20 August 2002

Herbert Casson's History of the telephone (1910) On the to-read list [via Adam Curry] 10:24:36 PM     comments

Malcolm Gladwell: Can you read people's thoughts just by looking at them? 1. Some people can (scary for the rest of us?) 2. It's a two-way street: facial expressions create as well as display emotion (interesting) 3. how long before security companies use this instead of biometrics for eg airline security?: instead of trying to match an actual face to a watchlist of 100,000s, measure emotion/intent from a "lexicon" of thousands on a face (interesting/scary?) 10:23:45 PM     comments

Schneier and Ozzie: Foolproof doesn't work, smart security and smart failure instead Charles Mann's Homeland Insecurity article for The Atlantic (Google-cached as The Atlantic's own link doesn't work for me) is a great overview of Schneier's view of security: Security that depends on secrecy is doomed to fail Cryptography is not enough; niether is any technology-only solution don't rely on single points of security/failure (eg: the firewall which protects only the boundary of your network) build failure into the design: no single failure should catastrophically break the system decisions must made made by people (not computers) at close range Once humans did the encryption (it was harder to encrypt your messages than to send them plaintext, so many didn't) and everyone hoped that technology would take care of the security (it didn't). Now the reverse is true: today Schneier advocates having humans do the security and technology silently handle the encryption. Very related to this: Ray Ozzie on complacency immune security, which is built into his Groove: It's not the individual's fault! It's up to us - the technology industry - to create systems that are complacency immune - that are designed to be complementary to the way that users and administrators really act. And it's up to IT to realize that it's their responsibility - likely to the point of liability - to broadly deploy technology that is configured to be secure in a complacency-immune fashion. No, it won't be perfect: this is all about risk management. You can't control how people behave - so create an environment in which they do the "right thing" naturally. Also: Will complacency ultimately net out to liability? 12:11:14 AM     comments

Useful web tools for (web) designers Robert Charlton's page size testing chart (with rulers etc) and Golden Mean 101. [via metafilter I think] 12:07:42 AM     comments

Maths and numbers, music and writing Mike Keith's World of words and numbers: combinatorics, rule-based poems, anagrams, numbers - it's all there. [via Doug Landauer's GIGO] 12:06:41 AM     comments