We have come across a botnet worm spreading around called "psyb0t". It is notable because, according to my knowledge, it:

* is the first botnet worm to target routers and DSL modems
* contains shellcode for many mipsel devices
* is not targeting PCs or servers
* uses multiple strategies for exploitation, including bruteforce username and password combinations
* harvests usernames and passwords through deep packet inspection
* can scan for exploitable phpMyAdmin and MySQL servers

Network Bluepill

Watcher is a runtime passive-analysis tool for HTTP-based Web applications. Watcher provides pen-testers hot-spot detection for vulnerabilities, developers quick sanity checks, and auditors PCI compliance auditing. It looks for issues related to mashups, user-controlled payloads, cookies, comments, HTTP headers, SSL, Flash, Silverlight, referrer leaks, information disclosure, Unicode, and more.

Major Features:

1. passive detection of security, privacy, and PCI compliance issues in HTTP, HTML, Javascript, and CSS
2. Works seamlessly with complex Web 2.0 applications while you drive the Web browser
3. non-intrusive, will not raise alarms or damage production sites
4. Real-time analysis and reporting - findings are reported as they’re found, exportable to XML
5. configurable domains with wildcard support
6. extensible framework for adding new checks

Casaba Security's Watcher tool for Web Security Auditing and Testing

Kellan Elliott-McCrea:

Don't let your design make promises you can't keep.

From the Economist:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

From the archive, Siva Vaidhyanathan:

"It's the collapse of inconvenience. It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn't realize it."

Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors

Richard Hamming:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

From the archive:

Marge: I'd really like to give it a try!
Homer: I don't know, Marge, trying is the first step towards failure.

Also:

One passionate person is worth a thousand people who are just plodding along ...

Finally:

There are 260 million people in America, and you are one of them.

Get Excited and Make Things

Newssift is a unique search tool for business professionals offering access to a comprehensive database, indexing millions of articles from thousands of global business news sources. A next generation vertical search tool, searches are based on meaning and relationships, moving beyond traditional keyword search.

Qualitative news is a powerful determinant affecting stock prices and corporate reputations. However, this type of news has been difficult to search and nearly impossible to analyze through keyword searches alone. This tool offers business professionals deeply qualitative business news and more relevant results that cut out the commercial clutter found with typical keyword search. Newssift.com offers a better way to view the qualitative news, trends, and opinions that shape business.

Newssift streamlines the process of search and search refinement to help users become more informed. Moving beyond simple keyword search, Newssift offers search based on meaning, relationships and business themes. Content is aggregated and annotated by editors to ensure relevant and deep analysis of global business news. Newssift allows you to know before you go.

Clay Shirky:

If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?

The answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work.

Ted Nelson:

The trick is to make people think that a certain paradigm is inevitable, and they had better give in.

Ira Glass:

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Newssift

Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas. This is an open-source project, and we will be releasing all of the code soon.

Clay Shirky:

If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?

The answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work.

Ted Nelson:

The trick is to make people think that a certain paradigm is inevitable, and they had better give in.

Ira Glass:

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Media Cloud

Clay Shirky:

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse.

If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?

The answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.

Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments.

Recently:

I think things are going to get very bad.

From the archive, a pointer to other recent Shirky:

The job of the next decade is mostly going to be taking the raw revolutionary capability that's now apparent and really seeing what we can do with it.

Thinking the Unthinkable

Steven Johnson:

We need to be reminded of what life was like before the web.

Instead of starting with the future, I propose that we look to the past.

In the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest.

Decius, in a prescient post from 2004:

Ever wanted to know what life was like in the 30s? You will.

Recently:

I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

Richard Preston:

The tallest redwoods were regarded as inaccessible towers, shrouded in foliage and almost impossible to climb, since the lowest branches on a redwood can be twenty-five stories above the ground. From the moment he entered redwood space, Steve Sillett began to see things that no one had imagined. The general opinion among biologists at the time -- this was just eight years ago -- was that the redwood canopy was a so-called "redwood desert" that contained not much more than the branches of redwood trees.

Instead, Sillett discovered a lost world above Northern California.

Old Growth And The Future

Neil Postman (with others interspersed):

What a technology undoes is a subject that computer experts apparently know very little about.

With one exception -- namely, Joseph Weizenbaum -- I have never heard anyone speak seriously and comprehensively about the disadvantages of computer technology, which strikes me as odd, and makes me wonder if the profession is hiding something important.

In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and energy.

It’s hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

In the Middle Ages people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.

As states recede and the new mediaevalism advances, the outside world is destined to move increasingly beyond the control -- and even the understanding -- of the new Rome.

In a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise.

By exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically.

The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the computer for this? Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine.

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Informing Ourselves To Death

Robin Sloan:

Is our high-tech future really just an asymptotic approach to zero effort? Is it only about making things easier than they already are?

I can’t decide if that’s utopian or dystopian.

John Lanchester, from a recent issue of LRB:

If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.

From the recent archive:

For many of us -- not least adolescents -- reality is now largely a virtual experience.

And from five years back:

Do you understand the difference between "Is it worth buying?" and "Can it be sold?"

The Future, It Will Be So Easy