Saturday, December 17, 2005

More Saudi Students in U.S.. Saudi Arabia is promoting a scholarship program that has already more than doubled the number of new Saudi enrollments at American colleges since last year. By JOEL BRINKLEY. [NYT > Education] 4:12:17 PM    comment []

Bush, Through the Looking Glass. Washington Post: On Hill, Anger and Calls for Hearings Greet News of Stateside Surveillance. Bush declined to discuss the domestic eavesdropping program in a television interview, but he joined his aides in saying that the government acted lawfully and did not intrude on citizens' rights. "Decisions made are made understanding we have an obligation to protect the civil liberties of the American people," Bush said on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass: "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." [Dan Gillmor's blog] 8:05:21 AM    comment []

The Synaptic Leap. Let's say you're an eager young bioscientist, ready to use open source models for your biomedical research and development. How do you do it? Well, you could put some of your work up on Bioforge, or try to hook up with a group like BIOS... but where are the enabling systems to make open source, collaborative development straightforward for researchers who don't want to be computer techs in their off-hours? The Synaptic Leap wants to be that enabling system. The Synaptic Leap is a start-up nonprofit led by Ginger Taylor of PeopleSoft (most of the group's employees, in fact, come from PeopleSoft). The Synaptic Leap describes itself as "dedicated towards providing a network of online communities that connect and empower scientific and medical researchers to conduct open-source style research." What that means in practice is the provision of online tools to allow researchers to coordinating efforts and exchange knowledge. Their first project is a big one: Malaria, in coordination with the Tropical Disease Initiative (TDI). (We wrote about the TDI back in January of 2005.) Sometimes considered an "orphan disease" because of the lack of major pharmaceutical projects, much of the current effort to fight malaria focuses on blocking or eliminating the carrier, mosquitos. The TDI intends to find medical treatments to prevent and cure malarial infection; there is still much work to do, and much of what Synaptic Leap intends to accomplish is the efficient organization of the work among the international collaborators: The Malaria genome is largely unexplored (~65% of ORF are annotated as hypothetical proteins). We intend to provide the Malaria community with tools to use, analyze and annotate the known data about all proteins in the Malaria genome. We believe that “collective knowledge” can contribute to a large efforts which could not be accomplished by the individuals alone. The use of open source methods and the tools to initiate research collaborations within the Malaria community of TDI, will help towards identifying the most promising targets and compounds for drug discovery against Malaria. The Synaptic Leap is very much a Tech Bloom-era organization. It uses Drupal and WordPress as content management systems, and project members can participate in online discussions, author blogs, even provide RSS feeds for a site aggregator. In short, The Synaptic Leap is the open source biology version of the "networked politics" movement, or the biomedical corps of the "second superpower." Can smart bio-mobs be far behind? The Synaptic Leap is still in its earliest days -- the site only went live in the last week or so, and there is still much work ahead for the project. No matter. This is an extremely exciting development, the step that could give open source biomedical research a model for a persistent structure and a toolkit for collaboration beyond a single focus. It is, from what I've found, the first viable example of an open source bioscience effort modeled not on the computer industry, but on the open political network movement. It's an early indicator that open source bio may now be ready to move from the fringes to become an important voice in the future of medical science. [WorldChanging: Another World Is Here] 8:04:59 AM    comment []

Your Amygdala and Orbitofrontal Cortex May be Telling You Nothing. This just in: people freeze in the face of ambiguity. I was wondering what all those lifesized ice sculptures were doing at SecureWorld Expo in Dallas these past two days. Here are a few pertinent excerpts from the press release:As predicted from past experiments in which this type of risk was observed in test subjects, the researchers knew that the Caltech subjects with no brain damage would be more likely to draw cards in the risk game than in the ambiguity game, because people dislike betting when they do not know the odds. They were more likely to take sure... [Spire Security Viewpoint] 8:04:45 AM    comment []

1926 classic Chinese essay veiling new protest. A Washington Post article today describes the flooding of a popular Chinese bulletin board with comments concerning warlords who opened fire on protesters — long ago. But those posting comments are actually complaining about something much more recent. They were using Lu's essay about the 1926 massacre as a pretext to discuss a more current and politically sensitive event -- the Dec. 6 police shooting of rural protesters in the southern town of Dongzhou in Guangdong province. Confucius: Many posting mob is smart. [Smart Mobs] 8:03:52 AM    comment []

China online: Will the censors ever crack?. Even as American corporations abet thought control, a surging civil society will not be denied. [Salon - How the World Works] 8:03:40 AM    comment []

NSA spies on US: calls, emails intercepted without warrants. A reminder that encryption and anonymizing tools for digital communications are the friends of liberty, even when governments are not.  . . . . Link [Boing Boing] 7:56:51 AM    comment []

More Lawlessness from Bush Administration. NY TImes: Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts. Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials. Once again, Bush has ignored the Constitution. And once again, Congress has been all too willing to let it happen. The big surprise in this story is that the Times held it for a full year before publishing, cowed by the administration's insistence that it should not be published. Okay, then, the paper should now tell us what exactly has changed. Perhaps the American people are finding out about this latest shredding of civil liberties only because Bush's ratings are sufficiently down that the Times feels emboldened. Sad to say, that would be no surprise at all. [Dan Gillmor's blog] 7:56:46 AM    comment []

Next in the series: Friday Star Wars: Open Design. This week and next are the two posts which inspired me to use Star Wars to illustrate Saltzer and Schroeder's design principles. (More on that in the first post of the series, Star Wars: Economy Of Mechanism.) This week, we look at the principle of Open Design: Open design: The design should not be secret. The mechanisms should not depend on the ignorance of potential attackers, but rather on the possession of specific, more easily protected, keys or passwords. This decoupling of protection mechanisms from protection keys permits the mechanisms to be examined by many reviewers without concern that the review may itself compromise the safeguards. In addition, any skeptical user may be allowed to convince himself that the system he is about to use is adequate for his purpose. Finally, it is simply not realistic to attempt to maintain secrecy for any system which receives wide distribution. The opening sentence of this principle is widely and loudly contested. The Gordian knot has, I think, been effectively sliced by Peter Swire, in "A Model For When Disclosure Helps Security."  . . . In a classical castle, things which are easy to change are things like the frequency with which patrols go out, or the routes which they take. Harder to change is the location of the walls, or where your water comes from. So your security should not depend on your walls or water source being secret. Over time, those secrets will leak out. When they do, they're hard to alter, even if you know they've leaked out. Now, I promised in "Star Wars and the Principle of Least Privilege" to return to R2's copy of the plans for the Death Star, and today, I shall.  . . . .  The overall plans of the Death Star are hard to change. That's not to say that they should be published, but the security of the Death Star should not rely on them remaining secret. Further, when the rebels attack with stub fighters, the flaw is easily found: OFFICER: We've analyzed their attack, sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your ship standing by? TARKIN: Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances! Good call, Grand Moff! Really, though, this is the same call that management makes day in and day out when technical people tell them there is a danger. Usually, the danger turns out to go unexploited. Further, our officer has provided the world's worst risk assessment. "There is a danger." Really? Well! Thank you for educating us. Perhaps next time, you could explain probabilities and impacts? (Oh. Wait. To coin a phrase, you have failed us for the last time.) The assessment also takes less than 30 minutes. Maybe the Empire should have invested a little more in up-front design analysis. It's also important to understand that attacks only get better and easier as time goes on. As researchers do a better and better job of sharing their learning, the attacks get more and more clever, and the un-exploitable becomes exploitable. (Thanks to SC for that link.) Had the Death Star been designed with an expectation that the plans would leak, someone might have taken that half-hour earlier in the process, when it could have made a difference. Next week, we'll close up the Star Wars and Saltzer and Schroeder series with the principle of psychological acceptability. [Emergent Chaos] 7:55:49 AM    comment []