A blog on social software, collaboration, trust, security, privacy, and internet tools, by Christopher Allen.

One of the slashdot posters in the Puppy Smoothies thread recommended this blog, which is a combination of very intelligent posts on internet rating/reputation systems and startup financing. Excellent.

Life With Alacrity

We created this site to talk about i-names, which were launched publicly this week at Digital ID World. The launch saw more registrations than any of us would have believed (thanks, Slashdot) and we are happy to see the interest and support. As of now, the promotion is over and i-names have returned to their regular price.

This site is will remain up to provide some basic information and some details about i-names as well as the link to buy them. There is a lot of information out there about i-names, XRI and XDI

This sounds very close to the correct answer for dealing with internet authentication going forward. Anyone have opinions on this stuff?

I want my name NOW!

Stratfor: Geopolitical Intelligence Report - September 12, 2006

The U.S. War, Five Years On

By George Friedman

It has been five years since the Sept. 11 attacks. In thinking
about the course of the war against al Qaeda, two facts emerge
pre-eminent.

The first is that the war has succeeded far better than anyone
would have thought on Sept. 12, 2001. We remember that day clearly,
and had anyone told us that there would be no more al Qaeda attacks
in the United States for at least five years, we would have been
incredulous. Yet there have been no attacks.

The second fact is that the U.S. intervention in the Islamic world
has not achieved its operational goals. There are multiple
insurgencies under way in Iraq, and the United States does not
appear to have sufficient force or strategic intent to suppress
them. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has re-emerged as a powerful
fighting force. It is possible that the relatively small coalition
force -- a force much smaller than that fielded by the defeated
Soviets in Afghanistan -- can hold it at bay, but clearly coalition
troops cannot annihilate it.

A Strategic Response

The strategic goal of the United States on Sept. 12, 2001, was to
prevent any further attacks within the United States. Al Qaeda,
defined as the original entity that orchestrated the 1998 attacks
against the U.S. embassies in Africa, the USS Cole strike and 9/11,
has been thrown into disarray and has been unable to mount a
follow-on attack without being detected and disrupted. Other
groups, loosely linked to al Qaeda or linked only by name or shared
ideology, have carried out attacks, but none have been as daring
and successful as 9/11.

In response to 9/11, the United States resorted to direct overt and
covert intervention throughout the Islamic world. With the first
intervention, in Afghanistan, the United States and coalition
forces disrupted al Qaeda's base of operations, destabilized the
group and forced it on the defensive. Here also, the stage was set
for a long guerrilla war that the United States cannot win with the
forces available.

The invasion of Iraq, however incoherent the Bush administration's
explanation of it might be, achieved two things. First, it
convinced Saudi Arabia of the seriousness of American resolve and
caused the Saudis to become much more aggressive in cooperating
with U.S. intelligence. Second, it allowed the United States to
occupy the most strategic ground in the Middle East -- bordering on
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Iran. From here, the United
States was able to pose overt threats and to stage covert
operations against al Qaeda. Yet by invading Iraq, the United
States also set the stage for the current military crisis.

The U.S. strategy was to disrup... [ Read More (1.9k in body) ]

There is an excellent article in this month's First Monday about using reputation systems to limit the effects of vandalism on public wikis like Wikipedia.

The Puppy Smoothies article has been Slashdotted. Unfortunately, I don't think many of the commentators have RTFAed but there are some interesting perspectives in here nonetheless.

Slashdot | Could a Reputation System Improve Wikipedia?

4. Where is the Constitution?

a. In the National Archives
b. In the Oval Office wastebasket
c. In an undisclosed secure location
d. In Senator Byrd's pocket

Constitution Day is this Sunday.

The Chronicle: 9/15/2006: A Pop Quiz for Constitution Day

The reliability of information collected from at large Internet users by open collaborative wikis such as Wikipedia has been a subject of widespread debate. This paper provides a practical proposal for improving user confidence in wiki information by coloring the text of a wiki article based on the venerability of the text. This proposal relies on the philosophy that bad information is less likely to survive a collaborative editing process over large numbers of edits. Colorization would provide users with a clear visual cue as to the level of confidence that they can place in particular assertions made within a wiki article.

I got published in this month's issue of First Monday! Make sure you check out the issue because there are a number of good articles in it.

The material my article covers was first presented at last year's PhreakNIC Conference during a talk that Rattle and I gave on various things we're working on. Video of the talk (Google Video) is available. The point where I talk about my reliability system for Wikipedia is about 30 minutes into the presentation.

Puppy smoothies: Improving the reliability of open, collaborative wikis

State of Emergency, a most disturbing fashion pictorial shot by Steven Meisel for Vogue Italia, September 2006. Models: Hilary Rhoda & Iselin Steiro.

Police State Style... Everyone is going to be watching you while the cops are beating you down at the airport this fall. Better make sure you're decked out in the latest Italian fashions.

These pictures are kind of disturbing, but they are also iconic.

Boing Boing: War-on-Terror-themed photo spread in Vogue Italia

In the first World Trade Center bombing case in 1993, prosecutors had to give the defense a list of 200 unindicted co-conspirators. The list, he writes, was “delivered to bin Laden” ” and “was later found during the investigation of the African embassy bombings.”

Thats an interesting datapoint. Of course, Bush's response to this threat was to simply not have trials at all. The court has required trials, so they've got to hold them. What confuses me is why they can't preserve proceedural fairness while improving information security. Haven't you limited the suspect's ability to communicate with free conspirators? Don't the defense attorneys have security clearances? (Of course, the latter could be used as a tool by the government to remove any useful defense attorney, but that need not be the case.)

A Terror Trial, With or Without Due Process

Dana Priest sums up the situation.

In the last three months, following a request from President Bush to "flood the zone," the CIA has sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to the pursuit of bin Laden.

The problem, former and current counterterrorism officials say, is that no one is certain where the "zone" is.

The Afghan-Pakistan border is about 1,500 miles.

At least 23 senior anti-Taliban tribesmen have been assassinated in South and North Waziristan since May 2005.

Pakistan has now all but stopped looking for bin Laden.

"Once again, we have lost track of Ayman al-Zawahiri," the Pakistani intelligence official said in a recent interview. "He keeps popping on television screens. It's miserable, but we don't know where he or his boss are hiding."

"There's nobody in the United States government whose job it is to find Osama bin Laden!" one frustrated counterterrorism official shouted. "Nobody!"

"We work by consensus," explained Brig. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr. "It's not that effective, or we'd find the guy."

This is an interesting vignette:

In early November 2002, a CIA drone armed with a Hellfire missile killed a top al-Qaeda leader traveling through the Yemeni desert. About a week later, Rumsfeld expressed anger that it was the CIA, not the Defense Department, that had carried out the successful strike.

"How did they get the intel?" he demanded.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then director of the National Security Agency and technically part of the Defense Department, said he had given it to them.

"Why aren't you giving it to us?" Rumsfeld wanted to know.

Hayden, according to this source, told Rumsfeld that the information-sharing mechanism with the CIA was working well. Rumsfeld said it would have to stop.

Bin Laden Trail 'Stone Cold'

Over the last year, as Iran, Iraq and Lebanon have dominated headlines, hopes of gaining firmer control of a largely forgotten corner of the war on terrorism — the lawless Pakistan-Afghanistan border region — have quietly evaporated.

On Tuesday, the Pakistani government signed a "truce" with militants which lets militants remain in the area as long as they promised to halt attacks.

Is this the "separate peace" that Rumsfeld was talking about? He must be furious about this, right?

The Taliban leadership is believed to have established a base of operations in and around the Pakistani city of Quetta. The Pakistani government sees the group as a tool to counter growing Indian influence in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, roadside bomb attacks have doubled this year, and suicide bombings have tripled.

This year, the United States cut its aid to Afghanistan by 30 percent.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban are no doubt betting that time is on their side.

Al Qaeda Finds Its Center of Gravity