On Tuesday, the creators of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, a cryptographic protocol, and two of the creators of EMC security division RSA gathered onstage for the annual cryptographers' panel at RSA 2008 in San Francisco.

The BD security rumor propagates.

Cryptographers speak of threats, voting, and Blu-Ray rumors

This paper provides the first rigorous assessment of the homeownership experiences of subprime borrowers. We consider homeowners who used subprime mortgages to buy their homes, and estimate how often these borrowers end up in foreclosure. In order to evaluate these issues, we analyze homeownership experiences in Massachusetts over the 1989–2007 period using a competing risks, proportional hazard framework. We present two main findings. First, homeownerships that begin with a subprime purchase mortgage end up in foreclosure almost 20 percent of the time, or more than 6 times as often as experiences that begin with prime purchase mortgages. Second, house price appreciation plays a dominant role in generating foreclosures. In fact, we attribute most of the dramatic rise in Massachusetts foreclosures during 2006 and 2007 to the decline in house prices that began in the summer of 2005.

Subprime Outcomes: Risky Mortgages, Homeownership Experiences, and Foreclosures

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is announcing the first-ever strategy to improve the ability of intelligence professionals to share information, ultimately strengthening national security.

The document, titled the U.S. Intelligence Community Information Sharing Strategy, complements a related national strategy that President Bush released last year. The document responds to needs identified in the 9/11 and WMD Commission reports, as well as mandates in executive orders and the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act.

The intelligence community’s strategy calls for the removal of institutional and technical barriers to information sharing in order to give the federal government an advantage in making critical decisions to help keep the nation safe.

Intelligence Community Information Sharing Strategy

While the gregarious Mr. Yoo continues to insert himself into the limelight and is now the best-known, it’s clear that his role is subsidiary to that of Haynes and Addington. And Haynes’s role in advocating the decisive Rumsfeld December 2, 2002 order and other documents may yet yield for him the dubious distinction of being the lead torture lawyer.

Over the last four days I’ve shared notes several times with Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, who tells me he senses a distinct gathering of storm clouds around Haynes.

Torture Lawyer in the Crosshairs

While new interfaces, video, images, binary streams of any kind you can think of are easily presented into plugins and other “wares,” we are still struggling to get to the “next level” of retrieval technology.

What Today’s Search Engines Cannot Tell You

Recommender systems have emerged over the last several years as an important area of research spanning the boundaries of such diverse set of disciplines as data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, human-computer interaction, marketing and operations research. Interest in recommender systems was further enhanced when Netflix announced its $1,000,000 prize competition in October 2006 that attracted over 20,000 participants from 167 different countries. One of the sub-fields of recommender systems that benefited very significantly from the Netflix Prize competition is the area of large-scale recommender systems, which deals with scaling recommendation methods to large datasets. Many Netflix competitors came to realize that some of the well-known recommendation algorithms would not scale well to the Netflix dataset. In addition, some of the most popular and well-regarded methods would perform poorly on the Netflix dataset — maybe because the asymptotic performance of these methods is quite different from their performance on smaller datasets.

Second KDD Workshop on Large-Scale Recommender Systems and the Netflix Prize Competition

On July 13th 2001, when Beijing won the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the Chinese government promised the world it would improve China's human rights record. In June 2004, Beijing announced its Olympic Games slogan, "One World, One Dream." From their inception in 1896, the modern Olympic Games have always had as their mission the promotion of human dignity and world peace. China and the world expected to see the Olympic Games bring political progress to the country. Is Beijing keeping its promises? Is China improving its human rights record?

When you come to the Olympic Games in Beijing, you will see skyscrapers, spacious streets, modern stadiums and enthusiastic people. You will see the truth, but not the whole truth, just as you see only the tip of an iceberg. You may not know that the flowers, smiles, harmony and prosperity are built on a base of grievances, tears, imprisonment, torture and blood.

The Real China and the Olympics

Holumbus is a Haskell library which provides the basic building blocks for creating powerful indexing and search applications. This includes a framework for distributed crawling and indexing as well as distributed query processing.

To explore the power of Holumbus, have a look at Hayoo!, a Haskell API search engine, or download (see below) Holumbus and check out some of the included examples.

Holumbus

Is Islam the best way to understand the war on terror? Tribalism may offer a clearer view of our enemies' motivations.

I and My Brother Against My Cousin

It’s a typical display of Mr. Yoo’s dubious talents for giving an outward appearance of legal reasoning to radical political diatribe. However, the circumstances around the memo tell us quite a bit. In this post I want to look not at the contents of the memo, but at the contextual questions. Why was it sought, and how was it used.

Yoo Two