Author and professor Dorothy E. Denning explains why good biometrics systems will succeed without keeping secrets. Both direct and concise, it's worth reading. She mentions two startup companies whose biometrics technologies look promising.

'Why I Love Biometrics' | Dorothy Denning in InfoSec Magazine

"To The Point", a Public Radio International (PRI) news program, discusses emerging intellectual property issues in the music industry. Guests include Peter Trimarco, President of Farenheit Entertainment, who released the first copy-protected CD in the US; Robin Gross, attorney for the EFF; Carey Ramos, legal counsel for the National Music Publishers Association, the Harry Fox Agency, and the DVD Forum; Paul Boutin, writer/editor for Salon and Wired; and Todd Boyd, author and USC professor of critical studies.

This discussion starts at about 7 minutes, 42 seconds into the 50 minute audio program.

Summary: Digital technology allows computer users to make and distribute exact copies of the music they get on CDs. While music producers have attacked the practice as "piracy," consumers insist it's "fair use." In an attempt to stop it, the industry has developed a hidden electronic lock that prevents CD owners from producing an exact digital copy and burning it onto another CD or uploading it onto the Internet. Has a new generation of listeners been spoiled by technology? Should the industry establish subscription services and other new models for compensating artists? We talk with industry insiders, civil libertarians and cultural critics about the recording industry's assault on the digital reproduction of music.

The Future of Copy-Protect Music | KCRW's 'To The Point' [RealAudio]

This is a 200-page report from a workshop held in 2001 on the future of postsecondary education. It is strongly correlated with the last chapters of _The Social Life of Information_ by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. (The last chapters were among the most interesting of this excellent book.) The report includes several papers presented at the workshop:

The Impact of the Changing Economy on Four-Year Institutions of Higher Education: The Importance of the Internet
Higher Education, the Emerging Market, and the Public Good
A Role for the Internet in American Education? Lessons from Cisco Networking Academies
Creating High-Quality Learning Environments: Guidelines from Research on How People Learn

The Knowledge Economy and Postsecondary Education | National Academy Press

Lots of interesting projects here, spanning such categories as visualization, information exploration, digital libraries, learning, mining creavity, and more. A few projects of note:

Codex, Memex, Genex: The Pursuit of Transformational Technologies
Excentric Labeling: Dynamic Neighborhood Labeling for Information Visualization
Treemaps: Visualizing hierarchical and categorical data

Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland

In the spring of 1991, John Warnock, then CEO of Adobe Systems, authored a paper called "The Camelot Project" that first presented his vision for the worldwide exchange of rich media documents. It's an interesting look at how new projects emerge in large corporations.

In this paper, PDF is viewed as a stop-gap measure until personal computers were powerful enough to render normal PostScript documents in real-time. Warnock then planned to migrate back to the use of PostScript for both printing and on-screen viewing. With the great success that PDF has now achieved, it's not likely to be replaced any time soon ...

The Camelot Project: The Prehistory of Adobe Acrobat PDF

New Scientist offers a brief article with several quotations from OpenCola founder Cory Doctorow. He claims running code will be released "later in 2002", but I'm not holding my breath.

Perhaps more interesting than Swarmcast's technical utility is its striking ability to attract loads of media attention that propagates unchecked claims of "infinite scalability". Considering that they apparently plan to use the Reed-Solomon FEC library I logged recently, I have much doubt in the "infinite" scalability claim.

Yet more hype for Swarmcast vaporware

Dan Gillmor, columnist for the Mercury News, claims that the success of Google is reducing friction over DNS-related intellectual property issues. He says that if people rely on Google for name resolution instead of strongly branded, highly memorable domain names, then no one will fight over them. I think he's missing something, but I can't quite put my finger on it. What do you think?

The flawed logic of the 'Google effect'?

"Cryptography could give us data privacy today. Only no one's asking for it."

Xerox PARC scientist Tom Berson laments the current state of the research community in cryptography. He seems to oversimplify things a bit, though. I can't wait for Bruce Schneier to dig into this. The article wraps up with gems like this:

"When enough of us understand how easy it is to make truly secure systems, and refuse to buy anything that offers us less, we will give companies the economic incentive they currently lack." (emphasis added)

Cryptographic Abundance | MIT Technology Review, Jan/Feb 2002

"The purpose of these nanoparticles is to introduce a new type of therapy -- to actually go inside individual cells ... and repair them, or, if there's a lot of damage, to get rid of those cells," explains James Leary of the University of Texas Medical Branch. Leary is leading the research along with Stephen Lloyd, and Massoud Motamedi, also from the University of Texas; Nicholas Kotov of Oklahoma State University; and Yuri Lvov of Louisiana Tech University.

Voyage of the Nano-Surgeons

To start 2002, Edge editor John Brockman asks each of the usual suspects to pose an important question and explain/justify its relevance. Here's a sampling.

Ray Kurzweil asks the fundamental, "Who am I? What am I?" Brian Greene ponders the concepts of space and time. Brian Eno asks, "Why do we decorate?" Danny Hillis asks, "Why do people like music?" Steven Pinker wonders what truly shapes the human mind. John Markoff: "can wealth be distributed?" MIT's Seth Lloyd wonders if the universe is actually a quantum computer. Gregory Benford wonders if wormholes might be real. Richard Dawkins: "how different could life have been?" Actor Alan Alda wonders, "what is the nature of fads?" George Dyson: "where are They (the aliens)?" Freeman Dyson: "why am I me?" Douglas Rushkoff: "why do we tell stories?" Daniel Dennett wonders how the brain encodes semantic information. and many more.

Edge 96