Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Details (as well as plenty of rumor and speculation) continue to emerge about how messages and images from Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's Yahoo! e-mail account were made public earlier this week. The FBI and U.S. Secret Service are investigating the incident, but several news outlets and blogs report the attack was a multi-step process made possible by weaknesses in the password reset feature (found on many Web sites—not just Yahoo!) as well as proxy servers that allow people to cover their tracks as they navigate the Web.
The hackers may have exploited the password resetting system of Yahoo's e-mail service using details about Palin's life—her birth date and zip code, for example—pulled from sources freely available on the Web, BBC News reported today.
A story by ComputerWorld's Gregg Keizer provided a bit more detail, reporting that on Wednesday, someone identified only as "rubico" claimed on the 4chan.org message board to have gained access to Palin's e-mail by using Yahoo's password reset feature. Keizer also reports that the FBI has contacted the operator of the Ctunnel proxy service (which serves primarily students or workers who want to access sites that are normally blocked by their network administrators), because the person (or persons) who accessed Palin's e-mail account did so through Ctunnel (a move intended to keep law enforcement from tracking illegal activity back to the culprit's IP address).
Perhaps the best blow-by-blow description of what may have happened is provided on the blog of conservative syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin by one of her readers. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
In a case of self-scrutiny, bloggers and other Web users searching for the culprit have linked the handle "rubico" to the 20-year-old son of Tennessee Democratic State Rep. Mike Kernell. The Tennessean Thursday reported that Mike Kernell confirmed that his son, David, a University of Tennessee-Knoxville student, is at the center of an Internet discussion into the hacking of the personal e-mail of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info The article, however, does not say—despite reports on several Web sites, including here—that David Kernell admitted to hacking Palin's e-mail or that Mike Kernell named his son as the culprit. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Monday, September 1, 2008
word 0000127 Louis J. Sheehan
On a European television broadcast 2 years ago, a border collie named Rico wowed viewers by correctly retrieving items from an array of children's toys at the request of one of his German owners. For example, if instructed to "get the panda," that's what the black-and-white canine brought back. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
Julia Fisher, a psychologist at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and two of her colleagues watched Rico's performance with keen interest. In ensuing experiments with the dog, they found that he recognizes the names of about 200 objects and learns names for new items as well as 3-year-old children have been reported to do.
"Our results support the view that rapid word learning by toddlers is mediated by simple cognitive building blocks that are present in another species," Fisher says.
The dog's word-learning skill is as good as chimpanzees' and parrots', the researchers conclude in the June 11 Science.
Initial trials indicated that Rico treats certain spoken words as names for specific items rather than using nonverbal cues, such as a speaker's shrugs or gaze direction, to determine a word's meaning. The scientists randomly assigned to 20 sets the 200 items Rico's owners claim that the dog knows. While one of his owners waited with Rico in another room, an experimenter arranged the 10 items of one set in an adjoining room. He then told the owner to instruct the dog with a single verbal command to fetch a specific item.
Forced to search where he couldn't see anyone, the dog in four tests retrieved 37 of 40 objects correctly.
An experimenter then placed a toy that Rico had never seen before with seven familiar ones in the adjacent room. Rico's owner instructed him to fetch the item, using a name the dog hadn't previously heard. In 7 of 10 trials, Rico returned with the new item. The researchers propose that the dog matched the unfamiliar word to a novel object through a process of elimination.
One month later, Rico correctly retrieved three items during six tests, each test using one of these new words. That's a good score, given that it was only the second time the dog had heard each word, Fisher says. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
Rico's interpretive skill partly stems from the breeding of border collies for mental agility. Also, 9-year-old Rico has been trained by his owners to retrieve toys by their names since he was 9 months old. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
Still, it's not yet clear whether Rico realizes that words refer to categories of objects, as even 1-year-old children do, remarks Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom in a comment published with the new report.
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