Really long (almost 2 hours) presentation - but given my current job, this is a must-see :-0
Recorded at the 8th www.ToorCon.org Information Security Conference, Sept 30th and Aug 1st, 2006 in San Diego, California. Content produced by www.MediaArchives.com — PRIVACY IS DEAD – GET OVER IT, with Steven Rambam. This talk will include numerous examples of actual data and investigative online resources and databases, and will include an in-depth demonstration of an actual online investigation done on a volunteer subject. (The subject is Rick Dakan, a noted author, who will be present.) (From CNN: “…Rambam was scheduled to discuss how he dug up — in just over four hours of searching private and public databases — more than 500 pages worth of data on Rick Dakan, who was attending the conference and had agreed to participate in the project. “All I had given him was my e-mail and name,” Dakan said. “He knew everywhere I’d lived, every car I had driven, and even someone else in Alabama who was using my Social Security number since 1983.Emphasis will be placed on discussing the “digital footprints” that we all leave in our daily lives, and how it is now possible for an investigator (or government Agent) to determine a person’s likes and dislikes, religion, political beliefs, sexual orientation, habits, hobbies, friends, family, finances, health and even the person’s actual physical whereabouts at any given moment, solely by the use of online data and related activity
A number of emerging technologies will soon collectively enable an open social web in which users control their information and it can flow between multiple sites and services. OpenID, OAuth, microformats, OpenSocial, the Social Graph API, friends-list portability, and more will be discussed, as well as a coherent vision for how the pieces fit together and how developers can start taking advantage of them now.
Renowned linguist Steven Pinker speaks at Google’s Mountain View, CA, headquarters about his book “The Stuff of Thought.” This event took place on September 24, 2007, as part of the Authors@Google series. For more information about Steven Pinker, please visit http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/stuff/index.html
the longest, most comprehensive documentary about the history of computing ever produced… a whirlwind tour of computing before the Web, with brilliant archival footage and interviews with key players — several of whom passed away since the filming. Jointly produced by WGBH Boston and the BBC, it originally aired in the UK as The Dream Machine before its U.S. premiere in January 1992.
Advogato is a community blog for free software developers, founded in 1999 as a testbed for ideas on attack-resistant trust metrics. The site now has 13k registered users, of whom over 3000 are ranked with one of the “Apprentice”, “Journeyer”, or “Master” certifications. Though I neglected the maintenance of the site for many years, it has retained an active community, and is seeing significant new life since it was handed over to the new maintainer, Steven Rainwater. By the exponential-growth standards of the dot-com boom, Advogato has been only a modest success. Yet, the experience of the site over the years contains a number of lessons. First and foremost, attack-resistant trust metrics do work. The site succeeds in being remarkably spam-free, as well as completely open to the worldwide community of free software developers, and achieves these goals without needing a huge amount of manual input to delete spammers. Thus, the main lesson is that trust metrics do work, but they need to be applied with care. Experience with the site teaches the importance of choosing and implementing the appropriate trust metric for the assumptions at hand. There is widespread “cert inflation,” where many users are ranked higher than the guidelines would recommend. The trust metrics also did not bring a flow of very high quality articles to the front page. Another important lesson is that openness and transparency work. The workings of the trust metric (including the complete source code) is public. Thus, Advogato strongly refutes the prevailing wisdom that secrecy is needed for spam protection. This lesson is similar to the ineffectiveness of “security through obscurity”. Lastly, I’ll spend some time discussing why Advogato failed to catch fire in the public’s imagination, despite its qualities. Possible factors include lack of promotion, and fact that the trust metrics were never tested against real money