Posts from — March 2004

wonder where all of this stuff went to? small bits were likely used to make drugs, but 6 tons?

Ninja!
You are a sneaky Ninja.
We don't even know you're there…
before it's too late!

Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot?
brought to you by Quizilla

just look at what he did to that bear

ACM on e-journal economics. Anat Hovav and Paul Gray, Managing academic e-journals, Communications of the ACM 47(4), 79-82 (April 2004). (Access restricted to subscribers.) Hovav and Gray consider e-journals from a number of economic and distribution factors, pointing to their increasing acceptance by researchers, as well as difficulties in marketing and archiving, but not addressing the open access question. Rather, they point to the decline in the percentage of “free” journals, thus remarking their unsustainability. (Source: Confessions of a Science Librarian) [Open Access News]

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interesting article……

yes, cars are contrary to having a good campus climate. everyone knows it, no one wants to admit it. just think about what they mean to most people personally and culturally and you'll see why.

here are my commonly suggested ideas to discourage car use when possible:

• parking fees that scale significantly higher when you live within reasonable walking distance to class, live on campus, want to have a car? that will be $500/m live within a 1/4 mile circle of campus, 400/m, 1/2 mile 200/m etc. waivers will apply for certain conditions of course.
• close all main campus roads to all vehicles other than visitors, service vehicles and public transportation between 8am and 5pm, and ticket heavily.
• remove parking from areas where people can walk from a major parking lot. get rid of lots or lines that hold less than 100 cars and make them parks.
• provide emergency transportation for people who walk to work, call xxxxx to get a quick ride home in case you forgot something. etc.

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 -]

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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]

Brandom on Universities and the Pernicious Idea of Students as Customers. Interesting and apt remarks by distinguished philosopher Bob Brandom from a talk to the Board of Trustees at the University of Pittsburgh:

The students are not always initially happy about being required to take these [philosophy] courses, though our exit evaluations of satisfaction are very high. This underlines what is wrong with thinking of our students as customers, whose desires ought to drive our offerings. If we just give the students what they want, half of them would do nothing but channel-surf through undemanding courses on the symbolism of the Matrix movies and what the popularity of reality TV says about contemporary culture ÷ with lots of video-viewing time.

A somewhat better model than that of commercial customer is that of professional client, in relation, for instance, to a doctor or lawyer. No one with any sense goes to their counselor and says: Prescribe this drug for me in this dosage, or file a lawsuit for me under this section of the Uniform Commercial Code. One goes instead for access to a different kind of judgment and advice, which one wants to take account of a whole range of possibilities and constraints initially visible only to the professional.

The case of university-level instruction is even further out on this spectrum. What we have to offer is in no small part instruction about what sort of education the students should be pursuing, what is worth reading, learning, thinking and writing about ÷ and what counts as doing that. The students come to us to become familiar with, and be held to standards of excellence of various sorts, as much as for our specific knowledge.

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