You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers. Let's say it's Super Bowl Sunday and you're blogging about beer. You see Budweiser's blockbuster commercial and have a reaction you'd like to share. Thanks to search engines and aggregators that compile lists of interesting posts, you can reach a lot of people — and Budweiser, its competitors, beer lovers, ad critics, and your ex-boyfriend can listen in. "You just need to know how to type," says Matthew Hurst, an artificial intelligence researcher who studies this ecosystem at Microsoft Live Labs. Here's how the whole process goes down during the big game.

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits -- to You

This paper by Bellovin, Blaze, Diffie, Landau, Neumann, and Rexford will appear in a forthcoming issue of IEEE Security and Privacy.

A new US law allows warrantless wiretapping whenever one end of the communication is believed to be outside national borders. This creates serious security risks: danger of exploitation of the system by unauthorized users, danger of criminal misuse by trusted insiders, and danger of misuse by government agents.

I first told you about this paper in October, when I recommended an early draft. It is a follow-up on Landau's op-ed in August of last year.

Risking Communications Security: Potential Hazards of the Protect America Act

Edward Tufte video on the iPhone. Said to be a must-see.

The iPhone platform elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information--too often leaving users with "Where am I?" puzzles. Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space rather than stacked in time.

To do so requires increasing the information resolution of the screen by the hardware (higher resolution screens) and by screen design (eliminating screen-hogging computer administrative debris, and distributing information adjacent in space).

This video shows some of the resolution-enhancing methods of the iPhone, along with a few places for improvements in resolution.

Interface design and the iPhone

This talk is an essay on design. In the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne invented a new genre of writing he called an essai, which in modern French translates to attempt. Since then, the best essays have been explorations by an author of a topic or question, perhaps or probably without a definitive conclusion. Certainly there can be no theme or conclusion stated at the outset, repeated several times, and supported throughout, because a true essay takes the reader on the journey of discovery that the author has or is experiencing.

This essay -- on design -- is based on my reflections on work I’ve done over the past 3 years. Some of that work has been on looking at what constitutes an “ultra large scale software system” and on researching how to keep a software system operating in the face of internal and external errors and unexpected conditions.

In this presentation I’ll look at the nature of design through the lenses these two inquiries provide. Namely, what can we learn of design when we look at an extreme design situation, and when we look at how to give a system the characteristic of homeostasis: the ability of a system to regulate its internal environment to maintain a stable, constant condition. The exploration is what we can learn about design when we examine design situations that are beyond (current) human abilities.

Design Beyond Human Abilities

Many people envision scientists as dispassionate characters who slavishly repeat experiments until "eureka"—something unexpected happens. Actually, there is a great deal more to the story of scientific discovery, but seeing "the big picture" is not easy. Connections: Patterns of Discovery uses the primary tools of forecasting and three archetypal patterns of discovery—Serendipity, Proof of Principle, and 1% Inspiration and 99% Perspiration—to discern relationships of past developments and synthesize a cohesive and compelling vision for the future. It challenges readers to think of the consequences of extrapolating trends, such as Moore's Law, to either reach real machine intelligence or retrench in the face of physical limitations. From this perspective,the book draws "the big picture" for the Information Revolution's innovations in chips, devices, software, and networks.

With a Foreword by James Burke and bursting with fascinating detail throughout, Connections: Patterns of Discovery is a must-read for computer scientists, technologists, programmers, hardware and software developers, students, and anyone with an interest in tech-savvy topics.

See the table of contents. Authors are H. Peter Alesso and Craig F. Smith.

Connections: Patterns of Discovery

This list of classic books is the result of a poll ACM conducted where members named their favorite computer science books.We plan to make the full text available online to members as we obtain permissions from authors to display each book. We hope you enjoy the books in this Classic Books series!

ACM Classic Books

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have made the world seem like a small place after all. But even on the Internet, persistent language barriers and cultural differences mean that the planet may not be quite as interconnected as you think.

The List: The World’s Top Social Networking Sites

As I’ve already blogged, I was the victim of a phishing scam and my flickr account was deleted.

According to some flickr forum discussions (where others are reporting similar occurrences) Yahoo/flickr has known about this particular culprit for a year or so. And they’ve failed to implement sufficient countermeasures, technical or otherwise.

Phishing typically targets banking and PayPal information, obviously for financial gain. In my case, someone left a comment on a photo, with a link. And clicking on that link led me to this sad situation. Why did Yahoo let someone post a link that was harmful?

Sure, the forums are also filled with smug posts (not from the flickr staff; they have been instructed to use a soothing tone, while not providing any resolution) from people who insist that the victims of these scams are to blame for not knowing better. I would have thought I did know better, actually.

This miscreant deleted my account, just for fun. And Yahoo can’t restore it. We all know there are backup copies all over the place, but they can only recreate my account, blank.

Stories, lost forever

It turns our passive, private, spontaneous appreciation of popular culture into something active, public and market-driven. It leads us to confuse self-expression (which is, of course, all about us) with art (which more generously “speaks to us even though it doesn’t know we’re there”). It has created what Mr. Siegel calls the first true mass culture, though he cites critics who in 1957 worried about how culture could be degraded by the masses. Culture for the masses, he says, was a worry of the past. Culture by the masses is what is being born in the present and will shape the future.

Peppering his argument with potshots at writers (among them Mark Dery and Malcolm Gladwell) who view any of these developments enthusiastically, Mr. Siegel both defines and decries an array of current misconceptions. We are being persuaded that information and knowledge are interchangeable, he claims, when they are not; we would have citizen heart surgeons if information were all that mattered. And mainstream news outlets, which Mr. Siegel is otherwise delighted to assail (his love-hate relationship with The New York Times is particularly intense), suddenly look worthwhile to him by virtue of their real, earned authority. Better the old press than the new tyranny of bloggers. Their self-interest, he says, makes them more mainstream than any standard news source could possibly be.

The vindictiveness and disproportionate influence of the blogosphere is a particularly sore subject. Who is it that “rewrote history, made anonymous accusations, hired and elevated hacks and phonies, ruined reputations at will, and airbrushed suddenly unwanted associates out of documents and photographs”? Mr. Siegel’s immediate answer is Stalin. But he alleges that the new power players of the blogosphere have appropriated similar powers.

Spinning Out Into the Pileup on the Information Superhighway

Photos, e-mails, graphics, documents. Who knows what else you've got hidden away?

NoteBook helps you keep track. It's a combination outliner and free-form database that lets you clip, annotate, and share unstructured information.

NoteBook - Organization for a creative mind