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2004

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Identities (WTF Series, 1)

Some say that it’s very important that they be able to use one identity while doing one thing, and a different one for another. In ‘cyberspace’ they want to be able to express themselves without that expression being tied back to them.

My gut reaction is that I don’t like this. It seems dishonest. It’s contradicts what is possible in meat space, where I have to stand behind what I say and do. Do they have something to hide? Shouldn’t they be held accountable for their statements?

Yes, but, some say, the net doesn’t forget. You can do a search on something you said or posted at the beginning of (internet) time and it will still show up. Don’t you ever say something that you later regret? Or that is innocent now but harms your reputation later?

Like many things, the speed and scope of computers and telecommunications changes things. Where in the past it was workable to consider impersonation as a bad thing, perhaps in the 21st century it is perhaps reasonable to support multiple digital identities.

Maybe. But the world works on personal relationships and reputation. I am willing to do business with you because someone I trust has told me that you are a good person.

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Outsourcing and Immigration (WTF Series, 3)

What’s the relationship between offshore outsourcing and immigration? Here’s an interesting connection. Immigration brings workers from other countries to this one. With outsourcing, we send the work to them (because with fast networks, we can…)

For years Immigration was a hallmark of U.S. society, the melting pot and all that. Its fair to say that it’s been viewed positively. The people that are against offshore outsourcing today would have been against immigration in the past. (And I say that as an actual immigrant 🙂

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Virtual People? (WTF Series, 2)

One of the reason that society needs people to transact with each other using real identities, maybe, is that in the end, virtual digital persona can’t own and transfer ownership. I can’t buy or sell or trade with a virtual digital persona. Corporations in fact are virtual people in some sense, and indeed they are legally regulated much like people are.

Maybe in the future the law will expand to allow my virtual identity to own and transact separately from me, with it’s own ‘social security number’, the ability to have a checking account, to own property and generate income. But for that to happen it would seem to me that the law would have to catch up and regulate digital personas as a third actor along with natural people and corporate-like entities.

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Welcome to Movable Type

If I did things correctly, you should not have noticed too much different. But today, with the help of Dennis Doughty, I've switched to using Movable Type as my blogging software. It's no picknick, let me say that. My only reason to switch really was to make it easy for me to post from different computers. Other than that, I was happy with Radio Userland, and in fact I will miss certain things I've gotten used to in Radio. We'll see how it goes. Please let me know if anything breaks!

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Going to college?

Having someone in the family who applied to college (and got in) I really appreciate this article. Not to mention that I agree totally with the point of view.

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RF-ID uptake slower than expected?

I've been a quasi-believer about RD-ID technology for a while now. I know more than several people who are investing their time and money into this space, but I am a fence-sitter. Briefly, why?

  • From what I hear and read, it doesn 't quite work reliably yet. The readers can easily be confused by multiple tags, mis-counting or mis- identifying.

  • While the advantages over bar-codes are very real, they don't strike me as real enough to effect the kind of rapid industry change that fans of the technology are betting on.

  • The backbone infrastructure that will be needed to process all this super-detailed new data doesn't exist yet. It strikes me that it might be an effort of Y2K proportions to upgrade the overall Enterprise software stack (ERP and others) to accomodate it.

That said, while I am a fence-sitter, I do think that RF-ID technology is very important and represents a real sea-change. I just think that it will take much longer than people think.(Remember one of my standard nuggets, it's easy to predict the future, what's hard is predicting exactly when.)

I was interested to see this article in the New York Times today about Wal-Mart delaying of their oft-cited deadline for all their suppliers to adopt to RF-ID.

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Overview of Collaboration

I had the opportunity to be a guest lecturer at Brandeis University today, which was fun. Brandeis of course is my Alma Mater, so I was quite at home there. The course was about "Internet and Society" and the section was about Collaboration. Here are my slides, for those few who might be interested.

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Behavior Signature Analysis (Demo Series

Behavior Signature Analysis (Demo Series 10) This is a little arcane but I thought it was an interesting pattern among several products launched at Demo 2004. "Behavior Signature Analysis" is the idea of learning something about the intent or higher level purpose of an activity by doing pattern analysis on some aspect of it's low level behavior. There were several companies showing products that tried to do this at the Method invocation and HTTP Request levels: that you can tell something about meaning strictly by analyzing patterns of low level.

Memento: BC Krishna has built a really cool new solution to measure and understand the actual use of business application in the enterprise to demonstrate the value of the IT investment. So in contrast with Imperva, Memento uses patterns of object invocations as evidence that an application is being used in an expected fashion and using that information as evidence of business value.

Imperva SecureSphere does this by watching HTTP requests before they are handled by the web server or database and judging that repeated requests during a single session that don’t follow patterns (signatures) that were recorded during a training phase are probably indicators of some kind of malicious activity.

Different objectives, analogous techniques.