"I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
UC Santa Cruz Wikipedia coloring project
Topic: Technology
11:45 pm EDT, Aug 5, 2007
New program color-codes text in Wikipedia entries to indicate trustworthiness.
Acidus mentioned this to me this morning. I saw that this paper was at www2007 and it sounded like really good work, although I haven't read it in detail yet. I plan on it. There is a link in this press release to a demo site they are running, and they even referenced my Puppy Smoothies paper. :) I'm really happy to see this sort of idea being pursued in an environment with adequate resources to do it right. I hope my paper was helpful to them...
Internet Archive: Report to the Congress: Congressional Hearings Online
Topic: Politics and Law
4:12 pm EDT, Aug 4, 2007
By the end of the 110th Congress, the U.S. House of Representatives could achieve the goal of providing broadcast-quality video of all hearings and the floor for download on the Internet.
This is an important and under-recognized victory for the openness of our democracy.
NBC Reporter with hidden camera in purse hoping to catch conference attendees committing to crimes (according to Defcon staff) flees Defcon 15 after being outed.
OMG FUCKING LOOOOOOLLLLL!!!!
For more information on this awesome totally ethical NBC program, see this.
Neal Krawetz... gave an interesting presentation today at the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas about analyzing digital photographs and video images for alterations and enhancements.
Interesting were the examples Krawetz gave of al Qaeda images. Krawetz took an image from a 2006 al Qaeda video of Ayman al-Zawahiri (above right), a senior member of the terrorist organization... After conducting his error analysis Krawetz was able to determine that al-Zawahiri's image was superimposed in front of the background -- and was most likely videotaped in front of a black sheet.
Wish I hadn't missed that one. I wonder if he is re-presenting at defcon...
Schneier on Security: Conversation with Kip Hawley, TSA Administrator (Part 4)
Topic: War on Terrorism
12:46 pm EDT, Aug 2, 2007
Our Behavior Detection teams routinely -- and quietly -- identify problem people just through observable behavior cues. More than 150 people have been identified by our teams, turned over to law enforcement, and subsequently arrested... We publicize non-terrorist-related successes like a murder suspect caught in Minneapolis and a bank robber caught in Philadelphia.
One individual, identified by a TSO in late May and not allowed to fly, was killed in a police shoot-out five days later.
In the past month, however, two new court rulings suggest that judges are developing a more sophisticated sense of how corporations conduct online and technology transactions with their customers.
Schneier on Security: Conversation with Kip Hawley, TSA Administrator (Part 3)
Topic: Society
2:51 pm EDT, Aug 1, 2007
KH:
We do not publicize how often the no-fly system stops people you would not want on your flight. Several times a week would low-ball it.
Almost 20,000 False Positives:
The Justice Department's proposed budget for 2008 reveals for the first time how often names match against the database, reporting that there were 19,967 "positive matches" in 2006.
19,967 / 52 = 383.9 What that really translates to approximately 350 people per week inconvenienced. If they were arrested, deported, or their plot foiled we would of heard about it in the news.
But remeber what KH said about why they use the no-fly list:
janelane wrote: Aack! The spammers are attacking! The spammers are attacking!
-janelane, fuck those blogs!
Hopefully in a few weeks you shouldn't really see them anymore. I'm working on it. I was under the mistaken impression that it mattered to them whether or not the stuff they were posting produced traffic/revenue/search ranking, and if it didn't, they'd ignore us. I was wrong. I've plugged every hole that could possibly be leading to them getting useful traffic. They keep coming back. I have two theories:
1. The people who pay the people who spam here aren't keeping track of whether or not the work that they do is worth the money they are spending.
2. Another website is paying these people to post stuff on competing sites.
Either way, I have some improvements to the site that I will be rolling out in phases over the next few weeks, and one of those phases will remove the current batch of spammers from view. The unfortunate downside is that it will also remove any other new users from view until one of the admins has the time to go in and bless them, or unless you like culling through the new users on the weblogs page to see if anyone has posted anything cool, but we've no choice. Most new users are spammers, by a huge margin. It makes more sense to be filtering in the good ones rather than filtering out the bad ones.
