A follow-up on Getting Owned Across the Air Gap, in which hired IO guns engage in a long-term attack against a high-value target.

To be considered in view of the $30 billion "cyber security" program:

Overall conclusions:

* Botnets and trojans will be extremely difficult to find and analyze in the near future.
* Nascent market shift to automated incident response as part of vulnerability analysis faces ongoing challenges as attackers build one-time custom-use trojans

Thoughts?

Information Operations, Immunity Style

Nicholson Baker, in the New York Review of Books:

It's like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks and puppy smoothies.

My advice to anyone who is curious about becoming a contributor—and who is better than I am at keeping his or her contributional compulsions under control—is to get Broughton's Missing Manual and start adding, creating, rescuing. I think I'm done for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue—a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren't libelous or otherwise illegal. Like other middens, it would have much to tell us over time. We could call it the Deletopedia.

The Charms of Wikipedia

The existence of the informal organization, argued the Hawthorne researchers, meant that shaping human behavior was much more complicated than the then-dominant paradigm of scientific management had led managers to believe. The social system, which defined a worker’s relation to her work and to her companions, was not the product of rational engineering but of actual, deep-rooted human associations and sentiments. For example, on the question of the link between financial incentives and output, the Hawthorne researchers found that a worker might feel rewarded if she had pleasant associations with her co-workers and that this might mean more to her than a little extra money. Indeed, the researchers found that many workers resisted incentive plans because they felt they would be competing against people whose good will and companionship they valued.

The Human Relations Movement: A New Vision

James Surowiecki:

Americans may disagree about nearly everything, but few contest the idea that owning your home is a good thing. The housing boom undoubtedly helped the economy’s growth rate and made lots of first-time home buyers happy. Unfortunately, it may also end up prolonging and deepening the current downturn.

Home Economics

Despite the global interest in the rise of China, no one is paying much attention to its ideas and who produces them. Yet China has a surprisingly lively intellectual class whose ideas may prove a serious challenge to western liberal hegemony

China's new intelligentsia

40% of the finding that people do is actually re-finding.

INFO 141 Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business

The STEPS project is setting out to create “Moore’s Law Software”: a high-risk high-reward exploratory research effort to create a large-scope-and-range software system in 3-4 orders of magnitude less code than current practice.

This is new from Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute.

From the archive:

"Thinking" is a higher category than "just" math, science, and the arts. It represents a synthesis of intuitive and analytical approaches to understanding the world and dealing with it.

STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming

How paint dries, the way flags flutter, how Nature discovered origami, and other marvels of the physical world

"Just because something is familiar doesn’t mean you understand it. That is the common fallacy that all adults make—and no child ever does."

The Physics of the Familiar

Memeticist Susan Blackmore uses the hotel-bathroom toilet-paper fold as an example of a useless meme -- a meme that has spread throughout the world, even though there is no human reason for it to exist. The persistence of this meme easily disproves the comfortable notion that we humans only spread ideas that are useful or interesting -- it shows that, once a meme takes on life, it spreads itself.

Inspired by Blackmore's research, origamist and TEDster Bruno Bowden created a combinatorial meme -- linking Blackmore's ideas with the sophisticated folding techniques discussed by origami master Robert J. Lang onstage at TED.

To see what happened when Ze Frank was attacked by this meme on Day 4 of TED@Aspen, visit our Flickr set.

A new meme unfolds

All aboard!

The renewable energy industry is stepping up its meteoric rise into the mainstream of the energy sector, according to the REN21 Renewables 2007 Global Status Report. Renewable energy production capacities are growing rapidly as a result of more countries enacting far-reaching policies.

"Soy! Soy! Soy! Soy! Soy!"

Renewable Energy Accelerates Meteoric Rise