Being "always on" is being always off, to something.
De-anonymizing Social Networks
Topic: Technology
7:42 am EDT, Mar 30, 2009
New work by Arvind Narayanan:
Operators of online social networks are increasingly sharing potentially sensitive information about users and their relationships with advertisers, application developers, and data-mining researchers. Privacy is typically protected by anonymization, i.e., removing names, addresses, etc.
We present a framework for analyzing privacy and anonymity in social networks and develop a new re-identification algorithm targeting anonymized social-network graphs. To demonstrate its effectiveness on real-world networks, we show that a third of the users who can be verified to have accounts on both Twitter, a popular microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing site, can be re-identified in the anonymous Twitter graph with only a 12% error rate.
Our de-anonymization algorithm is based purely on the network topology, does not require creation of a large number of dummy “sybil” nodes, is robust to noise and all existing defenses, and works even when the overlap between the target network and the adversary’s auxiliary information is small.
See also, earlier work by Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov, from 2006-2007:
We present a new class of statistical de-anonymization attacks against high-dimensional micro-data, such as individual preferences, recommendations, transaction records and so on. Our techniques are robust to perturbation in the data and tolerate some mistakes in the adversary's background knowledge.
The scientific research enterprise is built on a foundation of trust. Scientists trust that the results reported by others are valid. Society trusts that the results of research reflect an honest attempt by scientists to describe the world accurately and without bias. But this trust will endure only if the scientific community devotes itself to exemplifying and transmitting the values associated with ethical scientific conduct.
On Being a Scientist was designed to supplement the informal lessons in ethics provided by research supervisors and mentors. The book describes the ethical foundations of scientific practices and some of the personal and professional issues that researchers encounter in their work. It applies to all forms of research--whether in academic, industrial, or governmental settings-and to all scientific disciplines.
This third edition of On Being a Scientist reflects developments since the publication of the original edition in 1989 and a second edition in 1995. A continuing feature of this edition is the inclusion of a number of hypothetical scenarios offering guidance in thinking about and discussing these scenarios.
On Being a Scientist is aimed primarily at graduate students and beginning researchers, but its lessons apply to all scientists at all stages of their scientific careers.
Martin Schwartz:
Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.
Louis Menand:
Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20’s in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read – and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.
Richard Hamming:
If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.
Utility is not contingent on perfection of form. In fact, the lessons I’ve learned about crafting elegant experiences—from the creative brief to user interface design—involve abandoning the desire for perfection entirely.
Malcom Gladwell:
We should be lowering our standards, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about.
Douglas Bowman:
Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. “Is this the right move?” When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.
If central casting called for a poised, straight-talking, and capable-seeming president, it would be hard to come up with someone better than the Barack Obama who walked and talked around the White House grounds with Steve Croft on "60-Minutes" Sunday night. He may perfectly represent the majority who elected him, though, because he also appears to be in full commanding denial of the realities overtaking our American experience.
For those of you sitting on US Treasury bonds and bills, now would be a good time to get out.
See also, from Emergent Chaos:
This reminded me of a conversation I had over a beer with a banking regulator back in August 2006 or thereabouts. He reported on a IM conversation he had had with a colleague whose expertise lay in the area which subsequently imploded. After jokingly asking "Time to buy gold, huh?", there was a pregnant pause. Then came the response: "Buy ammunition".
A 1993 video by Neil Goldberg (b. 1953) of 73 gay men brushing their cats and saying, "She's a talker."
Update: Note that linked video has been removed from YouTube, but you can still find it here (nsfw web site). See also an interview with Neil Goldberg in which he talks about the film.
Command-line Fu: The best UNIX commands on the web
Topic: Technology
7:59 am EDT, Mar 25, 2009
Command-Line-Fu is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.
Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on and discussed - digg-esque voting is also encouraged so the best float to the top.
We have come across a botnet worm spreading around called "psyb0t". It is notable because, according to my knowledge, it:
* is the first botnet worm to target routers and DSL modems * contains shellcode for many mipsel devices * is not targeting PCs or servers * uses multiple strategies for exploitation, including bruteforce username and password combinations * harvests usernames and passwords through deep packet inspection * can scan for exploitable phpMyAdmin and MySQL servers
Dearth of technical experts leaves US open to cyber attack
Topic: Military Technology
7:59 am EDT, Mar 25, 2009
The United States isn't producing enough engineers and technicians to combat the growing threat to government and business computer networks, a panel of security experts said yesterday.
"We are not portraying an image that this is an exciting career path," said Eugene Spafford.
"There are less than 100 people who truly know and understand control systems cyber security," said Joseph Weiss, managing partner of Applied Control Solutions.
Pointy-Haired Boss:
"I need to be managing a sexier project to boost my career."
"There's no reason we should all be homeowners," says Joseph Gyourko, a professor at the Wharton School of Business and coauthor of "Rethinking Federal Housing Policy." "Homeownership has a lot of benefits, but it has costs, too."
Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than you think.
A paradox of the long view is that the time to embrace it is right now. We need to start down that path before disastrous policy errors, including fatal banker bailouts and cuts in Social Security and Medicare, are put into effect. It is therefore especially important that thought and learning move quickly. Does the Geithner team, forged and trained in normal times, have the range and the flexibility required? If not, everything finally will depend, as it did with Roosevelt, on the imagination and character of President Obama.
From 1998, Stewart Brand:
In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.
