Its almost 2005. It seems like time stopped on September 11th and hasn't really moved forward since. Everything since has been a dream... It doesn't feel like the decade is half over.

This decade doesn't have a style yet. It doesn't have a message. It doesn't have music. And its half over. The only thing about 200x is blogs and terrorists and camera phones. What the fuck? By 1995 we had seen the rise and fall of grunge rock. By 1985 we'd had Atari and Devo and MTV and Madonna and RunDMC. In 1975 we had disco and Ozzy. In 2005 we ain't got shit.

What are the cultural themes of this decade??

1. Strife - Terror. Fear. Security. War. Partisanship.
2. Marketing killed the human spirit - The new music sucks because its too marketed. Too much a product and not a statement. The spirit of the Olympic Games is hard to hold onto when people are getting fired for wearing the wrong brand of tennis shoes. The internet is a cesspool of pop up-ads and spam. You can't believe in anything anymore because the minute someone makes something worth believing in they try to use it to sell soda pop.
3. Bloggers.

Is that it? Am I being too cynical here? What am I missing?

] Strict regulations published by Athens 2004 last week
] dictate that spectators may be refused admission to
] events if they are carrying food or drinks made by
] companies that did not see fit to sponsor the games.
]
] Sweltering sports fans who seek refuge from the soaring
] temperatures with a soft drink other than one made by
] Coca-Cola will be told to leave the banned refreshment at
] the gates or be shut out.

Usually they just ban all outside food and drink as a "security measure." In this case they've tipped their hand.

SBN: Olympics marketers tip their hand

] TypeKey helps ensure that people who comment on a site
] have a verified identity, keeping conversations on track
] and helping to prevent abusive or offensive content
] (comment spam) from being posted.

Moveable Type's solution to comment spam was to build their own version of Microsoft Passport.

1. One wonders why they didn't just use Microsoft Passport.

2. I predict that because most net users have the IQ of a rock they won't understand that this is exactly the same as Microsoft Passport. Furthermore, they will think its a "great idea" and wonder why no one did it before. They won't be at all concerned about the privacy of their data because its not the architecture of the system that is important but who made it that matters.

3. TypeKey currently doesn't share information about how to interoperate with their system. They hint that people will have to pay them money in order to interoperate. Depending on the costs associated with that they may or may not expand this little service outside of the world of their own software. They are unlikely to get this right.

4. It will be interesting to see how their system actually works. If they developed a good enough protocol an open source typekey system would enable people to run their own identity servers that are compatible with moveable type. Its easy to mis-design a system like this so that it doesn't really work well for such a purpose.

5. There is a remote possibility that if the protocol is right, the money is right, and MT's perception in the user community is right that this could become the way that everyone shares authentication information on the internet. Its unlikely, and it won't happen in way that MT likes (they'll loose control). But its possible.

TypeKey

] Motorists are routinely driven to distraction by car
] insurance bills over which they have little control. A
] GPS based system aims to end all that, by introducing
] monthly pay-as-you-drive cover.

Surveillance makes things cheaper for you. And more convenient. Sign up now. Pretty soon, everyone will be hooked up and you'll be left out in the cold.

BBC NEWS - Could pay-as-you-drive insurance work?

A neat little tool for creating virtual sticky notes on a web page. Somewhat wiki like. Worth a look. Unfortunately does not work in Safari.

Webnote - an online tool for taking notes

] According to an article in EcommerceTimes, Microsoft is
] trying to migrate Office from a product to an online
] service with a focus on automating collaborative work.
] Quote: 'Making collaboration faster, easier and more
] efficient will be the next revolution in worker
] productivity, and we want to be in the forefront,' said
] Peter Rinearson, vice president for new business
] development in Microsoft's information worker group

wikiwiki

Slashdot | Microsoft Renovates Office Suite as a Web Service

] Memigo recommends news articles you will be interested in
] based on your ratings and those of other users that are
] similar to you.

Memigo is fairly interesting. I was suprised that it hadn't been recommended before. There are a lot of similarities between Memigo and MemeStreams. It does have some neat features.

memigo : cut through the infoglut

This is short and to the point...

Decius wrote:
] ] Where does this leave us? MD5 is fatally wounded; its
] ] use will be phased out. SHA-1 is still alive but the
] ] vultures are circling. A gradual transition away from
] ] SHA-1 will now start. The first stage will be a debate
] ] about alternatives, leading (I hope) to a consensus among
] ] practicing cryptographers about what the substitute will
] ] be.
]
] Answer, not a 5 alarm fire, but if you write or maintain
] cryptography code you can still expect some work coming up.

Hal Finney has posted a nice writeup of Joux's SHA-0 result to the cryptography list. The implications are pretty significant for CHF design...

"Nevertheless, Joux's results cast doubt on the very strategy of building hashes out of iterating compression functions. It appears that there is no hope of creating hashes in this way which approximate the theoretical model of a random function, which is the usual design goal for hash functions. This will probably further motivate researchers to explore new directions in hash function design."

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg02611.html

RE: Followup on SHA-1 break

] National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice says the
] United States needs to work harder at reaching out to
] Muslims if it is to win the war on terrorism. President
] Bush's top security adviser admitted Thursday that the
] United States has not done enough to counteract
] widespread anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world.

Rice urges dialog with Islam

] The images presented on this page show a selection of the
] types of art that can be created using POV-Ray. To a new
] user the concept of creating such images may seem
] daunting, but remember - all of the artists featured here
] were one day new users themselves.

POVCOMP 2004: Hall of Fame