Congratulations to Elonka on making prime coverage in the New York Times ...

For nearly 16 years, puzzle enthusiasts have labored to decipher an 865-character coded message stenciled into a sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. This week, the sculptor gave them an unsettling but hopeful surprise: part of the message they thought they had deciphered years ago actually says something else.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Sanborn left a phone message for Elonka Dunin, a computer game developer who also runs an e-mail list for enthusiasts trying to solve the "Kryptos" puzzle. For the first time, Mr. Sanborn had done a line-by-line analysis of his text with what Mr. Gillogly and Mr. Stein had offered as the solution and discovered that part of the solved text was incorrect.

Within minutes, Ms. Dunin called back, and Mr. Sanborn told her that in the second section, one of the X's he had used as a separator between sentences had been omitted, altering the solution. "He was concerned that it had been widely published incorrectly," Ms. Dunin said.

Ms. Dunin excitedly started sending instant messages ...

Another CIA leak?! Can't these people keep a secret? Shesh!

Ok. So let me see if I am following correctly. I'll translate into Rummy.. As I understand it, there are known knows, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. This was a known known intelligence, that turned out to include an unknown known error due to Sanborn. Now the full information is in the hands of hackers and terrorists everywhere, looking to break the CIA cafeteria.

Information about anything in regard to the CIA cafeteria must be heavily protected, and must not leak into the public domain.

And now, your moment of zen.

Good job Elonka. You rock.

A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery

April 17, 2006 — The recently arrested "boss of bosses" of the Sicilian Mafia, Bernardo Provenzano, wrote notes using an encryption scheme similar to the one used by Julius Caesar more than 2,000 years ago, according to a biography of Italy's most wanted man.
. . .
The letter, written in January 2001 by Angelo Provenzano to his father, was found with other documents when one of Provenzano's men, Nicola La Barbera, was arrested

"...I met 512151522 191212154 and we agreed that we will see each other after the holidays...," said the letter, which included several other cryptograms.

"The Binnu code is nothing new: each number corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. "A" is 4, "B" is 5, "C" is 6 and so on until the letter Z , which corresponds to number 24," wrote Palazzolo and Oliva.

While the classic Caesar cipher moves everything three letters later (A becomes D, B becomes E, etc.), the "Provenzano code" assigns a number to each letter by simply increasing by 3 the value given to the 21 letters of the Italian alphabet listed in order.
So, A becomes 4 (1 3), B becomes 5 (2 3), C becomes 6 (3 3), etc
"In the Provenzano code the key is the 3 shift," mathematics expert Alessandro Martignago told Discovery News.

As the code is cracked, the "512151522 191212154" person becomes "Binnu Riina." Most likely, it refers to Bernardo Riina, arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of aiding Provenzano while he was on the run.

I got a letter from someone who said that Provenzano might have done better if he would have read my book first . . . ;)

Mafia Boss's Encrypted Messages Unraveled

In an internal memo last October, Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer, who joined Microsoft last year, wrote, "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."

The trouble with Microsoft.

Windows Is So Slow, but Why? - New York Times

Acidus wrote:

At the end of the day, Google's Davidson says that his biggest worry is not for Google but for the prospect of bringing fresh innovation to the Internet. After all, if worse comes to worst, Google can pay AT&T or BellSouth to maintain its role as the Internet's dominant search engine. But the bright young start-up with the next big innovative idea won't have that option.

This is exactly my concern.

with reference to an article previously recommended on memestreams the service provided by AT&T is not providing pipes but rather providing a marketplace (a bazaar) in that context it is perceived on both sides of the atlantic that it is philisophically legitimate to maintain the market as a level playing field eg anti-trust (monopoly legislation) insider trading legislation
innovation is the engine of capitalism and requires a level marketplace
these threats are anti free market

RE: Who really gets hurt by 'prioritization' of the Internet

We're hearing tales of two scenarios--one pessimistic, one optimistic--for the future of the Net. If the paranoids are right, the Net's toast. If they're not, it will be because we fought to save it, perhaps in a new way we haven't talked about before. Davids, meet your Goliaths.

This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it. The subjects covered here are no less enormous than the Net and its future. Even optimists agree that the Net's future as a free and open environment for business and culture is facing many threats. We can't begin to cover them all or cover all the ways we can fight them. I believe, however, that there is one sure way to fight all of these threats at once, and without doing it the bad guys will win. That's what this essay is about.

Here's a brief outline of the article. If you want to go straight to the solution, skip to the third section:

*

Scenario I: The Carriers Win
*

Scenario II: The Public Workaround
*

Scenario III: Fight with Words and Not Just Deeds

Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes | Linux Journal

Acidus wrote:

Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems

Tom will be talking about some enhancements he is working on for Wikipedia at Phreaknic. Looks like this issue is only growing.

Ironically, the original poster suffers from having looked at a particular article at a particularly bad timeslice and gotten an ugly result. The present text of the Bill Gates article is greatly improved. Interestingly, this is exactly the sort of problem that my wikipedia talk looks toward addressing.

Furthermore, its important to understand what wikipedia is and what it is not. Wikipedia is not a replacement for a traditional encyclopedia. This does not mean it isn't useful. A famous engineer's cynicism is: Cost, Speed, or Quality, pick one. An Encyclopedia is a model that picks Quality. Encyclopedias are slow and expensive, but the results are good. Wikipedias are fast and cheap, and the results are not as good.

If you want to teach 11 year olds about the history of Greece, you don't want wikipedia. They may get bad information, they can't easily reference a particular revision (most people don't understand how to do that with wikipedia), and they are going to be exposed to poor grammar and poor structure at a time when you are trying to teach them how to communicate effectively.

If you want to learn about a terrorist incident that occured two months ago, an encyclopedia is of no use. You could turn to the press, but old press articles are hard to find, and Wikipedia is often a vastly more useful resource, because it presents information in a matter of fact way and often draws from a wider array of resources (including press reports which form a primary source material).

Wikipedia fills the gap between the bleeding edge of the headlines and the cast in stone of dusty reference materials in a way that no other resource can. The sooner people realise that every tool doesn't have to solve every problem the better they'll be at figuring out how to make their tools really succeed at the particular things they are well suited for.

it suddenly occured to me that as there needs to be a way of judging, other than the facility of editing it, the quality of ( or usefulness, or a variety of criteria) of articles on wikipedia.
how about a simple facility of voting for articles and obviously articles which consistantly score badly should pop up for review.
although should each edit deserve a fresh score or should past editions be included but weighted according to the edit
that way adding a comma won't remove a particularly good set of scores and thus discourage edits or adding a comma set to zero a deservely bad score.
plus a scoring system is in accordance with wikipedia's democratic philosophy and adds an element of meritocracy.
systems need feedback
plus different writers could get, like the reputation agent, different scores

RE: Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems | The Register

The Internet's primary oversight body approved a plan Wednesday to create a virtual red-light district, setting the stage for pornographic Web sites to use new addresses ending in "xxx"

Lauren Weinstein has observed that this may open pandora's box as conservative groups move to push content into this TLD and ban it. Legislatures will write laws requiring ISPs to block it, as well as requiring sites with certain content to be listed under it. Some sites which are clearly not porn sites but which have some content which may be inappropriate for children will be forced into this box under duress, and they'll fight back. And then there is the matter of interstate commerce. In sum, this is going to start a constitutional fireworks show.

Furthermore, I want to point out that ICANN is totally inept at choosing TLDs in general. I don't think that they should be allowed to do it. They have too much power to shape the internet, they are really not accountable to anyone, and they are terrible at it.

Consider .BIZ. Self respecting people do business, not "bizzzzzz." Bizzzz is what people who fence stolen goods do. No one uses that tld.

.XXX is simply a bad choice for a domain name. They should have used .SEX. XXX implies hard core porn. SEX is far more likely to be acceptable to a wider range of websites and I think would result in fewer legal battles. For example, sites about sex education would love to be listed under .sex, but would refuse to be classified as XXX. However, the conservative christians will want them clumped into the red light district so they can block them more easily, and so the fireworks...

Not to mention that .KIDS, which I think is a great idea, and presents fewer legal difficulties, is still considered a bad idea by ICANN. Obviously some people might have different opinions about content that is appropriate for the .kids tld, but the issue is likely to be less contentious as no one will be forced into the domain.

I actually considered applying for a position at ICANN, but I am not Joi Ito. Yet.

CNN.com - Stage set for '.xxx' Internet addresses - Jun 2, 2005

] In the next few months, after being patiently nurtured
] for 22 years, an artificial brain called Cyc (pronounced
] "psych") will be put online for the world to interact
] with. And it's only going to get cleverer. Opening Cyc up
] to the masses is expected to accelerate the rate at which
] it learns, giving it access to the combined knowledge of
] millions of people around the globe as it hoovers up new
] facts from web pages, webcams and data entered manually
] by anyone who wants to contribute.
]
]
] Crucially, Cyc's creator says it has developed a human
] trait no other AI system has managed to imitate: common
] sense. "I believe we are heading towards a singularity
] and we will see it in less than 10 years," says Doug
] Lenat of Cycorp, the system's creator.

It's about time. Cyc has been perported to be on the verge of taking off for five years now. It would be really exciting if Lenat's decades-long effort were to be successful.

New Scientist Whatever happened to machines that think? - Features

Google Maps is extremely cool. Great interface. The maps are very good, however they are missing a few things, such as the direction of one way streets. It also does not support Safari yet.

Google Maps

] The US military is planning to deploy robots armed with
] machine-guns to wage war against insurgents in Iraq.
]
] Eighteen of the 1m-high robots, equipped with cameras and
] operated by remote control, are going to Iraq this
] spring, the Associated Press reports.

] Mr Quinn says there are plans to replace the computer
] screen, joysticks and keypad in the remote-control unit
] with a Gameboy-style controller and virtual-reality
] goggles.

BBC NEWS | US plans to deploy 'robot troops' in Iraq