[blog.rayfoo]

Probably would be rated NC-16 today for his perverted and vulgar acts

(FINALLY) Started watching the drama series Great Teacher Onizuka (グレート ティーチャー オニヅカ) (MySoju link) with my wife today, and as expected, this show really captivated me

The main actor plays an ex-bike gang member who manages to become a teacher, and how he changes his students (from the most notorious class in the school) and the people around him for the better.

I really like the non-conformist attitudes shown by people like these.  Not the destructive, being-non-conformist-for-the-sake-of-rebelling type, but the type that stands up for what is right in the midst of an environment where evil prevails and the remainder of the people just “stay low” (in fear) just for the sake of “surviving”.

This show is NOT about a prom queen

Another show that’s similarly liked is The Queen’s Classroom 女王の教室 （じょおうのきょうしつ） (MySoju link).

This show is about a teacher who’s really non-conformist amongst the system.  Her strict rules imposed on her class seems unreasonable, but in the end what she does prove to be what’s really needed by the students of that age (and even more today).

Interestingly these two shows also highlight the problems brought about by the corporatization of the education system (parents = customers = king = always right), and how the education of children does not only occur in the school, but much at home too.

It’s pretty interesting/ironic too that such good socio-commentaries come from the land of the Rising Sun, where it is (or was?) very much ingrained into their culture the values of discipline, respect, honour and conformance.  And these shows are O_L_D.  The problems we face today aren’t new, but it also meant that we haven’t been able to solve them at a larger scale since then.

Socio-commentaries like these really need to be watched and learnt from by many parents and teachers, probably all people in fact.

Here phishy phishy phishy

Found this ZDNet article talking about a recent study on spear-phishing, which doesn’t sound good at all:

A recently conducted ethical phishing experiment impersonating LinkedIn by mailing invitations coming from Bill Gates, has achieved a 100% success rate in bypassing the anti-spam filters it was tested against.

(Have yet to read the articles and papers in detail, but I thought I’d share it first.)

Phishing and (its deadlier cousin) spear-phishing have been out in the wild for a very long time already, but they continue to be effective against users because:

• “Some” users don’t exhibit caution &/or common sense when clicking on links, allowing themselves to be manipulated into giving away their credentials
• Others who’re careful, can never be vigilant all the time

Security has always relied on the combination of both people and technology in order to be effective.  In the past, technological vulnerabilities meant that programs were the main target for the malicious, but as technology improves, the human user is often the weakest link in the chain, and hence the many attacks relying on human silliness/carelessness.

There are plenty of efforts in making it easier to detect/prevent the phishing attack on the user, but it is still very much an arms race (the race to list the bad sites versus churning these sites out as fast as possible).  And even if it were possible to flag out ALL phishing sites somehow, as long as people could retain full use of their computers somehow (we tend to not like systems where we don’t know/have control on what’s happening, like Windows…), there would be always the group that clicks “Allow” when prompted “Danger! Would you like to allow action?”.

For now, keep the common sense when using the computer.  Don’t just happily do something (like logging in) whenever a seemingly legit page asks you for it.  Pause and think first.

CrypTool seems pretty impressive as a learning/teaching tool.  Do check it out!

Runs in Windows only, though that’s not going to stop me from trying to run it under Wine.. heh.