There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Alessio Rastani, 'Trader'
Topic: Business
6:54 am EDT, Sep 28, 2011
Alessio Rastani:
I'm an attention seeker. That is the main reason I speak. That is the reason I agreed to go on the BBC. Trading is a like a hobby. It is not a business. I am a talker. I talk a lot. I love the whole idea of public speaking.
Emily Lambert:
Was his little talk a hoax? When I reached Rastani in London to ask, he spouted some vague wisdom, mentioned his "trader friends," and insisted that trading is his obsession.
Jonathan Russell:
A man who doesn't own the house he lives in, but can sum up the financial crisis in just three minutes - a knack that escapes many financial commentators.
John Bird and John Fortune:
They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.
Andy Bilchbaum:
We've never heard of Rastani. Despite widespread speculation, he isn't a Yes Man.
Joe Nocera:
They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.
Eric Schmidt:
You get a billion people doing something, there's lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We'll get lots of money for it.
Shyamnath Gollakota, Nabeel Ahmed, Nickolai Zeldovich, and Dina Katabi:
This paper presents the first wireless pairing protocol that works in-band, with no pre-shared keys, and protects against MITM attacks. The main innovation is a new key exchange message constructed in a manner that ensures an adversary can neither hide the fact that a message was transmitted, nor alter its payload without being detected. Thus, any attempt by an adversary to interfere with the key exchange translates into the pairing devices detecting either invalid pairing messages or an unacceptable increase in the number of such messages. We analytically prove that our design is secure against MITM attacks, and show that our protocol is practical by implementing a prototype using off-the-shelf 802.11 cards. An evaluation of our protocol on two busy wireless networks (MIT's campus network and a reproduction of the SIGCOMM 2010 network using traces) shows that it can effectively implement key exchange in a real-world environment.
Recently:
Tom Cross, Manager IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence and Strategy, talks through the challenges of using open wifi and his proposal for secure open wireless networking.
Also:
I sat down last night and recorded a 70 minute long presentation on Secure Open Wireless Access. You can download the recording as a 37 Meg Quicktime Movie here.
Reed Hastings: An Explanation and Some Reflections | The Netflix Blog
Topic: Business
6:48 am EDT, Sep 19, 2011
Reed Hastings:
So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. It's hard for me to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to "Qwikster".
We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name "Netflix" for streaming.
A negative of the renaming and separation is that the Qwikster.com and Netflix.com websites will not be integrated. So if you subscribe to both services, and if you need to change your credit card or email address, you would need to do it in two places. Similarly, if you rate or review a movie on Qwikster, it doesn’t show up on Netflix, and vice-versa.
It would seem the primary reason to impose this non-integration annoyance on customers is that they plan to sell off the DVD service in the very near future. Also, the decline of this business won't be associated with the Netflix brand.
Neal Stephenson, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Anathem, returns to the terrain of his groundbreaking novels Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon to deliver a high-intensity, high-stakes, action-packed adventure thriller in which a tech entrepreneur gets caught in the very real crossfire of his own online war game.
In 1972, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, fled to the mountains of British Columbia to avoid the draft. A skilled hunting guide, he eventually amassed a fortune by smuggling marijuana across the border between Canada and Idaho. As the years passed, Richard went straight and returned to the States after the U.S. government granted amnesty to draft dodgers. He parlayed his wealth into an empire and developed a remote resort in which he lives. He also created T'Rain, a multibillion-dollar, massively multiplayer online role-playing game with millions of fans around the world.
But T'Rain's success has also made it a target. Hackers have struck gold by unleashing REAMDE, a virus that encrypts all of a player's electronic files and holds them for ransom. They have also unwittingly triggered a deadly war beyond the boundaries of the game's virtual universe--and Richard is at ground zero.
Racing around the globe from the Pacific Northwest to China to the wilds of northern Idaho and points in between, Reamde is a swift-paced thriller that traverses worlds virtual and real. Filled with unexpected twists and turns in which unforgettable villains and unlikely heroes face off in a battle for survival, it is a brilliant refraction of the twenty-first century, from the global war on terror to social media, computer hackers to mobsters, entrepreneurs to religious fundamentalists. Above all, Reamde is an enthralling human story -- an entertaining and epic page-turner from the extraordinary Neal Stephenson.
On Anathem:
Though he's been consistently ambitious in his work, this latest effort marks a high point in his risk-taking, daring to blend the elements of a barn-burner space opera with heavy dollops of philosophical dialog.
From The Diamond Age:
Dr. X was the ideal man for this job because of his very disreputability. He was a reverse engineer.
Hackworth was a forger, Dr. X was a honer. The distinction was at least as old as the digital computer. Forgers created a new technology and then forged on to the next project, having explored only the outlines of its potential. Honers got less respect because they appeared to sit still technologically, playing around with systems that were no longer start, hacking them for all they were worth, getting them to do things the forgers had never envisioned.
I combined everyday soap bubbles with exotic ferrofluid liquid to create an eerie tale, using macro lenses and time lapse techniques. Black ferrofluid and dye race through bubble structures, drawn through by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism.
The day after Dave Crawford and I inspected nighttime Tucson, I drove five hundred and fifty miles north to Bryce Canyon National Park, in southern Utah. That evening, I joined about two hundred people, including many children, outside the visitors' center, where telescopes of various sizes had been set up in the parking lot. Several were equipped with computerized tracking devices, which could be programmed to find and follow interesting objects in the sky. At one station or another, I saw the four Galilean satellites of Jupiter (tiny dots in a line), Saturn (with rings), a dense group of old stars, known as a globular cluster, a pair of twin stars (one blue and one gold), and the mountains and valleys that Galileo saw on the moon. With just my own eyes, I saw the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, which rapidly crossed the sky just before eleven o'clock, and, a little later, I saw the meteor-like flash of a passing Iridium satellite.
I spoke with Chad Moore, the program director of the National Park Service's Night Sky Team. "Many people who come to our programs have never really looked at the night sky," he told me. "A woman once came up to me and said, 'The moon was out during the day this morning -- is that O.K.?' "
I laughed out loud when I read that last sentence.
Here's a photo I took of the daytime moon in Bryce Canyon:
And for good measure in reference to Bruce Sterling's photos of a recent Texas fire, here are two of a 2009 fire at Bryce Canyon:
Please Don't Mistake My Optimism About My Future For Hope About Yours
Topic: Society
8:07 am EDT, Aug 8, 2011
Chris Fogle via DFW via William Deresiewicz:
What is heroic about true heroism is that it has no reward.
Rebecca Solnit:
Victory sometimes seems so quotidian that you have to look twice to notice it.
Hunter S. Thompson:
The bulk of the press in this country has such a vested interest in the status quo that it can't afford to do much honest probing at the roots, for fear of what they might find.
The conservative position that all spending is evil obliterates any distinction between investment and consumption, between the long-term and the short-term. The United States suffers with an increasingly third-world level of infrastructure, a third-tier education system, and enormous gaps in the preparedness of its workforce. The debate has now ended: Money to upgrade those faltering systems will not be forthcoming.
Rebecca Solnit:
Unpredictability is grounds for hope, though please don't mistake hope for optimism.
There may be a quid. There may be a quo. But because the two are independent, there is no pro.
James Gleick:
Google makes more from advertising than all the nation's newspapers combined.
What it means to own information is very much in flux. There is no information utopia. Google users are parties to a complex transaction, and if there is one lesson to be drawn ... it is that we are not always witting parties.
This much is clear: We need to decide what we want from Google. If only we can make up our collective minds. Then we still might not get it.
Charlie Brooker:
Suddenly there is no stick. There's just you. You are the stick.
Malcom Gladwell:
There is no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care about.
Mark Foulon:
It has become clear that Internet access in itself is a vulnerability that we cannot mitigate. We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient.
