Friday, June 30, 2006

Economics and Information Security. I'm sitting in a conference room at Cambridge University, trying to simultaneously finish this article for Wired News and pay attention to the presenter onstage. I'm in this awkward situation because 1) this article is due tomorrow, and 2) I'm attending the fifth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, or WEIS: to my mind, the most interesting computer security conference of the year. The idea that economics has anything to do with computer security is relatively new. Ross Anderson and I seem to have stumbled upon the idea independently. He, in his brilliant article from 2001, "Why Information Security Is Hard -- An Economic Perspective" (.pdf), and me in various essays and presentations from that same period.  . . . More generally, many of the most basic security questions are at least as much economic as technical. . . . .  . . . WEIS encourages papers on these and other issues in economics and computer security. We heard papers presented on the economics of digital forensics of cell phones (.pdf) -- if you have an uncommon phone, the police probably don't have the tools to perform forensic analysis -- and the effect of stock spam on stock prices: It actually works in the short term. We learned that more-educated wireless network users are not more likely to secure their access points (.pdf), and that the best predictor of wireless security is the default configuration of the router. Other researchers presented economic models to explain patch management (.pdf), peer-to-peer worms (.pdf), investment in information security technologies (.pdf) and opt-in versus opt-out privacy policies (.pdf). There was a field study that tried to estimate the cost to the U.S. economy for information infrastructure failures (.pdf): less than you might think. And one of the most interesting papers looked at economic barriers to adopting new security protocols (.pdf), specifically DNS Security Extensions.  . . . [Schneier on Security] 9:05:57 AM    comment []

Just One Word: Fructose. Scientists have discovered a clean and efficient way to make soda bottles, computers and clothes from sugar instead of petroleum-based plastics. By Griffin Wright. [Wired News: Top Stories] 9:05:07 AM    comment []

Petroleum-Free Polymers from Fructose. More evidence to support my theory that sugar is the best substance in the world: A research group at the UW Madison has just released a report on more efficient and less costly means of converting fructose (fruit sugar) from biomass into a chemical compound used for producing plastics, fuel-additives and biofuel (called HMF). According to UW Madison's own news source: The new process goes beyond making fuel from plants to make industrial chemicals from plants...Dumesic's research group made a series of improvements that raised the HMF output, and also made the HMF easier to extract. Once made, HMF is fairly easy to convert into plastics or diesel fuel. Although the biodiesel that has made headlines lately is made from a fat (even used cooking oil), not a sugar, both processes have similar environmental and economic benefits, Dumesic says. Instead of buying petroleum from abroad, the raw material would come from domestic agriculture. Expanding the source of raw material should also depress the price of petroleum. The idea itself is not new, and in fact, Madison has long been a hotbed for research into biomass conversion for kicking the petroleum habit. Professor James Dumesic and his team, however, have broken new ground in terms of creating a process that can compete economically with the more conventional and unsustainable models. According to a Wired article on the subject: Initially, producing plastics this way might require some investment, but the long-term gain would be that the process is much cleaner than petroleum-based methods. While using petroleum dumps new carbon dioxide into the air, the carbon dioxide released when extracting chemicals from plants is created from molecules that are already in the ecosystem. As long as the biomass of plants remains relatively stable around the world, the balance of carbon dioxide naturally occurring in the atmosphere should remain, and global warming should not be significantly affected. From the sound of it, if the patent pans out, the process will not only be groundbreaking in terms of economic viability for biomass-produced material, but also for the sheer breadth of products that could be made in this way. Considering that polymers comprise nearly every material thing we interact with in the world, it's a pretty vast arena. This reminded me of Plantic, a biodegradable, non-toxic plastic that was recently spotted in the blogosphere as someone's rather surprising snack. I suspect, however, that these fructose-derived polymers will not have much to offer in the culinary department. [WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future] 9:05:03 AM    comment []

Rocketboom covers mobile phone booths in narobi. A great video on Rocketboom, on a mobile fixed phone service in Narobi. Childhood polio has confined both men in this video to wheelchairs. For years they strugged on the streets selling materials to live. Now they have a mobile phone business thanks to their goverment. The introduction of these mobile fixed phones made that possible. The phone is connected to a mobile phone network in Kenya and works like any fixed phone . So every day they place themselves where they expect to attract the most customers who need to make a phone call. Vlogged by video journalist Ruud Elmendorp, RocketBoom Narobi. [Smart Mobs] 8:44:16 AM    comment []

"Internet isolationism is bad for business". Dan Kaminsky has a good essay on internet isolationism, which is his name for the opposite of net neutrality. It starts: Oh, sure, there's UPS and DHL and the US Postal Service. But imagine if they were all proposing that, because people make money based on the contents of packages other people shipped, that they should see some of that money. Imagine they implied that, if you or your company did not pay a reception fee... well, things might happen. Packages might get lost, you see. Read "Internet Isolationism is bad for business." Me, I'm fond of noting when business tactics can be compared to the mafia. Anyway, it's a good essay, and worth realizing that the opposite of neutrality isn't opinion, it's isolationism and an end to innovation on the internet. [Emergent Chaos] 8:44:03 AM    comment []