Amazon’s new e-reader, Kindle, is good because it feels old. Wonder how long that’ll last.

The Victorian iPod

The U.S. intelligence community defines DOMEX as "the processing, translation, analysis, and dissemination of collected hard-copy documents and electronic media, which are under the U.S. government's physical control and are not publicly available." That definition goes on to exclude "the handling of documents and media during the collection, initial review, and inventory process." DOMEX is not about being a digital librarian; it's about being a digital detective.

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This article introduces electronic document and media exploitation from an academic perspective. It presents a model for performing this kind of exploitation and discusses some of the relevant academic research. Properly done, DOMEX goes far beyond recovering documents from hard drives and storing them in searchable archives. Understanding this engineering problem gives insight that will be useful for designing any system that works with large amounts of unstructured, heterogeneous data.

The DOMEX challenge is to turn digital bits into actionable intelligence.

Linda Stone gave a fantastic talk at ETech, continuing to build out her thesis on the changing ways we pay attention. Her talk began by orienting the audience in the same way as her 2005 Supernova talk, but it then went into new territory. Continuous partial attention is neither good nor bad, it just is. And like all evolved techniques, there are situations in which it's useful and situations in which it's a hindrance. Her thoughts on the new strategies we're building were, with Clay's magnificent talk, the highlights of the conference for me.

ETech: Linda Stone

What is it?

It's a new way of managing files. Or rather not manage files. Currently it's a cross between a calendar and a file browser with labels. It's a free/open source GTK application written in C#.

Codename Nemo

The spread of wide-scale Internet surveillance has spurred interest in anonymity systems that protect users’ privacy by restricting unauthorised access to their identity. This requirement can be considered as a flow control policy in the well established field of multilevel secure systems. I apply previous research on covert channels (unintended means to communicate in violation of a security policy) to analyse several anonymity systems in an innovative way.

One application for anonymity systems is to prevent collusion in competitions. I show how covert channels may be exploited to violate these protections and construct defences against such attacks, drawing from previous covert channel research and collusion-resistant voting systems.

In the military context, for which multilevel secure systems were designed, covert channels are increasingly eliminated by physical separation of interconnected single-role computers. Prior work on the remaining network covert channels has been solely based on protocol specifications. I examine some protocol implementations and show how the use of several covert channels can be detected and how channels can be modified to resist detection.

I show how side channels (unintended information leakage) in anonymity networks may reveal the behaviour of users. While drawing on previous research on traffic analysis and covert channels, I avoid the traditional assumption of an omnipotent adversary. Rather, these attacks are feasible for an attacker with limited access to the network. The effectiveness of these techniques is demonstrated by experiments on a deployed anonymity network, Tor.

Finally, I introduce novel covert and side channels which exploit thermal effects. Changes in temperature can be remotely induced through CPU load and measured by their effects on crystal clock skew. Experiments show this to be an effective attack against Tor. This side channel may also be usable for geolocation and, as a covert channel, can cross supposedly infallible air-gap security boundaries.

This thesis demonstrates how theoretical models and generic methodologies relating to covert channels may be applied to find practical solutions to problems in real-world anonymity systems. These findings confirm the existing hypothesis that covert channel analysis, vulnerabilities and defences developed for multilevel secure systems apply equally well to anonymity systems.

Covert channel vulnerabilities in anonymity systems

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year is …. “W00t”.

I’m not a great language purist (I’m a Webster’s New World fan, and don’t much care for the overly prescriptivist American Heritage), but I don’t know that I would call this interjection from leetspeak a ‘word’ exactly.

I’d have gone with ‘waterboarding’ myself.

W00t the Heck?

In response to Josh Catone’s observation that del.icio.us has failed to go mainstream, Richard Ziade offers three hypotheses:

1. Nobody really needs a way to centrally store their bookmarks
2. Most people don’t understand what del.icio.us does
3. People don’t feel compelled to share del.icio.us with others

The winning explanation, I am sure, is #2. Nobody understands what del.icio.us does. I am constantly explaining the nature and value of its social information management capabilities. Just this week, in various meetings on Microsoft’s Redmond campus, I found myself reiterating four of my major uses of del.icio.us.

Jon Udell: Discovering versus teaching principles of social information management

Afghans are often credited with maintaining a stubborn optimism in the face of 30 years of war, drought, displacement and lawlessness. Two writers fresh from visits to the country have delivered sharply differing views on whether that sense of hope has survived the country’s latest round of hardship.

Have Afghans Lost Hope?

What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race.

If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate, what explains the Flynn effect -- the steady rise in scores across generations?

Gladwell reviews What is Intelligence?

None of the Above | Malcolm Gladwell

confess. if you read this blog, you are addicted to data. this means you do not like Christmas presents. in fact, you hate those information-less presents your friends buy you each year. even after patiently telling them "any present should self-update at least each 30 seconds", last year's Christmas was still a disaster, despite that wireless weather station from your wife that is now measuring the temperature & humidity of those boxes on your attic.

starting from $15, here are infosthetics' 20 most wanted Christmas gifts for the info-addicted.

shopping guide for the data-addicted