Anders Albrechtslund:

In this article, I argue that online social networking is anchored in surveillance practices. This gives us an opportunity to challenge conventional understandings of surveillance that often focus on control and disempowerment. In the context of online social networking, surveillance is something potentially empowering, subjectivity building and even playful – what I call participatory surveillance.

Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

As the web and web browsers have matured, people have started expecting different things out of them. When we first released Firefox, few people were browsing with tabs or add-ons. I’ve written before about how web usage patterns have changed, so too have our strategies on how to effectively make use of system resources such as memory.

Firefox 3 Memory Usage

The IRS uses the Terminal Access Controller Access Control System (TACACS ) to administer and configure routers and switches. Users of the TACACS must be authorized by managers. The IRS had authorized 374 accounts for employees and contractors that could be used to access routers and switches to perform system administration duties. Of these, 141 (38 percent) did not have proper authorization to access the TACACS . Authorizations for 86 of the 141 employee and contractor accounts had been provided on some prior date, but the authorizations had expired at the time of our review. However, we could not find that the other 55 employee and contractor accounts had ever been authorized to access the System. We are particularly concerned that 27 of the 55 employees and contractors had accessed the routers and switches to change security configurations.

To authenticate users, the TACACS uses a security application that requires users to enter an account name and password. System administrators had circumvented this control by setting up 34 unauthorized accounts that appear to be shared-user accounts. Any person who knew the passwords to these accounts could change configurations without accountability and with little chance of detection. For this reason, the IRS requires that shared accounts be used only on a limited basis and that they be subjected to special authorization controls. However, during Fiscal Year 2007, 4.4 million (more than 84 percent) of the 5.2 million accesses to the TACACS were made by the 34 user accounts. None of the accounts were properly authorized.

Inadequate Security Controls Over Routers and Switches Jeopardize Sensitive Taxpayer Information

On Tuesday, the creators of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, a cryptographic protocol, and two of the creators of EMC security division RSA gathered onstage for the annual cryptographers' panel at RSA 2008 in San Francisco.

The BD security rumor propagates.

Cryptographers speak of threats, voting, and Blu-Ray rumors

Holumbus is a Haskell library which provides the basic building blocks for creating powerful indexing and search applications. This includes a framework for distributed crawling and indexing as well as distributed query processing.

To explore the power of Holumbus, have a look at Hayoo!, a Haskell API search engine, or download (see below) Holumbus and check out some of the included examples.

Holumbus

Steve Jobs, in a 2003 New York Times magazine interview, said:

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

And that’s just it.

Daring Fireball: Firefox 3 vs. Safari 3

RECENTLY, the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust task force invited me to be the lead witness for its hearing on “net neutrality.” I’ve collaborated with the Future of Music Coalition, and my band, OK Go, has been among the first to find real success on the Internet — our songs and videos have been streamed and downloaded hundreds of millions of times (orders of magnitude above our CD sales) — so the committee thought I’d make a decent spokesman for up-and-coming musicians in this new era of digital pandemonium.

I’m flattered, of course, but it makes you wonder if Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner sit around arguing who was listening to Vampire Weekend first.

Beware the New New Thing

Forget using paper. Take notes, create to-dos, save what’s important, and then find it all anytime.

A Single Place For All Your Notes! | EverNote Corporation

Researchers at the University of Rochester have digitally reproduced music in a file nearly 1,000 times smaller than a regular MP3 file.

The music, a 20-second clarinet solo, is encoded in less than a single kilobyte, and is made possible by two innovations: recreating in a computer both the real-world physics of a clarinet and the physics of a clarinet player.

The achievement, announced today at the International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing held in Las Vegas, is not yet a flawless reproduction of an original performance, but the researchers say it's getting close.

Music File Compressed 1,000 Times Smaller than MP3

Comcast announced Thursday an about-face in its stance and said it will treat all types of Internet traffic equally.

Comcast said it will collaborate with BitTorrent to come up with better ways to transport large files over the Internet instead of delaying file transfers.

Comcast to Stop Hampering File-Sharing