Welcome to the Dark Side

By Hayden Hilgenhold

The internet.  A place where you can do almost anything as long as you have the knowhow and a good connection.  However, you’re usually exposed.  Out in the open where the world can see you, so crime can usually be cracked down on with relative ease.  However, there is a place in the internet where crime runs rampant, and it is completely anonymous.  The Deep Web, little known to the general public, is the dark desolate ghetto of the beautiful Utopia of the internet, where the law doesn’t have a leg to stand on, unable to make a dent in the corruption.

The Deep Web, made by the government as a tool for intelligence agents, law enforcement, and anyone else who would need to conduct their online affairs privately and/or anonymously.  However, like many things that are made for the greater good, such as dynamite or nuclear power, it had limitless dark potential that became easily exploited.  Now it is used as a bazaar for many vendors of illegal and questionable items and services such as, drugs, weapons, fake passports, counterfeit money, hired thieves and thugs, and even assassins.  

So how does it work? How do you keep complete anonymity over the internet?  Well not through any normal web browser.  First you have to have a special browser known as Tor.  Using Tor your data is completely encrypted, and then passed through several relays, running it through any other computer using Tor, bouncing you around the globe making you near impossible to trace.  Not only that but most of the sites that are selling illegal items are only available through Tor, and are hosted on private servers owned by Tor.  To break it down for you the indexed, easy to find and search internet is about 19 terabytes, or about 3,800,000 songs.  That’s a lot, right? But when you consider the non-indexed part of the internet is 7500 terabytes or 1,500,000,000 songs, it shows you just how much of the internet is relatively hard for the law to get a grip on, and with programs such as Tor it is even harder to find the culprits.  

So why doesn’t the government stop Tor in its tracks? Shut down its servers and wipe them of all these illegal sites? Well, you have to remember, Tor has become vital to many intelligence and law and enforcement agencies.  Since it is so vital, it would endanger a lot of our own law enforcement.  So Tor is here to stay, dark side and all.   

Some New Middle and High School Resources to Share

Kris Walsh

I know many of you have been suffering from withdrawal since missing Techy Tuesday last week due to our snow-cation. I know many teachers who spent at least part of the time grading, planning and getting caught up on paperwork and other tasks that need to be done. I was able to get caught up on some reading and professional social networking that often gets buried during a typical work week. I found a couple of resources that I thought were worth sharing to the group at large.

These resources that I have are mainly focused on middle and high school classrooms, but they do have applications in other settings, such as the upper elementary. These resources came to me through the DOE Google+ network for Indiana eLearning Coaches.

       (As a quick aside, there are several great Google+ networks for most subject areas and grades. They are a great way to use social networking professionally. Please let any of the e Coaches know if you would like to know more about how to get involved)

The first resource comes courtesy of Jeff Chicki. It is a link to a great mindmap (a great tool on its own) of iOS apps that can be used in the classroom. I cannot say that I have had personal experience with all of the resources that are shown, but I have used many of them and the ones that he has listed and I have used are all good. He does a good job of separating the apps out into subject areas and or tool categories. Even if you do not have access to an iDevice, many of the listed tools can also be found on the web as well. Follow the link below to access the mindmap Jeff has created.

http://www.mindmeister.com/406649297/ios-apps-for-middle-school-education

The other resource I would like to share comes to us from Maria Sellers. She shared a resource for finding free academic articles that students can use for research. The articles are in .pdf format that students can use to markup and highlight. I have messed around with the site a little and it seems to be a great and easy place for students to use for research. The sites and articles that I found were all reliable sources that would be useful in completing a project which required it. One warning is that the first 2 or 3 search results are ads. They are marked as such, but students may not notice that, you may want to let them know this. Ads are often a sad fact of life when looking for free web resources. Follow the link below to access the site.

PDF search engine for free scientific publications - FreeFullPDF

Flash Storage Vs. Traditional Hard Drives

By Sean Bybee

Even before I began working for Mr. Wright, I was already well aware of the beating that our school laptops endured on a day to day basis. Every day, I see laptops dropped, crammed into backpacks with heavy textbooks, and hit by frustrated users. Last year, my little brothers laptop was taken and dropped from the gym’s second floor into a trash can fifteen feet below. When laptops are given to young students, there is very little guarantee that any care will be taken to ensure that it stays in good condition. That being said, while we cannot easily prevent students from ripping optical drives out or shattering displays, there is one step we can take (that I can think of) to minimize necessary repairs, and potentially even lower the total costs of laptop repairs.

With fewer moving parts, a solid state drive (or SSD) has a much lower chance of going bad as a result of dropping or being hit repeatedly by the user. To those not familiar with the internal operation of a traditional hard drive, it is important to know that the basic operation is dependent on an internal disk, most commonly spinning at 7200 rpm. This, in combination with a small arm that “reads” the disk, allows information to be stored on the disk magnetically. These constantly moving parts are always at risk of being jammed or otherwise damaged. An SSD operates similarly to flash drives in that they have absolutely no moving parts and operate on the concept of flash storage. While the initial investment of an SSD is slightly higher than that of a hard drive, the increased durability would likely allow it to pay for itself in the long run. It seems like it is a daily occurrence that someone’s hard drive has gone bad and needs replaced. With a lack of moving parts, I feel that replacing the traditional hard drives in our school laptops with SSDs would help to save Mr. Wright some hassle, and perhaps even save the school some money.

Lasting durability is not the only advantage of SSDs over hard drives. Because a solid state drive is not dependent on moving parts, access to the information stored on the drive is much quicker compared to that of a traditional hard drive. In a hard drive, in order to access information, the disk must spin to proper position, and then a mechanical arm must maneuver to the exact position at which that information is stored on the disk. Anyone that has ever seen the inside of a hard drive during operation will know that this all happens extremely quickly. However, regardless of how fast we are able to make the disk spin (10000 rpm drives currently exist), that hard drive could never be quite as fast as a solid state drive, because they do not have these physical limitations at all. This is relevant to Perry Central, because anyone that has used our laptops even once will be well aware of the time consuming process of booting them up. 

Overall, I think that SSDs for the school laptops would be a worthy investment. The increase in speed would hopefully increase the productivity of students, allowing them to spend more time working rather than trying to boot their computers. In addition despite the higher price per gigabyte of flash memory, the price is steadily dropping. This, in combination with the longer lifetime of the devices could potentially save the school money in the long run.

More Power for Steam

By Chris Bybee

Graphics cards such as brands like ASUS, can provide vital resources like extra memory. Some of these graphics cards are already used in computers, like in the wood shop and the yearbook room specifically for editing and graphic design. Should this equipment be added ti all computers that are owned by the school such as in the lower grade classes on the other side of the school? No computer in the school (laptops) besides the computers in the shop and yearbook room have these and I believe that they should! Laptops however, with no graphic changes available to them, can stay as is. I’ve seen the insides of our old desktops, and they are not all that expensive, so putting even the same types of cards into the desktops we already have can greatly improve the speeds of our students work, while using programs like Autodesk or another 3D render program.

As far as laptops go, cards are not really needed because normal students with laptops will have no need for a 3D render program, however for those who do, a computer that has that upgraded technology like a graphics card, could be supplied to them if it is needed for the education of that specific student. Now, from my old blog about RAM, this can be the same concept because of how much memory can be stored inside the graphics card itself. I believe that the cards in our desktops now have about 512 megabytes of random access memory stored inside of them to help with the speeds of the game and or program it is trying to run that just needed a little bit more of the computers system resources.

With this new equipment, students can work a little faster than they would have been able to because of how fast the program could be running. So let’s say that a student spends 10 minutes of his time waiting for the program to load up while the student next to him waits 5 with the new equipment. Even with that short of a time difference, it can make a large impact in how much work can be done for these students allowing teachers to move on to any new lesson faster to get their work done just a tad faster too! I’ve stated my reasons as to why I think that this is needed for our students in programs such as Steam and LEAF because they can get so much more done than before.