A semantic agent for xmpp / jabber network which finds and shares content about resources (using RDF/SPARQL) for you and your jabber friends.

xOperator

I see a bright future in the New School, and would put this book as a “first-read” for anyone who needs to be initiated on the subject of information security / assurance.

Implications of The New School

Know your goo.

How should scientists and engineers respond to the concern over technology-driven threats? Although there are persuasive arguments for the proposition that they not engage in public policy debates or speculate about the possibility of social harm emanating from research and development, the author believes that they should possess the analytical techniques to evaluate (not judge) the societal impacts of technology. Technology impact studies should be incorporated into the research plans of major new initiatives, along with formal requirements to mitigate known negative societal impacts. Finally, scientists and engineers should undertake, on their own initiative, efforts to reduce the negative impacts of their work.

Whose Responsibility?

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Google Web Toolkit

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)

In the end, Morris apologized, earned three years of criminal probation, performed four hundred hours of community service, and was fined $10,050. He transferred from Cornell to Harvard, founded a dot-com startup with some friends in 1995, and sold it to Yahoo! in 1998 for $49 million. He is now a respected, tenured professor at MIT.

In retrospect, the commission’s recommendations—urging users to patch their systems and hackers to grow up—might seem naïve. But there were few plausible alternatives. Computing architectures, both then and now, are designed for flexibility rather than security. The decentralized, nonproprietary ownership of the Internet and the computers it links made it difficult to implement structural revisions. More important, it was hard to imagine cures that would not entail drastic, wholesale, purpose-altering changes to the very fabric of the Internet. Such changes would have been wildly out of proportion to the perceived threat, and there is no record of their having even been considered.

Johnathan Zittrain, on how to meet the security threat.

Protecting the Internet Without Wrecking It

Software developers need to be aware of the compromises they face when using virtualization technology.

The Cost of Virtualization

This popularly written booklet contains nontechnical descriptions of 10 major engineering achievements selected by the National Academy of Engineering on the occasion of its 25th anniversary, December 5, 1989. The achievements are the moon landing, application satellites, the microprocessor, computer-aided design and manufacturing, computer-assisted tomography, advanced composite materials, the jumbo jet, lasers, fiber-optic communication, and genetically engineered products.

Engineering and the Advancement of Human Welfare: 10 Outstanding Achievements 1964-1989

The private and public sectors depend heavily upon information technology (IT) systems to perform essential, mission-critical functions. As existing technology evolves and new technologies are introduced to provide improved capabilities and advanced features in systems, new technology-related vulnerabilities often arise. Organizations implementing and using advanced technologies must be increasingly on guard. One such category of technologies is active content. Broadly speaking, active content refers to electronic documents that can carry out or trigger actions automatically without an individual directly or knowingly invoking the actions. Exploits based on vulnerabilities in active content technologies can be insidious. The following key guidelines are recommended to organizations for dealing with active content.

Guidelines on Active Content and Mobile Code: Version 2

The Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) was passed by Congress and signed into law by the President as part of the E-Government Act of 2002 (Pub. L. No. 107-347). The goals of FISMA include development of a comprehensive framework to protect the government’s information, operations, and assets. Providing adequate security for the Federal government’s investment in information technology (IT) is a significant undertaking. In fiscal year 2007, the Federal agencies spent $5.9 billion securing the government’s total IT investment of approximately $65 billion for the fiscal year 2007 enacted level, equating to approximately 9.2 percent of the total IT portfolio. Funds spent on IT security are used for cross-cutting and system-specific security activities including certification and accreditation (C&A) of systems, testing of controls, and user awareness training.

FY2007 Report to Congress on Implementation of the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002