Technology

I’ve been keeping track of interesting stories about security over the past couple of months for my intersession course, mostly ones that I have found through Slashdot, BoingBoing and/or Digg. As part of the process of selecting which ones will make it into the final week of the course and which ones will not, I thought I would put the whole list here, mostly without comment. If you notice anything that seems particularly interesting (especially if you happen to be in my course!) let me know and it will probably move up my list of things to discuss. Last year’s … Continue reading It’s 11 o’clock. Do you know where your data is?

I’ve been saving up news articles about security vulnerabilities for my cyberattacks class, but I’m not quite sure where to fit in a discussion of potential vulnerabilities in Boeing’s New 787. On the crazy-cool side, the plane is going to have internet connectivity in the cabin for passengers. On the crazy-stupid side, the passenger’s network is connected to the cockpit network. Solutions are being discussed, but they do not seem to include just keeping the two networks physically separate. But software solutions can, and probably will, have holes, and Boeing is treating this as a software-debugging problem. I can’t imagine … Continue reading Avoiding a pun about “crashing”….

I would not want to buck the weblogging tradition of posting some type of year-end wrap-up, and I was quite lax on the photography and book-reading this year so I thought I would tie up 2007 with a recap of some of the new technologies that I have started using in the past year. RSS Feeds: My general websurfing habits had been to open folders of bookmarks into my Firefox tabs and click my way through them, but I finally broke down and tried out reading feeds and it’s an experiment I’m sticking with. I started out using Sage, a … Continue reading Moving on to 2008….

I was chatting with a friend tonight about the fact that both of us are interested in learning Python, for slightly different reasons. He has noticed some job listings that indicate Python as being a particularly desirable skill, and theorizes that it would be pretty straightforward to pick up if you have a good understanding of Java. That theory is supported by the large number of books and articles written specifically to help the Java programmer learn Python. (See: Python for Java Programmers or Python for Java Programmers) In fact, if you have a background in Java, this Python & … Continue reading It probably even supports ArrayList….

Are you interested in Web 2.0? Maybe you are taking a course on the topic soon. Hell, maybe you are teaching a course on the topic soon ;) Whatever it is, last month the new-to-me but old-to-the-internet Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication had a special issue on social network sites. Besides just trying to tackle the problem of defining a “social networking site” – which at least is a more manageable task than defining the mostly meaningless in my mind phrase “Web 2.0” – there is a a somewhat interesting study of who, demographically, does and does not use social networking … Continue reading Appropriately, this will automatically post to Facebook as well……

This video of a SIGGRAPH07 demo is amazing – I really wasn’t sure when I started watching it if I was understanding what was going on. It is showing a tool that, instead of having you resize an image by cropping or scaling find the least important portions of the image to remove or expand, even if they are not in simple vertical or horizontal bands. It seems be be based on finding low-energy paths through the image, where the definition of energy can be tweaked to get good results for the image in question. But you really need to … Continue reading Crazy Image Morphing

If you know me, you may know that I fall pretty far on the information-privacy-over-convenience spectrum and can even be a bit paranoid. You would not be at all surprised that I liked this article on how to de-RFID your credit card. You might be interested that it involves a dremel tool and not a microwave…..

I haven’t tried this out yet, but Frucall lets you comparison shop by calling them on your cell phone from a store and entering the bar code of what you’re thinking of buying. [via Physics Geek] Their system will check in their database of products, providers, and prices and let you know a range of prices, where you can get that item, etc. It’s a free service, from what I can see, except for whatever your cell phone provider charges for the call. If you are at your computer, you can also just search their database directly. I tried that … Continue reading 21st Century Comparison Shopping

This weblog post has a really fun table contrasting current cyberattack techniques to those in classic cyberpunk stories, particularly Gibson’s stories. [via Boing Boing] The comments are also worth reading – it’s interesting to think about whether the difference indicate that we haven’t come as far as Gibson predicted, or whether they reflect dated presumptions about how technology of the future would work on Gibson’s part. The observations about the types of systems being attacked (focusing on the recent denial-of-service attack against Estonia) are particularly interesting, I think: Cyberpunk stories: Cyber-attack targets were fancy-pants specialized computer installations accessible to few, … Continue reading Fantasy, not Sci-Fi

I’d love to see additional details on how schools collected their data to conclude that giving students their own laptop does not improve learning. [via Arts & Letters Daily] There are many examples cited of the laptops being a distraction or being used for frivolous or illicit purposes. This isn’t at all shocking, and if laptops were otherwise improving learning this could likely be addressed through technological and disciplinary means. I’ve talked to someone at a small school that gives every student a laptop, and there are routine checks into the content on the laptop (no games or IM clients … Continue reading Tech for tech’s sake