most of the people in the valley talk.Other companies are starting by exploiting inefficiencies in the existing higher education system and using the money to bankroll more disruptive ideas. After visiting the Quizlet headquarters in San Francisco, Michael and I hopped onto Highway 101 and drove south toward Palo Alto. We stopped at the well-appointed headquarters of Chegg, which is basically the Netflix of textbooks; students rent their textbooks online and then mail them back when they’re done. Chegg has tens of thousands of student-customers and lots of cash, but it knows that sending textbooks back and forth in the mail is not the business of the future. So it has begun expanding into other services, like, for instance, one that creates a marketplace for students to share their class notes with each other. another company that I visited that afternoon, called Course Hero, conducts a similar business.Both companies have been on the receiving end of cease-and-desist letters from colleges and universities claiming that student notes of a lecture remain the intellectual property of the lecturer and thus can’t be resold for money. but this just highlights the radical changes in power over information wrought by information technology. When colleges were originally built, there were only two ways to get scholarly information: read a book or talk to a smart person. So it made sense to concentrate the books and smart people in distinct places, and colleges benefited enormously from the combination of a growing demand for expert information and the high barriers to entry for building libraries and assembling learned faculty. the college business model depends on holding that position, so they don’t take kindly to upstart companies facilitating new ways of sharing their once-scarce information.and the one thing that sticks with me more than anything else is that the onslaught is shaping up to be relentless.Perhaps the biggest sign that this assault on the university is of an unprecedented scale is that some of the biggest incumbents have finally started making moves to defend themselves. in Palo Alto one evening, Michael and I walk to a bar and meet a woman who is helping Stanford build out its online higher education infrastructure. For the previous five months, Stanford had been on one end of a fascinating game of higher education technology one-upsmanship. throughout the fall 2011 semester, a group of well-known Stanford professors had been running an unorthodox experiment by letting over 100,000 students around the world take their courses, online, for free. those who did well got a certificate from the professor saying so. Then, in December, MIT announced the creation of MITx, a new nonprofit organization, branded by the university, which would also offer so-called “massively open online courses,” or MOOCs, and would also give certificates to those who earned them—a new kind of academic currency.in January, some of the Stanford professors broke off from the university and formed a new for-profit company called Udacity, designed to offer the same MOOCs, sans Stanford. in March, some of the other Stanford professors formed another company, Coursera, to offer courses from Princeton, Stanford, Michigan, and Penn, also online, also for free. in May, a few weeks after I returned from the trip, Harvard got into the game by joining the MIT side and founding a larger initiative called edX. Harvard had displayed virtually no interest in online education up to that point. the edX move smacked of an industry leader finding itself in the unfamiliar position of being left behind. in July, the University of Virginia, fresh off its technology-panic leadership crisis, jumped on the Coursera bandwagon along with Duke, Cal Tech, Johns Hopkins, Rice, the University of Edinburgh, and a half-dozen other well-known universities. A week later, UC-Berkeley joined edX. in less than a year, online higher education has gone from the province of downmarket for-profit colleges to being embraced by the most famous universities in the world.fear is a powerful motivator, and the source of that fear becomes clearest to me on the evening that Michael and I take a drive to the Presidio, a gorgeous, forested area of San Francisco near the Golden Gate Bridge that was once a military base. We park along the sidewalk and walk a short distance under streetlights, dodging sprinklers that are watering thick, green grass. We’re visiting Founders Fund, a major VC firm led by Peter Thiel. Thiel has been a major figure in the valley for years, having gotten phenomenally rich founding PayPal before making an early investment in Facebook now worth several billion dollars. but he was largely unknown in the rest of America until last summer, when he created the “Thiel fellowship.” the idea was to prove a point, which is that higher education is basically bullshit, and probably a bubble of some kind or another, and that it was ridiculous for the smartest students to waste four years and $250,000 for a bad education when they could be doing something useful, like founding start-ups in the valley and making money instead.the fellowship program pays twenty people under the age of twenty to leave college and spend their time creating their own business, or something else; it’s up to them. It was a genius PR move, and the timing could not have been better, because it started rolling out just as a group of fed-up people decided to occupy Wall Street. the population of anticapitalist and generally leftily outraged people with enough time on their hands to live in tents in a public park day and night turned out to be highly correlated with the population of well-educated recent graduates of expensive colleges and universities who, owing to the recent economic catastrophe caused by various greedy and reckless Wall Street financiers, couldn’t get a job that paid enough money to pay back the kind of loans you need to take out to float a $250,000 tuition bill. they were pissed off and began dominating the public discourse, and so people were primed to hear a famous and interesting valley rich guy say that the whole thing is a corrupt enterprise doomed to collapse in a spectacular, real-estate-market-circa-2008 fashion. the media lapped it up, and soon enough Thiel was featured in long New York and New Yorker profiles.It’s past 8:30 when we get into the Founders Fund offices. the space is beautifully appointed (the massive flows of money in and out of the valley have clearly spawned a lucrative ancillary industry in interior design), and the waiting area features a round table, in the middle of which is a model rocket roughly two feet tall. We sit down with Scott Nolan, who works for Thiel, in the boardroom nearby.Nolan explains how Thiel (and, thus, Founders Fund) sees the world. A lot of their vision is in a manifesto (that’s what they call it) on their Web site titled “What Happened to the Future? We Wanted Flying Cars, instead We Got 140 Characters.” Its point is that human progress has been disappointing in recent decades (no flying cars like we were promised), and venture capital is partly to blame. Investors have chased after clever short-term innovations and looked for quick profit, which is not only bad for the world but bad for most investors—since 1999, according to the manifesto, venture capital has lost money on average. only the top 20 percent are any good. Thiel thinks that the smart money goes with the best people pursuing transformational ideas. He’s not someone who believes in hedging your bets through broad category investment. he wants to find the next Facebook.Nolan restates Thiel’s thesis like this: Most of the money and talent and energy have focused on things that Thiel describes as “1 to N”—in other words, taking an existing thing and making it better or distributing it to more people. Thiel (and, thus, Founders Fund) is interested in “0 to 1”—creating something amazing that genuinely didn’t exist before. there is a rough parallel in this to genuinely disrupting education as opposed to simply expanding it to new people or getting rich fixing or exploiting one of its many manifest inefficiencies or absurdities.I grow curious about how someone who’s not very old—I’d guess late twenties or early thirties—ends up helping Peter Thiel invest money. So I ask, and Nolan’s story proceeds from undergraduate and graduate degrees in aerospace engineering at Cornell to a job working for another formidably smart and unconventionally minded guy, Elon Musk, who founded PayPal along with Peter Thiel. Musk used his vast PayPal fortune to start three different companies, including Tesla motors, which makes high-performance electric roadsters that are currently owned by the likes of Matt Damon; a solar energy company; and SpaceX, which recently made its first flight to the International Space Station and that aims to reduce the cost of carrying stuff into space to roughly one-tenth that of NASA’s shuttle. the scale model of this rocket is what you see in the waiting room of Founders Fund.I ask Scott which job is harder: rocket scientist or venture capitalist? he smiles and says it depends. what exactly did he do for SpaceX? I ask. “Do you really want to know?” he replies. Sure—it’s been a long day, my head is swimming, and people keep comparing start-up investment to “building a rocket and lighting the fuse.”So he walks over to the whiteboard that makes up the entire wall of the conference room and deftly sketches out the inner workings of a rocket engine, showing what happens when thousands of gallons of rocket fuel are sprayed into a chamber of fire, thus igniting and creating fantastic amount of force, the eddies and whorls of which need to be predicted and calculated in minute, down-to-the-millisecond detail, so that the force can be directed down through the closed chamber in which the initial combustion occurs and out the bottom of the rocket in the form of enough thrust to take something the size and weight of, say, a telecommunications satellite, up and away from the gravitational bonds of our planet. Any flaws in design or misunderstanding of the precise nature of the whorls and eddies result in what Scott calls a RUD—a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” meaning the rocket blows up.this is, in and of itself, a design challenge daunting enough to keep an engineering geek in bliss. and there’s more. the whole point of SpaceX is to make space flight both reliable and cheap. you can get to cheap with cheaper materials—but cheaper might mean weaker and less reliable and thus more likely to cause a RUD. So the real holy grail is a more efficient use of fuel to create thrust. the amount of thrust needed to liberate X amount of weight from the Earth’s gravity well is a brute math problem. It’s inescapable. and, crucially, as Scott explains it, when the rocket is sitting on the launching pad, most of the weight is fuel.Most of the weight is fuel.that stays with me, even after we finally leave Founders Fund, dodging the sprinklers again, and I catch a taxi a few blocks from the gates of the Presidio and head back to SoMa and my hotel. Because when most of the weight is fuel, Scott explains, a reduction in the amount of fuel you need to create thrust increases the payload weight you can move from Earth into orbit along a logarithmic scale. It’s not a linear, one-to-one thing. the less fuel you need, the less fuel you need. It’s exponential.this, I realize, is pretty much what’s happening to the basic math undergirding the Silicon Valley economy and, with it, the likelihood of higher education encountering some kind of dramatic disruption at the hands of a Musk-like figure. As access to the Internet grows and the cost of everything technological moves toward zero, the amount of money needed to start a company that can grow to scale and just possibly change the world—that can go from 0 to 1—drops along the same kind of exponential scale. When does that cost become functionally indistinguishable from nothing? in the admittedly much less complicated business of photo sharing, it got there nine hours before I arrived at Founders Fund. That’s Instagram, the billion-dollar company that consisted of nothing more than a handful of ramen eaters (on the day it was purchased, Instagram had fewer than twenty employees) armed with ergonomic black chairs, wi-fi, and MacBook Airs.During a meeting on Sand Hill Road, the fabled home of Silicon Valley venture capitalism, one investor told me that the basic model of firms like his making huge startup bets was ripe for disruption. A new breed of venture firms has taken to investing small amounts in start-ups, in the range of $25,000 to $50,000. These firms recognize that the cost of starting a new company is far less than it used to be, which means that investors can spread their money around to more entrepreneurs and ideas. and the entrepreneurs themselves can “fail faster,” a crucial idea in an ecosystem driven by experimentation and groping around for the new new thing.instead of shooting for the moon by building a beautiful, expensive product and hoping like hell that the whole world comes to your door, the idea now is to build the “minimal viable product,” get it to the market quickly, watch what happens, and iterate like crazy. Because the Cloud is so cheap, it doesn’t take much in the way of money to do this. Because the scale of the entire world is so large, the potential to get big is vast. If that doesn’t work, everyone can move on to the next thing with relatively little time and money wasted.in the future, anyone with an idea will be able to build a rocket, aim it at the gigantic trillion-dollar market of education, and light the fuse.who will hit the target? I have no idea. It might be someone like Eren Bali, who is in his late twenties and grew up in a rural village in Turkey, near the Iraqi border. A math prodigy, Bali had nowhere to go but the Internet to feed his hunger for information. With free materials he managed to cobble together online, he learned enough to enter and win several international math competitions. that led him to start a Web site and, perhaps inevitably, fall under the gravitational pull o Silicon Valley. his company, Udemy, is on the second floor of a building in SoMa, in an open space occupied by multiple start-ups at once.Udemy is a classic platform design. Anyone can log on to the site and, using tools provided by the company, design an online course. If designers choose to sell their courses to students, Udemy keeps 30 percent of the revenues. Or, people can give the course away for free. Like Facebook or Instagram, the goal is to create a fun, elegant user experience, let other people create all of the content, and stand in the middle of information and financial exchange. the site is currently hosting hundreds of courses, including some designed by professors at Dartmouth, Vassar, Colgate, and Duke. but most of the designers don’t have PhDs. They’re just experts, and, as Bali notes, there are hundreds of thousands of experts all over the world. Most of them have never had a chance to offer higher education or reach a global audience of people who might need them—until now.Perhaps Udemy’s democratic nature will give it a leg up in the coming war to build the dominant higher education platform. maybe the three titans of Harvard, Berkeley, and MIT will propel edX to victory, or maybe the user experience expertise and facility with the economics of Silicon Valley will help Udacity carry the day. Coursera’s marriage of world-class brands with valley know-how seems like a formidable combination. Pearson, the British textbook giant, is working to build a platform of its own. there is a great deal of money and power at stake now. We may not know who and we may not know when, but someone is going to write the software that eats higher education.It will probably take a little while to digest. Cars and automobiles almost entirely killed the long-distance passenger train industry, for example, but railroads today carry more freight than ever, and it would be almost impossible to build automobiles if railroads did not exist to transport the raw materials. Similarly, TV did not replace radio, but merely diluted its influence. Older models often adapt and endure in significant if less important forms. As the platform wars commence and huge online courses grow in prominence, most of the first adopters won’t be American students forgoing the opportunity to drink beer on weekends at State U. instead, they’ll be students like Bali, among the hundreds of millions of people around the world with the talent and desire to learn but no State U to attend. the initial MOOC statistics bear this out—according to Udacity’s founder, Sebastian Thrun, more people from Lithuania signed up for his Stanford class than attend Stanford itself.instead of trying to directly challenge American colleges—a daunting proposition, given the political power and public subsidies they possess—the new breed of tech start-ups will likely start by working in the unregulated private sector, where they’ll build what amounts to a parallel higher education universe. A few weeks after returning from the West Coast, I watched Eren Bali spend two hours in a Washington, D.C.-area conference room listening to government officials, regulators, and representatives of for-profit higher education corporations discuss the morass of accreditation rules and federal regulations that make it hard for entrepreneurs to compete directly with traditional schools. Finally, Bali raised his hand and politely said, in effect, I don’t understand why any of this matters. I can go online right now and get everything I need to learn—courses, textbooks, videos, other students to study with—for free. and if I need to know what someone else has learned, I can look at their Linked-In profile or their blog to find out.At a certain point, probably before this decade is out, that parallel universe will reach a point of sophistication and credibility where the degrees—or whatever new word is invented to mean “evidence of your skills and knowledge”—it grants are taken seriously by employers. the online learning environments will be good enough, and access to broadband Internet wide enough, that you won’t need to be a math prodigy like Eren Bali to learn, get a credential, and attract the attention of global employers. Companies like OpenStudy, Kno, Quizlet, Chegg, Inigral, and Degreed will provide all manner of supportive services—study groups, e-books, flash cards, course notes, college-focused social networking, and many other fabulous, as-yet-un-invented things. Bali isn’t just the model of the new ed tech entrepreneur—he’s the new global student, too, finally able to transcend the happenstance of where he was born.That’s when American colleges and universities will eally start to feel the pain. Political pressure will continue to grow for credits earned in low-cost MOOCs to be transferable to traditional colleges, cutting into the profit margins that colleges have traditionally enjoyed in providing large, lecture-based college courses. At the same time, people with huge student loan burdens from overpriced institutions will be undercut in the labor market by foreign-born workers willing to work for less because they incurred no debt in getting valuable credentials in the parallel higher education universe. Colleges with strong brand names and other sources of revenue (e.g., government-sponsored research or acculturating the children of the ruling class) will emerge stronger than ever. everyone else will scramble to survive as vestigial players.At least, that’s what people are dreaming of in the valley. If history is any guide, some of them are going to be right. Join the ConversationPlease log in below through Disqus, Twitter or Facebook to participate in the conversation. Your email address, which is required for a Disqus account, will not be publicly displayed. If you sign in with Twitter or Facebook, you have the option of publishing your comments in those streams as well.

The Siege of Academe

You can integrate it with the video feed, or keep separate. You can also have two way audio, to and from the camera.This allows you many possibilities like ease of installation, cost savings, synchronized audio with video, and two-way audio; duplex, half duplex, simplex.With integrated audio, you can have remote dialog and allow gate or door access, as well as listen in on the location. This is a great way to help with surveillance scenes.7. your Communications are Secure: CCTV video cameras are easy to tap into the video and replace it with a signal from another source. In the film, mr. & Mrs. Smith, Brad Pitt changed the video in an elevator camera before it was destroyed.With IP cameras, they require authentication, and with their encryption, you cannot tap into the signal, giving you complete privacy, secure image capture and transmission, and an evidence trail.8. Flexible and Cost Effective Infrastructure Choices: With CCTV cameras, you have expensive coax cable, fiber, and unreliable wireless installations. the further you go from your DVR, the worse the images. when you add power or audio, it just makes things harder.With a network camera you have an established IP address, giving you clear digital pictures with no loss of quality. You can send many streams of video from dozens of cameras at one time, giving you a single wire network that allows hundreds of simultaneous full frame video streams.This gives you better image quality, flexibility and scalability in a lower cost to operate than traditional CCTV cameras.9. A True Digital Solution: A network video surveillance system will give you much clearer video due to the images being digitized on the spot. with a CCTV camera, you loose image quality every time you transfer the video from the analog signal when it is digitized in the cameras Digital Signal Processor, which is then converted back to analog to run up the coax cable, which is again digitized at the DVR for recording.With a network camera, the images are digitized once, and they stay digital with no more conversions, resulting in the clearest video you can get from a video camera.10. the Lowest Total Cost of Ownership: When you compare the cost per camera, and the flexibility and performance a network camera gives you, it makes sense to go with the Network IP camera.Things to consider are the back end applications and storage costs, as well as using open-system based servers, vs. proprietary hardware like a DVR. the software that comes with the camera is usually functional enough for basic viewing, though control center software allows you to watch multiple locations at one time.Also, you are using your current network infrastructure, which can save you money in the long run.It’s clear that the future of video surveillance is with network cameras, let’s sum up the benefits:Remote accessibility Easy and future proof integration Scalability and flexibility Clear video with no interlacing problems Cost-effective •lower installation costs Distributed intelligence Proven technology

10 Reasons Why IP Network Cameras Are Superior to CCTV Cameras