The Department of Homeland Security is paying Rutgers $3 million to oversee development of computing methods that could monitor suspicious social networks and opinions found in news stories, Web blogs and other Web information to identify indicators of potential terrorist activity.

The software and algorithms could rapidly detect social networks among groups by identifying who is talking to whom on public blogs and message boards, researchers said. Computers could ideally pick out entities trying to conceal themselves under different aliases.

Researcher Nick Belkin is one of the PIs; check out his presentation on the "Prospects for information 'selection'" for the Unified Cryptologic Architecture Office.

Also: GSA on SIS:

The Unified Cryptologic Architecture Office (UCAO) is developing a secure information sharing architecture, called HatWizard, to support intelligence information dissemination within the cryptologic community.

Also: Trust Architecture for Future Intelligence Processing, alternately titled "A Trust Framework for the DoD Network-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) Environment".

Government research to track online networking

I'm with Acidus on this one.. This is more of a gift to people looking to do evil things to people, than it is to creating interesting websites. There are way better ways to handle shared storage between websites.

In this post I'll walk through some of the ways web application developers take advantage of local storage to speed up applications, persist user preferences, and enable features for "occasionally connected" users.

A web application can rely on local storage options when disconnected from the Internet, saving changes locally and synchronizing results whenever an active Internet connection is available.

Imagine a personal finance site storing your stock portfolio and historical prices locally, creating quick access to charting and planning tools powered by pre-loaded data.

I swear on all that is holy Niall Kennedy, for even suggesting this, I am going to punch you in the face if I ever meet you.

Current versions of Firefox 2 allow unlimited storage through the DOM Storage feature but future Firefox releases (post-2.0.0.1) will restrict usage to 5 MB per-domain. A website can access not only data within its own subdomain or domain, but within a given top-level domain (.gov, .com, etc.) or any requesting page, creating some interesting opportunities for shared data namespaces.

Why is it every time I turn my back the web developers of this world decide to collectively binge drink on stupid?

Boost Ajax performance using local storage

Sound of Traffic is a Java "application" which converts TCP/IP header information into midi notes via the Java Synthesizer. The purpose is to listen in on network traffic in ordered time, via a tempo, rather than realtime, which could be more chaotic. In this sense it becomes closer to music then noise.

Play back of traffic is sorted by source and destination addresses and ports. Ports are assigned individual midi instruments and played on odd or even ticks depending upon whether it is a source or destination packet. The note played by the port is based upon the number of hits (amount of traffic) occurring on the port.

Development is on hold while I develop a new package for converting numeric data from any data stream into audio (MIDI, Sampled, FM Modulation.)

Sound of traffic is kinda neat.

Sound of Traffic

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

Go to Google News, and then past this into your URL window and hit enter

Decius wrote:

Rattle wrote:
One big question remains.. What good registrars are out there these days? I have not had a chance to do any research.

I'm also interested if anyone has any feedback on this question. I've sent them a formal email and tried to explain to them why I think this situation was mishandled, but it remains to be seen if they are going to address the problem in a substantive way. So far their public communications have been defensive and somewhat misleading. They need to acknowledge the mistake and communicate about how they are addressing the problem. I'm willing to give them time for that to sink in. They provide a good service at a really good price and I don't want to go through the hassle of transferring from them, but if they don't clear this up I really have no choice. It is inevitable that people post objectionable material here, and Rattle and I are usually on top of it, but the last thing I need is for my DNS registrar to pull my domain and then offer that they'll get back to me in "1 to 2 business days" about a resolution, and charge me a fee for my trouble. Thats not OK.

Objectionably material? Whatever. The only thing I regulate on is spam and things which are blatantly illegal. So far, I've only had to deal with the former. The shit we let ride is amazing.

I'm one of those people who can recite/type the first amendment by heart down to the semicolons, and structure arguments to support every point therein.

I still have not had the chance to do much research on domain registrars. These are the ones currently sitting open in my browser: Namecheap, RegisterFly, and HostWay. I've barely scratched the surface of what is available. And this time around, surveying ToS agreements is key. This is going to take some time. It's truly annoying that it has to be done at all. I've been happy with GoDaddy, but their current behavior is simply unacceptable.

RE: More experiences with GoDaddy, free speech, and domain deletion [Politech]

Last your GoDaddy yanked the domain for the data center where my computers are hosted. (nectartech.com) They managed to take thousands of domains offline as a result. I helped get them back online by recording two phone calls to their tech support department.

GoDaddy shut down an entire internet provider overnight in January by killing their domain, which broke their DNS resolution. You can listen to phone calls in which their customer support people refuse to bring the domain back online in spite of the fact that 100s of customers are offline. Whats more, people who work for GoDaddy show up in the threads and start threatening the person who posted the recordings!! The fact is that $8 domain name registrations sometimes have millions of dollars riding on them. A company with this sort of flippant attitude about people's network infrastructure shouldn't be responsible for it.

I think it may be time to formally start a boycott of their services and get press around it. At a point when they are spending a ton of money on a Super Bowl commercial, and their marketing department is probably throwing it's big yearly bash, they should have another issue on their minds.

One big question remains.. What good registrars are out there these days? I have not had a chance to do any research.

More experiences with GoDaddy, free speech, and domain deletion [Politech]

Rita Katz is in the kill chain!

Open-source information gathering can rival, if not surpass, the clandestine intelligence produced by government agencies.

The "collaboration" section of this article essentially describes the MemeStreams model.

Why aren't you selling it? (A: We are not sure anyone takes us seriously. We are working on that.)

America will be a more secure country once it discards the notion that secrecy is equal to strength.

The Jebsen Center at Tufts, mentioned in this article, has an open-invite Brown Bag lunch seminar program. Coming up in February, the NYPD intelligence department will conduct a recruiting Q&A session for those interested in counterterrorism.

The Wikipedia way to better intelligence

Woah! If only this wasn't Cingular.

Apple - iPhone

A statistically rough (one sigma) estimate might be 75-100 million servers @ ~350-550 watts each.. Call it Forty Billion Watts or ~ 40 GW. Since silicon logic runs at three volts or so, and an Ampere is some ten to the eighteenth electrons a second, if the average chip runs at a Gigaherz, straightforward calculation reveals that some 50 grams of electrons in motion make up the Internet.

Applying the unreasonable power of dimensional analysis to the small tonnage of silicon involved yields much the same result. As of today, cyberspace weighs less than two ounces. It's hard to gauge its heft more exactly, since devices vary in speed, but to get a handle on The Whole Web instead of just the suburbs we're wired to, try tripling that figure-there are maybe ten times more mostly idle CPU chips in PC's than servers, and fewer very busy ones in the world's comparative handful of supercomputers.

ADAMANT: Weighing the Web

I've seldom seen as much disruption of the Internet as is still being caused by the Taiwan Earthquakes of 26-27 December. Six undersea cables cut at once may be a record, as may disruptions from Taiwan to Nepal.

This link has an animation of Internet routing chaos in Singapore after undersea fibers near Taiwan were cut. This doesn't actually convey much information worth a damn, but I think I lived it once, and was too screwed up to notice. Kudos to the Internet for making that possible.

Taiwan Earthquakes Boil Internet