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Thursday, November 10, 2005 |
Wes:
Arnaud Legout, Guillaume Urvoy-Keller, Pietro Michiardi: Understanding BitTorrent: An Experimental Perspective. "To gain a better understanding of the key algorithms of the protocol, we have instrumented a client and run experiments on a large number of real torrents. Our experimental evaluation is peer oriented, instead of tracker oriented, which allows us to get detailed information on all exchanged messages and protocol events. In particular, we have explored the properties of the two key algorithms of BitTorrent: the choke and the rarest first algorithms."
8:50:54 PM 
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Robertson warns Dover of God’s Wrath. ABC News: Televangelist Robertson warns town “God would not help you” Conservative Christian televangelist Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting “intelligent design” and warned them on Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck. Robertson, a former Republican presidential [...] [The Politburo Diktat]
6:40:49 PM
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New wiretap order could affect Webster. An order by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has expanded a federal wiretapping law. The law now requires universities and other organizations to update their internet infrastructure to make it easier for the government to tap in. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), requires schools to change the way their networks receive and store data and they are expected to pay for the changes themselves. [The Journal]
11:03:34 AM
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Sniffing Passwords is Easy.
From InfoWorld:
She said about half the hotels use shared network media (i.e., a hub versus an Ethernet switch), so any plain text password you transmit is sniffable by any like-minded person in the hotel. Most wireless access points are shared media as well; even networks requiring a WEP key often allow the common users to sniff each other's passwords.
She said the average number of passwords collected in an overnight hotel stay was 118, if you throw out the 50 percent of connections that used an Ethernet switch and did not broadcast passwords.
The vast majority, 41 percent, were HTTP-based passwords, followed by e-mail (SMTP, POP2, IMAP) at 40 percent. The last 19 percent were composed of FTP, ICQ, SNMP, SIP, Telnet, and a few other types.
As a security professional, my friend often attends security conferences and teaches security classes. She noted that the number of passwords she collected in these venues was higher on average than in non-security locations. The very people who are supposed to know more about security than anyone appeared to have a higher-than-normal level of remote access back to their companies, but weren't using any type of password protection.
At one conference, she listened to one of the world's foremost Cisco security experts as his laptop broadcast 12 different log-in types and passwords during the presentation. Ouch!
I am interested in analyzing that password database. What percentage of those passwords are English words? What percentage are in the common password dictionaries? What percentage use mixed case, or numbers, or punctuation? What's the frequency distribution of different password lengths?
Real password data is hard to come by. There's an interesting research paper in that data. [Schneier on Security]
11:03:27 AM
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Why the Complete New Yorker is a mess, and other insights from the Wall Street Journal.
You all should take advantage of the fact that the Wall Street Journal site is free this week and check out this story about why the Complete New Yorker DVD is so clumsy and hard to navigate. (Answer: copyrights prevented the publisher from reformatting the pages.) See also this curious piece on surgery for gored matadors and an article about authors who assume aliases after their books flop.
[Stay Free! Daily]
The New Yorker's copyright hack.
I am a very proud owner of the DVD set, The Complete New Yorker. It is truly incredible to have almost 4,200 issues of the magazine compiled in one spot. However, it doesn't take long for a user to ask the question the Wall Street Journal (free feature) answers today: Why does The Complete New Yorker feel so low-tech?
Answer: The explanation lies in a years-long battle over a clause in U.S. copyright law concerning the ownership of rights to magazine articles written by free-lancers.
Quote:
"When Congress revamped copyright law in 1976, it said magazine publishers retained the right to print collections and revisions of past issues. But when a magazine wants to republish a free-lance work in a new and different format, the free-lancer must be compensated accordingly, two more-recent court rulings have found. That means when republishing articles on DVD or other digital formats, magazines must pay free-lancers again, get their permission to republish free -- or preserve the original print context. The New Yorker's solution was to scan the original magazine pages onto DVDs."
[rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog]
10:55:19 AM
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Guitar Hero video game uses 3/4-size guitar as input device
Guitar Hero is a game for the PS2 that lets you play the part of a stardom-bound rock guitarist. You have to kick out power chords and strum along to the prompts to move to the next level, where I guess you get better drugs and hotter groupies. IGN gives Guitar Hero for PS2 a positive review.
 The best part about the guitar is that it incorporates most of the real life techniques and motions that a guitarist would perform on a real instrument. Hammer-ons, pull-offs and up-down strumming all work with this device, making the transition from the real thing to the Guitar Hero SG as minor as moving from strings to buttons. Had the guitar not allowed for conventional techniques that are second-nature in a guitarist's repertoire, it would have been crippling. Smartly, Red Octane has designed the peripheral to not only utilize these techniques in the songs, but to embrace real guitar playing styles and techniques as well. Kudos for that.
Link
[bOing bOing]
Also there: Katamari sushi
10:54:19 AM
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Something to Think about if You Teach Podcasting, Too.
Nice catch by the ‘Brary Web Diva: Podcasts and Presence
“If you haven't visited the iPodder home page lately, you might not know they have introduced some customized iPodder options available in their store….
If your library is podcasting (or thinking about doing so) why not make a customized iPodder download with your feed already loaded? You could even provide a service by searching out the local news, sports, NPR, etc. podcast feeds and pre-load those as well!
If you can afford the $100 option, think of the constant presence you'd be with your library logo right there on their iPodder!” [’Brary Web Diva] [The Shifted Librarian]
10:54:13 AM
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Growing up with the wired generation.
Being sent to your bedroom used to be a punishment: now it's a teen dream. Through personal computers, mobile phones and gaming consoles, teenagers are spurning antisocial angst for a culture of "connected cocooning". The Guardian reports.
Such limitless communication is having a revolutionary impact on the way young people interact, socialise, work and play. This tech-savvy teen tribe is united as never before, with the lonely search for identity set to become a vision of the past.
"Technologies certainly do create cultural phenomenon, whether for good or for ill," says Windsor Holden, senior analyst at Analysys. "Young people have seen all these different facilities, adapted them and changed the means of communication."
... Sixteen-to-24-year-olds just can't stop talking to each other," says Graham Brown, chief executive of DhaliwalBrown, which runs Wireless World Forum (W2F) and mobileYouth. "Take away their means of communication, and they are really lost."
[Smart Mobs]
7:51:32 AM
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