Wednesday, May 15, 2002
Distributed Security: Lessons From Nature
Jon Udell
Steven Hofmeyr just gave a fascinating talk on immunological approaches to security. The basic idea is that you generate detectors, which are just bitstrings, starting from random patterns. Throw away the ones that match patterns in the self set. You're left with selectors for non-self. Give them finite lifetimes, and constantly regenerate them, so things stay dynamic. A key point about these detectors: they evolve within, and are specific to, local environments.
Data dyspepsia blights the workforce
One of the biggest challenges facing an organisation today is filtering the good from the bad information. It's the classic signal/noise equation. We all like to get the right signals — and all hate the noise. But for each and every employee these are highly debatable categories. Gartner found, quite surprisingly, that the most useful information employees receive comes from personal networks, contact with friends and colleagues, and emails — rather than the finely tuned information source that is supposed to be the Intranet. But how do you manage that? The other option is some kind of sophisticated knowledge management solution — but no one has even figured out what this is yet so don't expect that one to solve your woes.
John Robb
The solution isn't a sophisticated KM solution, it is K-Logs. A well authored K-Log provides a filtered knowledge stream based on the Intranet. It is simple, elegant, and leverages the Intranet — the perfect way to improve the signal to noise ratio.
Siva Vaidhyanathan On Copyrights and Wrongs
I knew that Napster would radically change the ways we interact with the copyright system. And I knew the DMCA would radically undermined the democratic safeguards that were built into our copyright system. But I knew that there was much more to this story. So I wrote an article for The Nation which defended Napster and peer-to-peer. I used this as the starting point for what would become the second book.
Some useful links from the article...
Quickies from a Galaxy Far Far Away
- Star Wars: The Han Solo Affair
- Fan Film
- The Matrix: Reloaded
- Build the Dark Lord of the Sith™!
- Fernandes Launches Series of Star Wars Collector's Guitars
- Exclusive: New Star Wars Characters Revealed!
- Brad King - Skywalker: The Family Tree
- Brad King - Star Wars: A Vader Is Born.
- Roger Ebert - A technological triumph for few
- Roger Ebert - Review
- Building a Life-size Millennium Falcon.
The State of Innovation: Information Technology
Wade Roush
It's no news flash to say that computers are going to keep getting smaller, as they have for the past 50 years. But even as they vanish from sight, computers will, in an important sense, grow much larger.
The technology behind Napster is far from dead
Dan Gillmor
On Tuesday, the pioneering file-sharing company lost its latest chief executive and moved closer to a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. Sometimes the revolutionaries take the bullets.
May 2002 Crypto-Gram Newsletter
Bruce Schneier
The reasoning behind Kerckhoffs' Principle is compelling. [ ... ] if the algorithm or protocol or implementation needs to be kept secret, than it is really part of the key and should be treated as such.
The Day the Napster Died
Brad King
Fanning's legacy won't be the company he founded. Napster may have been like a shooting star that galvanized the digital world for a brief moment, but his legacy will live on with services like Grokster and Kazaa.
