Palindrome wrote:
I graduate in a few hours and it still hasn't sunk in.

Congradulations Palindrome!

RE: Moving right along

"It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," Bush said during his fourth and final speech before Thursday's vote for Iraq's parliament. "As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq.

Bush's position sounds a lot stronger to me when he acknowledges its weaknesses. This is not a paradox. It shows objective consideration of alternatives.

CNN.com - Bush takes responsibility for invasion intelligence - Dec 14, 2005

This document serves as a reclassification advisory for the Microsoft Internet Explorer JavaScript Window() DoS vulnerability, originally reported on 31/05/2005.

Contrary to popular beliefs, the aforementioned security issue is susceptible to remote, arbitrary code execution, yielding full system access with the privileges of the underlying user.

I was stumbling around on the web tonight and got hit with a malicious version of this. Fortunately I was running Firefox at the time, where the issue is merely a denial of service (at least as presently understood). Its a remote code execution problem in IE. The perps were trying to shovel adware onto my machine.

Figured I'd mention this here as a public service. People are definately out there exploiting this. Microsoft released patches yesterday. Patch your machine.

If you go to the linked site from a vulnerable host and click on the proof of concept it will launch a copy of calc.exe on your desktop.

I got 0wned... (sort of) - Patch your browser if you haven't.

However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule.

The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.

Internet encyclopaedias go head to head : Nature

“Some people never learn,” he says. During the Vietnam War, Pyle blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring and infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests when he published an article in the Washington Monthly in January 1970.
The public was outraged and a lengthy congressional investigation followed that revealed that the military had conducted investigations on at least 100,000 American citizens. Pyle got more than 100 military agents to testify that they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens — many of them anti-war protestors and civil rights advocates. In the wake of the investigations, Pyle helped Congress write a law placing new limits on military spying inside the U.S.
But Pyle, now a professor at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, says some of the information in the database suggests the military may be dangerously close to repeating its past mistakes. “The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again,” he says.

The very minute that the rules about domestic intel gathering and information sharing between the military and domestic law enforcement are loosened they seem to have gone right back to doing the kind of stuff that got these rules established in the first place.

Is the Pentagon spying on Americans? - Lisa Myers & the NBC Investigative Unit - MSNBC.com

Until Tuesday, Web users who turned to search engines like Google and typed in the word Shanwei, the city with jurisdiction over the village where the demonstration was put down, would find nothing about the protests against power plant construction there, or about the crackdown. Users who continued to search found their browsers freezing. By Tuesday, links to foreign news sources appeared but were invariably inoperative.

But controls like these have spurred a lively commentary among China's fast-growing blogging community. "The domestic news blocking system is really interesting," wrote one blogger. "I heard something happened in Shanwei and wanted to find out whether it was true or just the invention of a few people. So I started searching with Baidu, and Baidu went out of service at once. I could open their site, but couldn't do any searches." Baidu is one of the country's leading search engines.

If you remove the "hl=zh-CN" from that Google news search above you get VERY different results. There are some relevent links in the Chineese web search results right now, but the results seem odd given the amount of press coverage. This news search has relevent information, but its mostly coming from a handful of protesty news sources (peacehall & epoch times), same ones that show up in the google search, and not mainstream media. Its possible that these are approved dissenters. (Although VOA also shows up.) More totally unreliable information here. Stratfor has coverage here.

Beijing Casts Net of Silence Over Protest - New York Times

There is a stupid notion going around that the news media would be better off if anyone and everyone got to make a contribution to it. Blogs and podcasts are examples of this and reader-generated electronic "newspapers" are beginning to spring up. People who should know better see this as democratizing the flow of news and information...

I have been concerned about this new, online "citizen journalism" becoming the source of more disinformation than truth, a concern that actually extends to most of the Internet.

Some people in the media are absolutely giddy about the opportunity to pile a complete and total indictment of the entire Internet on top of this incident. Oh my god! People can express their own views without control from the 4th estate! How will we ever know what is true anymore?!

Check out the headline on this article:

For all its wonders, the world-changing effects of the digital civilization contains a slimy, anarchic undercurrent of democracy run amok.

There is so much that is broken about the perspectives being offered around this incident:

The idea that Wikipedia and encyclopedias are the same kinds of things and their value should be judged by the same criteria.
The idea that Wikipedia must either be 100% reliable or completely useless for any purpose.
The idea that people are not capable of critical thinking and should not be responsible for doing it.
The idea that the alleged connection to the Kennedy Assasination would have been viewed as credible by anyone who isn't nuts.
The idea that internet anonymity is a bad thing.
The idea that "supporting freedom of speech" is compatible with "demanding accountability." (Haven't you people ever heard of the Federalist Papers?!)
The idea that the highly reliable totally awesome 4th estate should be the arbiter of the truth, when in their articles about this VERY incident they have repeatedly twisted this guy's voluntary resignation from his job (which he had to do because of the pressure THEY would put on his employer if he hadn't) so that it appears as if he was fired. "Man looses job over wikipedia prank..."

The biggest problem here is the idea that a national press campaign and the threat of lawsuits are a reasonable way of dealing with a problem on a publically editable wiki! This notion is so irrational that one suspects John Seigenthaler of taking advantage of the opportunity because he wanted to launch a broder attack on the Internet. You gunna sue me for suggesting that, John? Go ahead. Make my fucking day.

Internet Backlash

A brain chemical recently found to boost trust appears to work by reducing activity and weakening connections in fear-processing circuitry, a brain imaging study at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has discovered. Scans of the hormone oxytocin's effect on human brain function reveal that it quells the brain's fear hub, the amygdala, and its brainstem relay stations in response to fearful stimuli. The work at NIMH and a collaborating site in Germany suggests new approaches to treating diseases thought to involve amygdala dysfunction and social fear, such as social phobia, autism, and possibly schizophrenia, report Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, M.D., Ph.D., NIMH Genes Cognition and Psychosis Program, and colleagues, in the December 7, 2005 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

"Studies in animals, pioneered by now NIMH director Dr. Thomas Insel, have shown that oxytocin plays a key role in complex emotional and social behaviors, such as attachment, social recognition and aggression," noted NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, M.D.. "Now, for the first time, we can literally see these same mechanisms at work in the human brain."

"The observed changes in the amygdala are exciting as they suggest that a long-acting analogue of oxytocin could have therapeutic value in disorders characterized by social avoidance," added Insel.

Tell the truth now... trust me... :)

Trust-building hormone short-circuits fear in humans

Looks like a decent blog on Reverse Engineering...

OpenRCE

Tom Cross, who is a software security researcher and co-developer of the MemeStream social networking website, also disagrees that “if we want to improve America's scientific competitiveness, we need to increase the supply of technical workers, which will reduce their cost.” Gathering Storm, he believes, has “misdefined the problem, [which] is on the demand side and not the supply side.”

“Technological competitiveness is not about how much technology you are doing but what kind,” he states. “You don't want to lead the world in having development sweatshops where people grind out code for hours at low wages. ... You want to lead the world in creating new innovations.”

Science Magazine quoted my MemeStream. :)

ScienceCareers.org | What's Wrong With American Science? : Benderly: 9 December 2005