The economics of information security has recently become a thriving and fast-moving discipline. As distributed systems are assembled from machines belonging to principals with divergent interests, incentives are becoming as important to dependability as technical design.

The new field provides valuable insights not just into ‘security’ topics such as privacy, bugs, spam, and phishing, but into more general areas such as system dependability (the design of peer-to-peer systems and the optimal balance of effort by programmers and testers), and policy (particularly digital rights management).

This research program has been starting to spill over into more general security questions (such as law-enforcement strategy), and into the interface between security and sociology. Most recently it has started to interact with psychology, both through the psychology-and-economics tradition and in response to phishing.

The promise of this research program is a novel framework for analyzing information security problems -- one that is both principled and effective.

New from Ross Anderson.

Information Security Economics – and Beyond

Technology has always been about hope. As the pace of technological innovation has intensified over the past two decades, businesses have come to expect that the next new thing will inevitably bring them larger market opportunities and bigger profits. Software, a technology so invisible and obscure to most of us that it appears to work like magic, especially lends itself to this kind of open-ended hope.

... Management became accustomed to the idea that buying more computers and more software would continue to cut costs and improve operations. But there are limits, some of which are inherent in the nature of software itself.

The proposed fix for these problems — the next new thing — is service-oriented architecture.

The Lego dream has been a persistent favorite among a generation or more of programmers who grew up with those construction toys. Unfortunately, however, software does not work as Legos do.

The Trouble With Enterprise Software

AudioRadar, provides a map of songs by their sound and similarities. Using algorithms developed by other acoustical researchers over the years, it scans a music collection, measuring song qualities: tempo, chordal shifts, volume, harmony, and so on. Then it weights the songs by four key criteria: fast or slow, melodic or rhythmic, turbulent or calm, and rough or clean. (Turbulence measures the abruptness of shifts; "rough" indicates the number of shifts.)

Based on these metrics, the application creates a map in which a chosen song appears at the center of the screen, with similar songs clustered in a circle around it -- sort of like points of light on a radar screen. Then users can gauge, for instance, the "calmness" or "cleanness" of another music choice by its relative position on the map. Distances are scaled; for instance, a song at the circle's outer edge would be twice as calm as one in the center. And the cluster rearranges itself after each new song. Thus, users can surf their collections without needing to remember every song they own. They can build mood-based playlists or let the program select the next most similar song.

There's a paper:

Collections of electronic music are mostly organized according to playlists based on artist names and song titles. Music genres are inherently ambiguous and, to make matters worse, assigned manually by a diverse user community. People tend to organize music based on similarity to other music and based on the music’s emotional qualities. Taking this into account, we have designed a music player which derives a set of criteria from the actual music data and then provides a coherent visual metaphor for a similarity-based navigation of the music collection.

Audio Software for the Moody Listener

If you are interested in Hadoop, this may be newsworthy.

As we noted last week, Doug and Eric Baldeschwieler (Yahoo's Director of Grid Computing) are presenting Meet Hadoop at the 2007 Open Source Convention this week. While this is one of the first times we're really talking about our involvement with Hadoop in public, it certainly won't be the last.

Yahoo's Hadoop Support

Philosophers and AI researchers may argue the point, but Bruce Donald believes his microscopic invention qualifies as a robot. Donald’s machine is about as wide as a strand of human hair. He likens it to a car, because it’s controllable: “You can steer it anywhere on a flat surface, and drive it wherever you want to go.” Unlike previous attempts at such a microelectromechanical system, Donald’s robot has no tether, but operates via electrical charges on a silicon grid. It’s a real speed demon, proceeding in nano-sized hops (one billionth of a meter, 20,000 times per second), ultimately achieving two millimeters per second, or the equivalent on a more human scale of 80 kilometers per hour. To the tunes of a Strauss waltz, Donald demonstrates two robots dancing in straight and wavy lines around each other, and then coupling to form a single system.

Donald envisions many possible applications for this work. Since his robots can push and shove things in their path, and can also latch onto each other, they might prove quite useful assisting in techniques involving protein design, manipulation of cells and biomedical engineering. The next five to 10 years, Donald predicts, will see an even smaller generation of robots, which “will be doing useful things in the lab.”

Building Very Small Mobile Micro-Robots

The Lemelson Center’s mission:
• To document, interpret, and disseminate information about invention and innovation
• To encourage inventive creativity in young people
• To foster an appreciation for the central role invention and innovation play in the history of the United States

Lemelson Center: Explore invention at the Lemelson Center

Technology Review spoke with Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, to get a hint of what we can expect from search technology in the years to come.

This interview is pretty fluffy, but this comment was notable:

Norvig: I think another focus is to understand how people interact with Google and interact with each other on the Web, in general. How do people operate in these social networks? Understanding that question can help us serve them better.

The Future of Search

If, say, a computer were used to diagnose a patient's symptoms and recommend treatment, and the result was flawed, could the computer be held responsible? If so, then it is hard to see why computers should not be recognised for good work as well.

Stephen Emmott and Stephen Muggleton are developing an “artificial scientist” that would be capable of combining inductive logic with probabilistic reasoning. Such a computer would be able to design experiments, collect the results and then integrate those results with theory. Indeed, it should be possible, the pair think, for the artificial scientist to build hypotheses directly from the data, spotting relationships that the humble graduate student or even his supervisor might miss.

In the future, PhD's will have access to an automated thesis defense module.

Computing and biology | Arresting developments

If you want to stop hackers from invading your network, first you've got to invade their minds.

Is this for real? Apparently.

In (some parts of?) Asia it is reportedly one of the three most popular certifications.

I learned a new term today: "left hat" hacker. As far as I can tell, this is the invention of one Malaysian reporter; no one else is using it.

EC-Council | Certified Ethical Hacker

"The economies of the Middle East are the fastest growing in the world. So what do they do? They buy planes. But five years ago it was like, 'Who are these guys?'"

... modern Dubai seems built on hyperbole.

Halliburton is moving its headquarters from Houston to Dubai.

... the Mall of Arabia, the world's largest shopping mall.

"One of the issues becoming obvious in the aviation industry is that it is not about the United States anymore. It's an extraordinary shift in power."

See also:

Mubadala Development Co. and Lockheed Martin will create a UAE-based company to service Block 60 F16 fighter planes in the Persian Gulf emirate, an executive said Tuesday.

The UAE has begun to take delivery of 82 of Lockheed's latest Block 60 F16 fighters.

The objective is to diversify away from heavy reliance on oil and energy and to develop the sustainability of a broad-based economy for the fast-growing United Arab Emirates.

Emirates aims to redraw world aviation map