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Wednesday, February 26, 2003 |
The Obvious Society. Britt has an excellent piece on 'The Obvious Society', which is an elaboration on his ideas about a Transparent Society. A Transparent Society is a society where we collectively know as much about each other as did the citizens of a 19th century village, but this time through shared technology. Our transactions and our track record is out in the open. We carry around webcams that can record everything we do. We can easily track where everybody is at any time. We can easily track every item of any kind we have a need for tracking. I know that some people find all of this a horrible thought, but I agree with Britt that if all of this is available in a truly democratic fashion, our society is transformed in very useful ways. Crime would no longer be viable, for one thing. Neither would dishonesty. That is a transparent society. Then what is an 'Obvious Society'? It is the inevitable conclusion to such transparency. It is when it becomes obvious how to indicate our needs, obvious how to notice the needs of others, obvious how to be rewarded for good deeds. It is where we are seen so clearly, and we see others so clearly that it is obvious what we need to do, and obvious what transactions we should carry out amongst each other. If everything is out in the open, life can become more simple again, as we can focus on the obvious things to do, which are those things we are suited to do, and which need doing. And the value of that will be obvious to others, which translates into an elightened economy. [Ming the Mechanic]
6:37:00 AM 
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When It's Time to Break the Mold. Mold infestations are dangerous to buildings and people. A new do-it-yourself kit lets you test your home or office for the presence of the dreaded fungi. By Louise Knapp. [Wired News]
6:33:05 AM
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Sunday, February 23, 2003 |
Rice saunas: high-carb relaxation. Japanese relaxation technology is still light-years ahead of poky ole America. Behold the rice-sauna!
 Here is my mom buried in rice. She introduced me to this AMAZING experience. It's a wooden box full of the outer layer of rice mixed in with special bacteria that does what bacteria does and produces major heat. You basically strip down and get covered in this stuff for 15 minutes...and that must be the maximum because when you get out, your body is jeeeellllooooo. The rice and bacteria combined with the heat open your pores, suck out bad stuff, and infuse you with good stuff (minerals?). Sorry I can't be more specific, but there's something phenomenal going on: you get heated to the core in a very different way than a hot bath.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Dav!) [Boing Boing Blog]
10:26:14 AM
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Saturday, February 22, 2003 |
somethin' for the ladies
in Little Saigon, they call it Ngau Pin. in my house, we call it Beef Penis. no matter how you slice it, that's a whole lot of cow. thank heavens it comes with "Handling Instructions." [the reverse cowgirl's blog]
5:33:41 PM
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Island nation collapses. Nauru, a south-seas island, has dissolved into chaos. Nauru used to be one of the righest nations in the world, until its lucrative phosphate mines dried up, leaving a "moonscape" behind. No one on the island had been paid since last year, and the plan to become an offshore tax haven resulted in the nation becoming a money-laundry for the mob. There seems to have been a presidential coup on Jan 8, and all communications with the island have been cut off since then, except when visiting ships dock long enough to gather bits of news like the fact that the presidential palace has been burned to the ground.
The problem is so bad that more than 400 banks were registered to one mailbox alone, international investigators say.
The island has also begun interning asylum seekers while their applications to live in Australia are processed, in return for aid from Canberra.
However this appears to have gone badly wrong.
Late last year, Australian immigration officials admitted that the asylum seekers, mainly Iraqis, had been running their own detention centre since officials abandoned the site following a riot.
"Effectively you could call it a self-managed centre," a senior Australian immigration official told an inquiry.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!) [Boing Boing Blog]
I've always enjoyed stories on islands. I remember when the DNR in Minnesota sold a lighthouse on an island for $80,000. I was crushed that I didn't know about it before hand.
5:01:40 PM
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Ethnomathematics - What Next?. Mathematics is the same everywhere in the world. It is a true universal language. But some folks are upset about it, because of its Western roots. So now we get Ethnomathematics! From the New York Times (free subscription required), we learn: The only possibility of building up a planetary civilization depends on restoring the dignity of the losers.'' Robert N. Proctor, who teaches the history of science at Pennsylvania State University, says he wants to counter the notion ''that the West is the be all and end all'' when it comes to mathematical studies. ''After all,'' he adds, ''all math... [Useful Fools]
4:37:16 PM
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Faking the Lomo effect. I've always liked the look of Lomo photos (typically bright colored and highly saturated with darkened edges), but I didn't want to worry about getting another camera or messing with film & scanning. Yesterday I asked people if there was a Photoshop filter that could turn a regualr photo into a Lomo-style photo. Several people responded with the Melancholytron filter and a tutorial on achievin... [kottke.org]
4:32:47 PM
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There was a screen shot included in the piece. I got an upset email from Jacob Levy asking if George Matesky knew I was broadcasting the fact that I was considering hiring him. Heh. There really was a George Matesky, but he died before I was born. He was a semi-famous anarchist who blew up phone booths in New York. One of the first terrorists? [Scripting News]
11:18:06 AM
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Thursday, February 20, 2003 |
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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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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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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Wednesday, February 19, 2003 |
Man scared by government, media will suffocate in house before surrendering to Saddam
On the "Perhaps this is going too far" front: Paul West of Winstead, Conn., wrapped his house in plastic sheeting and duct tape after government warnings blasted through the media scared the wits out of him. Now, I ask you, do you think the media's doing us any good when this is the result of its unreflective regurgitation of idiotic advice from the Department of Homeland Security? I think not.
[RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing]
5:25:39 PM
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Tuesday, February 18, 2003 |
IPCC Climate Report Gets Blown Away. In 100 years, will Libya have a larger economy than the United States? How about Lithuania and Tunisia? Would you be willing to place a multi-billion dollar bet that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea will have a higher GDP than the United States by 2100? Will Gabon's GDP race ahead of Australia's by 2100? If not Gabon, perhaps from the sands of Algeria an economic miracle will blossom, growing Algeria's economy larger than those of many first world nations? Would you be willing to bet Swaziland will overtake Australia by 2100? Vanuatu? New Caledonia? Care to wager a few hundred billion dollars on it? According to Statistics/Economics Professors Ian Castles and David Henderson, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made all of those assumptions, and more, in their seminal IPCC reports on global warming, and the world is contemplating its bets at the casino called the Kyoto Protocol, the multibillion dollar treaty that flowed from the IPCC reports. The reports have vastly overstated the growth rates for developing countries, linked the GDP of these developing countries to greenhouse emissions, and consequently greatly overestimated the magnitude of global warming over the next 100 years. According to these two professors, using the IPCC's most conservative estimate of GDP growth rate of developing countries, all of the above instances will happen. [kuro5hin.org]
7:30:38 PM
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Germans Cover-Up Smallpox Stockpile. Andrew Sullivan reports: Astonishing piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung today. Just before the German elections last year, German intelligence found very serious evidence of Iraq's stockpiling of smallpox bioweapons. The report came with a "high degree of confidence." The piece alleges that Schroder helped bury the report, so as not to get him off-message during his anti-American campaign. Gotta love those Germans!... [Useful Fools]
7:15:03 PM
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Monday, February 17, 2003 |
Don't shoot, we're Republicans!.
Fifty years ago today, the Willie D as the Porter was nicknamed, accidentally fired a live torpedo at the battleship Iowa during a practice exercise. As if this wern't bad enough, the Iowa was carrying President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the time, along with Secretary of State, Cordell Hull and all of the country's WWII military brass. They were headed for the Big Three Conference in Tehran, where Roosevelt was to meet Stalin and Churchill. Had the Porter's torpedo struck the Iowa at the aiming pointy, the last 50 years of world history might have been quite different.
Via Jerry Pournelle, Don't shoot, we're Republicans!
Nothing much to add here, other than it's an amusing story and I'm finding it fun to think about what would have happened had the torpedo actually struck the Iowa. I don't think much would have happened in the long run—FDR would have most likely survived, been transported to another ship and still made Tehran, but still, there was that slight chance he would have been killed.
Even so, I don't think the outcome of the war would have been that much different; Truman still had to take over from FDR before the war was over. [The Boston Diaries]
6:42:00 PM
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CNN doctors the news. Dan Hon has done an excellent analysis of CNN's doctoring of the transcript of Hans Blix' report to the U.N. Friday.
After grabbing the text from the two transcripts, correcting for where the BBC inserted a whole bunch of whitespace, there it was. A count in Word says that there's 866 words in one version that aren't in the other. At all. And they're, variously, about Iraqi moves towards compliance and partial refutation of the evidence presented by Powell to the UNSC. Get that. CNN deliberately left out the things Blix said about Iraq complying with the UN resolution, and the parts where he refutes Colin Powell's evidence from the week before. Look for yourself. BBC's full version is here and CNN's fake version is here. [Ming the Mechanic]
5:33:37 PM
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An amazing technology breakthrough - Dan Gillmor reports on a major milestone: storage costs for electronic files has dropped to $1 per Gigabyte. Dan's article reflects on the significance of low cost storage, and uses a lot of great examples.
For lawyers, who deal with reams of paper, here is another metric: 1 GB of data is equivalent to about 6 bankers boxes of scanned paper.
Here in our law firm it costs us $13.52 to send a box of records to storage, and then it's .23 per month for each box. So if we sent 6 boxes to storage, it would cost us $79.50 for the first month, and then $1.38 per month for the next 11 months. So the total yearly cost of storing 6 boxes would be $94.68.
Since it only costs $1 to store that data in electronic form, as compared to about $100 to store it in paper form, that means that the cost of storing paper is 100 times the cost of storing electronic documents.
Oh, and the cost of retrieving paper is not cheap. For our firm it would be $21.96 to retrieve a box from storage and return it. Or $13.39 to retrieve it permanently. Or $6.76 to have the storage company destroy the box. Obviously, there is no cost for retrieval or destruction of electronic files. [Ernie the Attorney]
5:13:06 PM
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CNET NEWS.COM By Declan McCullagh - Perspective: Closer to a national ID plan?
A little-known company called EagleCheck is hoping to provide a standardized identity check technique that governments and corporations will use to verify that you are who you claim to be.
EagleCheck, a privately held firm in Cleveland proposes that whenever someone uses a driver's license or a passport for identity verification, the ID's authenticity will be checked through EagleCheck's network that is tied to state motor vehicle and federal databases. The databases will respond by saying whether the ID is valid.
I ran into David Akers, EagleCheck's president, last week in a Senate office building where he was hawking his system to a crowd of politicians understandably nervous about Threat Level Orange, Osama bin Laden, and possible terrorist attacks sparked by a loominginvasion of Iraq. Stacked on a table were brochures warning in stark crimson letters that "EagleCheck could have flagged" 14 of the 19 terrorists who hijacked planes on Sept. 11, 2001, because some had used expired visas and stolen passports.
Akers has had some success so far. In December, the Transportation Security Administration gave permission for EagleCheck to link its systems "to government databases" in a pair of test projects at the Cleveland and Akron, Ohio airports.
>But EagleCheck isn't limiting its marketing plan to airport security. "We are certainly looking at a variety of other applications other than airports," said Akers, listing bars, banks, government buildings--in short, wherever ID is required--as possible customers.
If EagleCheck or a similar system succeeds, it raises the specter of something akin to a national identity card, a concept that Americans have shunned in the past but could return in a more high-tech form. (In a column last summer, I wrote about how the White House was pressuring state governments to move in this direction by standardizing on driver's licenses.)
[ ... ]
It's true that many of us already use our driver's license as a general form of identification. But a true national ID would be different in two important ways: First, it would be tied to a back-end database so all verifications would be logged with the time, date and location. Second, you likely would be required to show it on demand to police, shrinking our sphere of anonymity even more.
One problem with such a system is that it would not thwart terrorists who--if you believe the FBI--are already living in the United States and likely could obtain a valid identity card either legally or illegally. Administering such a database would require a massive bureaucracy, and the inevitable errors or glitches would eliminate an innocent person's freedom to travel from one place to another until they were corrected.
If EagleCheck or a system like it succeeds, it becomes eerily possible to imagine a future in which identity card readers are omnipresent, girding us in a constant mesh of surveillance. Want to pick up your car from the parking garage? Insert your identity card and forefinger in the reader first. Going to work at the office or coming home to an apartment building? Better make sure you have that microchipped card with you. Have any unpaid parking tickets anywhere in the United States? Better just stay at home.
Needless to say, this massive database would end up bursting with detailed records of all our life's activities. It would be incredibly valuable to police and create an irresistible temptation for misuse, either through corrupt officials or through electronic intrusions. I'm not saying that such a scenario is happening today. It isn't. But it's possible, and if there's another terrorist attack on the United States, all bets are off. [Privacy Digest]
4:20:49 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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