Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Lenny's children. 40 years after Lenny Bruce began his dark descent, here are the top 10 true heirs to his outlaw legacy. [Salon.com] 10:35:51 PM    comment []

Del.icio.us Smartmobs. Whenever a media-using habit becomes obsessive-compulsive fun, I know something is happening that might change the way I do everything. I remember the first Macintosh I got my hands on, and the hours that were lost in Macpaint -- almost all of it using Fatbits, an artistic capability that no instrument had provided before. I remember when the first thing I did online every morning was check the NCSA Mosaic site to see what wild, wonderful, and useful websites had been created the night before. Virtual communities. Instant messaging. Blogging. Now I find myself drawn to the del.icio.us home page, just to see what people have bookmarked. Even more fun is checking out what has been added to the smartmobs or cooperation collections of juicy finds. Who ARE these people? And what ELSE are they bookmarking? Social bookmarking, folksonomy -- I even like the jargon people use before any of us really knows what shape this critter will take when it grows up. If you come across any sites that would interest others who are tracking smart mobs or cooperation -- bookmark them to those tags. Some day in the not too distant future, I'll post the best of what turns up. [Smart Mobs] 8:29:36 PM    comment []

Elvis Costello disclaims antipiracy warnings on his own CD Elvis Costello's new CD "The Delivery Man" is plastered with obnoxious FBI anti-piracy warnings. Over these is this legend: "THE ARTIST DOES NOT ENDORSE THE FOLLOWING WARNING. THE FBI DOESN'T HAVE HIS HOME PHONE NUMBER AND HE HOPES THAT THEY DON'T HAVE YOURS. Link (Thanks, Gary!) [bOing bOing] 8:29:24 PM    comment []

Academics get NSF grant for Net security centers. National Science Foundation grants $12.6 million to university scientists to study worms, viruses and the Net's ecology. [CNET News.com] The Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses, or the CIED, will work to understand how digital diseases such as worms and viruses spread across the Internet, and how epidemics can be defeated. The Security Through Interaction Modeling, STIM, Center will draw parallels with nature's ecology to understand the complex interaction between machines, humans and cyberattacks. "These centers, as well as our other funded activities, are looking not only for new ways to cope with imperfections in today's systems but also for the knowledge and techniques to build better systems in the future," Carl Landwehr, the NSF's program director for Cyber Trust, said in a statement.  . . . The CIED, led by Stefan Savage of the University of California at San Diego and Vern Paxson, a fellow principal investigator at the International Computer Science Institute of the University of California at Berkeley, will receive $6.2 million from the NSF. The center will study ways to quickly analyze self-propagating programs and to develop techniques for stopping outbreaks before they spread worldwide. "It is easy to build a defense against one particular virus or worm; that is what we do now," Paxson said in a statement. "But to stop whole classes of these pathogens requires far more insight into what it means to be an epidemic and how infectious behavior stands apart from legitimate use." The STIM Center, led by Mike Reiter of Carnegie Mellon University, will receive almost $6.4 million in funding from the NSF. The center will classify "healthy" network interactions to determine how to distinguish attacks and will study the interplay between different "species" of applications, such as e-mail and peer-to-peer networks. 8:26:04 PM    comment []

A Defiant Iran Starts Enriching Uranium. Iran begun converting tons of uranium into gas, a crucial step in making fuel for a nuclear reactor or a nuclear bomb. By By CRAIG S. SMITH. [The New York Times > International] If true -- or even widely perceived to be so -- oy. 8:18:16 PM    comment []

'Warez lawyer' had double agenda - claim, by Jan Libbenga, The Register. More details have emerged on the arrest of a German lawyer and three businessmen who masterminded an international warez network and grossed .1m. . . . The main suspect, Bernhard Syndikus, a lawyer, was arrested for criminal breach of copyright,money laundering and membership in a criminal conspiracy. He didn't request a lawyer himself after his custody, a spokesman told press agency DPA. Police last week raided the offices of Gravenreuth & Syndikus, a Munich law firm, of which Syndikus is a partner. According to German reports almost all the funds of the warez site Ftpwelt.com were channeled through an offshore company Internet Payment Systems Ltd, registered on the Caribbean island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, and ended up in a small eastern German town, Breitungen. Although hackers discovered the link between Ftpwelt.com and Syndikus, a posting earlier this year already revealed the relationship between the lawyer and several illegal sites, including Ftpwelt.com and what was advertised as Germany's biggest Bittorrent site, Bitfilme.com. A search in Google reveals this site was extremely popular among illegal movie swappers. . . . Syndikus is also the director of Global Netcom, a German company that developed diallers for pornographic vendors. German anti-dialler internet forums such as Computerbetrug.de (Computerfraud) and Dialerschutz.de (Dialler protection) have often issued warnings against these dialers, many of which are activated by closing a unwanted "pop-up" window. Not surprisingly, anti dialler sites urge victims to ignore bills they receive from rogue dialler companies. However, Syndikus argued that refusing to pay these bills is against the law. . . . Even more remarkable is the reputation of Syndikus's partner Günther Freiherr von Gravenreuth (real name: Günter Werner Dörr) who, according to his own biography, advised the European Institute for Computer Anti-Virus Research and German Association for Entertainment Software. von Gravenreuth was behind the much publicised Tanja campaign against software piracy. He tricked mostly adolescent male computer users into sending a list of pirated software to a fictional girl named "Tanja", and subsequently dragged them to court. The teenagers received a cease and desist notice along with a request for payment, in most cases between .1,000 and .5,000. 8:35:49 AM    comment []

Free Content Still Sells. Books containing material available online for free, like the 9/11 Commission Report, are still managing to rack up good, and in some cases very impressive, sales. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News] 7:22:45 AM    comment []

A9's UI. I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere - so I'll pitch in my own insights into A9. Not only is it a major step forward in the world of search engines - and sure to give Google and Yahoo a run for it's money - but it's also a major step forward in mainstream UI.  . . . I just love the images, the built in diary and the notion of an accompanying toolbar. [unmediated] 7:16:36 AM    comment []

Two from The New York Times > Business: Genes From Engineered Grass Spread for Miles, Study Finds. Critics worry that a new strain of grass that is resistant to the herbicide Roundup could transfer its resistance to weedy relatives. By By ANDREW POLLACK. Frequent Fliers Wonder if Their Miles Have a Future. With all these newly bankrupt airlines, what are frequent fliers doing to preserve their mileage assets and stay on schedule? By By CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT. 7:13:31 AM    comment []