Now that we have been conditioned, by experience or Kerouac, to idealize the open road, it may seem quaint that the dream, in those early days, was to replicate the surrender and effortlessness of train travel, where you didn’t have to navigate at all. But, in some respects, the rail ideal persists; we’ve just got craftier about aspiring to it. Navigation is big business these days. Web sites that offer maps and directions, such as MapQuest and Google Earth, are growing more sophisticated; global-positioning satellite technology and the in-car navigation systems that rely on it, such as General Motors’s OnStar and Hertz’s NeverLost, are becoming ubiquitous. Geographic Information Systems, or G.I.S., may be the plastics of our time. It’s not hard to envision the demise of the paper road map, in a generation or two, because a map, for all its charms, is really a smorgasbord of chance information, most of it useless. Who cares where Buffalo is, if you’re trying to get to Coxsackie? Most people just want to be told where to turn.

Ouch. How's that for an indictment of modern society? The truth hurts.

The science of driving directions | The New Yorker

For bin Laden and his followers the weapons of terrorism are no longer simply the guns and bombs that they always have been, but now include the mini-cam and videotape, editing suite and attendant production facilities; professionally produced and mass-marketed CD-Roms and DVDs; and, most critically, the lap-top and desk-top computers, CD burners and e-mail accounts, and Internet and worldwide web access that have defined the information revolution today.

Indeed, in recent years, the art of terrorist communication has evolved to a point where the terrorists themselves can now control the entire production process: determining the content, context and medium over which their message is projected; and towards precisely the audience (or multiple audiences) they seek to reach. The implications of this development are enormous.

A new information revolution has occurred to empower these movements with the ability to shape and disseminate their own message in their own way: enabling them to bypass completely traditional, established media outlets. As Tina Brown, the doyenne of post-modern media, has pointed out: the ‘conjunction of 21st-century Internet speed and 12th-century fanaticism has turned our world into a tinderbox.’

Testimony presented to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on May 4, 2006.

RAND | Testimonies | The Use of the Internet by Islamic Extremists

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Congratulations to Elonka on making prime coverage in the New York Times ...

For nearly 16 years, puzzle enthusiasts have labored to decipher an 865-character coded message stenciled into a sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. This week, the sculptor gave them an unsettling but hopeful surprise: part of the message they thought they had deciphered years ago actually says something else.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Sanborn left a phone message for Elonka Dunin, a computer game developer who also runs an e-mail list for enthusiasts trying to solve the "Kryptos" puzzle. For the first time, Mr. Sanborn had done a line-by-line analysis of his text with what Mr. Gillogly and Mr. Stein had offered as the solution and discovered that part of the solved text was incorrect.

Within minutes, Ms. Dunin called back, and Mr. Sanborn told her that in the second section, one of the X's he had used as a separator between sentences had been omitted, altering the solution. "He was concerned that it had been widely published incorrectly," Ms. Dunin said.

Ms. Dunin excitedly started sending instant messages ...

A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery

The Pentagon hopes to save at least $2 billion after trimming a troubled $34 billion radio project, the Defense Department said.

After more than a year of restructuring, the Joint Tactical Radio System remains in limbo. Program officials have shuffled the program structure and mapped out a new outline, but details remain hazy.

DoD Trims Troubled Radio Project, Hopes To Save Billions

A bomb scare that shut down security checkpoints for two hours at Atlanta's airport was the result of a computer software glitch, the nation's top security administrator said.

Transportation Security Administration Director Kip Hawley said a screener at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport spotted what looked like an explosive on an X-ray machine. It was a false alarm. Hawley apologized for the numerous flight delays.

Computer Glitch Blamed in Atlanta Airport Bomb Scare

The ABL is a Boeing 747 aircraft being equipped with a high-powered chemical laser to destroy ballistic missiles in their boost phase. Boeing Co. of Chicago is the prime contactor on the effort.

As envisioned, the aircraft would fly in a figure-eight pattern over an area deemed a likely site of a missile launch. Onboard infrared sensors would detect the launch and feed that information into a computer that would direct the laser turret to point at the ascending missile. The turret would then fire two lower-powered solid-state lasers—one to track the missile and one to measure atmospheric distortion—before shooting the high-powered chemical laser at the target.

SPACE.com -- Officials Map Out Test Milestones for Airborne Laser

ClickRepair finds and repairs clicks and crackle in audio files obtained by capturing vinyl and shellac (78) records to digital CD format. It is not a filter; it searches the file sample-by-sample, and only changes those identified as being suspect. It is possible to operate automatically, or to intervene manually as required. Favorite detection and repair settings may be named and saved.

ClickRepair

I saw a video the other day that really stood out from the rest of the links making the rounds.

It depicts a man demonstrating software that appears to parse what he's saying fast enough to reassemble the same words by pulling and reordering bits from a recorded Michael Jackson interview. The result: Jackson appears to speak the same sentence right back to him.

The man goes on to explain how the software behind this process works, and his video closes with a live performance of the software in which a performer appears to employ the beat-box method to control the playback of audio and video on a large video screen behind him, in front of what I can only imagine must be a dazzled crowd.

If you haven't seen it yet, you can watch the video here.

The Man Behind Scrambled Hackz

More than four years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, federal agencies still have not standardized processes to share terrorist-related as well as sensitive, but unclassified, information, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a report released yesterday

GAO: Feds need governmentwide policies on info sharing - Computerworld