Being "always on" is being always off, to something.
Trust and the Future of the Internet
Topic: Technology
11:51 am EDT, Aug 25, 2007
Interested in a free trip to Toronto?
The Internet Society (ISOC) Board of Trustees is currently engaged in a discovery process to define a long term Major Strategic Initiative to ensure that the Internet of the future remains accessible to everyone. The Board believes that Trust is an essential component of all successful relationships and that an erosion of Trust: in individuals, networks, or computing platforms, will undermine the continued health and success of the Internet.
The Board will meet in special session the first week October of 2007 for intensive study focused on the subject of trust within the context of network enabled relationships. As part of this process, the Board is hereby issuing a call for subject experts who can participate in the two day discussion. Topics of interest include: the changing nature of trust, security, privacy, control and protection of personal data, methods for establishing authenticity and providing assurance, management of threats, and dealing with unwanted traffic.
Lions: Africa's Magnificent Predators | By Nathan Myhrvold
Topic: Science
11:51 am EDT, Aug 25, 2007
Even a buffalo separated from the herd has reasonable chances. At one point we saw a lone bull that was trying to get back to the herd, which was about a half mile away. In between him and the herd were four lionesses, sacked out asleep. This looked like the perfect opportunity for a kill, but the buffalo surprised both us and the lions. He crept up on the sleeping lions, then when he got close he lowered his horns and charged. The lions awoke, panicked and scattered into the bushes. The buffalo then trotted victorious back to the pride. It was a perfect illustration of the adage that the best defense is a good offense.
This essay carries the following warning at Edge.org:
WARNING: some of the photos are a bit gory, and one shows explicit lion sex.
See also the latest research on fight-or-flight, using fMRI on video-game-playing humans.
There is increasing concern amongst a wide range of commentators that human nature is in the process of being irrevocably changed by technological advances which either have been achieved or are in the pipeline. According to a multitude of op-ed writers, cultural critics, social scientists and philosophers, we have not faced up to the grave implications of what is happening. We are sleep-walking and need to wake up. Human life is being so radically transformed that our very essence as human beings is under threat.
Of course, apocalypse sells product, and one should not regard the epidemiology of panic as a guide to social or any other kind of reality. The fact that one of the most quoted panickers about the future is Francis Fukuyama, who has got both the past wrong (The End of History) and the present wrong (recovered neo-con Pentagon hawk), should itself be reassurance enough. Nevertheless, it is still worthwhile challenging the assumptions of those such as Fukuyama who are trying to persuade us to be queasy about the consequences of the various technologies that have brought about enhancement of human possibility and, indeed, want to call a halt to certain lines of inquiry, notably in biotechnology.
Effective resizing of images should not only use geometric constraints, but consider the image content as well. We present a simple image operator called seam carving that supports content-aware image resizing for both reduction and expansion. A seam is an optimal 8-connected path of pixels on a single image from top to bottom, or left to right, where optimality is defined by an image energy function. By repeatedly carving out or inserting seams in one direction we can change the aspect ratio of an image. By applying these operators in both directions we can retarget the image to a new size. The selection and order of seams protect the content of the image, as defined by the energy function. Seam carving can also be used for image content enhancement and object removal. We support various visual saliency measures for defining the energy of an image, and can also include user input to guide the process. By storing the order of seams in an image we create multi-size images, that are able to continuously change in real time to fit a given size.
The paper is freely available from the author, Ariel Shamir, but it is large and will take you quite a while to download it from that URL.
The Google Books Project has drawn a great deal of attention, offering the prospect of the library of the future and rendering many other library and digitizing projects apparently superfluous. To grasp the value of Google’s endeavor, we need among other things, to assess its quality. On such a vast and undocumented project, the task is challenging.
In this essay, I attempt an initial assessment in two steps.
First, I argue that most quality assurance on the Web is provided either through innovation or through “inheritance.” In the later case, Web sites rely heavily on institutional authority and quality assurance techniques that antedate the Web, assuming that they will carry across unproblematically into the digital world. I suggest that quality assurance in the Google’s Book Search and Google Books Library Project primarily comes through inheritance, drawing on the reputation of the libraries, and before them publishers involved.
Then I chose one book to sample the Google’s Project, Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. This book proved a difficult challenge for Project Gutenberg, but more surprisingly, it evidently challenged Google’s approach, suggesting that quality is not automatically inherited.
In conclusion, I suggest that a strain of romanticism may limit Google’s ability to deal with that very awkward object, the book.
In a digitally connected, rapidly evolving world, we must transcend the traditional Cartesian models of learning that prescribe “pouring knowledge into somebody’s head." We learn through our interactions with others and the world ...
As opportunities for innovation and growth migrate to the peripheries of companies, industries, and the global economy, efficiency will no longer be enough to sustain competitive advantage. The only sustainable advantage in the future will come from an institutional capacity to work closely with other highly specialized firms to get better faster.
A new paper by Mark Allman, for an upcoming conference.
Incessant scanning of hosts by attackers looking for vulnerable servers has become a fact of Internet life.
In this paper we present an initial study of the scanning activity observed at one site over the past 12.5 years.
We study the onset of scanning in the late 1990s and its evolution in terms of characteristics such as the number of scanners, targets and probing patterns.
While our study is preliminary in many ways, it provides the first longitudinal examination of a now ubiquitous Internet phenomenon.
One of the things I was doing on my recent sabbatical was asking myself "what the heck am I working on, and why?" I was taking a bit of a breather to more clearly figure out what I want to focus on, and what direction I want to take my life and career.
Today I want to blog about having your own Personal Research Agenda. A Research Agenda is a list of questions to focus on -- they are the destinations you are tacking towards, the organizing principle around which you work. You might not be focusing on all of them all the time, but just formulating a list and putting it down will cause your mind to roll over them in the background like a kind of background thread.
Using del.icio.us as a writing summarization tool (by Jeremy Zawodny)
Topic: Society
11:50 am EDT, Aug 25, 2007
It occurs to me that with a sufficient number of people bookmarking an article and selecting a short passage from it, I have a useful way to figure out what statement(s) most resonated with those readers (and possibly a much larger audience). It's almost like a human powered version of Microsoft Word's document summarization feature.
This draft has some rather interesting security issues, since if implemented incorrectly and then abused it could allow an attacker to "bug your phone" -- that is, turn it into a remote listening device. Similar attacks could also be used to run up the victim's connectivity bill, run down the device's battery, aggravate the "voice hammer" DOS attack, and so on.
This lead us into a discussion of the SIP security model in general. Most SIP practitioners who have been at it for awhile know that if the proxies we have decided to trust suddenly decide to get malicious, then we're very much at their mercy. They can do all sorts of things, including routing our media through interceptors, mangling SDP payloads, injecting (or blocking) instant messages, altering presence information, and so on.
But this aspect of SIP is not obvious to naive implementors, or even to less naive security types.
Maybe every SIP extension document should include a boiler-plate reminder about the sensitivity of proxies, then go on to enumerate and describe the new ways that malicious proxies (should there be such a thing) can wreak havoc using the extension being documented.
What do you folks think?
1) Could a reasonable "How you could be violated by trusted proxies that turn rogue" boilerplate be drafted? 2) Would the practice of repeating this in drafts help or hurt us? 3) Would it be useful for us to document how each extension could be used by a rogue proxy?
I've been thinking a lot about the social graph for awhile now: aggregating the graph, decentralization, social network portability, etc.
If you've seen me at any conference recently, I probably talked your ear off about it. It's time I braindump this, so here goes ...
Problem: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site, but also: Developing "Social Applications" is too much work.
Goal: Ultimately make the social graph a community asset.
