Thanks to his innovative and ingenious books on the subject of cryptography, Bruce Schneier has become the world's most famous security expert. Now, his trio of revolutionary titles can be found in this unprecedented, value-priced collection.

Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, Second Edition: This seminal encyclopedic reference provides readers with a comprehensive survey of modern cryptography. It describes dozens of cryptography algorithms, offers practical advice on how to implement them into cryptographic software, and shows how they can be used to solve security problems.

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World: This narrative, straight-talking bestseller explains how to achieve security throughout computer networks. Schneier examines exactly what cryptography can and cannot do for the technical and business community.

Practical Cryptography: As the ideal guide for an engineer, systems engineer or technology professional who wants to learn how to actually incorporate cryptography into a product, this book bridges the gap between textbook cryptography and cryptography in the real world.

My guess is that the publisher wants to unload its stock of "Secrets & Lies". At $63 in paperback, compare to $28.65+$12.21+$31.50=$72.36. A $9 discount on the bundle? Hardly seems worth it.

Schneier's Cryptography Classics Library

Microsoft C#UNG (pronounced “chung” and short for C# Universal Network/Graph System) is a desktop application that displays graphs, which are collections of vertices connected by edges. C#UNG can read graphs in several file formats, lay them out using one of several layout algorithms, and display them with a variety of display options. An Excel add-in enables graph data entered in an Excel worksheet to be displayed easily in C#UNG. The components used to develop the application are available as an API for developers who want to create and display graphs in their own applications.

C#UNG

Originally recommended by Hijexx in January.

Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore.

(Still) doesn't work (yet) on Intel Macs.

Packet Garden

Pulp-Based Computing is a series of explorations that combine smart materials, papermaking and printing. By integrating electrically active inks and fibers during the papermaking process, it is possible create sensors and actuators that behave, look, and feel like paper. These composite materials, not only leverage the physical and tactile qualities of paper, but can also convey digital information, spawning new and unexpected application domains in ubiquitous and pervasive computing at extremely affordable costs.

By Marcelo Coelho and Pattie Maes, in collaboration with Joanna Berzowska and Lyndl Hall.

Pulp-Based Computing

Kevin Kelly:

My friend Stewart Brand, who is now 69, has been arranging his life in blocks of 5 years. Five years is what he says any project worth doing will take. From moment of inception to the last good-riddance, a book, a campaign, a new job, a start-up will take 5 years to play through. So, he asks himself, how many 5 years do I have left? He can count them on one hand even if he is lucky. So this clarifies his choices. If he has less than 5 big things he can do, what will they be?

What are your Big Things?

Conceptual Trends and Current Topics

For years now, WHOIS has been a battlefield between privacy advocates who want to change the system and commercial and law-enforcement interests who want to keep it as is.

The most recent attempt at compromise, involving a large ICANN working group, ended in another and perhaps final impasse last week:

“Finished off” might be a better term. Despite flirting with the kind of compromises and reforms that might actually reconcile privacy rights with identification needs, in the final weeks of the process trust and agreement among the parties broke down completely.

What makes the WHOIS deadlock interesting is that it reveals, in microcosm, the great and ever widening divide that lies at the net's heart - the divide between the network as a platform for commerce and the network as a forum for personal communication. The way that tension is resolved - or not resolved - will go a long way toward determining the ultimate identity and role of the internet.

Nicholas Carr, on the WHOIS deadlock

A variety of programming accidents, i.e., models and methods, including extreme programming, are examined to determine that each has a step that programmers find painful enough that they habitually avoid or postpone the step. This pain is generally where the programming accident meets requirements, the essence of software, and their relentless volatility.

The Inevitable Pain of Software Development

In industrial countries cell phone usage offers access to patterns of human dynamics and mobility at a level and detail unimaginable before. The purpose of this talk is to quantify the main features of human activity and travel patterns that can be discovered from this data. We start out by testing the standard hypothesis that human activity is fundamentally random in space (travel patterns) and time (inter-event times). We find significant deviations from the random expectation. For the timing of the events the measurements indicate that human activity has a bursty character with well-defined mathematical characteristics, a property shared by a wide range of data, from mobile phone usage to library visitation and emails. In contrast, we find that human travel is far more regular than diffusion models would predict, described mathematically on many spatiotemporal scales a centrally biased random walk. We discuss the implications of these findings on the nature of time and space experienced by humans.

For a review:

... a fascinating paper (abstract PDF) on "Time and Motion in Mobile Communication", in which he described a project that uses large datasets of mobile phone subscribers to describe analyze how people move about cities. As his abstract states "cell phone usage offers access to patterns of human dynamics and mobility at a level and detail unimaginable before.

Barabasi set out to study human activity using a huge dataset that recorded the time of mobile phone calls and the cell site ID - which allowed them to geolocate the callers to approximately the neighborhood level. They can then create metrics for each individual that describe their movement patterns in space and time - essentially a mobility signature for each person. Then you can look at the overall patterns, and as it turns out, there are significant differences between how different people move.

This kind of analysis has many applications, but on of the most interesting he raised is using it during an epidemic to look at real-time flux of people across parts of a city.

This paper caught my attention because there are a number of interesting research projects that are starting to leverage the mobile as a real-time sensor, to create some very interesting pictures of emergent social phenomena. ... Interestingly enough, it seems that Boston is emerging as the global epicenter for this new research niche.

Time and Networks in Mobile Communication

The launching of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, was a life-changing event — one that ignited imaginations, dictated the course of careers, and changed the way people thought about science, education and global politics. The New York Times asked scientists and others who lived through it (and a few who were yet to be born) to reflect on what Sputnik meant to them.

Voices: 10/4/57 | Sputnik - Recollections - New York Times

In the world of agile development, context is key.

Agile processes are not a technology, not a science, not a product. They constitute a space somewhat hard to define. Agile methods, or more precisely agile software development methods or processes, are a family of approaches and practices for developing software systems. Any attempt to define them runs into egos and marketing posturing.

Voyage in the Agile Memeplex