Book Reviews


[Day Permalink] Tuesday, November 26, 2002

[Item Permalink] Identity thefts and privacy -- Comment()
Cops Bust Massive ID Theft Ring: "Federal prosecutors have arrested three men involved in what officials are calling the largest identity fraud case in American history.... Cummings would then use the ruse of "helping" the customers work through software and hardware problems to obtain the customer code that allowed the company to request credit records."

iRights comments: "This is like a textbook case on why privacy issues are so importent. There is no such thing as "a company" or "a government" having access to privacy information; only "people in a company" or "people in a government" can have access to privacy-sensitive information. Now the people who had their credit records stolen, who have committed no crime, have to go through the effort of checking their records and potentially changing their Social Security Number and putting a fraud lock on their records, making credit transactions that much more difficult for the duration of the lock."


[Item Permalink]  -- Comment()
Just posted! Sigma SD9 review: "The Sigma SD9 is the first digital SLR to utilize Foveon's revolutionary X3 sensor. The X3 sensor is the first image sensor capable of capturing..." [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]


[Item Permalink]  -- Comment()
BBC says to avoid Explorer: "The easiest way to avoid parasite programs, he says, is to stop using Internet Explorer because it is targeted by many of the adware and spyware companies." [Slashdot]


[Item Permalink] Per Bak and self-organized criticality -- Comment()
Seb's Open Research writes about self-organization: "A nice introduction to self-organization by a physicist, Cosma Rohilla Shalizi." Incidentally, I just noticed today in Nature that Per Bak, one of the most cited physicists, died on October 16, 2002. In 1991, I organized a workshop on cellular automata, and Per Bak was one of the invited speakers. His work on self-organized criticality is well-known today, and influences current physics research.


[Item Permalink] Feedback and insults -- Comment()
I wrote earlier: "By the way, it may be a singularly Finnish trait that when giving positive feedback we tend to insult the recipient a bit." I received a comment from Bjarne Tveskov: "Maybe it's a Nordic/Scandinavian thing, in my experience, danes do that all the time as well." This is good to hear, now I'll feel less out-of-place in Scandinavian meetings.


[Item Permalink] Can't stomach Microsoft? -- Comment()
If you can't stomach Microsoft, the help is near: LIINUS (the text is in Finnish) will help your stomach to cope with the daily stress. LIINUS is a dietary supplement (functional food), marketed by Orion Pharma, for making your stomach behave. It may also prevent you from getting cancer. My food-related English vocabulary is a bit rusty, but I believe FLAXSEED as Functional Food for People tells of the same benefits as the Finnish discription of LIINUS.

Here is a slogan for the product: "Can't Stomach Microsoft? Use LIINUS!" Could I make a career in advertising?


[Item Permalink] What's a Weblog? -- Comment()
Halley's Comment writes about weblogs:
  1. A weblog (or blog) is a daily online diary on the Net where you write and publish at the near-same moment to a few million of your closest friends, except only about 20 people actually read what you write. Each entry is called a "post" and the person writing a weblog (or "blog") is called a "weblogger" or "blogger."
  2. A blog is a love letter, scribbled on three-hole paper and scrunched up all sweaty in your hand that you try to pass to the cutest looking guy in class and he drops it and walks on it and then your friend goes to retrieve it and bring it back to you, unread while you die a thousand deaths.
  3. A blog is a new medium as new and weird as the novel was a few hundred years ago. It's a medium that has embedded news, non-fiction narrative, fiction, poetry, graphics, music and most importantly hyperlinks to all other media which gives it its quintessential differentiating characteristic -- it can NOT exist outside of the web. It's a purely networked form. Writers love it because (oh shit, shall I spill the beans, it's EXACTLY how they think and experience the world. Scary, eh?) Talk about baggy monsters.
  4. It's telepathic training wheels -- that is, it's a very early stage on the way to the REALLY big next big thing -- brain-to-brain telepathic transfer. Bye bye telephone, bye bye writing, bye bye fortune cookies, bye bye every other way you used to communicate. Blogs open up people's minds, you travel the road with them, see it all through their eyes. It's all we've got now, but soon enough we'll all be in bed with each other, embeded with each other I mean.
  5. Blogs are embarrassingly textual and visual now, but will soon be audio/video. Don't hold it against them. They're trying to get there asap. You will hear them talking soon. Yes, that A/V guy who was a putz in 8th grade will be king. Just get used to it.
  6. Blogs are one of the last places where you can still tell the truth.
  7. Blogs are one the first places where women are finally telling the truth.
  8. A weblog is good way to make friends, visit friends, love people and not leave your house.
  9. A weblog is my head, open to you, day and night, at your convenience. Come on in. Please take your shoes off at the door, I hate having to vacuum after you leave.
  10. A weblog is watching brains at work, especially watching brains with the ultimate prosthetic device -- everyone else's brain and the whole net connected. Weblogs let you watch people learning at lightning speed. Awesome to witness.


[Item Permalink]  -- Comment()
In digital world, you must protect your privacy rights: "How much private information are you willing to give away for a freebie or discount? Do you mind having all your drugstore purchases tracked for a markdown?" [Privacy Digest]


[Item Permalink]  -- Comment()
Is Microsoft Truly 'Trustworthy'? "Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie recently suggested that in the name of security, it may be appropriate to force you to install Microsoft patches or updates, and if that breaks your existing applications, well, it's for your own good." [Privacy Digest]


[Item Permalink]  -- Comment()
Living Without Microsoft points to an article by Michael Jennings: "Microsoft has moved from making operating systems that are independent to making operating systems that are dependent on its own computers. Besides possible privacy and security vulnerabilities, this raises numerous concerns. For example, if Microsoft decided to remove the support for Windows XP, users might be forced to upgrade. Or, Microsoft could decide to ask for monthly payment for the use of its computers."


[Item Permalink] No more feminism -- Comment()
kasia in a nutshell points to Girl Power: "Game Over. But it took me a day or two to name the new game. It's "girlism" -- women want to be sexy girls and use all the tricks girls use. Crying, flirting, begging, winking, stomping their feet when they don't get their way, general trotting around showing off their long legs and whatever else they decide to show off thereby distracting and derailing men."


[Item Permalink]  -- Comment()
A Shallow Introduction to the K Programming Language: "K is an exceptional language for dealing with mathematical analysis, financial prediction, or anything that handles bulk data. I have used it for a document search engine and other computational linguistic tasks. K doesn't work very well when the problem is not vectorizable and scalars are the largest datum to operate on." [Lambda the Ultimate]