Digg has begun its major site overhaul with the launch of new social networking features that make it possible to promote stories within a small circle of friends rather than the community at large.
Memestreams Circles...
In an effort to avoid a tyranny of the new majority, Digg’s new social features allow you to set up a group of friends and promote stories within the group, so you friends will see what’s important to you, even if it never makes the front page of Digg.
Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. With an unpleasant grimace. And an ant-sized chip in its lower left molar. "Perhaps the most amazing demo I've seen this year," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images.
SeaDragon and Photosynth are amazing pieces of software. Blaise envisions that all the related images on the internet can be linked together based on the semantic information contained in the individual images. Imagine what that could do for local navigation.
I want the high res image zoom technology on my cell phone and I want the related images environment to be my next option of online street view maps.
Automated email-based password reestablishment (EBPR) is an efficient, cost-effective means to deal with forgotten passwords. In this technique, email providers authenticate users on behalf of web sites. This method works because web sites trust email providers to deliver messages to their intended recipients. Simple Authentication for the Web (SAW) improves upon this basic approach to user authentication to create an alternative to password-based logins. SAW: 1) Removes the setup and management costs of passwords at sites that accept the risks of EBPR; 2) Provides single sign-on without a specialized identity provider; 3) Thwarts all passive attacks.
Bandwidth could become a form of "currency" with users paying for downloaded files by uploading more data themselves, researchers say.
The goal is to ensure that future content, particularly video, is distributed as fairly and efficiently as possible.
Computer scientists have have used the idea to develop peer-to-peer file-sharing software, which they are asking computer users to try out. They hope eventually to create a "global marketplace in bandwidth", where people can trade it as a commodity.
The researchers' free software, called Tribler, uses a modified version of the popular BitTorrent file-trading algorithm.
P2P is a legitimate model for data transfer. It wasn't so long ago that it had a bad connotation. However now, more and more companies are embracing it all the time. Ala system.net.peertopeer.
Vaughan Pratt presented "Top Down Operator Precedence" at the first annual Principles of Programming Languages Symposium in Boston in 1973. In the paper Pratt described a parsing technique that combines the best properties of Recursive Descent and Floyd's Operator Precedence. It is easy to use. It feels a lot like Recursive Descent, but with the need for less code and with significantly better performance. He claimed the technique is simple to understand, trivial to implement, easy to use, extremely efficient, and very flexible. It is dynamic, providing support for truly extensible languages.
Oddly enough, such an obviously utopian approach to compiler construction is completely neglected today. Why is this? Pratt suggested in the paper that a preoccupation with BNF grammars and their various offspring, along with their related automata and theorems, has precluded development in directions that are not visibly in the domain of automata theory.
Now we get to AjaxWorld West 2007 and there are 5 presentations about security and all of them look great. Brian Chess from Fortify, Joe Stagner from Microsoft, Byran and I from SPI/HP, Danny Allen from Watchfire/IBM, and Pothiraj Selvaraj from CGE. I am absolutely floored by the turn out. And its not just more security speakers at Ajax conferences. There are other indications thats people are accepting Ajax Security. We are seeing a number of books on Ajax Security come out. Ajax frameworks are starting implement security features natively. In some cases framework developers are reaching out directly to the web security companies that seem to get it. For example SPI has been to Redmond multiple times this year working with the ASP.NET and Atlas teams. We see security vendors and consultants who were in denial about Ajax have toned down the rhetoric. Now vendors from the scanner and source code analysis spaces are joining SPI on stage this year on AjaxWorld. We've gone from a 20 something with long hair talking about Ajax security to CTOs and CEOs, and VPs spreading the message. And that is extremely satisfying.
I suppose if anything, AjaxWorld 2007 is a nice breath of fresh air. A cause SPI has been championing for nearly 2 years now is becoming more mainstream and finding acceptance in the Security and Development communities. I welcome my friendly competitors to the party, even if they were a little late and got lost along the way. :-) Because at the end of the day, more smart people working on tough problems helps everyone.
See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
Topic: Technology
12:09 pm EDT, Aug 15, 2007
Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
