Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Dave: How to edit an outline for the podcast directory. [Scripting News] 8:50:22 PM    comment []

E-Health Gaffe Exposes Hospital. An Indiana computer consultant finds a password hard-coded into a popular medical office application, and that leads to patient data from a hospital in Washington, D.C. By Kevin Poulsen. [Wired News: Top Stories] 6:35:23 AM    comment []

Update on HOPE speaker Rambam arrested by Feds at event. Xeni Jardin: Following up on this earlier BoingBoing post, Brian Krebs at the WaPo's security blog reports that the FBI is charging Rambam (aka Rombom) with witness tampering and obstruction of justice. Snip: The complaint, available here as a PDF, charges Rombom with obstruction of justice and with witness tampering, alleging that in April 2006 Rombom impersonated a federal investigator at the request of a client who had hired him to locate a government informant who was central to the client's money-laundering indictment in 2003. Rombom is a licensed private investigator and founder of Pallorium Inc., which bills itself as the largest privately held online private investigation service in the United States. The government charges that Rombom unlawfully interfered with an ongoing case prosecutors filed against Albert Santoro, a former Brooklyn assistant district attorney who was indicted in Jan. 2003 with one count of money-laundering (prosecutors have accused Santoro of agreeing to launder $100,000 in cash for drug dealers and claiming he knew how to stymie money-laundering investigations); The complaint says Santoro hired Rombom to locate one of the government's confidential informants, whom Santoro has publicly accused of entrapment. (...) Rombom appeared in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York yesterday and was released on his own recognizance. He is scheduled to appear again on Aug. 7. The Washington Post print edition today carries a brief story that draws from this update and reporting from the last two blog posts. Link to full text of post. And BoingBoing reader Jayzel reminds us that Rambam was "previously involved in a lawsuit against a prominent anti-spam blacklist hosting service." [Boing Boing] 6:34:58 AM    comment []

amazon drought nearing climate tipping point. The Amazon rainforest becomes "a desert" after three consecutive years without rain - the trees die. Next year would be the third year of an ongoing drought. The forest contains 90 billion tons of carbon (or about 45 years of stored human emmisions at current rates) - 3/4's of the carbon is released within a year of dieing. The Amazon is "headed in a terrible direction". [MetaFilter] 6:32:26 AM    comment []

Dave Pollard on Comfort Music. Saturday night as I was driving home from our daughter's house (about the only useful thing I've accomplished in the last week, thanks to the ulcerative colitis and the @&%^ drug that's supposed to alleviate its symptoms) I was listening to a CBC summer radio program called Sample This. At the end of the show they said next week's program would be about comfort music, and invited listeners to write in with their recommendations in that genre. Naturally, this hit home with me. . . . . I went through my iTunes list and concluded that everything in my 800-song collection is comfort music, of one of four kinds: angry, defiant, get it out of your system music (subjectively comforting) distracting, uplifting, relating music that has personal meaning to you (subjectively comforting) songs whose lyrics are unambiguously intended to comfort, calm, soothe everyone (objectively comforting) grooving, transporting, get away from your cares instrumental music (objectively comforting)   . . . Type 3 Calming Music (with calming melody and comforting lyrics): Shower the People, by James Taylor (pictured above) Bridge over Troubled Water, by Simon & Garfunkel Willow, by Joan Armatrading Happy Man, by Chicago Heal Over, by KT Tunstall Type 4 Transporting Music (instrumental): Sarah Victoria, by Acoustic Alchemy Zungulake, by Quatre Etoiles (it has lyrics, but they're in a Zairian language, so since nobody knows what they mean they don't count) Variations on a Theme of Erik Satie, by Blood Sweat & Tears (guitar/flute version of Satie's first Gymnopédie) Sand Sea & Time, by Bruce Cockburn Samba Pa Ti, by Carlos Santana Song With No Words, by David Crosby (brilliant 60s jam by 30 of the best musicians of the day) Smooching, by Mark Knopfler (from the Local Hero soundtrack) [How to Save the World] 6:32:17 AM    comment []

Monday, July 24, 2006

NYT on serious games. In the NYT, there is a good article by Clive Thompson about serious games or the inherent potential of games to be learning platform. Some excerpts: Games, they argue, can be more than just mindless fun, they can be a medium for change. (…) “What everyone’s realizing is that games are really good at illustrating complex situations,â€� said Suzanne Seggerman (…) Henry Jenkins, an M.I.T. professor who studies games and learning, said the medium has matured along with the young people who were raised on it. “The generation that grew up with Super Mario is entering the workplace, entering politics, so they see games as just another good tool to use to communicate,â€� he added. “If games are going to be a mature medium, they’re going to serve a variety of functions. It’s like with film. We think first of using it for entertainment, but then also for education and advertising and politics and all that stuff.â€� (…) This is the central conceit behind all these efforts: that games are uniquely good at teaching people how complex systems work. (…) But do these games actually work? Even proponents admit that it’s still difficult to say. “These things are just at the prototype level,â€� Professor Jenkins said. “We’ve just got one classroom here, one classroom there, where we’ve documented some benefits.â€� And without more studies documenting the effectiveness of the games, he said, “oxygen’s going to be sucked out of this.â€� (…) “Ultimately, a video game is just another medium for artistic expression,â€� he concluded. “Which is why I like this game in a weird way, because if you are going to play games, why not learn something important in the process?â€� The article is also full of examples of this types of games. [unmediated] 7:51:41 PM    comment []

Arrest mars second day of HOPE (IDG). Tensions ran high on the second day of the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference, as the FBI made a surprise visit to arrest one of the scheduled panelists. Steve Rambam, a noted private investigator who runs Pallorium, Inc., an online investigative service, was set to lead a panel discussion titled "Privacy is Dead... Get Over It." According to other members of the privacy panel, four men in blue coats appeared shortly before the panel and led Rambam away in handcuffs. "If you know Steve you know he's flamboyant, and at first I thought, oh, it's PR, you know," said a visibly distraught Kelly Riddle, one of the other members of the privacy panel, to the audience. Riddle said that the FBI had also taken Rambam's presentation -- which included Rambam's laptop and around 500 pages of documentation that Rambam had amassed from the Internet to illustrate his talk. . . . . True to the hacker ethos, at least one conference attendee was already sporting a "Free Steve" T-shirt a few hours later--an echo of the long-running "Free Kevin" campaign to release famed hacker Kevin Mitnick. Mitnick was also missing in action on Saturday; the hacker, who was released in 2002 after serving five years in jail, was set to star in the hotly anticipated "Hackers in Prison" panel, in which three of the most notorious formerly imprisoned hackers--Mitnick, Mark "Phiber Optik" Abene and bernieS--were to appear onstage, together, for the first time. Mitnick was also scheduled to lead an "Kevin Mitnick Unplugged" talk afterward. According to conference organizers, Mitnick was in a hospital in Colombia, and they did not know when he would return. Even without Mitnick, the "Hackers in Prison" panel captivated the crammed hall. . . . . 7:01:28 AM    comment []

Is buying local always best?. Small shops and farmers benefit. But that may be outweighed by the cost to other parts of the world. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories] 6:24:39 AM    comment []

Scott: One blog ends, another begins. This blog is moving. Almost exactly four years ago, on July 22, 2002, I started my first blog. Blogging felt natural to me since I'd been writing for the Web since 1994 and self-publishing since 1974 (originally via mimeograph). My blog was part of a larger blogging program I'd put together at Salon, in partnership with Userland. It was the tech-downturn doldrums -- an era when every time we at Salon opened the papers or fired up our browsers we knew that someone, somewhere, would be predicting our imminent demise. And there wasn't a lot of extra cash at the company at the time, so the blogs program was chiefly a labor of love, launched in the wee hours. I did the CSS, wrangling Salon's home-page design into Radio Userland templates, all by myself (which anyone who knows anything about CSS can probably tell with a single glance at the unruly code). I loved Radio Userland at the time for the way it combined a blog publishing system and an RSS reader. But times change; Userland put its energy into other products; Salon Blogs produced many great blogs but not a substantial change in Salon's business; and my blog settled down from the program's focal point to a personal-publishing bullhorn. Several months ago, in anticipation of Salon's plan to build a new platform for users to contribute their own writing, we closed off new signups to the old Salon Blogs platform. Today I'm moving my own blog to a new home, here, at Wordyard. I've managed to export my whole four years' worth of archives (over 1000 posts, averaging about one per weekday for the whole timespan) to Wordpress. (For those who care, I used the Radio Userland exporter, which pops out a plaintext file in Movable Type export format; edited that file to make things like titles and categories work; then imported into Wordpress.) The comments, alas, will remain back at the original Salon Blogs location, where they will continue to be available. With this move, I plan to blog somewhat more vigorously, and to provide more posts about my forthcoming book, Dreaming in Code, as its January 2007 publish date nears. I also look forward to leveraging some of the great features and plugins created by the Wordpress open-source community. If you subscribe to my RSS feed in Bloglines (the reader I've been using daily for years), the transition should be transparent -- Bloglines will do the flip for you, you don't need to touch anything. If you subscribe through other feed readers or services, you'll have to resubscribe to the new feed address, which is here. More anon! [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 6:24:10 AM    comment []

Best "Series of Tubes" yet: t-shirt from HOPE con. Xeni Jardin: Further embiggening the pile of parodies inspired by Senator Stevens' infamously inept analogy: a t-shirt spotted at HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) in NYC this week. Link (thanks, Jacob Appelbaum!) [Boing Boing] 6:07:34 AM    comment []

Sunday, July 23, 2006

On-Line Philosophy Lectures (Nadelhoffer). The good folks at A Brood Comb have put together a list of on-line philosophy lectures here.  If you know of others, feel free to email me and I will update this post.  In this context, it's worth reminding everyone that the second installation of the On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC)--tentatively planned for February 2007--will kick off with a webcast as well!  [Leiter Reports: A Group Blog] 4:47:53 PM    comment []

95 Theses of Geek Activism: how to defend freedom with tech. Cory Doctorow: The "95 Theses of Geek Activism" is a great list of 95 ways to use knowledge for good, and to defend freedom with technology. 1 Reclaim the term "hacker". If you tinker with electronics, you are a hacker. If you use things in more ways than intended by the manufacturer, you are a hacker. If you build things out of strange, unexpected parts, you are a hacker. Reclaim the term. 2 Violating a license agreement is not theft. 3 All corporations are not on your side. 4 Keep in touch with everyone you can vote for and make sure you know where they stand on the issues you care about. 5 More importantly, make sure they know where you stand on the issues you care about. Link (Thanks, Devan!) [Boing Boing] 4:47:02 PM    comment []

DIY Cyberglasses. I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of waiting for my wearable cybertech enhancements. It looks like some other folk are getting twitchy too, to the extent of getting on with it themselves - some futurist with sharp eyes and steady hands cheerfully went and built his own head-up display into a pair of innocuously normal-looking sunglasses. I wonder if he does custom orders? [unmediated] 4:46:57 PM    comment []

Saturday, July 22, 2006

unmediated: Podcast Quick Tip: PDF in iTunes (via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated) In addition to putting audio and video files in your iTunes podcast feed, you can also feed an Adobe PDF file to your listeners. 8:06:39 PM    comment []

The Persian game: Masters of ambiguity, Iran's leaders don't want war with Israel and the U.S. -- and are more alarmed by the Lebanese crisis than the West realizes. By Afshin Molavi, in Salon. 5:50:05 PM    comment []

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Two from BNA News: BOGUS CLICKS ON WEB ADS CONTINUE TO RISE A report by Click Forensics says swindlers have stepped up their effort to fleece millions of dollars from online advertisers who use lucrative marketing networks run by Google and Yahoo. The sales referrals generated by clicks on the brief advertising links popularized by the two Internet powerhouses are a sham 14.1 percent of the time, up from a click fraud rate of 13.7 percent three months ago. AGE VERIFICATION AT SOCIAL-NETWORK SITES COULD PROVE TOUGH With heightened concerns over sexual predators lurking at so-called social-networking sites, state attorneys general have called for such communities, particularly MySpace, to improve age and identity checks. However, experts say that implementing such a system would not be that easy. MySpace's safety czar says any technical solution must be part of a set that includes education and cooperation with law enforcement. 7:23:06 AM    comment []

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Revised Report by Federal Commission Offers Less Harsh Critique of Higher Education, by Kelly Field, CHE. The new version of the report incorporates revisions suggested by members of the 19-member panel and omits some of the most stinging barbs included in the original draft, including a sentence that blamed rising college costs on institutions' failure "to take aggressive steps to improve institutional efficiency and productivity." Instead, the new version acknowledges that cuts in state funding have contributed to rising tuitions. The report also eliminates references to grade inflation, "lax" academic standards, and "a campus culture that in too many instances seems to promote underachievement, anti-intellectualism, and excessive socializing." . . . At commission members' request, a section on the importance of preparing students to compete in the global economy was added to the report, along with new statistics on the underrepresentation of minorities and low-income students in higher education, among other things. Earlier coverage here, and Commission Web page, with links to reports and so on, here. 8:46:39 PM    comment []

Three from the gang at BoingBoing: Coming soon, the $1000 genetic report card. David Pescovitz: In the near future, it might only cost $1000 to sequence your entire genome. Three years ago, the first human genome decoding cost a total of $500 million. Now, it might cost $10-$15 million. The New York Times reports on several companies vying to drive the cost down to less than a grand, possibly ushering in an age where "genetic report cards" may be available at birth. From the new York Times: David Bentley, Solexa's chief scientist, said that the company's DNA sequencing machine had already decoded several bacterial genomes and that he was planning to sequence a human genome -- that of an anonymous man from the Yoruba people of Nigeria. An African genome was chosen because there is greater genetic diversity in African populations, Dr. Bentley said. The demand for whole genome sequencing is a long way off, in Dr. Bentley's view, but not so distant that it is too early to think about the consequences of generating such information. He advocates that two people should control access to a person's genome sequence -- the patient and the physician. Why not the patient alone? Dr. Bentley said genomes would be so difficult to analyze correctly that interpretation should stay within the medical profession. Otherwise, freelance services will spring up, offering to predict whether a person will get heart disease or their age of death. This potential for misinformation "would have a huge adverse impact on the medical use of genetic information," Dr. Bentley said. Link Will Bix kill the record industry? (I hope so). Mark Frauenfelder: Last month I had lunch with Epinions co-founder Mike Speiser, who showed me a preview of a product his team at his new company created. The company is called Bix (named after the early jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke). The idea behind Bix is neat -- a combination of American Idol and YouTube's lip syncing madness. Basically, anyone can set up a contest -- karaoke, lip-syncing, beauty, whatever (I suggested magic routines and Mike seemed to like that idea). People can enter that contest (sometimes paying a required entry fee, which will be split between the contest winner, the contest creator, and Bix) and use their webcam to record their performance. Bix has licensed the use of lyrics and music from the record companies, which I'm sure is costing quite a bit of money. One thing I'm interested in is seeing what happens when bands perform original music on Bix. If Bix (or something like it) really takes off, then bands who win "best original song" contests will have a built-in audience to buy their music. And who needs the record industry to press CDs or make deals with iTunes then? Bix and the artists could simply sell the music as MP3s right from the site. Sure, parts of the music industry probably won't ever go away, especially publishing. But the parts that involves making bands and making CDs are going to have to learn from these new experiments if they want to be around in the next five years. Om Malik has more to say on the business of Bix. Link Iran Air 747 TV ad for '70s TV audiences in the US. Xeni Jardin: Sassan says, This is a a late 1970s advertisement for Iran Air, the nation's airliner. It's interesting because this ad was created before the 1979 Islamic revolution, when Iran and the United States were strong allies. Link [Boing Boing] 8:45:29 PM    comment []

Stuart Hughes is still Beyond Northern Iraq. In fact, He's reporting from Lebanon now. Yup. He notes: Until Flickr updates straight onto the blog, you can check into the Beirut photostream here. 8:44:18 PM    comment []

sethf has some India ISP Blogspot Blocking - Conjecture: I've read a bit on the story of ISP's in India blocking certain blog services. Many people have confirmed that it's happening, so it's apparently true. But it doesn't make sense. India is a democracy, so one wouldn't expect the sort of extreme censorship found in e.g. China. I briefly considered it might be a case of bans of a few particular blogs accidentally leading to widespread overblocking by cutting off entire servers, since many blogs are hosted on a single server (i.e. banning meant to be by-name was instead implemented by-IP address). But that can't be right, since while one ISP might make that mistake, several ISP's wouldn't *all* make that mistake, especially after complaints started coming in. It sure can't be a terrible fear of the Voice Of The People, since only some services are being censored. If the government was afraid of self-agonizing emergent intarwebizens, all such services would be blocked. So that explanation is nonsense. I wonder if we'll find out that somebody said that terrorists were using *blogs* to communicate, so in a panic, prompted by the recent terrorist bombings in Mumbai, some government official issued a hasty "national security" directive to block certain blog services. That would fit the observed pattern, because those sort of panic directives are both overbroad, and people won't want to talk about them. It also implies that this should clear up in few days, as sanity prevails. We'll see. [Infothought] 7:52:00 PM    comment []

Monday, July 17, 2006

From the Department of Everything You Know is Wrong: Cortez and his legion didn't bring the microbes that kiilled the Aztecs by the tens of millions. Megadeath in Mexico: Epidemics followed the Spanish arrival in the New World, but the worst killer may have been a shadowy native—a killer that could still be out there. By Bruce Stutz, in Discover magazine. When Hernando Cortés and his Spanish army of fewer than a thousand men stormed into Mexico in 1519, the native population numbered about 22 million. By the end of the century, following a series of devastating epidemics, only 2 million people remained. Even compared with the casualties of the Black Death, the mortality rate was extraordinarily high. Mexican epidemiologist Rodolfo Acuña-Soto refers to it as the time of "megadeath." The toll forever altered the culture of Mesoamerica and branded the Spanish as the worst kind of conquerors, those from foreign lands who kill with their microbes as well as their swords. The notion that European colonialists brought sickness when they came to the New World was well established by the 16th century. Native populations in the Americas lacked immunities to common European diseases like smallpox, measles, and mumps. Within 20 years of Columbus's arrival, smallpox had wiped out at least half the people of the West Indies and had begun to spread to the South American mainland. In 1565 a Spanish royal judge who had investigated his country's colony in Mexico wrote: It is certain that from the day that D. Hernando Cortés, the Marquis del Valle, entered this land, in the seven years, more or less, that he conquered and governed it, the natives suffered many deaths, and many terrible dealings, robberies and oppressions were inflicted on them, taking advantage of their persons and their lands, without order, weight nor measure; . . . the people diminished in great number, as much due to excessive taxes and mistreatment, as to illness and smallpox, such that now a very great and notable fraction of the people are gone. . . . There seemed little reason to debate the nature of the plague: Even the Spanish admitted that European smallpox was the disease that devastated the conquered Aztec empire. Case closed. Then, four centuries later, Acuña-Soto improbably decided to reopen the investigation. Some key pieces of information—details that had been sitting, ignored, in the archives—just didn't add up. His studies of ancient documents revealed that the Aztecs were familiar with smallpox, perhaps even before Cortés arrived. They called it zahuatl. Spanish colonists wrote at the time that outbreaks of zahuatl occurred in 1520 and 1531 and, typical of smallpox, lasted about a year. As many as 8 million people died from those outbreaks. But the epidemic that appeared in 1545, followed by another in 1576, seemed to be another disease altogether. The Aztecs called those outbreaks by a separate name, cocolitzli. "For them, cocolitzli was something completely different and far more virulent," Acuña-Soto says. "Cocolitzli brought incomparable devastation that passed readily from one region to the next and killed quickly." After 12 years of research, Acuña-Soto has come to agree with the Aztecs: The cocolitzli plagues of the mid-16th century probably had nothing to do with smallpox. In fact, they probably had little to do with the Spanish invasion. But they probably did have an origin that is worth knowing about in 2006. 4:41:16 PM    comment []

Michael Geist: VIDEO AND THE INTERNET AN EXPLOSIVE MIX My weekly Law Bytes column examines the enormous success of a video mixing Diet Coke and Mentos, which has generated millions of viewers and $30,000 in revenue for the creators. I argue that the Mentos success story may sound like a fluke, it is better understood as part of a growing trend toward innovative online video distribution models, the majority of which operate outside traditional broadcast regulation. Toronto Star version at http://geistmentoscolumn.notlong.com Homepage version at http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id28 That last url is likely to break in transit. It should read (but all put together): http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php ? option = com_content & task = view & id = 1328 (Let's see how that works.) 10:38:48 AM    comment []

Has Skype been cracked? By David Meyer, ZDNet UK. Skype has moved quickly to try and scotch rumours of an imminent clone a development which would threaten the VoIP client's business model by introducing interoperability with its rivals Skype's model of being a communications island could be under threat, if reports that its voice and instant messaging client has been successfully reverse engineered are true. According to Charlie Paglee, the chief executive of a Chinese-American Internet telephony (VoIP) company called Vozin Communications, engineers from a small Chinese startup have managed to crack Skype's protocol. . . . Skype itself reacted to the news with a statement on Friday, saying it had "no evidence to suggest that this is true". "Even if it was possible to do this, the software code would lack the feature set and reliability of Skype which is enjoyed by over 100 million users today. Moreover, no amount of reverse engineering would threaten Skype's cryptographic security or integrity," Skype continued. 9:01:20 AM    comment []