This is very cool. From way back in 1971 a professor Leon Chua at the University of California (Berkeley) wrote a paper describing four basic passive electrical components: resistors, capacitors, inductors, and memristors. Until this year, the last one of these was only theoretical in nature, but some bright folks have finally cracked it.

Basically, its a substrate that exhibits a permanent(?) resistance change due to past current history. You could use them to make extremely fast, dense solid state storage devices.

Memristors, they exist!

Where do computer files go when you die?

The Walrus - Technology - The Big Log Off

To demonstrate why using fingerprints to secure passports is a bad idea, the German hacker group Chaos Computer Club has published what it says is the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's interior minister.

According to CCC, the print of Schauble's index finger was lifted from a water glass that he used during a panel discussion that he participated in last year at a German university. CCC published the print on a piece of plastic inside 4,000 copies of its magazine Die Datenschleuder that readers can use to impersonate the minister to biometric readers.

Good Job!

Hackers Publish German Minister's Fingerprint | Threat Level from Wired.com

Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URL's. The replacement?

Search boxes!1 With recommended search terms!

It makes sense, right? All the good domain names are gone. Getting people to a specific page in a big site is difficult (who's going to write down anything after the first slash?). And, most tellingly, I see increasingly more users already inadvertently put complete domain names like "gmail" and "netflix" into the Search box of their browsers out of habit — and it doesn't even register that Google pops up and they have to click to get to their destination.

cabel.name: Japan: URL's Are Totally Out

Akira/motorcycle fans --> This link is from February; but take a look at this bike! From what I read, Leo DiCaprio is going to star in the live action movie of Akira - which sounds cool; but look at this bike....
See also...

Winding Road » Archive » Japanese Fans Recreate Motorcycle from Anime Classic Akira

Adam Shostack has a new book.

Why is information security so dysfunctional? Are you wasting the money you spend on security? This book shows how to spend it more effectively. How can you make more effective security decisions? This book explains why professionals have taken to studying economics, not cryptography--and why you should, too. And why security breach notices are the best thing to ever happen to information security. It’s about time someone asked the biggest, toughest questions about information security. Security experts Adam Shostack and Andrew Stewart don’t just answer those questions--they offer honest, deeply troubling answers. They explain why these critical problems exist and how to solve them. Drawing on powerful lessons from economics and other disciplines, Shostack and Stewart offer a new way forward. In clear and engaging prose, they shed new light on the critical challenges that are faced by the security field. Whether you’re a CIO, IT manager, or security specialist, this book will open your eyes to new ways of thinking about--and overcoming--your most pressing security challenges. The New School enables you to take control, while others struggle with non-stop crises.

This is interesting but the editorial review (quoted above) makes a lot of bold claims without explaining how those claims are met. I eagerly await further reviews and shorter articles written by the authors to promote their book...

The New School of Information Security

A new web service that lets users rate and comment on the uniformed police officers in their community is scrambling to restore service Tuesday, after hosting company GoDaddy unceremonious pulled-the-plug on the site in the wake of outrage from criticism-leery cops.

Regardless of what you think of sites like "RateMyCop" the bottom line is that it is not appropriate for GoDaddy to pull a domain name without contacting the administrator. This is not a phishing site. Following this and a number of recent takedowns by ENOM; we need new regulation at the ICANN level that prohibits this sort of shoot first and ask questions later behavior. While the fact that GoDaddy personally contacted me in response to my complaints when they shut down seclists, this incident demonstrates that a year later their policies haven't changed. Actions speak louder than words.

GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com | Threat Level from Wired.com

"Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0—the wisdom of the crowds—and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined."

Its amazing to me what venture capitalists can be convinced to invest in. Clearly, large sums of money are not distributed generally to people who know best what to do with them. Here are some rules for you.

1. If the first place you hear about a hot new technology trend is the pages of Newsweek, this either means that you don't know much about technology, or its a bunch of fluff generated by marketing people that will have no real impact on anything.

2. The Internet will never be better than mass media at doing things mass media is good at. In general, the Internet is good at enabling more participatory media that produces content which meets the interests of narrow audiences. The Mass Media is good at presenting professionally produced information that meets the interests of a wide audience.

3. Revolutions in technology are generally driven by changes in technology. The change in technology that enabled more participatory media hasn't prevented less participatory media from being created. The creation of new "less participatory media" is not a technology revolution because it is not enabled by a change in technology. It was possible to do that all along.

While it is certainly the case that there are good business ideas that aren't based in technology revolutions, they certainly shouldn't be sold as technology revolutions if they aren't technology revolutions, and they shouldn't be expected to impact society in the same way that technology revolutions do.

This is the corner that the VC industry painted itself into with retail dot com companies. Webvan, for example, was not a new technology. It was a grocery store. The economics of it worked like the economics of grocery stores, and it was competing in the already saturated, low margin grocery store market. It was not a bad business idea, but it was also not a software company and the core mistake made by its investors was to assume that it would behave like a technology revolution behaves.

Is User-Generated Content Out? | Newsweek Technology | Newsweek.com

Friday March 21st in Atlanta.

Outerz0ne 4 | This might be habit forming...

On my first weekend last fall, I eagerly shut it all down on Friday night, then went to bed to read. (I chose Saturday because my rules include no television, and I had to watch the Giants on Sunday). I woke up nervous, eager for my laptop. That forbidden, I reached for the phone. No, not that either. Send a text message? No. I quickly realized that I was feeling the same way I do when the electricity goes out and, finding one appliance nonfunctional, I go immediately to the next. I was jumpy, twitchy, uneven.

I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really. - New York Times