Being "always on" is being always off, to something.
High-Tech Trash
Topic: Technology
9:59 pm EST, Dec 21, 2007
Will your discarded TV end up in a ditch in Ghana?
This reminds me of one segment in ManufacturedLandscapes. One village in China specialized in CRTs. For a while, anyway. The heavy metals got into the water supply and the area had to be abandoned.
The breakthrough of this year has to do with humans, genomes, and genetics. But it is not about THE human genome (as if there were only one!). Instead, it is about your particular genome, or mine, and what it can tell us about our backgrounds and the quality of our futures.
A number of studies in the past year have led to a new appreciation of human genetic diversity. As soon as genomes are looked at individually, important differences appear: Different single-nucleotide polymorphisms are scattered throughout, and singular combinations of particular genes forming haplotypes emerge. A flood of scans for these variations across the genome has pointed to genes involved in behavioral traits as well as to those that may foretell deferred disease liability. And more extensive structural variations, such as additions, deletions, repeat sequences, and stretches of "backwards" DNA, turn out to be more prevalent than had been recognized. These too are increasingly being associated with disease risks.
Our topic today, then, is the Gmail dashboard widget -- a handy dashboard frontend to Google Mail. As so many other widgets, this one, too, runs with access to the widget.system method. However, the bug in question here does not relate to eval(). Instead, it's script-injection into the DOM due to a lack of output cleansing in the client-side JavaScript code. It's, effectively, the same kind of vulnerability that underlies cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities in servers; for a change, however, this is a client-side problem.
Information Operations, Electronic Warfare, and Cyberwar
Topic: Military Technology
9:59 pm EST, Dec 21, 2007
This report describes the emerging areas of information operations, electronic warfare, and cyberwar in the context of U.S. national security. It also suggests related policy issues of potential interest to Congress.
For military planners, the control of information is critical to military success, and communications networks and computers are of vital operational importance. The use of technology to both control and disrupt the flow of information has been generally referred to by several names: information warfare, electronic warfare, cyberwar, netwar, and Information Operations (IO). Currently, IO activities are grouped by the Department of Defense (DOD) into five core capabilities: (1) Psychological Operations, (2) Military Deception, (3) Operational Security, (4) Computer Network Operations, and (5) Electronic Warfare.
Current U.S. military doctrine for IO now places increased emphasis on Psychological Operations, Computer Network Operations, and Electronic Warfare, which includes use of non-kinetic electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons, and nonlethal weapons for crowd control. However, as high technology is increasingly incorporated into military functions, the boundaries between all five IO core capabilities are becoming blurred.
DOD has noted that military functions involving the electromagnetic spectrum take place in what is now called the cyber domain, similar to air, land, and sea. This cyber domain is the responsibility of the new Air Force Cyber Command and includes cyberwarfare, electronic warfare, and protection of U.S. critical infrastructure networks that support telecommunications systems, utilities, and transportation.
There's what a politician believes, and how a politician believes. As I get older I put increasing weight on the latter. As a protest vote, Ron Paul seems fine, but hearing him or reading about him just makes me depressed. A good rule of thumb is not to get too excited about any candidate whose actual election would make the Dow lose thousands of points.
Taking the prestigious Rhodes Scholarships as a model, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in Princeton is creating a fellowship program that it hopes will lure top students into teaching and transform teacher education in the United States.
“Research shows that providing excellent teachers is the single most important way to improve student achievement,” said Arthur E. Levine, president of the foundation, which coordinates a variety of academic fellowship programs. “But the quality of our teaching force today is not as strong as it needs to be, and our teacher preparation programs are too weak. We hope this program will produce significant improvement in both and provide models that the rest of the country will follow.”
There are so many incredible astronomical photographs released every year that picking ten as the most beautiful is a substantial task. But it becomes easier when you consider the science behind the image as well. Does this image tell us more than that one? Was the scientific result drawn from an image surprising, or did it firm up a previously considered hypothesis?
There are some differences to be sure in this bubble or boom, such as a lack of public offerings and more cost-consciousness among companies. The parties are tamer, and now the impact of the credit crises looms, but there is still a sense of major excitement. And at least, as "Here Comes Another Bubble," demonstrates, there is a sense of history this time around.
Google Poaching Beacon Partners For “Universal Activity Stream”
Topic: High Tech Developments
10:32 am EST, Dec 21, 2007
Given the controversy, you’d think that Google wouldn’t touch anything remotely Beacon-like with a ten-foot pole. But a source familiar with the matter says that Google has contacted at least one Facebook Beacon partner, and perhaps more, in an effort to drum up support for its own initiative for OpenSocial, which it is calling “universal activity streams. These “universal activity streams” are meant to combine all actions you take online, similar to Facebook’s Beacon, and present them as a line of text in your personal activity feed on Google or an OpenSocial partner site like MySpace or Bebo. Within Google, for instance, these feeds could appear in Gmail, iGoogle, or Google Reader. The universal activity stream is expected to launch around February or March of next year.
