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Thursday, February 20, 2003 |
Microsoft's Kid Mobs.
Thanks to a bundle of bizdev chutzpah with a great name, Tammy Savage, Microsoft is developing something that may actually seem cool to 16-year-olds of all ages. Steven Levy describes the evolution of Threedegrees, a p2p smartmobbish application brewed by Microsoft's NetGen Lab, which is really a bunch of college just-graduates living in a big house, Real World style, helping Microsoft figure out how people who've grown up in a networked world want to take communication to the next level. Threedegrees, the result of this jam session, allows users to from mobs - er, ad hoc posses - of up to ten persons, with the theoretical possibility that they will "perform shared tasks," as the Jupiter analyst quoted in CNet's story says. Right, tasks... play tunes, chug virtual beer, that sort of thing. As Levy describes it, this is Microsoft's first anti-production tool... when a beta was added to servers within Microsoft, "productivity took a nose dive." Cory Doctorow says "...the project sounds kind of neat, until you realize that it's got an assload of DRM built into it and, in the end, does less than Napster did." (Thanks, Phred!) [Smart Mobs]
5:25:43 PM 
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50 DVDs' worth of data in a credit-card sized package. This National Science Foundation press-release describes a new electrical resistance techique that will "enable the storage of 50 or more DVDs on a hard drive the size of a credit card." I'm not sure if that's 4.5GB or 9GB DVDs, but either way, it's a pretty serious amount of storage.
Besides being useful for the multi-billion-dollar data storage industry, the BMR techniques could improve magnetic measurements and the study of magnetic effects in individual atoms, molecules and nanoscale clusters. It could also greatly enhance resolution and sensitivity of scanning probe imaging techniques that are widely used to characterize magnetic materials. Link Discuss (via Electrolite) [Boing Boing Blog]
5:23:37 PM
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Teenaged girl social engineers the hacker who ripped off her dad. A teenaged girl who, at 12, was duped into installing a trojan on her father's PC by a flirty Lothario, has run the little fraudster to ground. The hacker used the trojan to acquire her father's credit-card number and run up charges, and then came back for more. The girl flirted back, sending her crooked suitor a quiz that asked for his personal info, a successful social engineering hack that resulted in his arrest.
"I told him I wanted to see if we matched up. I was laughing when he e-mailed me back with all his details. He gave his name, address and even his mobile phone, which I had not asked for."
Danielle passed on this information to the police who were able to track him down to Moffat, near Dumfries in Scotland, through the email address he used to flirt with the young Nottingham girl.
Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
This is the type of people we need more of! You go Girl!
5:22:57 PM
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businesstoday.com ( Boston Herald ) - Fed allows banks to gather personal data: Rule change affects nonmortgage loans.
Housing advocacy groups praised the Federal Reserve's move yesterday to end a ban that has kept lenders from tracking the race and other characteristics of applicants for nonmortgage loans.
Advocates said the move could help heighten awareness of lending practices and help avoid discrimination.
``It's a step in the right direction,'' said Abbey Cook, of the Boston chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ``How can we detect discrimination if we don't really know exactly what is going on?''
But Cook said she would like the Fed to require the banks to report the data to the public.
The Fed's rule change, effective April 15, merely lets banks collect personal information about nonmortgage loan applicants - it doesn't require it. The banks that collect such information could choose to release the data or keep it, a Fed spokeswoman said.
The Fed has banned banks it regulates from inquiring about or noting the personal characteristics of nonmortgage loan applicants since 1976.
The Fed eased the ban yesterday to help lenders examine their own policies and make sure they comply with federal lending laws. [Privacy Digest]
5:20:30 PM
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Government Computer News - Alliance: Really smart cards guard privacy.
Individual privacy should rank as high as building security in smart-card authentication policies and procedures, the Smart Card Alliance says. "Both privacy and security must be considered fundamental design goals for any personal ID system" based on smart cards, the alliance said in a white paper released last week at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City.
The level of privacy protection depends on when and how smart-card data is accessed, distributed and destroyed. When authenticating a person's identity, a smart-card system should automatically prevent copying, spoofing and unauthorized sharing of the information, and it should access only as much data as is necessary for the immediate task, the alliance said.
It suggested that each smart card should incorporate a safety measure such as a personal firewall, public-key cryptography or biometrics--especially when one card serves several functions. The additional safeguards would not only boost protection but also boost user confidence, it said. [Privacy Digest]
5:19:54 PM
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Why Iraq Probably Has Smallpox. As war with Iraq approaches, there are reports circulating about whether Iraq has weaponized smallpox. Today there exists no solid evidence for that proposition. However, the indirect evidence is very alarming... In 1995, with the defection of Saddam's son in law, the world learned that Iraq had successfully been hiding a massive bioweapons program from the inspectors. Hints were found that smallpox was one of the weapons: an empty freezer was found marked "smallpox;" Iraqi's claimed to have been experimenting with camelpox - which makes no sense except as a proxy for smallpox. Smallpox samples were commonly kept in countries... [Useful Fools]
4:52:49 PM
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Banks attempt to cover up worst PIN vulnerability yet. As summarised on Cryptome, a new vulnerability (PDF) has been discovered in the crypto co-processors used by banks worldwide which allows insiders to trivially find out PINs of any or all of that bank's customers. The attack was discovered by Ross Anderson and Mike Bond in the course of their investigation into a "Phantom Withdrawal" court case where a bank customer had money debited from their account but denied that their card or PIN was used. In a new twist Citibank has applied for a court order (PDF) which could prevent public disclosure of this flaw. Ross Anderson has produced a response (PDF) opposing such an order. [kuro5hin.org]
4:49:29 PM
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The stampede continues towards Linux. Pixar Eclipses Sun with Linux/Intel [Slashdot] Most of the high-end computer graphics and film special effects houses are sick and tired of expensive Sun or SGI hardware and are switching over to Intel based platforms running Linux.
Pixar is using Rackspace blade systems - with 1,024 2.8Ghz Xeon processors. This is great for JahShaka - which I'm starting to get involved in. JahShaka is the worlds first OpenSource Realtime Editing and Effects System which takes advantage of the power of OpenGL and OpenML. This means it can run it's amazing stuff on XBox and PS2s!
[Marc's Voice]
4:45:46 PM
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When Storing Data Becomes More Convenient and Cost-efficient than Deleting It.
Free Storage
"Dan Gillmor's Sunday column points out that hard-disk data storage now costs less than one dollar per gigabyte. Thanks to Moore's law, the cost of storage is asymptotically approaching zero. It's interesting to stop and think about what happens as storage becomes essentially free.
Traditionally, storing data has been expensive, so we spent time sorting through our stored data to see what we could discard. We only kept something if we really needed it.
If storage is nearly free, though, the traditional cost equation inverts -- it becomes much cheaper to keep information than to worry about whether to delete it. Why go to the trouble and expense to sort through your old stuff, when instead you can just keep it forever?
If storage is free, then the only reason to delete a record is because it might embarrass you, or because it might put you in a bad legal position somehow. In such a world, the very fact that you deleted something would arouse suspicion....
All of this has serious implications for privacy. People will avoid excessive recording of their own activities, but the temptation to record others, just in case the recording might be useful, will be strong. If cost is no longer a barrier to surveillance by our neighbors, some new barrier has to arise. What will it be?" [Freedom to Tinker]
Meanwhile, Ernie the Attorney notes the implications for lawyers, while Gizmodo asks, "Can you believe that they can now squeeze 2 gigabytes of storage space into one of those keychain USB drives?" and TechBargains notes that TigerDirect has dropped the price of a 256MB Lexar USB 2.0 Jump Drive down to just $79.97.
How long until that 2GB version is under $100? [The Shifted Librarian]
4:43:52 PM
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Jet Blue Redefines "on Hold"
"Clive sez:
I was supposed to fly to San Francisco on Jetblue this morning, but the northeast blizzard has grounded all flights. So I'm on the phone to Jetblue trying frantically to get rebooked -- when I discover they have the finest 'hold' message on the planet. Here's my transcription of it:
'You know, everyone seems to think being on hold is a bad thing. Let's re-examine this, shall we? Don't look at it as being on hold. Look at it as being held! Because we all like to be held -- don't we?
For example, when you're sitting in front of a fire with someone special, being held is very comforting. Or when you're upset about something, being held can make you feel a whole lot better. Or when walking in the park with our significant other, we like our hands to be held. Or even coming home from school and having your books held.
You see? It's not all that bad. So remember. Don't look on it as being on hold. Look on it as being held!' " [Boing Boing Blog] [The Shifted Librarian]
4:42:52 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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