At PARC we had a slogan: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points."

Like all things Alan Kay, this article is worth your time.

Predicting The Future, by Alan Kay

The real issue is not privacy as such. It is how information about a person is used.

This new paper by Andrew Odlyzko goes well with Greg Conti's recent article, The Cost of Free Web Tools, from the May/June issue of IEEE Security & Privacy.

Abstract:

This note discusses briefly some questions on economics of privacy, especially the relation of privacy to price discrimination, as well as relevant developments in e-commerce and ordinary commerce. Various open questions that call for further research are discussed. In particular, while much interesting theoretical research has been done, and a small number of informative laboratory experiments have been carried out, much more work would be desirable, especially in some areas of behavioral economics, and there is a great unmet need for active monitoring of the marketplace.

Privacy and the Clandestine Evolution of E-commerce

From Chapter 2, "Beginner's Traps":

In summary, there are no small problems. Problems that appear small are large problems that are not understood. Instead of tiny details unworthy of the intellectual, we have men whose tiny intellects cannot rise to penetrate the infinitesimal. Nature is a harmonious mechanism where all parts, including those appearing to play a secondary role, cooperate in the functional whole. In contemplating this mechanism, shallow men arbitrarily divide its parts into essential and secondary, whereas the insightful thinker is content with classifying them as understood and poorly understood, ignoring for the moment their size and immediately useful properties. No one can predict their importance in the future.

I recommend this book. Amazon writes:

Although the wisdom contained in this slim, elegant volume is almost a century old, it is as fresh and useful today as it no doubt was then.

See also: Google Books; MIT Press offers some samples, or full text for CogNet subscribers.

Advice for a Young Investigator

Denial-of-Service attacks continue to grow despite the fact that a large number of solutions have been proposed in the literature.

The problem is that few are actually practical for real-world deployment and have incentives for early adopters.

We present Terminus, a simple, effective and deployable network-layer architecture against DoS attacks that allows receivers to request that undesired traffic be filtered close to its source.

In addition, we describe our implementation of each of the architecture’s elements using inexpensive off-the-shelf-hardware, and show that we can filter very large attacks in a matter of seconds while still sustaining a high forwarding rate even for minimum-sized packets.

We conclude by discussing initial deployment incentives.

Terminus: the End of the Line for DDoS

Subscription required for access to full text of most articles, but I wanted to point out a couple of articles that you might find it worthwhile to track down:

What Hackers Learn that the Rest of Us Don't: Notes on Hacker Curriculum

The hacker culture has accumulated a wealth of efficient practices and approaches to computer technologies -- in particular, to analysis, reverse engineering, testing, and software and hardware modification -- that differ considerably from those of both the IT industry and traditional academia.

The above article references the article by Greg Conti that appears in the same issue as Academic freedom and the hacker ethic. It also references a book by Jonathan Rosenberg, How Debuggers Work.

The End of Black and White, by Dan Geer

It's no longer just black hats or white hats in computer security. The more someone has to lose, the less likely they should be to trust the computer. It means that all people, all programs, all transactions are shades of grey. Black and white are just a memory.

This one appears to be freely available:

Estimating Software Vulnerabilities

Any given piece of software has some number of publicly disclosed vulnerabilities at any moment, leaving the system exposed to potential attack. A method for identifying and analyzing these vulnerabilities uses public data from easily accessible sources.

Latest Issue of IEEE Security & Privacy

Al Qaeda is stronger now than at any time since 9/11, say some; it is less strong than it could have become, answers the administration. Congressional Democrats say that instead of catching Bin Laden, Bush took his eyes off the ball and got mired in an irrelevant war in Iraq; the White House replies that if we don’t fight the jihadis in Iraq, we will have to do so in Manhattan.

And so American politicians argue in what seems to remain a cognitive vacuum, confusing the public and producing inane statements from our elected leaders. Had Al Qaeda consciously planned how to thoroughly confuse the infidels, this would have been the ideal result. It is all the persistent and inevitable outcome of executive delusions (jihadis are “a small minority”) and Democratic flippancy (“the war on terrorism is a bumper sticker,” Sen. John Edwards has charged) against a background of popular ignorance and an oversupply of lawyers and human rights activists. The result is that six years after 9/11 we (and the Europeans are generally worse) are still fighting a war in a conceptual fog —— and not getting any closer to winning it.

In reality, the nature and goals of the enemy, albeit complex, should be quite clear, as should the ways to defeat it. Until we understand a few key realities, we will continue to tread water and remain on the defensive.

How to Think about Jihad

Freeman Dyson is certainly working hard to get his message out ...

We are suspicious of genetic engineering, but bio-sciences are about to become the new industrial revolution. It’s not just about GM crops: soon we’ll be designing our own pets and tackling global poverty

This article covers the same ground as Our Biotech Future -- you know, things like housewives sharing "recipes" for "canine-based" automatic toilet bowl cleaners, and kids arguing over genetic "cheats" in Pokémon Live (think doping, a la Tour de France, or baseball) -- but for the newspaper audience, he leaves out the pointers to Carl Woese.

It takes a gene genie to feed a village

Another day, another director.

Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, renowned for his 1966 release Blow-Up, has died aged 94.

I had just watched L'Avventura again recently ... it's on Amazon's "essential" list. Time to revisit a few more, including The Passenger, with its single-shot, seven-minute-long final scene, which Amazon calls "one of the most famous in cinema history."

Michelangelo Antonioni dies

A Gold Star for Woody Allen's review of Ingmar Bergman's 1988 autobiography, The Magic Lantern. Read the review in its entirety.

Through a Life Darkly

Samantha Power is worth your time.

As Cheney put it, "old doctrines of security do not apply."

As Bush put it, "No nation can be neutral."

But Bush’s premises have proved flawed, and the war-on-terror frame has obscured more than it has clarified.

You could sum it up like this:

"Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction."

Remember Rumsfeld's snowflake?

"Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

Hello. I'm Leonard Nimoy.

The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false.

It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies.

And in the end, isn't that the real truth?

The answer ... is: No.

A few question-nuggets, from Power, Petraeus, and Shapiro:

One question in particular hangs over this discussion: Are the American and international publics so disenchanted with Bush’s effort to curb terrorism the wrong way that they will deprive his successor of the resources he or she needs to change course?

"What have you done for the people of Iraq today?"

"You can’t beat something with nothing."

Wrapping up on a down beat:

The American public, with little faith in the credibility of the government’s claims, may deny even cleareyed leaders the resources they need to meet the complex demands of neutralizing modern threats.

Our War on Terror