The Register has an interesting article about cell phone, blue-tooth specifically, security called How shall I own your mobile phone today? which is definately worth checking out.

Just a few weeks ago, a security group calling themselves Flexilis made the news. One of their members stood next to the red carpet at the Academy Awards with a laptop and an antenna hidden in his backpack, and the results weren’t exactly unsurprising: between 50 and 100 of the celebs were vulnerable to bluesnarfing (ignore the erroneous comparison the article makes between Paris Hilton and the Academy Awards - the techniques used in each situation are completely different).

Cell phones are so common place. People take them for granted and put complete trust in them, storing more and more personal information on them everyday. But cell phones and all electronic devices, computers and the internet for that matter, are vulnerable.

Here’s an example of just how vulnerable technology is:

On 25 August 2000, the press release distribution service Internet Wire received a forged e-mail that appeared to come from Emulex Corp. and said that the CEO had resigned and the company’s earnings would be restated. Internet Wire posted the press release, not bothering to verify either its origin or contents. Several financial news services and Web sites further distributed the false information, and the stock dropped 61% (from $113 to $43) before the hoax was exposed.

This is a devastating network attack. Despite its amateurish execution (the perpetrator, trying to make money on the stock movements, was caught in less than 24 hours), $2.54 billion in market capitalization disappeared, only to reappear hours later. With better planning, a similar attack could do more damage and be more difficult to detect.

This is something that Bruce Schneier calls The Third Wave of Network Attacks:

The first wave of attacks was physical: attacks against the computers, wires, and electronics. These were the first kinds of attacks the Internet defended itself against. Distributed protocols reduce the dependency on any one computer. Redundancy removes single points of failure. We’ve seen many cases where physical outages — power, data, or otherwise — have caused problems, but largely these are problems we know how to solve.

Over the past several decades, computer security has focused around syntactic attacks: attacks against the operating logic of computers and networks. This second wave of attacks targets vulnerabilities in software products, problems with cryptographic algorithms and protocols, and denial-of-service vulnerabilities — pretty much every security alert from the past decade.

The third wave of network attacks is semantic attacks: attacks that target the way we, as humans, assign meaning to content. In our society, people tend to believe what they read. How often have you needed the answer to a question and searched for it on the Web? How often have you taken the time to corroborate the veracity of that information, by examining the credentials of the site, finding alternate opinions, and so on?

Computer processes are much more rigid in the type of input they accept; generally this input is much less than a human making the same decision would get. Falsifying input into a computer process can be much more devastating, simply because the computer cannot demand all the corroborating input that people have instinctively come to rely on. Indeed, computers are often incapable of deciding what the “corroborating input” would be, or how to go about using it in any meaningful way. Despite what you see in movies, real-world software is incredibly primitive when it comes to what we call “simple common sense.” For example, consider how incredibly stupid most Web filtering software is at deriving meaning from human-targeted content.

Can airplanes be delayed, or rerouted, by feeding bad information into the air traffic control system? Can process control computers be fooled by falsifying inputs? What happens when smart cars steer themselves on smart highways?

Hmmm… We’ve going to have to figure out how to deal with these problems. Somehow :)

Making music with computers tends to be a frustrating business. You have these incredible ideas but you’re locked in this endless struggle to translate them into music, something audible, something real. The software interface and how it fits into the music making process is usually the root of the problem. People relate to music in vastly different ways but software can only accomodate a small percentage of those. So you find yourself having to mold your process around the software (not the other way around like it should be).

But! what if you could just skip all the software?

Brain-Computer Interface for Musical Applications:
The objective of this project is to develop technology to interface the brain with musical devices. In addition to improving social well-being and gaining a better understanding of the underlying neurology of musical processing, this research is aimed at the development of know-how for building innovative portable music devices and sophisticated equipment for music therapy

we-make-money-not-art has more details:

Although the musical ideas tested were extremely simplistic, compared with the complexity of musical composition, the team has demonstrated that the idea of interfacing the brain with computers for musical applications is no longer a science fiction fantasy.

Cool uh! Another incredible project, Regenerative Music, is investigating similar interactions and interfaces to music:

Regenerative Music explores new physiological interfaces for musical instruments. The overall goals of this project are to investigate the creation of “Regenerative Music'’. In Regenerative Music, the computer, instead of taking active only cues from the musician, reads physiological signals (heart beat, respiration, brain waves, etc..) from the musician/performer.

These signals are then used to alter the behaviour of the instrument itself. For instance filter settings on the sound can be applied, to which the musician responds by changing the way they play the instrument. The music will in turn generate an emotional response on the part of the musician/performer, and that this emotional response will be detectable by the computer, which then alters the behaviour of the instrument further in response.

Or, you could just learn to play an instrument.

via: Pasta and Vinegar.

Some years ago, as the year was ending, a pilot came up with the idea of celebrating the New Year by towing a banner displaying the year behind his aeroplane.

Keen to get to the New Year’s Eve festivities he quickly painted the banner and left it over night to dry. The following day he attached the banner to the plane, but when he took off and the banner unfurled he noticed that he had actually hung the banner upside down. However, it wasn’t a problem as the banner still read the correct year. So on December 31st he set to work.
Question

What year was the banner painted?

Source: http://flickr.com/groups_topic.gne?id=850

Taken from Natsuki Kurihara’s incredible flickr profile.

ITWeb: Internet Fiesta gets into full swing.

SA’s first Internet Fiesta attracted more than 2 000 first-time computer users and fostered a sense of community in one of Cape Town’s poorest suburbs, organisers say.

The event, designed to bring a sense of fun to people wanting to use the Internet, took place on Saturday and Sunday in Belhar, a traditionally poor coloured area with a high unemployment rate.

Organised by the SA Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC-ZA), the Internet Fiesta is modelled on similar events held in other African countries aimed at encouraging the use of technology by people who would not normally have access.

Thanks to Alan Levin for the heads up.

The Fiesta was successful beyond any of our expectations. Huge congratulations to Jenni Husler who chaired the outreach committee which arranged the Fiesta. Thanks also to all those volunteers and sponsors involved, I am leaving the full reportback for Jenni but in the meantime I invite you to view some pics at isoc.org.za Neils (a volunteer) blog

I just discovered sweetmagazine.

“Start with the taste. Imagine a moment when the sensation of honey or sugar on the tongue was an astonishment, a kind of intoxication. The closest I’ve ever come to recovering such a sense of sweetness was second-hand, though it left a powerful impression on me even so. I’m thinking of my son’s first experience of sugar: the icing on the cake of his first birthday. I have only the testimony of Isaac’s face to go by (that, and his fierceness to repeat the experience), but it was plain that his first encounter with sugar had intoxicated him - was in fact an ecstasy, in the literal sense of that word. That is, he was beside himself with the pleasure of it, no longer here with me in space and time in quite the same way he had just been a moment before.”

Sweet.

Check it out. Julian Jonker reviews Rhythm Science by Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky).

Boxes and Arrows has a great article about Vannevar Bush and the idea that gave birth to the internet.

Some of the ideas, the concept of associative indexing, trails and sets of trails are prescient to the modern topical blog. A single author connects documents that are associated by some common theme, annotated with commentary and available for others to read long after the original associations are made.

Bush described the memex reader reading documents and tying them together with links. “Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it to the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. […] He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.”4

Bush goes on to describe the sharing of trails between people and the creation of a “new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of common record. The inheritance from the master becomes not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.”

Vannevar Bush’s ideas lead to, and inspired the creation of hypertext and the WWW as we know it today but his vision went much futher than what we have today.

However, the importance of his legacy reaches far beyond this in the description of information organization and associative context. We are only now beginning to develop software and interactive spaces that allow a reader’s associative ability to be more automated and made available to others across the Internet. Through the addition of linking and the creation of trails, as well as personal commentary and annotation, the reader becomes author as well.

.

Here’s another great ETCon talk:

Independent Individuals and Wise Crowds, or Is It Possible to Be Too Connected?
In the past few years, we’ve seen a powerful and justifiable groundswell of interest in and adoption of bottom-up and collaborative approaches to problem-solving and decision-making. It’s now clear that under the right circumstances, these approaches can be remarkably effective, and can yield solutions that are consistently better than those produced by even the smartest expert. Groups, instead of falling to their lowest common denominator, can often rise to the level of their best member and beyond.

The paradox, though, is that groups are typically smartest when the people in them act as much like individuals as possible–when they rely primarily on their own private information, when their opinions are independent, and when their judgments are not determined by their peers. And in an ever-more connected world, this creates a challenge: how can we reap the benefits of collaboration and collective decision-making, while still ensuring that people remain independent actors? Are networks problems as well as solutions? What might it mean to be too connected?

This talk addresses the problem I ran into a few weeks ago. There are very tangible benifits to pluging into the hivemind (besides just sounding cool, that is. haha!). One just needs be weary of becoming dependant on the hivemind which, with the proliferation of syndicated content and sites like del.icio.us, is becoming a real posibility.

The transcript for the talk is available here.

ogigraphics.

notes from somewhere bizarre says: How to disappear (surveillance DK:UK)

The amount of sensitive data stored about individual citizens is rapidly increasing in the digital society. Information about such things as our education, health, private economy, political opinions and consumer-habits are being gathered, registered and stored.

As the title describes, the ‘How to Disappear’ kit is a practical do it yourself kit containing all the tips and gadgets you need to fight surveillance. Packaged in anonymous video cassette cases you will find a selection of ‘disappearance-articles’ along with usage instructions, a catalogue with more gadgets and tips, and of course, a lot more information on the subject.

Hmmm… Interesting.