Life of a "real hacker" - not fot TV

Canada Spending $1B on Security for G8/G20 Summit in June

From the Bruce - Think of all the actual security you can buy for that money. 

The Canadian government disclosed Tuesday that the total price tag to police the elite Group of Eight meeting in Muskoka, as well as the bigger-tent Group of 20 summit starting a day later in downtown Toronto, has already climbed to more than $833-million. It said it’s preparing to spend up to $930-million for the three days of meetings that start June 25.

That price tag is more than 20 times the total reported cost for the April, 2009, G20 summit in Britain, with the government estimating a cost of $30-million, and seems much higher than security costs at previous summits ­ the Gleneagles G8 summit in Scotland, 2005, was reported to have spent $110-million on security, while the estimate for the 2008 G8 gathering in Japan was $381-million.

These numbers are crazy. There simply isn't any justification for this kind of spending.

Amazing...

Google phasing out Windows

Digital Disconnect Causing Dramatic Drop In Empathy

"Several news sources report that today's college students show a precipitous drop in empathy (here's MSNBC's take). The study shows that students since the year 2000 had 40% less empathy than those 20 and 30 years before them. The article lays out a laundry list of culprits, from child-rearing practices and the self-help movement, to video games and social media, to a free-market economy and income inequality. There's also a link so you can test your very own level of narcissism. Let's hope the Slashdot crowd doesn't break the empathy counter on the downside."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Is "generation me" all about me?

"Many people see the current group of college students — sometimes called 'Generation Me ' — as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history," said Konrath, 

Are today's young people really more self-centered?

Konrath's colleague graduate student Edward O'Brien added, "It's not surprising that this growing emphasis on the self is accompanied by a corresponding devaluation of others.”

The role of media Even so, Konrath and O'Brien suggest several reasons for the lower empathy they found, including the ever-increasing exposure to media in the current generation.

"Compared to 30 years ago, the average American now is exposed to three times as much nonwork-related information," Konrath said. "

The rise in social media could also play a role.

"The ease of having 'friends' online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don't feel like responding to others' problems, a behavior that could carry over offline," O'Brien said.

"I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening," said one person in the study.  "I feel like most people these days are in a similar situation, for between having a Blackberry, a laptop, a television, and an iPod, people have become unable to shed their media skin."

In the new study... students wrote more than 110,000 words: in aggregate, about the same number of words as a 400-page novel.

"We were surprised by how many students admitted that they were 'incredibly addicted' to media," "But we noticed that what they wrote at length about was how they hated losing their personal connections. Going without media meant, in their world, going without their friends and family." 

Building upon that observation, an alternative explanation is that the students may have identified the "media" as what they were craving, but were actually missing the social connections afforded by the media. In other words, the students were "addicted" to the social ties — friendships and relationships — with others.

"The students did complain about how boring it was go anywhere and do anything without being plugged into music on their MP3 players," said Moeller.

"And many commented that it was almost impossible to avoid the TVs on in the background at all times in their friends' rooms. But what they spoke about in the strongest terms was how their lack of access to text messaging, phone calling, instant messaging, e-mail and Facebook, meant that they couldn't connect with friends who lived close by, much less those far away."

"Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. 

"When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life.

Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable." 

Very few students in the study reported that they regularly watched news on television or read a local or national newspaper... They also didn't mention checking mainstream media news sites or listening to radio news while commuting in their cars. Yet student after student demonstrated knowledge of specific news stories.

How did they get the information? 

In a disaggregated way, and not typically from the news outlet that broke or committed resources to a story... "Students expressed tremendous anxiety about being cut-off from information,”

"But most of all they care about being cut off from that instantaneous flow of information that comes from all sides and does not seem tied to any single device or application or news outlet."

That's the real takeaway of this study for journalists: students showed no significant loyalty to a news program, news personality or even news platform. Students have only a casual relationship to the originators of news, and in fact rarely distinguished between news and more general information. 

...often by following the story via "unconventional" outlets, such as through text messages, their e-mail accounts, Facebook and Twitter.

Please read full here

Steve & Bill Comic Strip

Time.... gone, wasted face it.

Recognizing Sarcasm with Computer Algorithms

PopSci - The pursuit of machine intelligence means we have to come up with ways to communicate with our computers in a way both entities can understand. But while computers process verbal commands in a straightforward fashion, humans tend to use more sophisticated speech forms, employing slang or symbols to convey an idea. So an Israeli research team has developed a machine algorithm that can recognize sarcasm.

Work or Email... digital diversion.

Geek Alphabet

See more at the "geek Alphabet"

Demise of net knowledge

THEN it was the ultimate tool of knowledge

TIME:  The Internet evolved from a computer system built 25 years ago by the Defense Department to enable academic and military researchers ... built up by people who lived and breathed the hacker ethic -- students at Berkeley and M.I.T., researchers at AT&T Bell Laboratories, computer designers at companies such as Apple and Sun Microsystems. "If there is a soul of the Internet, it is in that community," The scientists who were given free Internet access quickly discovered that the network was good for more than official business. They used it to send each other private messages (E-mail) and to post news and information on public electronic bulletin boards (known as Usenet newsgroups).

Now it is a tool for people to ...withdraw within their walled communities and never venture again into the Internet's public spaces. It's a process similar to the one that created the suburbs and replaced the great cities with shopping malls and urban sprawl. The magic of the Net is that it thrusts people together in a strange new world, one in which they get to rub virtual shoulders with characters they might otherwise never meet. The challenge for the citizens of cyberspace -- as the battles to control the Internet are joined and waged -- will be to carve out safe, pleasant places to work, play and raise their kids without losing touch with the freewheeling, untamable soul that attracted them to the Net in the first place.

If you get it, you get IT

The USA Pavilion Is a Disgrace

POPSci Many of the pavilions at the 2010 Expo in Shanghai are phenomenal, both inside and out. The USA pavilion, however, is neither. But far worse than being visually unimpressive (which it is), the essence of our representation at the largest World's Fair carries an even sadder message.

The mind-blowing pavilions make the failings of the USA's--the world's largest economy--even more shameful.

Soon we may not even have that. This whole scheme looks like it had ZERO creativity at all...

The uninspiring saga of the United States' World Expo pavilion in Shanghai.

Despite nearly two decades of U.S. government inattention to Expos, some in the State Department and the U.S. Expo community had hopes that the United States might put on a better show in Shanghai. In November 2006, the State Department, which had taken over the role of managing U.S. participation at Expos from the USIA, published an official "request for proposal" (RFP) to design, build, and fund a U.S. pavilion in Shanghai. Among other provisions, it required a detailed plan for raising a hefty $75 million to $100 million even though most of the national pavilions at Expo 2010 cost less than $30 million and the eventual U.S. pavilion is budgeted at $61 million. Despite this high bar, several groups of designers, architects, and producers submitted detailed proposals, including a proposal that had Frank Gehry as an architect.

But the State Department rejected them all, and according to correspondence shared between the department and the last rejected proposal group, the RFP ended in late 2007 without a team in place.

“We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint”

New York Times Via: crypto Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

"When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war," General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"PowerPoint makes us stupid," Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

"It's dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control," General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. "Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable."

In General McMaster's view, PowerPoint's worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC's Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict's causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. "If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise," General McMaster said.

Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making.

Ying and Yang

And they both need me to keep it together ;-)

Good things come in good time...

Read full by Lisa at socimages

Go outside ...

iPad the future is futile

Honoring the Father of the PC

PopSci - Henry Edward Roberts's Altair 8800 started the era of home computing, and inspired a young tinkerer named Bill Gates to write software

Roberts died on April 1 of pneumonia at the age of 68.

The Altair 8800 represented a $395 DIY kit for early computer geeks in 1975, or about $1557.56 in 2009 dollars. The switch-operated machine contained no display and used the Intel 8080 microprocessor.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen might stand astride the world, but they both paid homage last night to the passing of the man who booted up their careers. The Microsoft founders got their start in the computer biz writing software for the Altair 8800, a forerunner of home computing first created by Henry Edward Roberts, BBC reports.

"Ed was willing to take a chance on us -- two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace -- and we have always been grateful to him," Gates and Allen said in their joint statement on Thursday.

Schneier as the new head of TSA?

A recent opening and hint, gave our nation the hope to have some 'real' improvements in national security.
James Fallows Noted in a interview post with Bruce Schneier "Mr. Sanity about Security" Schneier that there was a high-level job opening at the TSA and he would testify for Schneier as the new head of TSA when he is nominated.
I second that!

nerd/dork/geek/dweeb diagram

From GreatWhiteSnark

Have you  been unfairly and inaccurately labeled "dorks," only to then exhaustively explain the differences among the three to a more-than-skeptical offender, I say: You're welcome. This nerd/dork/geek/dweeb Venn diagram should save you a lot of time and frustration in the future.

Via Matthew at Sed Contra, who will see you at the intersection of Blogging and Things that Have Latin Names.

Epic Understanding Fail Fail

Via: John Mayer l Tweetbag

The UnGooglable Man

FAIL - Chat beats logic and information on Web

How does facebook improve the world again?

Consumerist - It's official WEB FAIL-- playing Farmville and tagging friends in photos has become more popular than actually trying to find things on the internet, as a new report shows Facebook edged out Google as the most-visited site on the internet last week.

According to Hitwise, Facebook accounted for 7.07% of all web traffic for the week ending March 13.

That barely edges out Google's 7.03%.

This is huge news for Facebook, who only a year ago accounted for around 2% of U.S. web traffic and an EPIC fail for the age of the internet...

Read full at Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Young, Dumb, Full Of Risk For ID Theft

WashingtonPost - A new study finds that the young and the feckless are the most at risk for identity theft. 18-24 year olds are more likely to be victimized because they don't check their accounts frequently or thoroughly enough. You can beat the statistics, though, if 1 in 20 times you're tempted to check your friend's Facebook updates you instead scrutinize your account statements.  (Thanks to Ben Popken Consumerist!)

The Secret Origin of Windows

SlashDot -

"Windows has been so dominant for so long that it's easy to forget Windows 1.0 was vaporware, mocked both outside and inside of Microsoft — and that its immediate successors were considered stopgaps until OS/2 was everywhere.

Tandy Trower, the product manager who finally got Windows 1.0 out the door a quarter century ago, has written a memoir of the experience. (He thought being assigned the much-maligned project was Microsoft's fiendish way of trying to get rid of him.) The story involves such still-significant figures as Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, and Nathan Myhrvold; Trower left Microsoft only in November of 2009 after 28 years with the company."

A lot of eyes in the sky turning to e-waste

Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology

Onion - "I forgive Google, I forgive Google, I forgive Google," said Ohio resident Darla Mackenzie, sitting on the edge of her bathtub, her head in her hands. "Please, please, don't tell...about the things I have done.

Acknowledging that Google hasn't always been open about how it mines the roughly 800 terabytes of personal data it has gathered since 1998, Schmidt apologized to users— particularly the 1,237,948 who take daily medication to combat anxiety—for causing any unnecessary distress, and he expressed regret—especially to Patricia Fort, a single mother taking care of Jordan, Sam, and Rebecca, ages 3, 7, and 9—for not doing more to ensure that private information remains private.

Monday's apology comes after the controversial launch of Google Buzz, a social networking platform that publicly linked Gmail users to their most e-mailed contacts by default.

"I'd like nothing more than to apologize in person to everyone we've let down, but as you can see, many of our users are rarely home at this hour," said Google cofounder and president Sergey Brin, pointing to several Google Map street-view shots of empty bedroom and living room windows on a projection screen behind him. "And, if last night's searches are any indication, Boston's Robert Hornick is probably out shopping right now for the spaghetti and clam sauce he'll be cooking tonight."

"Either that, or hunting down that blond coworker of his, Samantha, whose Picasa photos he stares at every night," Brin added.

While admitting that security measures need to improve, Google officials also claimed that everyone makes mistakes, be it storing confidential data indefinitely or, say, "having a few too many drinks on the evening of Jan. 23, driving home in a haze, striking a pedestrian on the corner of Mercer and Cavendish, speeding off, and then desperately searching online for hit and run laws, right, Karen?"

"Americans have every right to be angry at us," Google spokesperson Janet Kemper told reporters. "Though perhaps Dale Gilbert should just take a few deep breaths and go sit in his car and relax, like they tell him to do at the anger management classes he attends over at St. Francis Church every Tuesday night."

"Breathe in, breathe out," Kemper added. "We wouldn't want you to have another incident, Dale. Not when you've been doing so well." ;-) Read full at The Onion

Social Priorities are minorities ;-)

The code of Homer

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Welcome WebCrawlers

95% of User-Generated Content Is BS

SlashDot - "The HoneyGrid scans 40 million Web sites and 10 million emails, so it was bound to find something interesting. Among the things it found was that a staggering 95% of User Generated Content is either malicious in nature or spam." Here is the report's front door; to read the actual report you'll have to give up name, rank, and serial number.

Here are the key findings: (via daniweb.com)
    * 13.7% of searches for trending news/buzz words (as defined by Yahoo Buzz & Google Trends) led to malware.
    * The second half of 2009 revealed a 3.3% decline in the growth of malicious Web sites compared to the first half of the year. Websense Security Labs believes this is due to the increased focus on Web 2.0 properties with higher traffic and multiple pages.
    * However, comparing the second half of 2009 with the same period in 2008, Websense Security labs saw an average of 225% growth in malicious Web sites.
    * 71% of Web sites with malicious code are legitimate sites that have been compromised.
    * 95% of user-generated posts on Web sites are spam or malicious.
    * Consistent with previous years, 51% of malware still connects to host Web sites registered in the United States.
    * China remains second most popular malware hosting country with 17%, but during the last six months Spain jumped into the third place with 15.7% despite never having been in the top 5 countries before.
    * 81% of emails during the second half of the year contained a malicious link.
    * Websense Security Labs identified that 85.8% of all emails were spam.
    * Statistics for the second half of 2009 show spam emails broke down as 72% (HTML), 11.2% (image), 14.4% (plain text with URL) and 2.4% (plain text with no URL).
    * 35% of malicious Web-based attacks included data-stealing code.
    * 58% of all data-stealing attacks are conducted over the Web.

Bad password

Moving Through Time... I think therefore I can

I believe we are at a level of technology and mind mapping to utilize digital interfaces that can enhance this potential... but we are a little busy playing games on our iPhone ;-)

Source: Psychological Science

Setting humans apart from other species is the ability to travel subjectively through time (Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007), a process termed chronesthesia (Tulving, 2002). Mental time travel enables people to tailor their behavior to satisfy the challenges of daily life (Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2007; Tulving, 2002). To date, work on chronesthesia has elucidated the neural basis of retrospection and prospection (Addis, Wong, & Schacter, 2007; Schacter et al., 2007) and documented how the process of mental time travel is affected by both aging (Addis, Wong, & Schacter, 2008) and mental illness (D'Argembeau, Raffard, & Van der Linden, 2008).

These insights aside, however, remarkably little is known about the wider psychological characteristics of this pivotal social-cognitive activity. One intriguing question is, how is temporal information processed when one revisits the past or anticipates the future (see Schacter et al., 2007)?

One possibility is that mental time travel may be represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. Specifically, the metaphorical "arrow of time" (Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008) may be grounded in a processing architecture that integrates temporal and spatial information in a directional manner (i.e., past = back, future = forward).

Given that abstract mental constructs can be revealed motorically, or embodied (see Barsalou, 2008), this viewpoint gives rise to an interesting hypothesis: If chronesthesia entails a coupling of thought and action, episodes of retrospection and prospection may be accompanied by backward and forward motion, respectively. To explore this possibility, we measured spontaneous fluctuations in the magnitude and direction of postural sway while individuals engaged in mental time travel.

Dumbing down the world - digital nation on Frontline

Frontline: 'just want to push the pause button of our age and says, what's going on here?'

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view/

Quote: It's not that their dumb or not trying... they are trying in a way that is not as effective as it could be. - Because they are distracted by everything else.

The most brilliant minds wasted in an online waste land.

We have created a unlimited way to waste time, dilute the meaning of everything meaningful and distract ourselves from gaining any tangible knowledge or true happiness.

Your digital life is a virtual life, now you have to find out if you want an actual 'life'

The only way to 'live' may be to disconnect...

Using the Power of Emotion for Web Design

Proudly pilfered from Smashingmagazine effectively developing an experience. Storytelling offers a way for the team to really understand what they are building and the audience that they are creating it for. Stories allow for the most complex of ideas to be effectively conveyed to a variety of people. This designed product/experience can then offer meaning and emotion for its users. The professionals that are currently using the power of narrative in their projects are doing it in vastly different ways.

Emotional Design. Through his research, Norman found that design affects how people experience products, which happens at three different levels, and translates into three types of design:

• Visceral Design This design is from a subconscious and biologically pre-wired programmed level of thinking. We might automatically dislike certain things (spiders, rotten smells, etc.) and automatically like others ("attractive" people, symmetrical objects, etc). This is our initial reaction to the appearance.
• Behavioral Design This is how the product/application functions, the look and feel, the usability, our total experience with using the product/application.
• Reflective Design This is how it makes us feel after the initial impact and interacting with the product/application, where we associate products with our broader life experience and associate meaning and value to them.

There is a lot more to emotion than can be covered here, but understanding those basic levels of processing gives us some insight into why storytelling is so powerful. Consider how the levels of thinking play off each other in an amusement park: People pay to be scared. At the Visceral Level we have a fear of heights and danger. At the Reflective Level we trust that it is safe to go on the ride, and we seek that emotionally charged rush and sense of accomplishment (overcoming that fear of heights) after the ride is finished. Knowing that emotion is so vital to how we think makes it more important to create not just a functional and usable experience, but to seek and make a meaningful connection.

Bring Teams Together

User experience professionals typically have to work with people from many different backgrounds. Depending on the type of experience, it might require the effort of everyone from an engineer to a user interface designer. Also, in many cases, the approach in creating websites or applications is to consider the technology, or limitations of that technology, first. Finally, to make matters more complex, larger teams tend be split with concerns regarding their domain. For example, the marketing person is going to focus on their directives and motivations based on their initiatives. This is not always in the end-user's best interest and results in a diluted and poor experience.

The Disciplines of User Experience by Dan Saffer

The infographic above depicts the many different fields that make up the disciplines of user experience. The user experience team selected to create an iPhone application for the masses would be quite different from one that is developing a medical device used by doctors. As described earlier, the individuals that have been involved in crafting stories have been successful in tapping into a way of communicating that has been around for thousands of years. Utilizing storytelling, user experience teams can also inject emotion and value into the end product for users.

Cindy Chastain refers to it as an Experience Theme. She says this theme is "the core value of the experience" being created. Christian Saylor refers to it as finding the Lead Character. Without this user-centered goal, he states, we are just "designing for the sake of designing."

By centering around a specific theme, or character, the uncoordinated elements of an experience all have a clear goal and purpose. With storytelling, a diverse team creating a website or application can collectively link together the tangible elements and create something that is a meaningful experience and is more than just bits and bytes.

Your ability to adhere to a process is dependent on many things, like timeline, budget, and business goals.

In reality, it's not always possible to do everything as specifically outlined. Storytelling is a way to connect teams quickly, and gain insight and understanding. The experiences we create communicate with those elements through the design, content, and user interaction. Storytellers have successfully been communicating for much longer than websites have been around — which makes it a valuable tool from the business side of design.

Please read more at  Smashingmagazine

If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee - that will do them in.

Blogs - I have nothing to say...

Wow that's a big iPhone you have ;-)

Original Apple iPad's... how soon we forget

That’s one big iPhone you got there

A genius out of his eliminate is an idiot...

State of the internet 2009 - Just Numbers

What happened with the Internet in 2009? How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more.

Email
* 90 trillion - The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
* 247 billion - Average number of email messages per day.
* 1.4 billion - The number of email users worldwide.
* 100 million - New email users since the year before.
* 81% - The percentage of emails that were spam.
* 92% - Peak spam levels late in the year.
* 24% - Increase in spam since last year.
* 200 billion - The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites
* 234 million - The number of websites as of December 2009.
* 47 million - Added websites in 2009.

Gamers and girls

krebson drops the guantlet... vulnerabilities will rock server community

'After working with the vendors long enough, we've come to conclusion that, to put it simply, it is a waste of time. Now, we do not contact with vendors and do not support so-called "responsible disclosure" policy,' Legerov said."

a slew of previously undocumented vulnerabilities in several widely-used commercial software products, including Mysql, Tivoli, IBM DB2, Sun Directory, and a host of others will be posted. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Infobesity... the result of excessive infocalorie consumption.

Bloated with mediocrity as they track their passive lives...

The average twittering brain has 126 followers which implies that an average of 126 brains are being followed back. If all these users stick to an average of 22 TPD (Tweets Per Day), reading the tweets will consume approximately 2.5 hours per day (not to mention responding to them).

"Just as the body survives by ingesting negative entropy, so the mind survives by ingesting information. In a very general sense, all higher organisms are informavores." - George Miller

2010 PC free your mind

From www.haroldsplanet.com

Web2.0 suicide machine start 2010 right

Tired of your Social Network?

Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego. The machine is just a metaphor for the website which moddr_ is hosting; the belly of the beast where the web2.0 suicide scripts are maintained. Our service currently runs with Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn! Commit NOW!

Feel free like a real bird again and untwitter yourself. Watch it here!