Tom Vanderbilt:

Who and where was this invisible metropolis? What infrastructure was needed to create this city of ether?

Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network.

The tilting CD tower gives way to the MP3-laden hard drive which itself yields to a service like Pandora, music that is always “there,” waiting to be heard.

But where is “there,” and what does it look like?

Have you read Vanderbilt's "Traffic"?

Ultimately, Traffic is about more than driving: it’s about human nature.

Data Center Overload

Steven Johnson:

The book's migration to the digital realm will not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but will likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.

There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Bruce Sterling:

"Poor folk love their cellphones!"

Have you seen Readernaut?

Share your reading experience by writing notes, tracking progress, and engaging in meaningful discussions with friends.

How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write

Ian Kerr, Valerie Steeves, and Carole Lucock:

During the past decade, rapid developments in information and communications technology have transformed key social, commercial, and political realities. Within that same time period, working at something less than Internet speed, much of the academic and policy debate arising from these new and emerging technologies has been fragmented. There have been few examples of interdisciplinary dialogue about the importance and impact of anonymity and privacy in a networked society. Lessons from the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society fills that gap, and examines key questions about anonymity, privacy, and identity in an environment that increasingly automates the collection of personal information and relies upon surveillance to promote private and public sector goals.

This book has been informed by the results of a multi-million dollar research project that has brought together a distinguished array of philosophers, ethicists, feminists, cognitive scientists, lawyers, cryptographers, engineers, policy analysts, government policy makers, and privacy experts. Working collaboratively over a four-year period and participating in an iterative process designed to maximize the potential for interdisciplinary discussion and feedback through a series of workshops and peer review, the authors have integrated crucial public policy themes with the most recent research outcomes.

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

David Barrett:

A European Union directive will require all internet service providers to retain information on email traffic, visits to web sites and telephone calls made over the internet, for 12 months.

Lessons From the Identity Trail

The SIP Digest Leak is a vulnerability that affects a large number of SIP Phones, including both hardware and software IP Phones as well as phone adapters (VoIP to analogue). The vulnerability allows leakage of the Digest authentication response, which is computed from the password. An offline password attack is then possible and can recover most passwords based on the challenge response.

By making use of sipdigestleak.py which is included in VOIPPACK, one can automate the process of getting the phone to ring, obtaining a challenge response and performing a brute-force attack. In this tutorial we shall be looking at how this module makes the whole process an easy task.

From the archive:

In this Special Edition, I sat down with Cullen Jennings out at VoiceCon San Francisco in August 2007 to talk about SIP security.

How to exploit the SIP Digest Leak vulnerability

Rob Minto interviews Lars Bak:

"In the US, there is an aggressiveness, the extra level of belief in yourself that is needed. The European way is less aggressive. But in the US, you can get promoted and stay in touch with the technical side. In Europe, you turn into a paper manager. It’s hard to get your fingers dirty."

Programming can be a very solitary pursuit. Although Bak and Kasper Lund work in close collaboration, there is still a sense of isolation from the rest of the world. You write code, test it, refine it, write more, and just keep going until something works like you need it to. For Bak, it’s very simple, and very secluded. And then, for some reason, the rest of the world wants in – to know about you and your work.

Far away, so close:

"Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are."

If Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.

... What does a man need---really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in---and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all---in the material sense.

The genius behind Google’s web browser

Timetric's here to help you make sense of data. If you think about it, most of the numbers we come across every day are things like temperatures, prices, rates, volumes: numbers which vary over time. That's what Timetric focuses on: graphing, tracking and comparing the movements of data over time.

From some time ago:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Timetric

We are a cyber nation. The U.S. information infrastructure - including telecommunications and computer networks and systems and the data that reside on them - is critical to virtually every aspect of modern life. This information infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable to exploitation, disruption and destruction by a growing array of adversaries.

The President's Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) calls for leap-ahead research and technology to reduce vulnerabilities to attacks in cyberspace. Unlike many research agenda that aim for steady progress in the advancement of science, the leap-ahead effort seeks a few revolutionary ideas with the potential to reshape the landscape.

The NITRD Program Senior Steering Group (SSG) for cybersecurity R&D invites you to participate in the National Cyber Leap Year.

National Cyber Leap Year

PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE JACKSON KY
1145 PM EST FRI FEB 13 2009

...POSSIBLE SATELLITE DEBRIS FALLING ACROSS THE REGION...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN JACKSON HAS RECEIVED CALLS THIS EVENING FROM THE PUBLIC CONCERNING POSSIBLE EXPLOSIONS AND...OR EARTHQUAKES ACROSS THE AREA. THE FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION HAS REPORTED TO LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT THAT THESE EVENTS ARE BEING CAUSED BY FALLING SATELLITE DEBRIS. THESE PIECES OF DEBRIS HAVE BEEN CAUSING SONIC BOOMS...RESULTING IN THE VIBRATIONS BEING FELT BY SOME RESIDENTS...AS WELL AS FLASHES OF LIGHT ACROSS THE SKY. THE CLOUD OF DEBRIS IS LIKELY THE RESULT OF THE RECENT IN ORBIT COLLISION OF TWO SATELLITES ON TUESDAY...FEBRUARY 10TH WHEN KOSMOS 2251 CRASHED INTO IRIDIUM 33.

(h/t to CV)

From last week:

For decades, space experts have warned of orbits around the planet growing so crowded that two satellites might one day slam into one another, producing swarms of treacherous debris.

It happened Tuesday.

Cloudy With a Chance of Satellite

It's almost 2009, and honestly, all you really need to know to be a success in this business you can read in the Cuckoo’s Egg.

Recently:

The first rule of Confidential Document Fight Club is you cannot acknowledge the existence of Confidential Document Fight Club.

From years ago:

Many system security failures occur not so much for technical reasons but because of failures of organisation and motivation.

And yet we still ask ourselves:

Why is information security so dysfunctional?

Fight Club

Native Client is an open-source research technology for running x86 native code in web applications, with the goal of maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability, and safety that people expect from web apps. We've released this project at an early, research stage to get feedback from the security and broader open-source communities. We believe that Native Client technology will someday help web developers to create richer and more dynamic browser-based applications.

Naturally it is easier to run OpenOffice in a browser if you can just run OpenOffice in your browser.

Native Client