BCI - Brain-computer-Interfaces - are utilized usually in medical or scientific environments to give a patient or proband feedback about his brain functions. Generally, waves of the outer brain regions are used to accomplish this (like in an EEG), a simple and unexciting technique. For musicians this isn't that new, either: some years ago I've read about brain to midi converters (see German KEYBOARDS, 1994/4: p13; short mention here). Game makers want to implement this into their next games. And immediately scientists caution against possible side-effects, when a game situation that has to be mastered with a special brain curve comes to reality and the trained response used in the game might not be the best response in reality. "You could have an accident. I think it's a rare possibility, but it should be tested before people do this.", says Niels Birbaumer, a leading independent research in medical applications of BCIs.
Evil thought: would you notice any difference between feedback car drivers and normal ones, especially when it comes to slow brain waves?
(Source)

Exploring our network, because I've found that somebody else uses my desktop's hostname, I've found some shared folders on that other machine, open for the public. Curious as I am, I browsed them.
There were some nudie pics.
They were done by my colleague next door.
They were showing him. D'OH!

No, I didn't tell anybody. Don't know how to meet this colleague without being reminded of his anatomy. Must tame my curiosity.

Watch your folders!

An interesting approach for the visualization of network structures is presented at this year's ACM SIGCOMM by computer scientists of the University of California, San Diego. Their graphs resemble kind of digital dandelions and is for experimenting with network structures and effects on them. Besides that, their graphics are very beautiful. The system's source code will be made publicly available. (Source, Original paper)

There's just a small number of job disciplines that claim to have a built-in future. Since its beginning in the Fourties of the last century, information technology has attracted numerous tech- and math-savvy people and has changed our life style significantly. IT development was always driven by highly charged situations like WW II, the cold war, aerospace, and the general need for progressive technology. Also, working in the IT industry has always been a warranty for a secure and wealthy life, a good basis for working in a hard but nonetheless satisfying environment.
This situation changes. After the New Economy bust a few years ago, the advent of offshoring, nd the commodification of IT services, a recent survey done by eWeek reveals that many IT workers like their work but feel somewhat unsettled and wouldn't encourage their children to work in the industry as they once did or still do. This is IT's midlife crisis and the declining number of IT students raises the question where to go from here.
At this moment, IT is dithering between eclecticism and Bohemia. Eclecticism in a way, that development of technical solutions (be it hard- or software) is penetrating nearly every aspect of everyday life, bowing to the dictate of creating something 'innovative' every few months. Innovations come and go like fashion trends, just consider discussions about programming paradigms, hardware cycles, trends in corporate work etc. Bohemia can be found in numerous people working as artists or self-employed persons, often with low salaries. One may even count scientists to this group, not to forget many low-cost workers like programmers in small companies with small income. An industry with product cycles geting shorter all the time, products that aren't innovative any longer (Do you really need all of Word's features?), innovators (researchers, developers) who are wasted in crunch time and are considered being 'old' when they hit their thirties: such an industry loses its attractiveness.
Unfortunately, there's no lunar landing programme that would boost technology; the 'war against terror' is a playground for military and security companies but not for the mainstream IT. Also, plans like saving mankind through technology have failed so far. So what's the Next Big Thing? Another reorganization? Calling the controllers? Some Next Generation technology? Which one?
The hype is over. Let's do it some more years, let's maintain the standards and let universities begin from scratch. IT must change to keep alive and vivid. When the Internet was invented, nobody thought about its return on investment. Fortran was invented to simplify the process of programming and not to lower scientists' salaries. When the first computers started computing, money was the last thing their inventors worried about. They just had to save their country. Think it over. It's time get fresh ideas and to inspire people again.

To be continued. (Source)

Unexpected offer in one of our expensive stores at the 'Kö' (Düsseldorf's luxury retail strip): a shelf with various DVDs below a "recommended videos" sign.

All movies were horror and slasher flicks! *g*

For connecting yourself to the internet, you're paying your monthly fee (apart from any technical tasks). So do content providers, like Amazon, eBay, and all the web site owners and maintainers whose sites you may visit. Generally, every web site is equally accessible to any user - this is called net neutrality.
Carriers and telephone companies see are fighting this base principle of the Internet and are going to succeed, because

the Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic (AP)

Certainly you know the famous TV show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Here's a bunch of special reports to probe further.

A favoured counter-terrorist measure is collecting data, followed by a statistical analysis, called data mining. Rather simple, in a technical way, is wiretapping of telephone and online contacts. But why did the FBI stop its analysis of phone-call patterns of suspected person's contacts? The idea was to create a "community of interest", thus creating a data base for link analysis, a data mining technique for identifying people who might have slipped through former investigations. As in every discussion, its proponents see link analysis as important tool in predicting and preventing attacks, but there opponents claim about the possibility of misuse, establishing links from terrorists to innocent people. FBI's Mike Kortan says that community of interest data is "no longer being used pending the development of an appropriate oversight and approval policy," and that the technique was used infrequently and was never used for email communications. They stopped the programme because of the large amounts of data that couldn't be handled in a meaningful way. According to NY Times, "the bureau stopped the practice early this year in part because of broader questions raised about its aggressive use of the records demands, which are known as national security letters, officials said".

Considering that important developments like this one arrive with a three-year-delay in Germany (as usual), I predict that our Ministry of Interiour will establish large scale online wiretapping followed by intense data mining. This programme will fail like the one above, of course, but all progresses and advancements in Internet communication of the last ten years will be poisoned by distrust against our gouvernment. Our administration should think this over before imitating failed surveillance programmes. (Source)

At last, the "world" takes notice. A well written overview about our gouvernment's strange interpretation of online security.

Corresponding to this, one of our local Internet providers starts to block adult internet sites in preemptive obedience due to legal protection of children and young persons. A german provider of adult content argues that foreign web sites don't have age verification systems as demanded in Germany, so they have to be banned. To avoid legal difficulties, the Internet provider follows this argumentation and cuts the wire.

This is just pleaded. Following their argumentation, in the end each site would be blocked that would offend laws in any country in the world. If providers practice censorship by allowing and denying content to their customers, one should probe further. The censoring provider is hosting an adult video portal itself, and is limiting foreign competition by blocking these other prominent sites. The adult market is highly competitive and rivalries are fought out on the backs of the customers.

Update (9/20): The aforementioned provider released the IP number block. Access to the blocked sites is possible again.

"We don't need hackers to break the systems because they're falling apart by themselves."

Interesting NYT article about the limitedness of our engineered world.

Just spotted a new product in the supermarket shelf: a bunch of care products (each item not containing more than 100 ml) packed together with a transparent plastic bag. "Complying with recent airport security standards."

What did I learn from this?

War on Terror just starts at the Point of Sale.

Alex is working in security business and he maintained a TOR server. Because somebody posted an offensive comment in an online forum for policemen and obfuscated his origin with Alex's server, Alex had a visit from the prosecution. They arrested him for some hours, confiscated his hardware (clients only, that TOR server hosted somewhere wasn't interesting for them) and locked his office.

I think it was Bruce Schneier who has written in his book "Secrets and Lies" that every security technology is vulnerable to a very old practice: it's called social engineering or, as happened in this story: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. It seems that the mission is accomplished: Alex has closed his TOR server. As he says: his moral courage is over.

At last! I'm getting the chance of going to school again (Proof)! I'm kind of new kid on the block and few people out of my hood do know me, so I'm better going to be careful, busy, honest, and beating just the bad ones. You may recognize me easily: I'm the big-nosed guy with the jug ear and full hair besides sunny who's trying to get me wet ;-) Mr. Bulo: well done!

Most of my new classmates already entered the stage. Funnily enough, I thought they were much taller :-)

Just by spidering the web and maintaining its database, software from the Dark Web project is searching for online activity of suspected people. No trojans, no spyware, just a spider doing its work. Though one could ask if researching the web for online terrorism does make sense at all (they're talking about 5000 web sites that matter), this shows a method of researching the web without compromising everybody's privacy. (Source)

Interesting things can sometimes be found even in your bathroom.

Is it art? Science? Or will it just be an inspiration for politicians to have a pefect surveillance tool? Wiki City Rome is a MIT project that gathers cellphone data (and of other wireless devices) to illustrate the movements of crowds and public transport vehicles in real time. Wiki City Rome is derived from MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory that studies the impact of new technologies on cities and may be considered science as well as art.

Though

Ratti's [senseable city lab's director] team obtains its data anonymously from cell phones, GPS devices on buses and taxis, and other wireless mobile devices. Data are made anonymous and aggregated from the beginning, so there are no implications for individual privacy.

Is the price for protecting public and private networks too high? In a project internally called "Cyber Initiative", NSA together with the Department of Homeland Security and other federal US agencies are planned to monitor networks in order to defend them against unauthorized intruders. For the NSA this would mean a rearrangement of its charter, because up to now it's responsible for protecting gouvernmental infrastructure.

Whoever is engaged in computer and network security knows: protecting means monitoring. To efficiently protect a network all incoming and outcoming traffic has to be monitored. One would need few imagination to fancy the uproar of citizens realizing that their internet traffic and harddisk content is scanned by intelligence agencies. Since gouvernments are always hungry for data the next step would be a total control for other purposes than terror prevention (tax offices are very interested in your ebay sales!).

If this will happen, terrorist don't have to go further. They will have won their struggle, because we'll live in a world whose main communication paths are widely controlled by gouvernments. This would be a step towards a strong, if not total state where putting the wrong words in your mouth is dangerous for you, your family and your friends. A world you have to watch every step you do, because the web and its controllers won't forget anything. This might not happen immediately. People will unlearn the value of privacy over a longer period. On some day, they won't know it at all and the last remembrance of privacy will be closing the toilet door behind you. No need for terrorists to throw bombs further. It can't get worse than that.

In the end, this is a dilemma. It's good, if gouvernments care about computer security to defend even normal citizens against crackers, phishers, spammers and other crap. To give up privacy is indeed a bitter pill and this price is much too high.

But surely this is just my gloominess. (Source)

When life is imitating art, it's time to mention bloggers who aren't in a comfortable situation like mine but who are struggling for the future of their country. Ko Htike's blog is one of few windows into Burma's dramatic situation. (Source)

If one accepts that video games and virtal worlds represent a cultural value of their own, the question for preserving these values. Since I'm busy running through the streets of Half Life 2 once more (and I might do this in some years again), it's good to know that the Rochester Institute of Technology joins the Library of Congress partnership for just this purpose. Main targets of this work

will explore the methods, infrastructure, standards and technology for preserving the complex software, content and interactivity in computer games and electronic literature

How about emulating old hardware? Works well for 8 and 16 bit platforms. Ah, I see: it's the dreaded copyright problem! This is a bigger threat to yesterday's treasures than the more technical questions, isn't it? (Source)

Having read the abstract of Laura Beckwith's PhD dissertation, I'm getting a bad mood. Beckwith and her adviser, Margaret Burnett (Oregon State University) were interested in the question for a possible key to make computer science (and the CS industry) more attractive for women. One of their tasks was to analyze how people use computers to solve problems. One of their results is that men are more likely to use advanced software features than women, indepent from their confidence in computer skills. Their experimentees had to find out bugs in various formulas within a spreadsheet and were allowed to use a debugging feature that would help them in detecting the errors. Even unexperienced male users who were less confident in computer tasks used that advanced software feature more often than the female users. Even experienced femals users were unlikely to use that debugger. The only way to raise the number of women in this setting was to add some more options to the debugger. In its first version, the debugging tool let users mark values "right" or "wrong." For the next version Beckwith added options for "seems right maybe" and "seems wrong maybe," and suddenly some tests had more female debugging users than male ones.

This is plain depressing. Does software really need "pink buttons"? What's wrong in saying "1" or "0"? Will "Excel for Women" become a reality and a joke for "real" users?

Beckwith's dissertation is available online.

I would be interested in a comparable study in different cultural circles, where women aren't that shy with math: Israel, India, Iran to name a few. Anyone? (Source)

America's IT industry will shortly suffer from labour shortage. (Source)

We created the whole artificial intelligence community and funded it. And we created the computer science world. When we started [IPTO, the Information Processing Techniques Office], there were no computer science departments or computer science professionals in the world. None.

I'm not sure one could start the old ARPA nowadays. It would be illegal, perhaps. We now live under tight controls by many people who don't understand much about substance.

People that you have to persuade [to build up big things] are too busy, don't know enough about the subject and are highly risk-averse. When President Eisenhower said, "You, Department X, will do Y," they'd salute and say, "Yes, sir." Now they say, "We'll get back to you." I blame Congress for a good part of it. And agency heads are all wishy-washy. What's missing is leadership that understands what it is doing.
We are becoming incapable of handling a technology challenge of any major magnitude. We are losing the ability to do big, complicated things.

What's missing is leadership that understands what it is doing. The whole thing is just off the rails.

Charles M. Herzfeld, a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Va., fifth director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1961, which was later renamed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and director of Defense Research & Engineering from 1990 to 1991, in a ComputerWorld interview. (Source)

Anti-Phishing Phil, developed by computer scientists of Carnegie-Mellon University, wants to improve people's alertness on email scams and phishing emails. Nice idea (though it's using only names and sites of american bank houses)!

Best way, nonetheless, is to be suspicious about every email that claims to come from your (or another) bank. Knowing how to read the headers of email messages isn't a bad idea, either.

Myanmar, land with many names. When I heard about blogger's international protest my first thought was: fine, I'll join and contribute to this! Having read some texts about the subject, I'm backing away. Let me explain.

Myanmar's history is violent. Long before british colonialism the various 135 ethnics were painfully, that means: martially, unified. That didn't last for long. When british tourists didn't put off their shoes they got into trouble with buddhist monks. This was just one episode in the vanguard position of monks in struggling against ruling authority.

Years later (as of 1940) the Burma Independence Army, commanded by Aung San (Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's father) fought against British colonial forces. Interestingly, they received their trainig in Japan, that means Hirohito's army, 'our' (Germany's) confederates. They turned the corner in 1945, teamed up the allied forces (USA, UK, F) and found themselves rulers of Burma some years after the war.

The short democratic era lasted a mere 14 years, then the military junta took over. A lot of riots against the militairies happened ever after (especially the "8888 Upraising" must be mentioned).

As I've understood things so far, buddhist monks of Burma form some kind of alternate social support system because of their freedom of taxes. Due to their relative poverty many Burmese enter a buddhist convent and live from charity and (mostly gouvernmental) benefits. Actual trigger of nowadays protests is the raise of fuel prices that directly affects the moneyless monks, so they take to the streets to protest against this. These protests get politicised quickly and the rest of the angry population joins the demonstrations.

If eastern monks feel similarly like western monks (and nuns), then they shouldn't care about the political system they're living in. Since they decided themselves against a life in profanity, I don't think that they have kind of a political programme in stock, nor would they clearly claim "for" democracy or raging "against" military. Nevertheless, their informal power and the peaceful momentum of their appearance is an important flywheel for the democratic movement. If this makes them automatically democratic allies - I cannot say. They are clerics and their kingdom isn't made of this world.

The democratic movement is united through its common enemy: the junta. However, democrats aren't experienced in gouvernance since Myanmar's democratic period lasted for only 14 years. Even famous Aung San Suu Kyi doesn't have a political agenda for the times after the junta; she derives her political authority from her father's importance. The precepts of the democratic movement seem to be descendent from the days of struggling against the British. But the reflection on yesterday's heroes won't make a political programme for tomorrow and doesn't give any warranty for a peaceful society. Tensions among the various ethnic groups keeps under cover while the junta suppresses them all, but who will preserve peace in the country as soon as militaries go back into their barracks?

Additionally, Myanmar is in the focus of its neighbours. China wants access to the Indian Ocean, so its container ships could spare drifting through the southern chinese sea. They would favour a military base in Myanmar, too. Also do the Russians.

One reason for us being relatively well informed about Burma's situation isn't just because the handful of bloggers, but because of the radio station "Democratic Voice of Burma" that is among others, supported by a US foundation. Even if one would avoid the bad word "propaganda", it's completely clear why the chinese support for the junta is particularly stressed. With due indignation against the junta we're calling about geopolitical interests and a country rich in natural resources situated in an interesting strategic place in the world. We as consuments of the Birmese situation, keeping alert by our mass media, thus understand China's and Russia's role as potential aggressors.

To put it in a nutshell: the whole situation is awfully complex and even if every Burmese soldier deactivates his weapon, it's completely unclear which direction Myanmar will take. There are other countries that took the way into disaster, torn between the interests of opposing forces, and without taxing my brain too much, I must think about civil war. Burma is a perfect scenario for a proxy war as Africa had some decades ago.

To come to a conclusion: just to say "Free Burma" is too simplistic to me. Military junta, corruption, destroyed villages, terror against the people: this is awful and just curse the junta! But just "free" the people - this is superficial, naive, and helpless. Therefore you won't see a "Free Burma" banner at this web site. But to get some information about the subject, learn about the context and write about it: that makes sense in my opinion. If one understands some of the details, he will learn where he can help and how. (Source)