"It hasn’t worked for Pakistan," said Frances Fragos Townsend, who heads the Homeland Security Council at the White House. "It hasn’t worked for the United States."

Still, Richard Boucher, the assistant secretary of state, described General Musharraf as America’s best bet.

But some new American measures might have to remain secret to avoid embarrassing General Musharraf.

"It has to be dealt with. If he can deal with it, amen. But if he can’t, he’s got to build and borrow the capability."

That's quite a nice euphemism you've got, there.

Bush Aides See Failure in Fight With Al Qaeda in Pakistan

A previously unseen 50-second clip of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden appeared July 14 as part of a new video released by As-Sahab media. The bin Laden segment, however, appears to have been taped at the same time as another video of him released in May 2002. Al Qaeda has little to gain by keeping bin Laden under wraps -- which suggests something is up.

Hrm.

Al Qaeda's Weak Attempt to Parade Osama bin Laden

Judith Miller on how cops do it.

Three time zones, 3,000 miles, and a cultural galaxy apart, New York and Los Angeles face a common threat: along with Washington, D.C., they’re the chief American targets of Islamic terror. And both cities boast top cops, sometime rivals—the cities are fiercely competitive—who know that ensuring that a dog doesn’t bark will determine their legacies. After investing millions of dollars in homeland security, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of New York and Chief William J. Bratton of L.A. can both claim counterterror successes. What can we learn from their approaches? And will they be able to continue preventing terrorist attacks in their cities?

On the Front Line in the War on Terrorism

This is the same Carl Woese that Freeman Dyson has been urging you to take seriously.

The Third Domain is the untold story of how the discovery of a new form of life first ridiculed, then ignored for the past thirty years by mainstream scientists is revolutionizing science, industry, and even our search for extraterrestrial life.

Classification is a serious issue for science: if you don't know what you're looking at, how can you interpret what you see? Starting with Carolus Linnaeus in the 17th century, scientists have long struggled to order and categorize the many forms of life on Earth. But by the early 20th century the tree of life seemed to have stabilized, with two main domains of life at its roots: single-celled and multi-celled organisms. All creatures fit into one of these two groups.

Or so we thought. But in 1977, a lone scientist named Carl Woese determined that archaea -- biochemically and genetically unique organisms that live and thrive in some of the most inhospitable environments on Earth -- were a distinct form of life, unlike anything seen on Earth before. This shocking discovery was entirely incompatible with the long-standing classification of life as we know it. But as it turned out, archaea were not life as we know it, and the tree of life had to be uprooted once again.

Now, archaea are being hailed as one of the most important scientific revelations of the 20th century. The Third Domain tells the story of their strange potential and investigates their incredible history to provide a riveting account of an astonishing discovery.

The Third Domain

These are the cats and dogs I didn't use elsewhere.

In trying to mimic the feel of sporty downshifts, it ladles on ever-higher levels of regenerative hybrid braking. To the driver, the sludgy effect feels like throwing anchors of various sizes out the window.

If straphangers can choose between local and express service, why can’t motorists?

It all comes down to price.

"Victory is defeating Al Qaeda," Tony Snow said last week, because "Al Qaeda continues to be the chief organizer of mayhem within Iraq."

If you’re a shady seafood dealer trying to unload a container of dodgy shrimp or tilapia, chances are 98 in 100 it will make it into the United States.

The speculative risk of food-borne illnesses, especially parasites, has captured the public imagination. There are several reasons, however, that these fears are unfounded.

What we need isn’t more tuna, but a renaissance in American sushi; to discover for ourselves -- and perhaps to remind the Japanese -- what sushi is all about.

Consultants have encouraged a culture that deifies them ...

Are these advisers really as important as they would like us, and their clients, to think? Have they ever been?

If they had $1 million, they could generate a rough draft of a mammoth genome in about a month.

What the battle at the mosque seemed to reveal was how complex Pakistani politics is, and how far Islamist radicals are from gaining widespread popular support.

"Today, over all, patents don’t work; for the information technology industry especially, they don’t work," said James Bessen.

"You’re not going to be photocopying forever, so while you are, become queen of the paper jam," Ms. Dixson suggested.

"What happens when all this stock comes back on the market? ... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Third View revisits the sites of historic western American landscape photographs. The project makes new photographs, keeps a field diary of its travels, and collects materials useful in interpreting the scenes, change and the passage of time.

Third View

I remember one incident well. Bilal lived above a Bengali restaurant. The other guy in his flat used to sing and play guitar, diabolically out of tune. I went round one day to Bilal's and heard this guy singing and wailing. I said, "What's this?" Bilal called him a "waster" and boasted to me that a few days earlier he had brought the guy into his bedroom. He sat him down and told him he needed to pray. He told him: "If you ever play again I'm going to smash the guitar." He then put on a video of al-Zarqawi beheading one of the hostages in Iraq. "If you think I'm messing about, this is what we do. This is what our people do - we slaughter." Bilal laughed when he recounted the story. I laughed with him, although I remember thinking the word slaughter was a bit disproportionate.

Glasgow bombs: the doctor I knew

Short and sweet; worth reading.

... an open-mindedness that was part idealism and part indulgence ... a rented house at the Jersey Shore ... gauze blouses and tousled Stevie Nicks perms ... clove cigarettes ... a seen-it-all continental daze ... a time of freedom and openness, a time before omnipresent fear ... a perspective to be gained from seeing things from a distance ...

Breaking Away

Publicly-accessible adaptive systems such as collaborative recommender systems present a security problem.

Attackers, who cannot be readily distinguished from ordinary users, may inject biased profiles in an attempt to force a system to “adapt” in a manner advantageous to them. Such attacks may lead to a degradation of user trust in the objectivity and accuracy of the system.

Recent research has begun to examine the vulnerabilities and robustness of different collaborative recommendation techniques in the face of “profile injection” attacks.

In this paper, we outline some of the major issues in building secure recommender systems, concentrating in particular on the modeling of attacks and their impact on various recommendation algorithms.

We introduce several new attack models and perform extensive simulation-based evaluation to show which attack models are most successful against common recommendation techniques.

We consider both the overall impact on the ability of the system to make accurate predictions, as well as the degree of knowledge about the system required by the attacker to mount a realistic attack.

Our study shows that both user-based and item-based algorithms are highly vulnerable to specific attack models, but that hybrid algorithms may provide a higher degree of robustness.

Finally, we develop a novel classification-based framework for detecting attack profiles and show that it can be effective in neutralizing some attack types.

It's nice to know that MemeStreams has been using a robust approach for years now.

See also the May/June issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems, which includes a special feature on recommender systems. Subscription required for access to full text.

Towards Trustworthy Recommender Systems: An Analysis of Attack Models and Algorithm Robustness

Google's Security team has discovered vulnerabilities in the Sun Java Runtime Environment that threatens the security of all platforms, browsers and even mobile devices.

"This is as bad as it gets."

Dangerous Java flaw threatens virtually everything