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] Which is to say I have become the expert on the origins
] of Murphy's Law. This happened by accident and
] if I'd known what the consequences would be of
] sticking my nose into it - how I'd draw the
] wrath of Chuck Yeager, get caught in the middle of a
] nasty 20-year feud, and nearly wind up in a hospital bed
] - I probably wouldn't have bothered.

The history of Murphy's Law

] As they gathered here for their annual convention, those
] who sell mortgage services, credit cards and corrugated
] roofing over the phone say that if they do not change the
] way they do business immediately, they may follow
] door-to-door salesmen into commercial extinction.

This story does seem to indicate that the do not call list is going to work. No, I don't have any sympathy for the industry's troubles. The timing sucks. In a bad economy we are spilling a bunch of unskilled labor on the market. They will have trouble finding work. But, on the other hand, thats why this should have been done years ago, before things got to this point. 104 million calls a day?? How many households are there in the United States? Thats got to be around one call per day per household!

Get off my phone, get out of my email inbox. I have never ever ever bought your products. You are not wanted here.

Call Centers Struggle in Face of Do-Not-Call Rules

] On Tuesday, Sun researchers plan to report that they have
] discovered a way to transmit data inside a computer much
] more quickly than current techniques allow. By placing
] the edge of one chip directly in contact with its
] neighbor, it may be possible to move data 60 to 100 times
] as fast as the present top speeds.

New Sun Microsystems Chip May Unseat the Circuit Board

] Plans to build the "world's biggest spiking neural
] network" to mimic the brain were announced by Mountain
] View, Calif.-based Artificial Development at the
] Accelerating Change Conference on Sunday.
]
] The CCortex system will be a "massive spiking neuron
] network emulation and will mimic the human cortex, with
] 20 billion layered neurons and 2 trillion 8-bit
] connections," according to AD's President and CEO Marcos
] Guillen, listed in the Guardian's "The Young Rich" for
] his former position as Director of Red Internauta of
] Spain, valued at 29.6 million pounds.
]
] The network will run on a 1000-processor supercomputer
] cluster operating at 4.8 teraflops, with 1.5 terabytes of
] RAM and 80 terabytes of storage, he said.

This is about 3 orders of magnitude short of the computational power required to simulate a human brain. By Hans Moravec's estimate, this is about as much power as it would take to simulate a rat's brain -- if one had a good model of how a rat's brain worked. Still, a lot of cognitive science has been done with rats, and if these folks are serious, it could be a step forward.

In the article, critics of this approach say that the 10^15 ops/sec estimated requirement is low by 7 orders of magnitude.

KurzweilAI.net

] How is a meme created? You can sit back and observe the
] spread of a new fashion, a new slang word, a new way of
] walking or talking - and let a meme burst onto the scene
] in its own good time. An example would be the current
] epidemic of basically, which, as a synonym for er, has
] infected a ludicrously high proportion of sentences now
] uttered by English speakers. But the ultimate test in
] science is experiment: You don't just wait for something
] to happen and observe it, you make it happen.

Richard Dawkins tries to create a new word for atheists. He misses that memes don't work if they are forced. People are too adapted to resisting cheap marketing messages to adopt any saying they are formally requested to adopt. I predict a short life for "bright."

Wired 11.10: Brights

] Cyan Callahan, an employee at San Francisco interactive
] marketing firm Mindshare Design, signed up for the
] national Do Not Call List the very first week it was
] announced in late June. Like many Americans, Callahan was
] receiving an average of three or four calls a day from
] telemarketers and was fed up. More than 45 million irate
] citizens have signed up since then. Though the list
] doesn't go into effect until Oct. 1, Callahan says she
] has already had more nights of total peace and quiet. "In
] the last two months, I've come home and thought: 'Wow, my
] phone's not ringing. I like this.'"

They spelled her name wrong!

BW Online | Where Do Not Call Does Not Count

I submitted this letter on the EFF's website. If you want to reference my letter in composing your own, please do so, but don't include my words without attribution as it will reduce the impact of my comments.

I'm an information systems security professional. I work as a software engineer at a well known internet security software vendor. Prior to that I spent many years designing secure network infrastructure for Internet connected computer systems. I've been an IEEE member for 10 years (member number: XXXXXXXX). I'm writing to express concern with the IEEE electronic voting standards process (SCC38/P1583).

Recently there has been a great deal of public discourse about the security of electronic voting technologies. Unfortunately, this has been a very muddied process. We have, on the one hand, technology vendors and elections systems officials who have a vested interest in dodging questions about systems that have already been built and deployed. Furthermore, these vendors and officials are used to hearing uninformed luddite objections whenever new technology has been applied to the voting process. On the other hand, we have activists who don't always understand what they are talking about. However, in all of the noise and drama surrounding this issue there have been a number of serious questions with real technical merit raised by security professionals, and I feel that industry and elections officials have found reasons to dismiss these objections without giving them serious consideration.

In listening to elections officials in my home state (Georgia), I found that their primary concern in deploying electronic voting equipment has been to reduce the workload involved with counting votes. These officials do not understand how difficult it is to develop information systems that are secure against manipulation from well funded adversaries, and they do not understand how the way that they use the systems vendors have supplied impacts the security of those systems. Furthermore, they seem uninterested in hearing from professionals outside of one individual professor in the local university system who they have designated as a trusted advisor.

In asking the IEEE to help develop standards for electronic voting systems, Congress has entrusted the organization with the role of providing a technical voice of reason in all of these discussions. Unfortunately, the IEEE has an extremely poor track record when it comes to information security standards. The recent 802.11* standards have had very poor security qualities, and these standards processes have moved forward for years without soliciting input from security professionals. (Only in the past few months have I heard, anecdotally, that they have started to reach out to people who have been breaking their security techniques for years.)

It is absolutely essential that the standards that this committee produces include very tight security requirements. I haven't read t... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

INTERPRETER (In English, to Bob): Right side. And, uh, with intensity.
BOB: Is that everything? It seemed like he said quite a bit more than that.

This is the English translation of a very funny scene from Lost In Translation.

I saw an ad for this last night. I'm not sure if its going to be a great film, (looks like a romantic comedy) but the footage of Tokyo looks really nice. It might be worth watching simply as a way to experience a little of Japan.

What Else Was Lost In Translation

] In the aftermath of the Florida election debacle, the IEEE
] took up the question of standards for voting equipment.
] It created a working group, called Project P1583,
] overseen by a Standards Coordinating Committee known as
] SCC 38. After passage by IEEE, this standard will go to
] ANSI for final validation. The substantive work is in
] its final stages, and the draft standard is currently out
] to ballot.

The EFF put this alert out about the IEEE Voting Systems Standard group. I asked them for more information. They provided this link to the standards committee, which they say they will put on their site:

http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/scc38/index.htm
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/scc38/1583/

While the draft standard is only available if you spend $100 on it, there are parts of the standard on this site if you do some digging. In particular, the security standards are available.

I think there are some serious questions that might be raised about these security standards. This is what I told the EFF:

"I haven't read this document in extreme detail, but it does appear at first glance to be weak. A glaring example is this text: "Voting systems that use electromagnetic (wireline or wireless) or optical (open air or fibre optic) transmission of data shall ensure the integrity of all transmitted data. This shall include standard transmission error detection and correction methods such as checksums or message digest hashes."

Checksums are not a reliable data integrity technique when one is concerned about malicious manipulation of data. This misuse of checksums in electronic voting equipment was discussed in Avi Rubin's paper on the leaked Diebold code.

This is just one example. There are all kinds of questions the might be raised about this document. Why allow voting systems to operate in an environment shared by other data processing applications? Are the restrictions on network connections complete enough? Why is there no discussion of programming techniques used to prevent memory management ("buffer overflow") vulnerabilities. Why not have more specific requirements for authentication of voting system administrators? Why is there no discussion of the security of features which maintain the anonymity of voters?

In sum, they ought to solicit audits of their security standards from well respected security professionals."

EFF: Make Your Voice Heard on E-Voting Machines