Cambridge academic Ross Anderson told MPs it would mean more computer files being encrypted.

He urged the government to look at establishing "back door" ways of getting around encryptions.

Ross Anderson supports GAK!?

BBC NEWS | Politics | UK holds Microsoft security talks

Aug. 16 - Last year a Chinese mathematician, Xiaoyun Wang, shook up the insular world of code breakers by exposing a new vulnerability in a crucial American standard for data encryption. On Monday, she was scheduled to explain her discovery in a keynote address to an international group of researchers meeting in California.

But a stand-in had to take her place, because she was not able to enter the country. Indeed, only one of nine Chinese researchers who sought to enter the country for the conference received a visa in time to attend.

"It's not a question of them stealing our jobs," said Stuart Haber, a Hewlett-Packard computer security expert who is program chairman for the meeting, Crypto 2005, being held this week in Santa Barbara. "We need to learn from them, but we are shooting ourselves in the foot."

A policy designed to protect national security by preventing tecchnology transfer from the US to China has actually hurt national security by preventing technology transfer from China to the US. If you know someone at State tell them to read this article. This matter is very serious and they should have made an exception in this case and gotten the visas in time.

Chinese Cryptologists Get Invitations to a US Conference, but No Visas

Gnod is my experiment in the field of artificial intelligence. It's a self-adapting system, living on this server and 'talking' to everyone who comes along. Gnod's intention is to learn about the outer world and to learn 'understanding' its visitors. This enables gnod to share all its wisdom with you in an intuitive and efficient way. You might call it a search-engine to find things you don't know about.

Gnod Music: Discover new bands and artists. Let gnod find out what music you like and what you don't like.

Gnod Books: Get to know new authors and find out what other people like you like to read.

Gnod Movies: Discover new movies, travel the world of film and discuss it all in the forums.

The music map is cool, but it works best in Internet Explorer.

Gnod - The global network of dreams

This is an ad for the Macintosh around 1989.

k wrote:
] Kind of a neat blast from the past.
] Sometimes we forget that there was a time when "Copy" and "Paste"
] were brand new concepts.

Matt Groening Apple Ad

The battle is on for the swaying of hearts and minds of the Muslim masses. Its chief focus for now is the Middle East, but Pakistan and Afghanistan are very much on the radar screen of the Pentagon.

I thought this article was particularly interesting in that all of this military propaganda reminded me of how domestic political dialog has changed.

Odds are even in the 'information' war

But it mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by examining the crowd that person has been hanging out with.

NNDB

Like the heads in a VCR, the ones in card readers can wear out. After all, they are reading cards at an extraordinary rate. The busiest turnstile in the subway system, turnstile No. 10 in the middle array by the escalators in the main entrance to the subway below Grand Central Terminal, reads a whopping 236,000 cards a month.

I thought that was a neat factoid. I can imagine New Yorkers saying to themselves, "I know that turnstile!"

The article is rich in trivia about heavy-duty magnetic card readers and the millions of people who (ab)use them.

Mastering the Art of the Swipe

The purpose of computers is human freedom.

Like "maturity" and "reality" and "progress", the word "technology" has an agenda for your behavior: usually what is being referred to as "technology" is something that somebody wants you to submit to.  "Technology" often implicitly refers to something you are expected to turn over to "the guys who understand it."

What we really need is software designs that go into realms that cannot be visualized on paper, to break ideas and presentations out of their four-walled prison.

Cyber means "I do not know what I am talking about" or "I am trying to fool and confuse you."

And please, Mr. Programmer, leave the choices to ME, not labyrinths of software outside my control, because I DO NOT TRUST YOU.

The Web is a foam of ever-popping bubbles, ever-changing shop windows.
The Web is the minimal concession to hypertext that a sequence-and-hierarchy chauvinist could possibly make.

If you haven't read Ted Nelson you're not really a hacker.

To anyone watching, it seems like magic. To a user, it becomes indispensable.

Basically the idea here is that you design a GUI in which UNIX style "do one thing, do it well" utilities could be plugged in to offer particular capabilities instead of having all of these separate monolithic applications like spreadsheets or word processors where the world has to be reinvented every time. The way spell checking works in the Mac is that its offered at the OS level, and every application gets it everywhere as a virtue of running on the OS, instead of having to have each application implement its own spell checking system. Now imagine taking that concept to a deeper level. Instead of that being on the periphery, for little things like spell check, make it the heart, for big things like browsers or editors or viewers... What COM would be if it didn't suck.

Crafting a Revolution with the Brother of the Macintosh