Although our national cybersecurity strategy might be announced in Washington, our national cybersecurity practice will be defined in the average Silicon Valley cubicle. It’s hard to see what government can do to affect what happens in that cubicle. Indeed, I’d judge our policy as a success if we have any positive impact, no matter how small, in the cubicle.

How Can Government Improve Cyber-Security?

A new paper by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues.

The Semantic Web drives towards the use of the Web for interacting with logically interconnected data. Through knowledge models such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Semantic Web provides a unifying representation of richly structured data. Adding logic to the Web implies the use of rules to make inferences, choose courses of action, and answer questions. This logic must be powerful enough to describe complex properties of objects but not so powerful that agents can be tricked by being asked to consider a paradox. The Web has several characteristics that can lead to problems when existing logics are used, in particular, the inconsistencies that inevitably arise due to the openness of the Web, where anyone can assert anything. N3Logic is a logic that allows rules to be expressed in a Web environment. It extends RDF with syntax for nested graphs and quantified variables and with predicates for implication and accessing resources on the Web, and functions including cryptographic, string, math. The main goal of N3Logic is to be a minimal extension to the RDF data model such that the same language can be used for logic and data. In this paper, we describe N3Logic and illustrate through examples why it is an appropriate logic for the Web.

N3Logic: A Logical Framework For the World Wide Web

Social interactions between individuals do not occur in a void. Nor do they take place on a pre-existing fixed social network. Real social behaviour can be understood both to take place on, and to bring about, a complex set of overlapping topologies best described by a multilayer network in which different layers indicate different modes of interaction. Here we distinguish between the milieu within which social organisation is embedded and the transactional relationships that constitute this social organisation. While both can be represented by network structures, their topologies will not necessarily be the same. Researchers in various domains have realised the importance of the context in which individuals are embedded in shaping properties of the functional transactions in which they choose to engage. We review several examples of the relationship between milieu and function and propose a conceptual framework that may help advance our understanding of how social organisation can occur as a result of self-organisation and adaptation.

Milieu and Function: Toward a Multilayer Framework for Understanding Social Networks

What I find interesting is that when I’m using a wiki, I love the fact that all of the users can do whatever they want — edit anything, delete articles, and generally make a mess of things. So I can’t help but think that the simple existence of user roles drives me to think in terms of those roles and who should be in them.

I think there’s something deep here about the way software is designed. When you provide users with features that define structure in some way, there is some compulsion to adhere to that structure, whether or not it makes sense. If your mail system provides folders, people feel like they ought to organize their mail in folders. If your bug tracking system provides a highly granular system of access control, people feel like they ought to assign privileges in that way.

...

These considerations add a layer of complexity to software design. As developers, we tend to think of adding new features simply as adding optional ways of usage that users can ignore, but there’s more to it than that. As users, we feel like we should use the options that are provided to us, whether it makes sense or not. I suspect this is one of the reasons for software spoilage.

How software warps your brain

Paper by danah boyd, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research.

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

Paper by Kristina Lerman at ISI.

Social networks are a prominent feature of many social media sites, a new generation of Web sites that allow users to create and share content. Sites such as Digg, Flickr, and Del.icio.us allow users to designate others as "friends" or "contacts" and provide a single-click interface to track friends' activity. How are these social networks used? Unlike pure social networking sites (e.g., LinkedIn and Facebook), which allow users to articulate their online professional and personal relationships, social media sites are not, for the most part, aimed at helping users create or foster online relationships. Instead, we claim that social media users create social networks to express their tastes and interests, and use them to filter the vast stream of new submissions to find interesting content. Social networks, in fact, facilitate new ways of interacting with information: what we call social browsing. Through an extensive analysis of data from Digg and Flickr, we show that social browsing is one of the primary usage modalities on these social media sites. This finding has implications for how social media sites rate and personalize content.

Social Browsing & Information Filtering in Social Media

Probably the most basic reason behind the absence of a general treatment of resource allocation in modern computer systems is an adequate model for program behavior. In this paper a new model, the "working set model," is developed. The working set of pages associated with a process, defined to be the collection of its most recently used pages, provides knowledge vital to the dynamic management of paged memories. "Process" and "working set" are shown to be manifestations of the same ongoing computational activity; then "processor demand" and "memory demand" are defined; and resource allocation is formulated as the problem of balancing demands against available equipment.

The Working Set Model for Program Behavior

I felt warm and safe following her thin blue line.

It was unnerving at first, but then a relief.

Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator.

Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.

Online content? I have externalized it. Now I just log on to MemeStreams and it tells me what I like.

That's David Brooks.

That last part? I paraphrased, but he does end the column with a comment about memes.

The Outsourced Brain

Contemporary artificial intelligence researchers (as well as neurologists and Karl Jung) are taken to task in this talk by one of the world’s preeminent scholars of artificial intelligence.

A talk by Marvin Minsky.

Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind

A paper by Frank Mabry, John James, and Aaron Ferguson, all from the Information Technology and Operations Center at West Point, in the latest issue of IEEE Security & Privacy.

Unicode is rapidly becoming the preferred means for representing symbols used in creating multimedia content, especially for information that's presented in multiple languages. A vulnerability in unicode leaves such content susceptible to being used for the creation of covert channel communications.

Also at IEEEXplore.

Unicode Steganographic Exploits: Maintaining Enterprise Border Security