Kevin Kelly:

There is a cost to run this machine, a cost we are only beginning to reckon with, but so far the gains from this ever enlarging technium outweigh the alternative of no machine at all.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Louis Menand:

Television was the Cold War intellectuals’ nightmare, a machine for bringing kitsch and commercialism directly into the home. But by exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically. We read the horror comics today and smile complacently at the sheer over-the-top campiness of the effects. In fact, that is the only way we can read them. We have lost our innocence.

The Unabomber Was Right

The Golden Grid is a web grid system. It's a product of the search for the perfect modern grid system.

The Golden Grid

Neil Postman:

It is all the same: There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and it is a delusion to believe that the technological changes of our era have rendered irrelevant the wisdom of the ages and the sages.

Nonetheless, having said this, I know perfectly well that because we do live in a technological age, we have some special problems that Jesus, Hillel, Socrates, and Micah did not and could not speak of. I do not have the wisdom to say what we ought to do about such problems, and so my contribution must confine itself to some things we need to know in order to address the problems. I call my talk Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. I base these ideas on my thirty years of studying the history of technological change but I do not think these are academic or esoteric ideas. They are to the sort of things everyone who is concerned with cultural stability and balance should know and I offer them to you in the hope that you will find them useful in thinking about the effects of technology on religious faith.

Richard Hamming:

I finally adopted what I called "Great Thoughts Time." When I went to lunch Friday noon, I would only discuss great thoughts after that. By great thoughts I mean ones like: "What will be the role of computers in all of AT&T?", "How will computers change science?" I thought hard about where was my field going, where were the opportunities, and what were the important things to do. Let me go there so there is a chance I can do important things.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change

Kevin Kelly:

In any debate about the merits of embracing new technology, the Amish stand out as offering an honorable alternative of refusal. Yet Amish lives are anything but anti-technological. In fact on my several visits with them, I have found them to be ingenious hackers and tinkers, the ultimate makers and do-it-yourselfers and surprisingly pro technology.

Amish Hackers

Sherry Turkle published a new book last Halloween.

I have a closet full of ancient Apples and Macintoshes — even a Lisa — and I dare not throw one away.

Why?

From the Publishers Weekly review:

Providing a number of perspectives on how everyday technology "inhabits the inner life and becomes charged with personal meaning," this collection from author, editor and MIT professor Turkle reconsiders "sanctioned ways of understanding" average devices.

Edward Valauskas, editor at First Monday, offers a review:

This book will force you to think about your relationships with technology, and to more carefully watch those around you and their uses of different devices.

Indeed, it will make you think about the machines around you in a profound way; how do these things really make you feel?

From the archive:

Kids are certainly enthralled. "I know tons of people who are addicted."

The Inner History of Devices

Bernardo Huberman:

Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.

Recently, Decius predicted:

Something interesting is about to happen here.

Today, we learned:

Twitter said Monday that 33 member accounts were hijacked, including those of President-elect Barack Obama, singer Britney Spears and CNN correspondent Rick Sanchez.

On Monday, fake updates were made to several accounts, including obscene references to body parts and mentions of illicit drug use.

From 2006:

As far as Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt. Rocky Costa is concerned, "MySpace has absolutely exploded, and the only real way to protect ourselves -- besides filtering and firewalls -- is to always tell yourself, `I am not gonna give out authentic information.'"

From 2001:

antrophagus: It’s only a few days until March 9

cator99: Still, I would have rather met you yesterday and felt your teeth

antrophagus: One can’t have everything. There’s still some time before you really feel my teeth

In 2002, Huberman wrote:

The power distance index of a culture has been shown to be correlated with the importance and acceptance of status symbols in that culture.

Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope

Ted Nelson has a new book.

The system of conventions called 'Computer Literacy' make little sense and can only be understood historically. Here is the briefest possible digest.

From the archive:

The trick is to make people think that a certain paradigm is inevitable, and they had better give in.

Geeks Bearing Gifts

The Cisco Annual Security Report provides a comprehensive overview of the combined security intelligence of the entire Cisco organization. Encompassing threat and trends information collected between January and October 2008, this document provides a snapshot of the state of security for that period. The report also provides recommendations from Cisco security experts and predictions of how identified trends will continue to unfold in 2009.

This year's report reveals that online and data security threats continue to increase in number and sophistication. They propagate faster and are more difficult to detect.

Key report findings include:

* Spam accounts for nearly 200 billion messages each day, which is approximately 90 percent of email sent worldwide
* The overall number of disclosed vulnerabilities grew by 11.5 percent over 2007
* Vulnerabilities in virtualization products tripled to 103 in 2008 from 35 in 2007, as more organizations embraced virtualization technologies to increase cost-efficiency and productivity
* Over the course of 2008, Cisco saw a 90 percent growth rate in threats originating from legitimate domains; nearly double what the company saw in 2007
* Spam due to email reputation hijacking from the top three webmail providers accounted for just under 1 percent of all spam worldwide, but constituted 7.6 percent of all these providers' mail

Fortunately, responses to these threats and trends are improving. Advances in attack response stem from the increased collaboration between vendors and security researchers to review, identify, and combat vulnerabilities.

Recently:

The potential value of total advertised goods observed by Symantec was more than $276 million for the reporting period. This value was determined using the advertised prices of the goods and services and measured how much advertisers would make if they liquidated their inventory.

Cisco 2008 Annual Security Report

Michal Zalewski, Googler:

This document is meant to provide web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers. Insufficient understanding of these often poorly-documented characteristics is a major contributing factor to the prevalence of several classes of security vulnerabilities.

Although all browsers implement roughly the same set of baseline features, there is relatively little standardization - or conformance to standards - when it comes to many of the less apparent implementation details. Furthermore, vendors routinely introduce proprietary tweaks or improvements that may interfere with existing features in non-obvious ways, and seldom provide a detailed discussion of potential problems.

From the archive:

“attacker can perform the aforementioned attack by deploying an uncooled microbolometer thermal imaging (far infrared) camera within up to approximately five to ten minutes after valid keycode entry”

Browser Security Handbook

Ben Laurie:

One simply cannot properly secure a general-purpose operating system.

We suggest a solution that involves taking both the Blue Pill and the Red Pill: providing the trusted path by means of a separate device with a secure operating system, used in tandem with the existing general purpose operating system.

Choose the Red Pill and the Blue Pill