Nat Torkington:

An introduction to privacy issues around cloud computing, with an eye to the ubiquitous computing future of the cloud.

From the archive, Larry Ellison:

"The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"

Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud

Web spam is a widely-recognized threat to the quality and security of the Web. Web spam pages pollute search engine indexes, burden Web crawlers and Web mining services, and expose users to dangerous Web-borne malware. To defend against Web spam, most previous research analyzes the contents of Web pages and the link structure of the Web graph. Unfortunately, these heavyweight approaches require full downloads of both legitimate and spam pages to be effective, making real-time deployment of these techniques infeasible for Web browsers, high-performance Web crawlers, and real-time Web applications. In this paper, we present a lightweight, predictive approach to Web spam classification that relies exclusively on HTTP session information (i.e., hosting IP addresses and HTTP session headers). Concretely, we built an HTTP session classifier based on our predictive technique, and by incorporating this classifier into HTTP retrieval operations, we are able to detect Web spam pages before the actual content transfer. As a result, our approach protects Web users from Webpropagated malware, and it generates significant bandwidth and storage savings. By applying our predictive technique to a corpus of almost 350,000 Web spam instances and almost 400,000 legitimate instances, we were able to successfully detect 88.2% of the Web spam pages with a false positive rate of only 0.4%. These classification results are superior to previous evaluation results obtained with traditional linkbased and content-based techniques. Additionally, our experiments show that our approach saves an average of 15.4 KB of bandwidth and storage resources for every successfully identified Web spam page, while only adding an average of 101 microseconds to each HTTP retrieval operation. Therefore, our predictive technique can be successfully deployed in applications that demand real-time spam detection.

Predicting Web Spam with HTTP Session Information

Some see Dean Kamen as a Willy Wonka character whose most famous invention - the Segway personal transporter - is still the butt of jokes. Others compare him to Henry Ford. His next project, after perfecting an electric car, is to 'to fix the world' - using a 200-year-old engine nobody else thinks can work.

From the archive:

Refactor Everything!

Dean Kamen finally announces his new product today.

Stirling engines -- great on paper but it's been hard so far to build practical ones.

Lindsay Publications has reprinted a lot of old 1900s - 1950s books detailing various concepts and ideas, including how to lay out sheet metal for ornate structures, building engines (combustion and Stirling), as well as subjects like steam power and wind power generation.

Dean Kamen: part man, part machine

At the nanoscale, one can fit trillions of devices in a chip-scale area. This is many orders of magnitude more than we can accomplish today. The Symposium on Computing Challenges brings together people with hardware, software, neuroscience, physics, and mathematics perspectives to discuss the key problems and the possible approaches to solutions for effectively harnessing trillions of devices that are made possible by use of the nanoscale.

Talks are available, including Jon Kleinberg on Information Dynamics and Network Structure.

Symposium on Computing Challenges | Kavli Institute at Cornell

In the same way as the web is quickly extending onto the mobile platform, we are starting to see the web moving further into the physical world. Many emerging technologies are beginning to offer physical-world inputs and outputs; multi-touch iPhones, gestural Wii controllers, RFID-driven museum interfaces, QR-coded magazines and GPS-enabled mobile phones.

These technologies have been used to create very useful services that interact with the web such as Plazes, Nokia Sports Tracker, Wattson, Tikitag and Nike Plus. But the technologies themselves often overshadow the user-experience and so far designers haven’t had language or patterns to express new ideas for these interfaces.

This talk will focus on a number of design directions for new physical interfaces. We will discuss various ideas around presence, location, context awareness, peripheral interaction as well as haptics and tangible interfaces. How do these interactions work with the web? What are the potentials and problems, and what kinds of design approaches are needed?

The web in the world

cruz (kroōz)

v. to sail about in an area without a precise destination. esp. for pleasure.

From the archive:

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea--"cruising", it is called.

Cruz - A Social Browser for Mac OS X Leopard

Inquisitor... speeds up your searches like no other.

Start typing and websites appear instantly, along with suggestions to help refine your search.

Inquisitor understands you, learning and tailoring your results as you search. You can also add more search engines with customized keyboard shortcuts.

Inquisitor is fast, smart, flexible... and free!

I have a feeling they'll be changing the name of this product.

Inquisitor

Curiosity is the main driving force behind scientific activity. Scientific curiosity, insatiable in its explorations, does not know what it will find, or where it will lead. Science needs autonomy to cultivate this kind of untrammeled curiosity; innovation, however, responds to the needs and desires of society. Innovation, argues influential European science studies scholar Helga Nowotny, tames the passion of science, harnessing it to produce "deliverables." Science brings uncertainties; innovation successfully copes with them. Society calls for both the passion for knowledge and its taming. This ambivalence, Nowotny contends, is an inevitable result of modernity.

In Insatiable Curiosity, Nowotny explores the strands of the often unexpected intertwining of science and technology and society. Uncertainty arises, she writes, from an oversupply of knowledge. The quest for innovation is society's response to the uncertainties that come with scientific and technological achievement. Our dilemma is how to balance the immense but unpredictable potential of science and technology with our acknowledgment that not everything that can be done should be done. We can escape the old polarities of utopias and dystopias, writes Nowotny, by accepting our ambivalence—as a legacy of modernism and a positive cultural resource.

Insatiable Curiosity: Innovation in a Fragile Future

David D. Friedman:

Future Imperfect describes and discusses a variety of technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known, freedom or slavery, effective immortality or the elimination of our species, and radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and play. We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely to be much like the past. It is worth starting to think about it now.

Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World

Brought to Light invites readers to step back to a time when photography, X-rays, and movies were new, when forays into the world beneath the skin or the realm beyond our everyday vision captivated scientists and the public alike. In this book, accounts of scientific experimentation blend with stories of showmanship to reveal how developments in 19th-century technology could enlighten as well as frighten and amaze. Through a series of 200 vintage images—produced by photographers, scientists, and amateur inventors—this book ultimately traces the rise of popular science.

The images demonstrate early experiments with microscopes, telescopes, electricity and magnetism, motion studies, X-rays and radiation, and spirit photography. We learn how these pictures circulated among the public, whether through the press, world’s fairs, or theaters. What started out as scientific progress, however, often took on the trappings of magic and superstition, as photography was enlisted to offer visual evidence of clairvoyance, spirits, and other occult influences.

With beautifully reproduced plates and engaging narratives, this book embodies the aesthetic pleasures and excitement of the tale it tells.

Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900