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  • 1 min read

Too much good stuff: makes me feel inadequate :-)

I saw this in the Wall Street Journal:

"Marcos Weskamp, a 27-year-old Web designer in Tokyo, created a graphical interface1 for Google News as a way to see how much attention is given to individual stories. A headline that has appeared in several publications is represented by a large box, while a story that is less widely covered shows up as a smaller square. The boxes are grouped by color into categories like business and entertainment." - Wall Street Journal, subscription needed.

What a totally cool idea, and beautifully implemented! Technorati Tags: cool, UI

  • 2 min read

[GEEK] The BIG LIE of certificate checking

Maybe you've read or heard my rants about what has become known as the "Scary Dialog Box" that users see when the run a Java application without a valid certificate. And if you have used BlogBridge, you will have seen it and many of you have asked what the heck it means, and I am sure many more have chosen not to run BlogBridge because of it. Sun has heard this complaint from many many people and is now trying to fix the problem, by introducing this new alternative dialog box to report the same thing. There's a post and a thread about this here. Here's what you see if your application is signed with a verified certificate: Is this an improvement? Yes. Is it good enough? No! IMHO the whole idea of using certificates to sign applications is fatally flawed. It provides illusory security. As a small developer, all I have to do to make it go away is to spend some number of hundreds of dollars to get a certificate from Verisign or one of the many other CAs. When I do this, the message then becomes this: How is the user any more secure? Any malware developer could do the same thing. Of course they are smart enough so their company name wouldn't show up as " Malware Developer" and the application wouldn't be called "Big Bad Virus." How is the user to know? So my problem with this whole signed application certificate thing is that it gives the user a very false sense of security. Technorati Tags: java, security, webstart

  • 1 min read

Happy Birthday Dave!

Picture 1-3 Long time readers of this blog (yes, I can say that now, it's been 2 years or so 🙂 know that I am a Dave Winer fan and a daily reader of Scripting News. In yesterday's posts, Dave talks about life and death, honest, open, sincere, like no one else can: "What's it like to die? Some people believe they know, but that's just a belief. You won't know for sure until it happens to you. And that, my friends, is both the curse and the blessing of humanity. It's the curse because it haunts each of us from the age of seven or eight when it first hits us that we 're going to die too." (from Morning Coffee Notes, Scripting News.) I remember, but for me it happened around age 11 or 12, but it was the same experience. Anyway , it's Dave's birthday today, so this post is in his honor. As it happens Dave and I are almost the same age. For me the big five-oh is coming in about 6 months. So Dave, Mazel Tov on your birthday, and I hope to still be reading you when we both are eighty!

  • 1 min read

Gmail spam filtering degraded?

In the last few weeks or so, I've noticed a marked increase in the number of spam emails that are making it into my Gmail inbox. It would be very interesting to know how the spammers vs. Google arms race is going. I've got to believe that Google is working hard on the problem, but given that this was one of the main benefits, at least for me, of going to Gmail, it is a bit of a worry. Anyone else notice this? p.s. This blog posting is a classic "cc: World" message. I want to ask everyone who I might know who is using Gmail, but boy would it be annoying to actually send an email to all of them! Technorati Tags: gmail, security

  • 1 min read

Hacking the papal election

I have to admit to being fascinated with the Vatican, and the ancient , elaborate traditions and rules that surround the papacy. Bruce Schneier, in his (excellent) monthly newsletter had a really interesting discussion about the rules and procedures that have been set down (and fairly recently updated) for the papal election:

"As the College of Cardinals prepares to elect a new pope, people like me wonder about the election process. How does it work, and just how hard is it to hack the vote?" (from Crypto-Gram)

Did you realize that the Vatican publishes the complete election rules online? It is quite interesting, if nothing else, to see how detailed they are, and that they are in (the Pope's) first person:

"After careful reflection I have therefore decided that the only form by which the electors can manifest their vote in the election of the Roman Pontiff is by secret ballot, in accordance with the rules set forth below. This form offers the greatest guarantee of clarity, straightforwardness, simplicity, openness and, above all, an effective and fruitful participation on the part of the Cardinals who, individually and as a group, are called to make up the assembly which elects the Successor of Peter." (from UNIVERSI DOMINICI GREGIS)

  • 1 min read

Who thought of it first? Who cares?

Microsoft and Apple are arguing about who came up first with the idea of having a pervasive search capability built into the OS Apple is shipping it imminently in Tiger, and Microsoft, eventually , in Longhorn. Well let's see: Windows had a broken Find command in the start menu forever. Apple has had find in the finder forever. Microsoft was talking about this kind of pervasive Find capability since Cairo.

"As described by Nash, the Cairo directory will maintain separate stores for files and the directory, but the file system will be extensible so users can add attributes, such as who created it, to a file identifier. The directory will be able to search for objects using those attributes, according to Nash." (from a Network World article of 4/8/96 - 9 Years ago!)****

I say, who cares? It is mind boggling that it's taken them this long to actually make it into the OS. Both Apple and Microsoft are way late. I also say, the only thing that matters is shipping the functionality to customers, and looking at it that way, clearly Apple gets props over Microsoft.

  • 1 min read

Losing a finger over biometrics

"They stripped Mr Kumaran naked and left him by the side of the road - but not before cutting off the end of his index finger with a machete. (from the BBC)"

There, I got your attention , didn't I? That's from the always fascinating monthly mailing on security, Crypto- Gram, from Bruce Schneier. He has a very interesting piece on "New Risks of Biometrics", where you can see the law of unintended consequences in full bloom:

"It's certainly possible to design fingerprint readers that test for "liveness": pulse, body temperature, etc. But these new security countermeasures will result in new criminal tactics, and the cycle will continue."

A similar scenario was used in the movie "Minority Report" which at the time might have seem outlandish, but now, I guess not so much. By the way, here's another bit of Minority report futurism is now creeping into reality:

"In the futuristic movie "Minority Report," Tom Cruise gestures with his gloved hands to sift through crime-clue data that are displayed on giant screens. With the twist of a wrist he can move information from one column to another or delete items." (from the Wall Street Journal)

Technorati Tags: biometrics

  • 1 min read

American Idol Existentialism

For you closet viewers of American Idol (the TV Show), I thought you'd be amused by this new TV blog, and it's discussion of some of the latest developments on that show. If you don't know the show, let me briefly tell you about one aspect, the voting model , which has raised some interesting questions. Here 's how the voting works. Every week a set of contestants perform some song, and at the end "America" gets to vote on which one they liked best. Whoever wins the fewest votes that week is booted off and the following week the remaining contestants do it all over again. It has happened more than once that a contestant is booted off, who everyone agrees is among the best. And there's an outcry and wringing of hands about this - how could it happen? Is it racism? The votes are stacked! Here's what I think may be an explanation for oddball results on the polls. When asked to vote for our favorite, my tendency would be NOT to vote for someone that I think is THE BEST, on the theory that they will get lots of votes from others and hence be SAFE anyway. No , I would vote for the one that I think is at risk of being booted even though I think they are great, the underdog , in other words. If everyone did that, then it's possible that the one that everyone thought was the BEST would actually get booted! American Idol Existentialism!