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

"Can you track me now?"

Zoombak, a privately held subsidiary of Liberty Media, develops leading edge solutions that keep consumers connected to their families, pets and possessions.

Zoombak now offers consumers a compact, assisted (A-GPS) locator that employs satellite-enabled GPS and a location network server to provide fast, reliable and accurate location technology to its customers.

The Zoombak Advanced GPS Locator features capabilities for a broad number of services ranging from locating lost pets and stolen cars, to helping concerned parents monitor teenage and senior drivers in their family. Through a secure area of Zoombak.com, users can establish customized “safety zones” which alert them via email and mobile phone text message if the locator device leaves or enters its intended location.

Zoombak

Eytan Adar, and others:

The Web is ephemeral. Pages change frequently, and it is nearly impossible to find data or follow a link after the underlying page evolves. We present Zoetrope, a system that enables interaction with the historical Web (pages, links, and embedded data) that would otherwise be lost to time. Using a number of novel interactions, the temporal Web can be manipulated, queried, and analyzed from the context of familar pages. Zoetrope is based on a set of operators for manipulating content streams. We describe these primitives and the associated indexing strategies for handling temporal Web data. They form the basis of Zoetrope and enable our construction of new temporal interactions and visualizations.

From the archive:

Hacks can express dissatisfaction with local culture or with administrative decisions, but mostly they are remarkably good-spirited. They are also by definition ephemeral.

Decius:

On the one hand, the web is very much the human knowledge system. Often people who are maintaining parts of it don't respect that, and aren't economically incentivized to respect it ...

On the other hand, the human memory is imperfect for good reason. People forget because if we remembered everything perfectly people would be constantly held accountable for things that they did years and years ago when they were very different people. People forgive and forget because people learn and mature.

I fear we are heading for a world that is the worst of both.

Take note:

Every culture has its own word for this nothing.

Stewart Brand and Freeman Dyson:

Brand: How might long-term ethics differ from ethics as we generally understand them?

Dyson: If you mean balancing the permanent against the ephemeral, it's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Remember when:

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night.

Zoetrope: Interacting with the Ephemeral Web

Bob Briscoe, in the latest IEEE Spectrum:

There’s a profound flaw in the protocol that governs how people share the Internet’s capacity.

A Fairer, Faster Internet Protocol

IBM:

Unveiled today, the third annual "IBM Next Five in Five" is a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years:

* Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows
* You will have a crystal ball for your health
* You will talk to the Web ... and the Web will talk back
* You will have your own digital shopping assistants
* Forgetting will become a distant memory

The Next Five in Five is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s Labs around the world that can make these innovations possible.

From the archive:

Forget, for a second, the image of fat-cat plutocrats walking away with taxpayer money.

Also:

Forgetting, or willed ignorance, is the preferred strategy of many beef eaters.

From way back:

Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years

Google's Lorenzo Colitti:

IPv6 is good for the Internet, and we want to help.

A Strategy for IPv6 Adoption

BusinessWeek Senior Writer Steve Hamm's new book, The Race for Perfect: Inside the Quest to Design the Ultimate Portable Computer, chronicles the four-decade history of mobile computing. This graphic adaptation explores the role of Alan Kay, whose ideas shaped the development of today’s laptops, handhelds, and smartphones.

From the archive, some bits of Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

Alan Kay is one of the most influential computer scientists of the modern era. His contributions, among many others, include the concept of the personal computer. We sat down with him to discuss his take on how innovations happen.

"Thinking" is a higher category than "just" math, science, and the arts. It represents a synthesis of intuitive and analytical approaches to understanding the world and dealing with it.

A bicycle for the mind, redux.

"I didn't know it was hard."

The Long Road To The Laptop