Social Informatics. Social Informatics
http://www.social-informatics.org/

Social Informatics includes comprehensive sections on relevant fields, infrastrctures, news, journals, associations, study programs and research centers. Social Informatics is an interdisciplinary perspective that uses both, the tools of the social science and the tools of the computer science to analyze the interaction between technology (usually information technology) and society. In other words we can say that SI takes into account social aspects of computerization. SI analyses consider an array of relevant factors, including social, cultural, organizational, and other contextual components. [Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant]

Joi Ito's on board.

We had a bit of trouble getting in touch with Joi, busy d00d that he is, but he's now on the program committee for the meeting and he's spreadding the word.

[Team Polysynchronous - Just Differently Intelligent - - Just Differently Intelligent -]

—–

this is supposed to be neat, cool, and intellectually interesting.

Used Hard Disks Packed with Confidential Information.

Simson Garfinkel has an eye-opening piece in CSO magazine about the contents of used hard drives. Simson bought a pile of used hard drives and systematically examined them to see what could be recovered from them.

I took the drives home and started my own forensic analysis. Several of the drives had source code from high-tech companies. One drive had a confidential memorandum describing a biotech project; another had internal spreadsheets belonging to an international shipping company.

Since then, I have repeatedly indulged my habit for procuring and then analyzing secondhand hard drives. I bought recycled drives in Bellevue, Wash., that had internal Microsoft e-mail (somebody who was working from home, apparently). Drives that I found at an MIT swap meet had financial information on them from a Boston-area investment firm.

…

One of the drives once lived in an ATM. It contained a year's worth of financial transactions÷including account numbers and withdrawal amounts÷from a organization that had a legal requirement to not divulge such information. Two other drives contained more than 5,000 credit card numbers÷it looked as if one had been inside a cash register. Another had e-mail and personal financial records of a 45-year-old fellow in Georgia. The man is divorced, paying child support and dating a woman he met in Savannah. And, oh yeah, he's really into pornography.

It's shouldn't be a secret anymore than when you “delete” a file, it's not really gone. Yes, the file is unreachable by ordinary means, but virtually all of the information is still there on the hard disk, recoverable by anybody with the right tools. If you really want to destroy data, you have to use special disk scrubbing tools that overwrite the “empty” disk space with random data. It's not rocket science, but you do need to be careful.

In Simson's study, between one-third and one-half of the drives had significant amounts of confidential data that could be recovered. Only ten percent of the used drives had been properly scrubbed.

[Link credit: Michael Froomkin at discourse.net]

[ATAC: Abusable Technologies Awareness Center]

What Would Our Forefathers Say About Open Source. 24 Mar 2004: “Open Source or GPL software will doom the economy, and is against the capitalistic foundation of our country”… so says Steve Ballmer and SCO. But is it really? I think Benjamin Franklin would roll over in his grave at
Microsoft and SCO's view of Open Source software. Education up until the 1700's used to be for the rich and powerful. You either came from money and went to school, or you were poor and worked the fields. Ben however, came up with the idea of.. and get this, “A free and ope [RootPrompt -- Nothing but Unix]