Liudvikas Bukys

Cringely: Collateral Damage:
Why Most Internet Advertising Doesn’t Work and What Little Does Work Is Killing Us:

“ At the same time that the sheer volume of spam is clogging networks and demanding server upgrades to handle all the sludge, crude anti-spam techniques are making our Internet communications less effective and less efficient. We are both drowning in spam and trying to stop it by hitting ourselves in the head. But wait, there’s more! Politicians, who think their job is to make laws that tell us when to breathe, now want to make spam illegal, which might be nice if it didn’t at the same time trample on the U.S. Constitution. One minute spam will be illegal and the next minute it will be against the law to say vice president Dick Cheney really ought to lose a little weight. Killing spam isn’t worth the loss of free speech, at least not to me.”

Linux Journal: Health Monitoring with lm_sensors

O’Reilly Network: Stein Gives Bioinformatics Ten Years to Live [Feb. 05, 2003]:
‘ Lincoln Stein’s keynote at the O’Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference was provocatively titled “Bioinformatics: Gone in 2012.” Despite the title, Stein is optimistic about the future for people doing bioinformatics. But he explained that “the field of bioinformatics will be gone by 2012. The field will be doing the same thing but it won’t be considered a field.” His address looked at what bioinformatics is and what its future is likely to be in the context of other scientific disciplines. He also looked at career prospects for people doing bioinformatics and provided advice for those looking to enter the field.
…
One of Stein’s tests for a discipline is the “Department Of” test. Take your favorite field or service and prepend it with your favorite institution’s name, followed by “Department of”. For example, he is quite happy with the phrase “the Harvard Department of Genetics.” On the other hand, a “Department of Microscopy” seems to him to fit better at an Institute of Technology. He said that for him, a Department of Bioinformatics has the same feel and he doesn’t predict the establishment of bioinformatics departments.
…
Stein returned to the question, what is bioinformatics? In light of his thoughts on services defined by tools and disciplines defined by problem, his answer was simple. Bioinformatics is just one way of studying biology. Whether you think of bioinformatics as High Throughput Biology, Integrative Biology, or Large Data Set Biology, fundamentally Stein argues that bioinformatics is biology.
’

Forbes.com: Pfizer’s Definition Of ‘Invention’:
‘Today Pfizer is celebrating because a patent covering a whole class of arthritis medicines was declared invalid. But the world’s largest drug company still insists that a similarly broad patent on impotence pills is valid. Any cynic would note one difference between the two patents: Pfizer owns the impotence patent, not the arthritis one. Still, it is worth taking a look at Pfizer’s definition of the word “invention.”’

Doc Searls and David Weinberger: World of Ends:

When it comes to the Net, a lot of us suffer from Repetitive Mistake Syndrome. This is especially true for magazine and newspaper publishing, broadcasting, cable television, the record industry, the movie industry, and the telephone industry, to name just six.

…
Fortunately, the true nature of Internet isn’t hard to understand. In fact, just a fistful of statements stands between Repetitive Mistake Syndrome and Enlightenment…

…
The Nutshell
1.
The Internet isn’t complicated

2. The Internet isn’t a thing. It’s an agreement.
3. The Internet is stupid.
4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its
value.
5. All the Internet’s value grows on its
edges.

6. Money moves to the suburbs.
7. The end of the world? Nah, the world of
ends.
8. The Internet’s three virtues:
a. No one owns it

b. Everyone can use it
c. Anyone can improve it
9. If the Internet is so simple, why have
so many been so boneheaded about it?
10. Some mistakes we can stop making already

Clay Shirky: Enter the Decentralized Zone
“The IT workers of any organization larger than 50 people are now in an impossible
situation: They are rewarded for negative events-no crashes or breeches-even as workers
are inexorably eroding their ability to build or manage a corporate sandbox. The obvious
parallel here is with the PC itself; 20 years ago, the mainframe guys laughed at the
toy computers workers were bringing into the workplace because they knew that computation
was too complex to be handled by anyone other than a centralized group of trained
professionals. Today, we take it for granted that workers can manage their own computers.

But we still regard network access and configuration as something that needs to be
centrally managed by trained professionals, even as workers take network configuration
under their control. There is no one right answer-digital security is a trade-off. But
no solution that requires centralized control over what network users do will succeed. ”

Microsoft & BEA: XML, SOAP, and Binary Data

Tim Bray: Bosworth et al on XML, SOAP, Binary Data

VNUNet: Security swallows a twelfth of IT budgets

IT directors have been advised to spend three to eight per cent of their IT budgets on ongoing security costs.

The figures are best practice guidelines given by analyst Meta at its 14th annual forum in Barcelona earlier this week.

Meta explained that the figure does not include special events, nor projects such as public key infrastructure implementations.

The analyst added that security budgets will increase by 10 per this year, as they had done in 2001 and 2002.

Financial services firms should spend eight per cent of their IT budget on security to cover ongoing costs. Energy companies should allocate 6.5 per cent, e-commerce companies six per cent, retailers five per cent and manufacturing companies three per cent.

These figures do not cover business continuity and disaster recovery, which should take up another 2.5 to four per cent, according to Tom Scholtz, vice president of security and risk strategies at Meta.

…
Meta’s nine components for a security programme:

• A governance structure that ties security to the business.
• A vision, reduced to quarterly deliverables, that drives toward an appropriately secured environment; an architecture that is adaptable.
• An organisational approach that supports accountability and the correct separation of duties.
• A plan to generate continuous cultural change.
• A maturity programme for security-related processes.
• An approach to supporting local management discretion in determining the appropriate level of security.
• The execution of processes that determine just how secure the environment is – right now!
• The execution of projects that make the environment more secure.
• The execution of processes which ensure that security is servicing the current needs of all aspects of the business.

United Press International: Hackers strike at University of Texas:
“Authorities Thursday sought computer hackers who stole the names and Social Security numbers of 59,000 current and former students, faculty and staff last week at the University of Texas at Austin.

UT Austin: Data Theft and Identity Protection:
“The malfunction was assessed to be the result of a deliberate attack from the Internet. Subsequent analysis revealed that a security weakness in an administrative data reporting system was exploited by writing a program to input millions of Social Security numbers. Those SSNs that matched selected individuals in a UT database were captured, together with e-mail address, title, department name, department address, department phone number, and names/dates of employee training programs attended. It is important to note that no student grade or academic records, or personal health or insurance information was disclosed.

Computer logs indicate the information was obtained by computers in Austin and Houston over a five-day period that began last Wednesday, according to UT officials. They don’t know yet if the identification information was used for any illegal purposes… Approximately 55,200 individuals had some of the above data exposed. This group includes current and former students, current and former faculty and staff, and job applicants.”

CW360°:

“The technology will be available by the end of this month free of charge on IBM’s alphaWorks web site and provides Soap enablement of existing CICS Cobol applications, permitting them to be invoked through Soap requests over either HTTP or WebSphere MQ messages and then integrated both inside and outside of the enterprise.”