Tuesday November 30, 2010 year: 130 No. 159 the student voice of
The Ohio State University
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thelantern Firefox add-on enables identity theft
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dylan tussel Lantern reporter tussel.2@osu.edu
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Ten of Big Ten’s best
Stealing someone’s virtual identity is now easier than stealing candy from a baby. Firesheep, an add-on for Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, allows people to “side-jack” the online accounts of others connected to the same Wi-Fi network. It adds a sidebar to the Firefox browser window. When the Firesheep user logs on to a website, the account information of anyone else connected to the same wireless network and logged on to that site will appear in a list on the Firesheep sidebar. By clicking someone’s account information in the sidebar, the Firesheep user can effectively hijack that person’s account. Ohio State’s wireless network uses WPA2
encryption to provide security to its users. But that encryption does not completely protect people from the add-on, which has been downloaded nearly 1 million times, according to the personal blog of Eric Butler, the freelance Web developer who created Firesheep. “A password-protected (WPA2) wireless network or even a wired network just requires that attackers perform one more step to carry out this attack,” Butler said in a blog entry Oct. 26. “It’s not very helpful to just enable WPA2. … Doing so might actually give users a dangerously false sense of security.” Information technology experts agree. “There could possibly be students or other people on our network that are playing around with a tool like this,” said Shawn Sines, information technology specialist for Security Planning and Outreach at OSU. “If students aren’t making the right
choices when they go to these websites to protect themselves … then they are still basically exposed to this risk.” The Office of the Chief Information Officer posted several tips on the BuckeyeSecure website to help students stay safe on the Internet. But each recommendation comes at a cost. Sines said students should use only secure versions of websites to ensure their protection. He advised students to use a Firefox add-on called HTTPS Everywhere, which is meant to provide users secure connections to every website they visit. But HTTPS Everywhere limits people’s access to certain websites that are not equipped to handle secure traffic, said Joe Bazeley, information security officer for IT Services at Miami University. “It’s a much more complicated decision than
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Coaches selected 10 Buckeyes to the All-Big Ten teams during Monday’s conference football awards show.
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OSU to close parts of 12th Avenue arts & life
Temple Grandin
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The animal scientist will lecture tonight at the 4-H Center to increase awareness about animal care.
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Men’s hoops moves up to No. 2 campus
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Cody Cousino / Lantern photographer
Professor Herb Ockerman stands in front of a map, which represents where he has donated books through the years, in his office at Plumb Hall on Nov. 11, 2010.
Prof: I donated $500M in books jenny fogle Lantern reporter fogle.96@osu.edu After almost 30 years of collecting and donating books, Ohio State professor Herbert Ockerman, 78, said he has donated an estimated $500 million in books to more than 300 locations around the globe. That figure, which is based on the price of books if they had been sold rather than donated, doesn’t include the professor’s first 10 years of donating and collecting. His philanthropy began in Brazil, where he visited students and noticed something missing from their classrooms: There were no books. To remedy that, Ockerman began visiting three
bookstores a day, mostly used bookstores, and purchased reasonably priced books that would “fit into a school or university library,” he said. He also gets books donated from Half Price Books, OSU and professors who need to shed books when they change offices. “I can’t solve all the world’s problems but I can find my niche and make a difference there I think,” said Ockerman, an animal science professor. Mark Maxwell, store manager of Half Price Books on Bethel Road, said the store gives Ockerman books that would be unsellable and end up in a landfill or recycled. “A 5-year-old textbook isn’t marketable to anyone here but it’s useful to people in places like Guatemala and Bangladesh,” Maxwell said. Occasionally, Ockerman comes home to find
mysterious stacks of books on his front porch from anonymous donors. The types of books he donates aren’t limited to his field, animal science. He tries to send books in all areas, including math, philosophy and medicine. But he does not send books related to politics, religion or sex. “I don’t have anything against any of those but I never know how they’re going to be received by the country,” Ockerman said. Once he gets a load of books, Ockerman goes home and cleans them, boxes them up and stacks them in his garage. He stores them in copy-paper boxes stacked 15 high. “I never thought I would still be doing it to this
Dog keeps geese off golf Fed Chairman visits OSU to discuss job market course
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weather high 53 low 31 rain
W 35/24 flurries R 40/24 partly cloudy F 39/26 partly cloudy SA 40/29 rain www.weather.com
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dylan tussel Lantern reporter tussel.2@osu.edu
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke is scheduled to visit Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business today to hear several business leaders’ thoughts on the job market, and economists say he is not in for good news. The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland will moderate a discussion between Bernanke and five panelists who represent companies ranging from Ford Motor Co. to Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams. “They were looking for a cross-section of large, medium and small businesses,” said June Gates, a spokeswoman for the bank. Bernanke mostly will listen to the discussion to get the business leaders’ perspectives on challenges employers are facing in the current economic conditions, Gates said. Economists say the job market is in turmoil. With 588,000 people without jobs in Ohio, the state’s unemployment rate was 9.9 percent in October, according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. That rate is well above the healthy range, said Mark Partridge, chair of Rural-Urban Policy at OSU. “An unemployment rate, say, between 5 and 6 percent would be considered more of a normal rate,” he said. Although Ohio’s unemployment rate has decreased steadily over the past year, from 10.8 percent in October 2009, it has done so at an extremely slow pace, Partridge said. “We’ve had about a year of job gains both in Ohio and in the country, but … certainly not enough to greatly reduce the unemployment rate or reduce the real pain out there in the country,” he said.
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Photo courtesy of MCT
After signing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama shook hands with Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, July 21.
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