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Wednesday, December 31, 2003 |
FBI warns of terrorists toting copies of Old Farmers' Almanac.
My country grows stranger by the day. The elderly Italian lady who
lives next door to me annotates her almanac to keep track of which moon
phases bode best for planting, thinning, or harvesting fresh back yard
arugula. Suspicious ways? She's definitely attempting to maximize the
likelihood of operational success through careful planning. If the
taste of the fresh, shared greens she drops off on my doorstep in brown
paper bags are any proof -- it's working.
The
FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying
almanacs, cautioning that the popular reference books covering
everything from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for
terrorist planning. In a bulletin sent Christmas Eve to about
18,000 police organizations, the FBI said terrorists may use almanacs
"to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning." It
urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops and other
investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially if the books
are annotated in suspicious ways. "The practice of researching
potential targets is consistent with known methods of al-Qaida and
other terrorist organizations that seek to maximize the likelihood of
operational success through careful planning," the FBI wrote.
Link (Thanks, David!)
[Boing Boing Blog] 
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Best geek gift yet: decommissioned aircraft carrier.
Sorry I missed this when we were assembling lists of hot geek gadget
gift ideas last week for NPR. L@@@K! Excellent buyer! A+++++! Would do
business again!
Aircraft carrier (deommissioned ) for sale.
Vehicle Description: This maybe the first ever aircraft carrier
(decommissioned 2001) available for auction at EBAY ! But the auction
was delisted not long ago due to accusation wrongly made by a
suspicious customer. We showed evidence that this vessel is
DECOMMISSIONED and therefore not Ordanance. We are shipbroker and not
arms dealer. We shipbrokers do not have the ownership of the vessels we
sell, as none of the shipbrokers does, just as your real estate broker
cannot ask you to transfer the title of your house to him before he
start selling propery for you.
Current bid: US $6,000,000.00.
Link (via Geeknews)
[Boing Boing Blog]
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RSS with CSS. Richard Soderberg figured out how put CSS in RSS. And Joi Ito is using this technique in his feed.
Some people think it’s cool, others don’t. I suspect an obvious feature
request will be for aggregators to notice when this technique is being
used and be able to turn it on and off. [inessential.com]
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MobileRSS. Keith Hurwitz wrote me and said that MobileRSS is "freakishly cool."
mobileRSS is specifically designed for small PDA screens, works
within your browser (thus requiring no software downloads or upgrades),
and stores all your settings and feeds online (thus using no memory on
your device). [The Scobleizer Weblog]
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The wardriver and the cop. Doc Searls
often writes about how his modus operandi for acquiring Internet access
while traveling is to cruise residential neighborhoods running MacStumbler,
which finds wireless access points and speaks to you in different
voices depending on whether the AP has WEP turned on or off. Jeremy
Zawodny recently wrote about
his wardriving adventures in and around Toledo, Ohio, while visiting
his family for the holiday. So it was probably inevitable that I would
find myself parked in front of the junior high school in a small town
in Michigan a few nights ago, explaining my odd behavior to a local
cop. ... [Jon's Radio]
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Wired: 24-Hour Movie People. Choire "Gawker Guy" Sicha writes:
Recently I was invited to spend the night with two lovely ladies, writer Xeni Jardin
and photographer Aliya Naumoff. We didn't sleep for a day and a half!
Oh, the hilarity. Anyway, the result: a documentation of the 24-hour
digital movie-making contest here in New York. To celebrate, here's a
shot of Xeni, who by that point was powered solely by espresso and her
iron will, stealth-discoing our non-sleep-deprived editor Rob [Levine]
at the Wired offices.
24-Hour Movie People, Wired, January 2004
[Boing Boing Blog]
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K-Logs: New Social Networking Software and K-Logs.
K-Logs continues to grow (nearing 1,000 members). I am going to do lots
more work on RSS systems over the next week that will be published
there as well as here. Also, any good insights on how to integrate
social networking software and weblogs would be welcome. Integrated web
apps make sense. [John Robb's Weblog]
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K-Logs: The types of RSS aggregators available. There is a large
variety of different RSS aggregators available (which adds to the
confusion in this area). Here is a list:
- Desktop aggregators.
- Server aggregators.
- Search engine aggregators.
- E-mail aggregators.
- Newsticker aggregators.
Any others? There is some overlap, but this list may cover most of the basic types. [John Robb's Weblog]
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K-Logs: Profiles of RSS users. The best way to analyze the
effectiveness of tools is to build profiles of typical users (based on
their intentions). Here are a couple:
- Newshounds. Hundreds of feeds. Sort and archive.
- Connectors. Create, modify, combine, and republish feeds.
- Simplifiers. Quick and simple. Easy to use. No hassles.
K-Logs: Profiles of RSS users (more detail). Here is a more fleshed out version of the profiles:
Newshound. This user wants lots of news from a
multitude of sources. This is the type of person that reads a newspaper
or two a day and a half dozen magazines a month. They want the ability
to archive the stories they like and search the archive. Simple ways to
find new sources of feeds is a big plus for this user. Categorization
of feeds is a must since this is the same approach they take with their
e-mail. "All the news that is fit to syndicate."
Flowmeister (previously the connector). This user
wants to consume, publish, and share custom feeds. This type of person
clips news articles they like and sends them to friends. This person
may be at the center of a community that needs customized information
or they may be interested in just decreasing the flow of information
they get via extreme customization. The key is control over the flow.
"The eye of the information storm."
Simplifier. This user wants an easier way to get
news from sites they like. Bookmarks just don't cut it. This type of
person scans newspapers for interesting stories, when they have time to
read a newspaper. They would be much happier spending time on other
things (like getting work done) rather than reading news. However, they
recognize the need to keep up to date. A simple, easy-to-use interface
is important. "Just the basics please." [John Robb's Weblog]
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Technology: Netscape, success or failure?. Here are the factors pro and con. First, the pro:
- At one point in early '96, everyone used its product. It changed
the world by making the browser and the Web something everyone could
use.
- It set the price of the browser at $0, a key factor in growing the Web.
- It pushed the evolution of the browser via standards and innovations for several years until it reached a very usable form.
- It was a success financially for its investors, founders, and early employees.
- It went away when it accomplished the above tasks.
- The talent trained at Netscape went into hundreds of other companies.
Con:
- Its browser isn't currently a counterweight to Microsoft's.
- ?
Hmmm. Looks like Netscape was a success. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Technology: Professional Virus developers target P2P.
Professional development has finally come to virus development. The
growth path of SoBig and Blaster shows that there are smart developers
driving their development cycles and not idle teenagers. New research
on this concurs and puts KaZaA in the crosshairs of the next big wave
of attacks:
Hughes predicted that these so-called 'zero day' attacks--called
that because of the ability of an exploit to appear before a
vulnerability is even known, much less patched--will increase in 2004.
Other threats which will plague users in 2004, he predicted,
will come from peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software, and spyware,
utilities for tracking Web usage that often piggyback on
free-for-the-downloading software. Hughes sees peer-to-peer
software, such as KaZaA, as being particularly troublesome in 2004.
After analyzing hundreds of the most popular files shared on
KaZaA--including 'cracks' that allow users to break copy protection on
commercial software--he discovered that 45 percent actually contained
viruses, worms, or Trojan horses. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Followup to MMM. Due largely to a link
from Slashdot (thanks!), "Make
More Mistakes" has endured the scrutiny of more readers than most of my
other essays. I've been getting a great deal of feedback, which I do
appreciate.
Lots of people have asked me how SourceGear has been able to financially
survive all those awful mistakes I've made. Some have checked my
background and speculated that I funded all those mistakes using money I got
from the Spyglass IPO, and therefore a posture of risk-taking is appropriate
only for those who are already rich, and therefore my article doesn't really
apply. That's essentially incorrect, but there is a grain of truth
here. I made some nice money when Spyglass went public (but nowhere near
enough to retire). The presence of financial cushion sometimes has made it
easier to take a risk, even though I am already a risk-taker by nature.
But in actuality, very little money has ever flowed from me to
SourceGear. With the exception of a small amount of capital we received
from a few angel investors, SourceGear has been entirely funded from its own
revenues. If this doesn't seem to add up, then keep in mind that half the
story of SourceGear is not being told right now.
The "mistakes" article tells the story of my failures, but we've
experienced an approximately equal collection of successes. I'm
not going to tell those stories right now. It should be sufficient to
know that our losses happened in the context of some wins, some of them quite
large. Each time I took a risk, I tried to be sure that the size of the
risk was appropriate for the company's resources at that time.
If you are just starting out, or if your company is much smaller than
SourceGear, then my mistakes may seem enormous to you. Absent my bad bets,
I could be driving a Ferrari right now. Still, none of these mistakes
were fatal for SourceGear.
Regardless of the scale of your business, the central point of my article
still applies: "Make all the non-fatal mistakes that you can -- don't make
any of the fatal ones." Only you can figure out what might
be "fatal" for your particular situation. Smaller firms should take
smaller risks. Bigger firms can take much bigger risks without
placing the survival of the company in jeopardy.
Either way, choosing to take no risks at all is an excellent algorithm for
avoiding success. [Eric.Weblog()]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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