When I read something like this, I start to wonder just how portable a system like this can be made?
Brain imaging ready to detect terrorists, say neuroscientists.
Brain-imaging techniques that reveal when a person is lying are now
reliable enough to identify criminals, with 99% accuracy, claim
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine researchers.When someone lies, their brain inhibits them from telli… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]
It is only a matter of time before this is going on almost
everywhere. It seems today that most of our government tracked
actions are recorded … but in many different and separate
databases. This appears to be an effort for the Dutch citizens to
see a unification of their identity information for a variety of
sociological benefits. Yes … I know that many people are
cringing at this. To me it only makes sense that it’s going ot
occur … it’s inevitable.
Dutch Treat: Personal Database.
Starting in 2007, every baby born in the Netherlands will receive a
Citizens Service Number and will have an electronic dossier opened in a
central database. This will allow Dutch authorities to track each
citizen from cradle to grave. [Wired News]
This morning was the November/December CTO Breakfast that Phil Windley
put
together. The breakfast started with a question about hiring good
talent. One of the employees from Canyon Bridge
said they have been looking to hire some good engineers, and have been
finding that few can answer some very simple questions. The
example that they gave was about reversing the order of a linked list.
There was a lot of talk about how to alter the hiring process, and also what types of questions people ask: What do you do outside of work? What Open Source projects do you work on?
There was also a lot of talk about how to gather names. Examples
were leverage your existing employees to get the names of “known good”
co-workers. The problem with this approach is that you can
quickly run out of references.
The conversation went on for a long time before it finally went over to the CP80
issue. CP80 is the “Clean Port 80” initiative to create laws
which forbid certain types of content to be delivered over port 80 …
the standard port used by web browsers. It again becomes an
interesting way to attempt to legislate morality. In the end, it
will not be technically possible, but could give lawyers a way to go
after the producers of “unacceptable” content. Yeah …
“unacceptable” to who? ([tags: cp80 clean filter porn])
The conversation at one point moved to downloading content from the
Internet, and the subject of Digital Rights Management (DRM).
Several sites were mentioned where you could get free content – Pandora (which is a very cool streaming site – part of the Music Genome Project), and one of my favorites Epitonic. ([tags: free music learning])
There was a brief exploration of the whole area of Wikis and the
inability of the “average” user to use “yet another markup
language”. I have to admit that it truly aggrevates me that the
various Wiki platforms have subtle differences … and most do not
provide WYSIWYG editors. and we spent some time discussing the
fact that there is a not a really good – Open Source – AJAX/WYSIWYG
editor. I mentioned the fact that my parents can use Microsoft
Word, but that having to learn a whole symbology wasn’t going to
happen. It reminded me of a great Podcast by Robert Lefkowitz @ OSCON 2005 … I’ll have to blog about that one! ([tags: wiki wysiwyg editors language])
Phil Burnes through out comments about Flock … a very cool Mozilla-based project, I brought up a very cool article that a friend sent me from Make
Magazine … it was about Mologogo
… which is a very cool mash-up of Cellular phones with GPS and Google
Maps giving you a very cheap “real-time” geopositioning/geolocation
system. We wrapped up on one of my favorite subjects … wearable
computers. We didn’t spend a lot of time on it … I’ll have to
bring some of my toys to one of the next breakfasts! ([tags: flock make mologogo gps google googlemaps geolocation wearables])
On the way out, Phil brought up a good point. His gatherings
bring together an incredible group of people with diverse interests and
experience. It is the level of experience of some of the people
that really brings a great spin to the whole conversation. We
ended up going almost 2.5 hours … and it was a great conversation the
whole time … and we could have gone longer! I’ll look forward
to January!
I just listened to a great podcast from ITConversations that was a
presentation at Pop!Tech 2005. It was a wonderful talk by Graham
Flint about the Gigapxl Project.
This is some amazing work where they are now taking pictures at extreme
resolutions – close to 4 Gigapixels! That is close to 4000
Megapixels … a LOT more than the digital cameras that you can buy
today. They are using some highly custom cameras to be able to
take pictures with incredible resolutions, built out of old U2 spy
plane parts. These are still “film” cameras, but he also
discusses the work on fully digital versions of these cameras being
built.
In his talk he mentions some interesting things that they find when
they are able to zoom in on these extremely detailed images. He
talks about this image of paragliders
on the coast of California. When his wife was reviewing the
image, she found people watching with binoculars and telescopes … but
they were looking down
… not up! When they followed the track of the people’s vision,
they found that below the paragliders was a nudist beach! When
they put this particular image in a museum, the resolution was so good
that they had to mask the faces and heads of the nudists! This
opens a whole new conversation about privacy … and continues to beg
the question “Is there such thing as privacy?”
The site has got a lot of very cool images, and examples of the
abilitty to zoom. They even had a cityscape of my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania!
I’ll have to check which podcast had the Q&A, however they did
bring up the questions of privacy. In this image of PETCO Park
he talks about the fact that they have detailed images of ~15,000
people … and how would you ever get a release from all of these
people? As a friend and I talked about this, it means that a
single photo of a demonstration or rally might give details images of
the people attending. Uh … what are you doing in that hotel room on the 15th floor?
It is truly some amazing work, and the podcast was a great
listen. I’ve attached the link to this post … we’ll see if it
works for you!
I love this article … and I’m almost amused at the perspective presented in this article – Blogger Blocked at U.S. Border.
A Canadian citizen was blocked from coming into the U.S. from Toronto
when U.S. border guards found references in his blog to being based in
New York. The blogger seems to be surprised that someone would hold him
accountable for what he wrote!
“One of them, a very sharp guy in fact, started to read every single post on
my blog. And it didn’t take long until he shocked me: ‘So you live in New York,
right? That’s what you’ve written in your [blog].'”Derakhshan did, in fact, write that he was based out of New York—mostly
because it sounded “sexier” than saying he was based out of Toronto, he said.But between his offhand blog comment and the fact that he was carrying a
Newsweek magazine sent to him at a New York address, the guards found grounds to
refuse his entry into the United States, for at least the next six months.According to U.S. policy, as a Canadian citizen Derakhshan may be legally
entitled to stay in the United States for up to six months.Canadian citizens entering the United States as visitors for business do not
require either a passport or a visa, although visitors are required to satisfy
border guards of their citizenship, according to the U.S. Customs and Border
Protection’s site.“It was obvious the guy was trying to find an excuse not to let me in, and he
found something,” Derakhshan told Ziff Davis Internet News. “He found that I
said in the blog that I said I’m based in New York now. He said being based in
New York is illegal.”
Uh … excuse me, but it seems to me that Mr. Derakhshan made the
choice to be irresponsible with his writing … he publicly claimed to
be in violation of the law. The “sharp guy” realized that not
only was this Canadian carrying a magazine with an address to him in
the U.S., but he outright claimed to be “based” in New York … in
direct violation of the law!
So what is the big deal? You got what you asked for. You were more interested in “looking good” (“Derakhshan did, in fact, write that he was based out of New York—mostly
because it sounded “sexier” than saying he was based out of Toronto, he said.”) and are now surprised at the consequences of your actions and words.
It is always amazing to me when people want to act surprised when they
get caught in their inauthenticities. I remember being taught to
be very careful what I say … and to understand the consequences of
telling lies. It appears that either he really was based in New
York illegally, or that his claims to look good have simply caught up
with him.
In either case, I love the idea of the border guards using Google!
Last night I was talking with a 13 year old who is creating some
impressive works in Photoshop. He created some very cool graphics
for his Counter Strike clan web site. I have to admit that I was
really blown away by what he created.
As we talked I asked him what he used to create the graphics, and that
is when he told me about using Photoshop. I asked what else he
was doing on the web and he replied “Some Javascipt … and a little
PHP.” Wow … I was surprised. We talked about Javascript,
and although his knowledge was not incredibly deep, he had a good grasp
of the basics of the language. I showed him some of the stuff
that I have been working on lately and he asked some good
questions. We then progressed to talking about PHP, and he
explained some of the small things that he is learning there.
Impressive.
What struck me today is the shift in learning to “speak” different
“languages”. Decades ago, or even hundreds of years ago, it was
seen as important to learn to speak other languages from around the
globe. People in non-English speaking countries learned
English. Most of the schools here in the USA taught middle and
high-school students Spanish, French, German, and other
languages. (I actually spent years learning Spanish … although
it is very rusty at this point!) It always seemed to me that the
intent was to give me a leg up on interacting with people of other
countries and origins. I have, from time to time, found value in
my Spanish learning.
Today it now appears that the future is more in “talking” to computers
and the Internet. And so now it seems there is more value in
learning “computer” languages … then “foriegn” langauges. As I
thought about this today, I realized that this is probably true.
More and more people from around the globe are learning English, and
much of the Internet – and computer technology in general – is based on
English. So where do children turn? To “interacting” with
computers. And so understanding the languages used by computers
is becoming more and more important.
Its fun to think about the evolution of computer langauges, and to see
the various roots of the popular langauges. In addition, most of
the scripting languages are becoming so high-level, and the component
libraries so rich, that even a beginner at programming can create
powerful applications. With the Internet as a platform, Web
Services, XML, RSS, and many other standards are emerging as the APIs
independent of operating system … or programming “langauge”. I
can only imagine what a 13 year old, who today is learning Javascript
and PHP, might be developing in 5 or 10 years. I know that it
will be fun to see!
Tonight I posted the lastest version (v3.2) of my RadioAtomBridge tool for
Radio Userland
. This tool is a way to mirror blog posts from Radio Userland
to
blogs that are hosted at Blogger.com. The tool has been working
great over the last year, but recently Blogger.com changed their API
(wisely!) to require the use of SSL. I discovered this when my
tool failed and stopped working.
I spent the last several weeks making a number of changes, and cleaning
up the tool in general. There were several fixes that I wanted to
get in place, and I think that I have covered the majority of
them. The primary change was to allow you to specify using
SSL/TLS for the ATOM posts. This does require a download from
Userland of the Radio Userland TLS module … but it’s a free download.
I’ve done a good bit of testing, and have actually posted this article
with the tool. I believe that I have things working well enough
to release a build as v3.2 … so go and grab a copy and give it a
try! If you have problems, please post comments on the
RadioAtomBridge blog … I’ll look for them there!
So as the world evolves, so will the requirements for tracking identity
and digital identity. It’s no longer enough to have attributes
for “mother” and “father” … now we have to account for the
possibility of multiple parents! This article talks about some
research going on where an embryo will be created with genes from two
mothers. So a child born of this type of research will have to be
able to list their mother and father … and other mother. As we
continue to explore digital identity, I hope that people realize that
the old ways of thinking about identity are long gone.
This reminds be of some foresight used by the authors of HumanML
… the Human Markup Language. When I was reading through their
schema I was surprised to see that they have already accounted for the
possibility that someone has had a gender-change operation! They
already define the attributes for ‘gender’, along with ‘gender at
birth’! Yep … they might not be the same.
The ironic issue is that this might not be enough … what if they
change their gender numerous times? May we live in interesting
times. The world of identity is going to be rocked.
The cloned baby with two mothers. Daily Mail Sep 9 2005 8:10AM GMT [Moreover Technologies – moreover…]
Few people seem to understand what all of these viruses and malware are really about. Yes, there is a certain amount of spam that you get that is designed to then barrage you with pop-up ads … as though you would say “Wow, what a great ad! I’m glad I get these pop-ups … I’ll have to go and spend money with these folks!“
One of the real business models behind all of this – the real people doing business in this space – are the ones that use large numbers of compromised computers at business and homes to launch DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) Attacks. These attacks are used for good ol’ conventional extortion. It becomes a very simple case of “Pay me, or your Internet presence will be shut down!” The person who controls the compromised machines can easily “task” them to attack various web sites, at various times, and for various amounts of time. Reading this article, you can begin to get the idea that large scale “Internet vandelism” can quickly grow into a profitable – yet illegal – business. I recently read another article where a California 20-year-old had over 400,000 machines under his control as a massively distributed “botnet” that he could divide up and control as a virtual military force. Yes … 400,000 machines!
A while back I had one of my Linux boxes compromised through a hole in a Open Source PHP application. The attackers were able to install and execute a small script that pulled down and ran a larger script. That one actually attached to an IRC server and waited for additional commands. I found that they then sent a command to download a DDOS script, and would then begin to run it from time to time attacking various sites. I discovered this whole scenario when I noticed that my DSL line would get swamped from time to time and isolated the traffic to that Linux box. I actually had some fun before cleaning everything up. I did patch the hole, but I modified the DDOS script to simply log information about the command and the target, but not actually generate the traffic. It was fun to review the log and see that my box was being controlled by a compromised machine in South America, and that I was being to used – at one point – to attack an on-line gambling site.
This got me thinking a lot about what we don’t know that we don’t know about the whole world of the Internet, spam, viruses, and malware. In addition, it reinforces the levels of indirection that can easily be created to hide the identity of the controller. But not forever!
Hackers Admit to Wave of Attacks. With their ringleader on the run, two cybervandals own up to using an army of compromised PCs to take down sites for commercial gain. By Kevin Poulsen. [Wired News]
I know that this type of identity theft is why so many people are working on identity solutions. I believe that these types of incidents are going to be on the raise for a while. What is interesting to me is that I am not sure that this can prevented except through the use of harsh penalties.
What we have is a company who specializes in outsourcing various work, and number of companies who have entrusted their customers – and their identity data – to this outsourcing entity. Within the outsourcing entity, there are employees – or this one employee – who saw the opportunity to compromise the system from the inside!
While I was working at Novell, we often saw the hacker/security breach reports that floated around, and in almost all of the cases that I could remember the biggest breaches were from the inside! We can do everything that we want to protect the identities of others, however when we have someone within our company – within our community or context – that is committed to exploiting our identity for their own purposes, there is little we can do. This becomes a fundamental breakdown within that community … and for significant violations in the past there were severe punishments. This truly gets at the roots of the meaning of being fired!
Indian call center worker arrested. In a new case of alleged data theft, Indian police have arrested a call center employee in the outsourcing hub of Gurgaon. [CNET News.com]
[tags: identity digitalidentity fired community security ]