"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." -- Marshall McLuhan, 1969
Schneier on Security: New German Hacking Law
Topic: Computer Security
9:12 pm EDT, Sep 26, 2007
Germany basically banned all "hacking tools." "Hacking tools" are not defined. This is having a spectacularly destructive impact on computer security research world wide as German resources become unavailable and people are starting to avoid traveling there. (Image from this story.)
You have no 4th amendment right to privacy in regard to your physical movements.
Topic: Surveillance
11:23 am EDT, Sep 25, 2007
This morning, you left the house tagged with a tracking device that the government can use to find out where you have been and where you are going.
I'm talking, of course, about your cell phone...
While most courts considering the issue have held that police need "probable cause" to track your movements, a new decision (.pdf) last week out of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts holds that law enforcement need show only "relevance to an ongoing investigation" to get a historical record of your past movement (something like the Jeffy trail in The Family Circus cartoon).
Someone sent me a link to woot.com this morning. I exclaimed that there is a special place in hell for the person who decided to use that domain for a commerical purpose. That hell involves having nothing to do but sit on efnet for millenia. Then I noticed the linked Thinkgeek page.
w00t belongs to gamers the world over. It seems to have been derived from the obselete 'whoot' which essentially is another way to say 'hoot' which itself is a shout or derisive laugh. But others maintain that w00t is the sound several players make while jumping like bunnies in Quake III. Still others want you to believe that it comes from the phrase 'wow loot' used in multiplayer RPGs many moons ago. And if you can believe it some folks even think it was derived from the gaming phrase, 'We Own the Other Team!' Fiction or fact? I suppose you'll just have to decide what 'w00t!' means to you...
Fiction you fucks. There is another special place in hell for people who think words like pwn and w00t are the recent inventions of multiplayer gamers. This word had become popular and then gone out of fashion long before Quake III was released. The first time I heard it was on efnet in a hacking related channel in 1992 or 1993. Its a combination of Woohoo and Root; as in "Woohoo, I got Root!"
Words like pwn and w00t are so obviously hacking related that its hard to understand why gamers would rationalize that they have something to do with quake. However, it is really interesting that these words have been appropriated by that scene and become extremely mainstream. When I saw Cartman say pwn on national television a few months ago I almost jumped out of my seat. I don't really know who invented the term, but that person is likely only one degree of separation from the folks who hang out at summercon.
A new technique shows resizing of images while keeping the important features of the image undistorted, also allows you to protect or remove part of the image with anything removed being automagically and seamlessly filled in.
This is making the rounds in technical circles today. The technique simple and very effective! Apparently Adobe has hired this guy so hopefully we'll see commercial availability soon.
had a project mentioned offhandedly on the Daily Show a few months ago but Virgil has seriously raised the bar by actually getting his picture on the Colbert report! We now have a new standard for leetness around here. If you haven't been personally denounced by Steven Colbert, you just aren't that important...
Katie Hafner puts Virgil on the front page of the Sunday New York Times.
The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor’s network. The address information was already available on Wikipedia, but the new site makes it much easier to connect those numbers with the names of network owners.
WikiScanner is the work of Virgil Griffith, 24, a cognitive scientist who is a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Mr. Griffith, who spent two weeks this summer writing the software for the site, said he got interested in creating such a tool last year after hearing of members of Congress who were editing their own entries.
Mr. Griffith said he “was expecting a few people to get nailed pretty hard” after his service became public. “The yield, in terms of public relations disasters, is about what I expected.”
Mr. Griffith, who also likes to refer to himself as a “disruptive technologist,” said he was certain any more examples of self-interested editing would come out in the next few weeks, “because the data set is just so huge.”
I love seeing my friends in the news. Especially when it's not because someone is suing them.
See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
Topic: Technology
11:50 am EDT, Aug 14, 2007
Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
The Department of Homeland Security is hoping to overcome that limitation by automating the identification of individuals whose behavior suggests they pose a threat via a program dubbed "Hostile Intent."
The software is pretty cool. So is the mood driven PONG. [ Video Link ]
But the spectrum of human emotion can not be lumped into a few categories.
Donnie: Life isn't that simple. I mean who cares if Ling Ling returns the wallet and keeps the money? It has nothing to do with either fear or love. Kitty Farmer: Fear and love are the deepest of human emotions. Donnie: Okay. But you're not listening to me. There are other things that need to be taken into account here. Like the whole spectrum of human emotion. You can't just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else!
Internet Archive: Report to the Congress: Congressional Hearings Online
Topic: Politics and Law
8:19 pm EDT, Aug 4, 2007
By the end of the 110th Congress, the U.S. House of Representatives could achieve the goal of providing broadcast-quality video of all hearings and the floor for download on the Internet.
This is an important and under-recognized victory for the openness of our democracy.
There is still more that needs to be done though. I feel it is also necessary to make searchable transcripts available of committee hearings in the same way as the rest of the congressional record.
