Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Analyzing the A-list of the blog world. A couple of weeks ago, when working on the entry about salaries for bloggers, Tristan Louis did a quick analysis of the entries in a day slice. Many people pointed out that this was a small slice and was not representative of what other blogs where doing. From there, he ended up with two questions basically bugging him: first, how many entries does the average blog produce on a daily basis? Second, what is the size of those entries? To answer the question, he analyzed the A-list of the blog world. Thank you Tristan ! [Smart Mobs] 10:37:40 PM    comment []

Yikes! BNA News reports CT. RULES THAT ENCRYPTION USE EVIDENCE OF CRIMINAL INTENT A Minnesota appeals court has ruled that the presence of encryption software on a computer may be viewed as evidence of criminal intent. Ari David Levie, who was convicted of photographing a nude 9-year-old girl, argued on appeal that the PGP encryption utility on his computer was irrelevant and should not have been admitted as evidence during his trial. But the Minnesota appeals court ruled 3-0 that the trial judge was correct to let that information be used when handing down a guilty verdict concluding that "evidence of appellant's Internet use and the existence of an encryption program on his computer was at least somewhat relevant to the state's case against him." 10:17:49 PM    comment []

Hacker Hunters, by Brian Grow, with Jason Bush in Moscow (Business Week). In an unmarked building in downtown Washington, Brian K. Nagel and 15 other Secret Service agents manned a high-tech command center, poised for the largest-ever roundup of a cybercrime gang. A huge map of the U.S., spread across 12 digital screens, gave them a view of their prey, from Arizona to New Jersey. It was Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2004, and Operation Firewall was about to be unleashed. The target: the ShadowCrew, a gang whose members were schooled in identity theft, bank account pillage, and the fencing of ill-gotten wares on the Web, police say. For months, agents had been watching their every move through a clandestine gateway into their Web site, shadowcrew.com. To ensure the suspects were at home, a gang member-turned-informant had pressed his pals to go online for a group meeting. At 9 p.m., Nagel, the Secret Service's assistant director for investigations, issued the "go" order. Agents armed with Sig-Sauer 229 pistols and MP5 semi-automatic machine guns swooped in, aided by local cops and international police. The adrenaline was pumping, in part, because several ShadowCrew members were known to own weapons. Twenty-eight members were arrested, most still at their computers. The alleged ringleaders went quietly, but one suspect jumped out a second-story window. Agents nabbed him on the ground. Later, they found a loaded assault rifle in his apartment. The operation was swift and bloodless. [Cybergangs] always thought they operated with anonymity, says Nagel, a tall, chiseled G-man. We rattled them. There's a new breed of crime-fighter prowling cyberspace: the hacker hunters. Spurred by big profits, professional cyber-criminals have replaced amateur thrill-seeking hackers as the biggest threat on the Web. Software defenses are improving rapidly, but law enforcement and security companies understand they can no longer rely on technology alone to deal with the plague of virus attacks, computer break-ins, and online scams. Instead, they're marshaling their forces and using gumshoe tactics to fight back -- infiltrating hacker groups, monitoring their chatter on underground networks, and when they can, busting the baddies before they do any more damage. The wave of the future is getting inside these groups, developing intelligence, and taking them down, says Christopher M.E. Painter, deputy chief of the Computer Crime section of the Justice Dept., who will help prosecute ShadowCrew members at a trial scheduled for October. Step by step, the cops are figuring out how to play the cybercrime game. They're employing some of the same tactics used to crush organized crime in the 1980s -- informants and the cyberworld equivalent of wiretaps. They're also busy coming up with brand new moves. FBI agent Daniel J. Larkin, a 20-year vet who heads up the bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center, taps online service providers to help pierce the Web's veil of anonymity and track down criminal hackers. In late April, leads supplied by the FBI and eBay Inc. (EBAY ) helped Romanian police round up 11 members of a gang that set up fake eBay accounts and auctioned off cell phones, laptops, and cameras they never intended to deliver. We're getting smarter every day, says Larkin. 10:17:39 PM    comment []

Michael Geist's essay on copyright reform in Canada is in The Literary Review of Canada's June issue. (Separately hosted PDF.) Geist writes about the value of the public domain in Canada how risky copyright term extension is. He also offers positive solutions. 9:41:51 AM    comment []

A Step Closer to Stem-Cell Heaven. After a heated debate over the ethics of using embryos for research, the House votes to lift the ban on federal funding of such studies. Bush promises a veto. [Wired News] 7:19:48 AM    comment []

Database Hackers Reveal Tactics. Three suspects in the recent LexisNexis security breach talk about how they got hold of the data and what they planned to do with it. By Kim Zetter. [Wired News] 7:14:46 AM    comment []

Seeking release. The press release headline reads, TargetX CEO Launches First Podcast for College Recruiters. Spake the release, "There's a revolution underway in recruiting communications," said Niles. "The old techniques are giving way to electronic tools like email, blogs and online chat sessions. Many admissions people understand that, but they don't know how to make effective use of the Internet for recruiting and marketing." Niles decided to use podcasts to help demonstrate how online communications can be more timely, interactive and entertaining when trying to attract a generation raised on the Internet. He created "On the Road," short and informal podcasts that cover some aspect of college marketing. These Internet broadcasts typically originate from a workshop or conference where he's speaking to a higher education audience on the strengths and challenges of interactive marketing. "The podcasts reflect what I'm hearing on the road and what I'm seeing in higher ed marketing," said Niles, who 10 years ago became one of the first college officials in the nation to use the Internet to recruit students. Well, kudos to TargetX for getting ahead of the curve. Since the company makes money advising colleges on how to use the Net, I hope they don't mind a little free advice that might help them improve the example they set: Don't call your blog "An Email Minute." Or vice versa. Nothing wrong with having your emails and blog cross-promote, or even duplicate each other. Chris Locke has been doing this with EGR and his blog since the Miocene. (And now with CBO as well.) But the two are very different, to say the least. Make your blog a blog. What you have is an archive of emailings. That means, use some kind of blogware, featuring permalinks and RSS feeds. You're doing that with your podcasts already. Do it with your blog as well. Thanks to Kurt Starsinic for the pointer. [The Doc Searls Weblog] 7:06:53 AM    comment []

Google's Free Video Servers. Dave Burstein, the Editor of DSLPrime, told a room full of people about Google's Video service yesterday. He was not casual in his delivery. He said, and I paraphrase -- they (Google) will host and serve your video free of charge, the higher the resolution, the better. I must have been on an other planet when this announcement was made. Let me apologize to my readers for not being one of the first to show you the following URL: https://upload.video.google.com/ When you go there, this is what you will see: Your work deserves to be seen. You've made a great video. Now who will watch it? Whether you produce hundreds of titles a year or just a few, you can give your videos the recognition and visibility they deserve by promoting them on Google - for free. Signing up for the Google Video Upload Program will connect your work with users who are most likely to want to view them. Sign up and upload ... We're accepting digital video files of any length and size. Simply sign up for an account and upload your videos using our Video Uploader (please be sure you own the rights to the works you upload), and, pending our approval process and the launch of this new service, we'll include your video in Google Video, where users will be able to search, preview, purchase and play it. For major producers ... If you're from a TV station or production facility, we have a separate process to help you join the Google Video Upload Program. If you are in the video production business, this is a must visit site. (Okay, so let's say Google gets the hosting and indexing side down. What happens next? Is a web browser the best way to search and view this stuff? -kc.) [unmediated] 7:06:09 AM    comment []

Mark: Fortune article on DIYers Dan Roth says: "I'm a writer at Fortune magazine. I thought you and your readers would like this article that's in the latest edition of Fortune. The piece is entitled "The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy" and talks about all the trend of consumers discovering that they can produce the goods that they want to consume. I spend some time talking about the work of Saul Griffith and the Bible of the movement, Make magazine. Here's an excerpt:  . . .  "Before, only the rich had access to tools and so only the rich were professionals, and the rest were amateurs," says Noah Glass, the co-founder of Odeo, which offers a free service for making, hosting, and distributing podcasts. "But now, as the creation tools have become easier to use and more freely distributed through open source, through the Internet, through awareness, more people have more access to more tools, so the whole amateur-professional dichotomy is dissolving." Citizen engineers are taking this even further, trying their hand not just in the digital world but in the physical world too. Much as eBay transformed distribution, they're redefining design and manufacture. Dan also says: "While Fortune articles are usually locked up behind a curtain, I've persuaded the dot-com side to open this one up to everyone." Link [bOing bOing] and also see Jamais Cascio: Do It Ourselves. Fortune profiles the "Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy," with a look at some of the people and groups making it possible for home inventors and innovators to design, make and sell unique and novel products. The article focuses on a guy designing a music player that looks like a Pez Dispenser as well as a few other similarly-quirky ideas. It's a good intro to an up-and-coming movement. And it completely misses the big story. Fortune is spot-on when highlighting the effect of design software and the various online services connecting developers to manufacturers. And the analogy they draw, between this new generation of inventors and other pathways to digital creation (blogging, podcasting, even mash-ups) is a good one. But they miss the signal difference between previous waves of "DIY" innovation and the present: collaboration. The Internet doesn't just enable cheap advertising and fabrication-by-email, the Internet makes it possible for disparate, distributed groups to connect up and share designs, tools and ideas. Open software is about to meet open fabrication.  . . . The number of people able and willing to collaborate on physical design projects will soon get much bigger. The rise of personal fabrication technology will make it possible for home designers to produce one-off and limited distribution products without having to outsource to Chinese factories. We're already seeing people making homebrew fabbers and free/open source fabber designs. Inkjet-style fabricators are already able to "print" biological tissues and polymer electronics (as well as resins and plastics). And just as relatively inexpensive laser printers and graphical computers kicked off the desktop publishing industry, these technologies will kick off a desktop fabrication industry. But it will be even bigger than that, because it will be collaborative fabrication, with designs shared as easily as music files. This doesn't mean that we'll all have to design our own chairs and laptops, any more than the rise of F/OSS has meant that we all have to code our own software. Those of us with limited product design skills may well still purchase most of our gear from big manufacturers and retailers, adding various open fabrication items as we stumble across them. But we'll be able to choose from a more diverse field, as microdesigners will find niches and product ideas which appeal to them and a handful of others, personalizing the material world. The PezMP3 is an early indicator that such a scenario will soon unfold. Get ready. [WorldChanging: Another World Is Here] 7:05:45 AM    comment []