journalism, security and mexicans

so in a discussion (you can guess where easily) last night, we wondered about new definitions for a
Mexican Wave (stay away from US - we're all ok)

Mexican Hat (keeping the infected at arms length)

Mexican standoff (sneeze at me & I sneeze at you)

etc etc - ah, Tequila Mockingbird, you may say...

meanwhile, why do the media (sorry, Ben Goldacre, you are right again as is Nick Davies
always cite security companies when reporting items about cyber-security threats eh?

do you really expect a security company to be moderate when discussing this? they have products (and shares) to sell....

it'd be like asking Big Pharma their opinion on Pandemics... ...

(c.f. Davies comments on the Millenium Bug)

more biased sampling of sources about botnets....

The Internet has a Great Future Behind it

I'm sitting here in Brussels listening to talks about the EU FIRE projects.
While there's lots of useful work going on, I am having a very hard time finding a
possible Future Internet in any of it.

The idea that is common and cool as a research experiment is the notion of a Living Lab.
The idea that's probably least useful is the Public Private Partnership as a vehicle to fund such a thing.

oh well.

A simple model of tussel spaces

if you have apolyadic op
x op y
such that there is also an inverse op, po
such that op aggregates, and po de-aggregates
a resource (where a resource can be an identifier space such as names
or a transmission resource such as links or a processor resource etc etc)
then obviously op and po aren't information hiding in some sense, but they may be land grabs

when are they land grabs? when the ag-op or de-ag-op stat mux, or
(essentially) do anything that is sub-linear (superlinear in the de-agg op case)
then there is an economic advantage going on (scaling, in internet terms)
so then you have a tussel...

qed

truly, the internet was for sharing moustache pictures

taches of distincion

they all look gay

truly, this is what the internet was invented for...

http://www.juliensauctions.com/auctions/2009/michael-jackson/catalog-list.html

making botnets out of voip pieces

I seem to recall saying something about this a few years back - now slashdot links to a
story about abuse of skype and google voice tech to do bad things...

anathematica

so thinking about neal stephenson's last tome, Anathem, it is a paeon to
science - the point of the story (spoiler alert:) Is that
the best people to communicate with aliens are scientists
because the "language" of science is (quite literally) universal (actually, it is meta-universal) so even if aliens show up from (several) parallel Universes
then we (scientists, or "avout" steeped in "theorics") can communicate with them - indeed, the aliens have a helpful clue (much as voyager does) which is they have a diagram of the geometric proof of Pythagoras (of coruse, neither they nor the folks
on the planet (arbre) call it Pythagoras) on the outside of their "ship"

one discussion about meta-theory centers on whether the metaverse is ordered (DAG) or random, and whether there is some "higher" versus "lower" plane; another discussion is about Hemn (quantum state) spaces....another is about cross breeding plants to grow a simulation of a part of history....still another is about time

most religions are given fairly short shrift in the book (though not all) and of course there are (as in snow crash) some cool dudes who do marshal arts quite well...