From danah boyd’s “Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing Community Into Being on Social Network Sites” (First Monday: December 2006)
John’s reference to “gateway Friends” concerns a specific technological affordance unique to Friendster. Because the company felt it would make the site more intimate, Friendster limits users from surfing to Profiles beyond four degrees (Friends [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, business | No Comments »
From Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Things He Carried” (The Atlantic: November 2008):
Because the TSA’s security regimen seems to be mainly thing-based—most of its 44,500 airport officers are assigned to truffle through carry-on bags for things like guns, bombs, three-ounce tubes of anthrax, Crest toothpaste, nail clippers, Snapple, and so on—I focused my efforts on bringing bad [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, history, law, security | No Comments »
From Stephen J. Dubner’s interview with Bruce Schneier in “Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions” (The New York Times: 4 December 2007):
Basically, you’re asking if crime pays. Most of the time, it doesn’t, and the problem is the different risk characteristics. If I make a computer security mistake — in a book, for a consulting [...]
Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, business, security | No Comments »
From Stephen J. Dubner’s interview with Bruce Schneier in “Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions” (The New York Times: 4 December 2007):
Identity theft is a problem for two reasons. One, personal identifying information is incredibly easy to get; and two, personal identifying information is incredibly easy to use. Most of our security measures have tried [...]
Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, business, security | No Comments »
From Glyn Moody’s “The duplicitous inhabitants of Second Life” (The Guardian: 23 November 2006):
What would happen to business and society if you could easily make a copy of anything - not just MP3s and DVDs, but clothes, chairs and even houses? That may not be a problem most of us will have to confront for [...]
Posted on November 29th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, art, business, history, security | No Comments »
From Stephen E. Arnold’s The Google Legacy: How Google’s Internet Search is Transforming Application Software (Infonortics: September 2005):
The figure Google’s Fusion: Hardware and Software Engineering shows that Google’s technology framework has two areas of activity. There is the software engineering effort that focuses on PageRank and other applications. Software engineering, as used here, [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, history, science, security, technology | No Comments »
From Richard Stallman’s “Transcript of Richard Stallman at the 4th international GPLv3 conference; 23rd August 2006” (FSF Europe: 23 August 2006):
Anyway, the term “intellectual property” is a propaganda term which should never be used, because merely using it, no matter what you say about it, presumes it makes sense. It doesn’t really make sense, because [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, business, language & literature, law | No Comments »
From Ian Urbina’s “High Turnout May Add to Problems at Polling Places” (The New York Times: 3 November 2008):
Two-thirds of voters will mark their choice with a pencil on a paper ballot that is counted by an optical scanning machine, a method considered far more reliable and verifiable than touch screens. But paper ballots bring [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, history, law, politics, security | No Comments »
From Clay Shirky’s “The Siren Song of Luddism” (Britannica Blog: 19 June 2007):
…any technology that fixes a problem … threatens the people who profit from the previous inefficiency. However, Gorman omits mentioning the Luddite response: an attempt to halt the spread of mechanical looms which, though beneficial to the general populace, threatened the livelihoods of [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, business, history, on writing | No Comments »
From Tim Wu’s “On Copyright’s Authorship Policy” (Internet Archive: 2007):
On May 4, 2001, a one-man corporation named Bridgeport Music, Inc. launched over 500 counts of copyright infringement against more than 800 different artists and labels.1 Bridgeport Music has no employees, and other than copyrights, no reported assets.2 Technically, Bridgeport is a “catalogue [...]
Posted on November 26th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, art, business, history, law, technology | No Comments »
From Tim Wu’s “On Copyright’s Authorship Policy” (Internet Archive: 2007):
On May 4, 2001, a one-man corporation named Bridgeport Music, Inc. launched over 500 counts of copyright infringement against more than 800 different artists and labels.1 Bridgeport Music has no employees, and other than copyrights, no reported assets.2 Technically, Bridgeport is a “catalogue [...]
Posted on November 26th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, art, business, history, law | No Comments »
From James Turner’s interview with Dr. Barbara Simons, past President of the Association for Computing Machinery & recent appointee to the Advisory Board of the Federal Election Assistance Commission, at “A 2008 e-Voting Wrapup with Dr. Barbara Simons” (O’Reilly Media: 7 November 2008):
[Note from Scott: headers added by me]
Optical Scan: Good & Bad
And most of [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, history, law, politics, science, security | No Comments »
From Federico Biancuzzi’s interview with security researchers Greg Hoglund & Gary McGraw, authors of Exploiting Online Games, in “Real Flaws in Virtual Worlds” (SecurityFocus: 20 December 2007):
The more I dug into online game security, the more interesting things became. There are multiple threads intersecting in our book: hackers who cheat in online games and are [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, law, security, technology | No Comments »
From Declan McCullagh’s “E-voting predicament: Not-so-secret ballots” (CNET News: 20 August 2007):
Two Ohio activists have discovered that e-voting machines made by Election Systems and Software and used across the country produce time-stamped paper trails that permit the reconstruction of an election’s results — including allowing voter names to be matched to their actual votes.
…
Ohio [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, politics, security | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “First Responders” (Crypto-Gram: 15 September 2007):
In 2004, the U.S. Conference of Mayors issued a report on communications interoperability. In 25% of the 192 cities surveyed, the police couldn’t communicate with the fire department. In 80% of cities, municipal authorities couldn’t communicate with the FBI, FEMA, and other federal agencies.
The source of the [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, politics, security | No Comments »
From James Fallows’ “The $1.4 Trillion Question” (The Atlantic: January/February 2008):
Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, politics, security | No Comments »
From BBC News’ “CCTV boom ‘failing to cut crime’” (6 May 2008):
Huge investment in closed-circuit TV technology has failed to cut UK crime, a senior police officer has warned.
Det Ch Insp Mick Neville said the system was an “utter fiasco” - with only 3% of London’s street robberies being solved using security cameras.
Although Britain had [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | No Comments »
From Marc Lacey’s “Exploiting Real Fears With ‘Virtual Kidnappings’ ” (The New York Times: 29 April 2008):
MEXICO CITY — The phone call begins with the cries of an anguished child calling for a parent: “Mama! Papa!” The youngster’s sobs are quickly replaced by a husky male voice that means business.
“We’ve got your child,” he says [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, law, security, technology | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “Inside the Twisted Mind of the Security Professional” (Wired: 20 March 2008):
This kind of thinking is not natural for most people. It’s not natural for engineers. Good engineering involves thinking about how things can be made to work; the security mindset involves thinking about how things can be made to fail. It [...]
Posted on October 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security | No Comments »
From Aaron Margosis’ “Why you shouldn’t run as admin…” (17 June 2004):
But if you’re running as admin [on Windows], an exploit can:
install kernel-mode rootkits and/or keyloggers (which can be close to impossible to detect)
install and start services
install ActiveX controls, including IE and shell add-ins (common with spyware and adware)
access data belonging to other users
cause code [...]
Posted on September 26th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | No Comments »