Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Emergence. What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form staggeringly complicated societies, all without a Toscanini to conduct them into harmony. How? That's our question this hour. [WNYC New York Public Radio] 8:34:49 PM    comment []

Changing the Game, PlayStation Goes Mobile. Sony is about to enter the American arena in hand-held gaming with its PlayStation Portable, a machine that can also play full-length films, home videos, photos and music. Will it score with new audiences? By MICHEL MARRIOTT. [NYT > Technology] 8:33:36 PM    comment []

Curiosity Kills MBA Hopefuls' Chances. On Foxnews: U.S. & World [NewsIsFree: Popular Items] 8:29:36 PM    comment []

I-Pod Experiment, by Steve Veres, The Chronicle (Duke U). 2:01:40 PM    comment []

Following up ... MIT says it won't admit hackers, by Robert Weisman, Boston Globe. (Though, mind you, it's the business school at issue, not CS or something.) The dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management yesterday said Sloan will join Harvard Business School in rejecting applications from prospective students who hacked into a website last week to learn whether they had been admitted before they were formally notified. Stanford's Graduate School of Business, meanwhile, asked its own applicant-hackers to come forward and explain their actions, in a sign that the California school soon may take tougher action as well. Thirty-two applicants apparently sought an early peek at the confidential data in their admission files at Sloan, while 41 files were targeted at Stanford and 119 at Harvard. Harvard on Monday became the second victimized business school to say outright it would not admit proven hackers. The first was Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, where one admission file was violated. Those schools, along with Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and Duke's Fuqua School of Business, all use an independent website run by ApplyYourself Inc. of Fairfax, Va., to receive applications and, in some cases, manage communications with applicants. After midnight last Wednesday, hundreds of business school admission files were targeted by computers around the globe when a hacker posted detailed instructions on a BusinessWeek Online forum. Most of the hackers saw only blank screens, though some who accessed admission files at Harvard viewed preliminary decision information. Students who hacked the ApplyYourself website will be denied admission to Sloan, the school's dean, Richard L. Schmalensee, said in an interview yesterday after a team from Sloan met with representatives of ApplyYourself to learn what happened. Sloan used the website only to receive applications, using a separate in-house server to handle the admissions process, he said. Schmalensee said he made his decision to reject the 32 applicants after seeing the directions posted by the hacker. The instructions are reasonably elaborate, he said. You didn't need a degree in computer science, but this clearly involved effort. You couldn't do this casually without knowing you were doing something wrong. We've always taken ethics seriously, and this is a serious matter. 11:01:13 AM    comment []

From BNA News, word that MAN SENTENCED TO 5 1/2 YEARS IN JAIL IN CHOICEPOINT THEFT A Nigerian national who used personal information from ChoicePoint and other companies to commit identity theft against thousands of people was sentenced to 5½ years in federal prison. In addition to the jail term, the man was ordered Monday to pay nearly $155,000 in restitution to 10 financial institutions. 9:54:16 AM    comment []

BitTorrent 4.0 has a new GUI on Linux and Windows, a new license, and miscellaneous small changes. [Hack the Planet] 6:16:56 AM    comment []

OJR tutorials on ethics, reporting and writing. [Scripting News] 6:16:02 AM    comment []

Fashion louder than words. In today's Iran, sporting a necktie with your suit says much more than the actuall words you could possibly say, especially if you are announcing you are planning to run for president. Ebrahim Yazdi, the most prominent of the main nationalist party in today's Iranian political scene, Nehzat-e Azadi (Iran Freedom Movement), has officially announced his candidacy today. His picture was on the cover of Shargh (PDF). [Editor: Myself (English)] 6:15:59 AM    comment []

Business schools redefine hacking to "stuff that a 7-year-old could do". When universities created business schools in the 20th Century traditional academics decried the collapse of standards.  Instead of students studying Literature, Art, History, and Science they would be going through the motions of a scholar while occupying their minds with things that formerly had been learned at a desk as an apprentice in a dreary Victorian counting house.  Now in the 21st century the B-schools are degrading the term "computer hacking". Here are the facts: Harvard and a bunch of other B-schools with a collective IT budget of maybe $50 million decided that writing Perl scripts was too hard so they outsourced Web-based applications to a company called ApplyYourself. You'd think that the main advantage of a centralized service such as ApplyYourself would be that a prospective student could fill out one application and the information be sent simultaneously to many schools.  However, this is not how it works.  Each school has a totally separate area with ApplyYourself. All the smart young Americans have gone to law, business, and medical school.  Companies don't like to hire old people (> 30 years) to write computer programs because it saddens them to see old folks doing something so degrading.  Thus ApplyYourself hired whoever was rejected by professional schools to write up some Visual Basic scripts to process HBS and other B-school applications. The ApplyYourself code had a bug such that editing the URL in the "Address" or "Location" field of a Web browser window would result in an applicant being able to find out his admissions status several weeks before the official notification date.  This would be equivalent to a 7-year-old being offered a URL of the form http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20030817-utah-air-to-air/ and editing it down to http://philip.greenspun.com/images/ to see what else of interest might be on the server. Someone figured this out and posted the URL editing idea on the BusinessWeek discussion forum, where all B-school hopefuls hang out and a bunch of curious applicants tried it out. Now all the curious applicants, having edited their URLs, are being denied admission to Harvard and, due to the fact that  universities form cartels to fix tuition prices and other policies, presumably to the other B-schools as well.  . . . In the 1960s the term "hacking" meant smart people developing useful and innovative computer software.  In the 1990s the term meant smart evil people developing and running programs to break into computer systems and gain shell access to those systems.  Thanks to Harvard Business school the term now means "people of average IQ poking around curiously by editing URLs on public servers and seeing what comes back in the form of directory listings, etc." [Philip Greenspun Weblog] 6:11:09 AM    comment []

Data Is Lacking on Iran's Arms, U.S. Panel Says. A report due this month will describe U.S. intelligence on Iran's weapons programs as inadequate to allow firm judgments. By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT. [NYT > International] 6:08:50 AM    comment []

First GDC keynote transcribed for your morning coffee. Wonderland has done a wonderful job of laying out one of the keynotes from GDC. The speaker was Raph Koster, who wrote "A Theory of Fun". It's a loose transcript but it does the job of catching Koster's enthusiasm just fine. He seems to believe that games are a lot more than entertainment. In fact, he thinks they hold the key to solutions to everyday problems - past, present and future. His conclusion launches GDC with just the right tone: We have to figure out games that don't have one right answer, and we face our own cognitive challenges here. Otherwise we know what the fate of games will be: they'll be the thing you stop doing when you're 25 and you get kids. We'll be missing out on a chance to improve the human condition. So what I want to see: the games about curing cancer. The games about how do we restructure Florida when it's under water? That's where we need to go. In the end games stand on their own as the ONLY MEDIUM THAT TEACHES FORMAL SYSTEMS IN THIS WAY. It is the only communicative medium that does this. It is the only fully experiential method of learning abstract concepts. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. If you've been falling asleep in the flood of holiday/post-holiday titles, the speech is like a shot of caffeine.[via boingboing] Via Joystiq [unmediated] 6:07:16 AM    comment []

Are telephone callers journalists?. Despite its having been on the table for at least six years now, this question of whether bloggers are journalists won't seem to rest, and now that the courts are getting involved, we don't have much choice but to revisit it, as Slashdot, among many others, has done today. Dan Fost's San Francisco Chronicle story provides a good summary of the issue, as Apple Computer pursues its suit to get some bloggers to reveal the sources of anonymous information they published. But the article misses the most basic distinction at work here. A blogger is someone who uses a certain kind of tool to publish a certain kind of Web site. The label tells us nothing about how the tool is used or what is published. We went through this discussion a decade ago, when people first started asking whether Web sites were journalism. To understand this, just take the question, "Are bloggers journalists?" and reframe it in terms of previous generations of tools. "Are telephone callers journalists?" "Are typewriter users journalists?" "Are mimeograph operators journalists?" Or, most simply, "Are writers journalists?" Well, duh, sometimes! But sometimes not. That is the only answer to the "Are bloggers journalists?" question that makes any sense. Bloggers sometimes engage in journalism, just as they sometimes engage in diary-writing, art-making, essayizing and many other forms of communication. This answer is inconvenient, as we face the question of whether bloggers should receive the same legal protection as more conventionally defined journalists; it doesn't provide a clearcut legal rule. But, let's face it, legal protections for journalists have always involved a certain fuzziness. Since, thankfully, the U.S. government doesn't legally charter journalists -- that would be difficult to square with the First Amendment -- everyone is free to apply the label to themselves. You don't need a journalism degree, either. (I've been a journalist for three decades and I don't have one.) You can try to define journalists by applying the filter of professionalism, by seeing whether people are actually earning a living through their journalistic work -- but then you rule out the vast population of low-paid or non-paid freelance workers, and those who are not currently making money in their writing but hope to someday. Apparently most of the existing shield laws use some version of the "you are where your paycheck comes from" definition of journalist (see Declan McCullagh over at CNET for more). That's one good reason for thinking that they might need some revision. There's a good definition of "journalist" sitting right at the top of Jim Romenesko's journalism blog today (is pioneering blogger Romenesko a journalist?), where CNN/U.S. president Jonathan Klein says: "I define a journalist as someone who asks questions, finds out answers and communicates them to an audience." By that standard, a hefty proportion of today's bloggers qualify. Does this vast expansion of the journalism population mean that the courts and legislatures are going to have second thoughts about protecting journalists' confidentiality? Perhaps -- and maybe those shield laws need tweaking or amendment, given the transformations underway. But any attempt to draw a narrow line around the journalism profession in order to preserve those laws is doomed to fail. There is no way to draw that line -- income level? circulation? corporate size? forget it! -- that is not ridiculous on its face. So we're left with the pathetic spectacle of beloved Apple Computer chasing down some bloggers to find out which of its employees leaked some early peeks at product information. Apple may win, and the laws may contort themselves to exclude the vast new throngs of online journalists from the protected club. But is there any doubt that, in the long run, it's Apple's dam-building effort that's doomed? Whether protected by law or not, the teeming network of the blogosphere is not going to shut down, any more than online music file sharing could be ended by the legal campaign against Napster. In this sense, the whole "journalists or not?" debate is an irrelevant, backward-looking theological dispute. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 6:01:39 AM    comment []

The Academy vs Blogging. Eric Anderson a reader/contributor of illigal comments on the academies take on blogging he feels that"...that academics not only will not embrace the blogosphere, they will fight it, because it challenges their presumed intellectual authority. Put another way, the suggestion is that academics might fight the blogosphere in the same way and for some of the same reasons the mainstream media has.." [Smart Mobs] 6:00:47 AM    comment []