Mini applications that allow advanced communication features used in social network sites like MySpace or Facebook might not be a security risk by means of vulnerability (viruses, trojans, phishing etc.) but they might corrupt user's privacy. In Facebook it is common practice to get access to a mini application only after checking a checkbox that tells the app's developer "who I am and [who is allowed to] access my information", a similar practice can be found in MySpace, where developers get access to a person's profile data.

Even if developers won't do any harmful things with these data (some of them use it for tweaking their advertising, though), the sheer masses of user data will make some of them greedy. It's just too easy to build a scraper that crawls for user data that give deep insight in a user's personal interests. The end of this development is identity theft. (Source)

I'm guessing there are a lot more geeks on Twitter than, say, amongst the average population, and you can construe that however you like, but the tools for developer collaboration that are making a big difference are things like git / svk and not Flickr or Twitter per se."

Usually software developers are sceptical about buzzwords in technology, the Web2.0 hype makes no difference. To read the marketing blurb or to listen to pseudo-religious statements on web conferences is nothing that draws an IT veteran from the woodwork. My personal experience is that the more professional software development is handled - such as in big companies - the developers working on a peculiar system are grouped together in neighbouring locations and - if there are persons at other locations - group meetings and video conferences are an important means of knowledge interchange. On a technical basis some code and version management solution is used, maybe a Wiki for documentation purposes and that's all.

Open source projects, where lots of individuals are dispersed all over the world, basically do it the same way: a CVS and a website for docs, faqs, and a download area usually suffice. Web2.0 visions where everybody, developers as well as application users, will boundlessly communicate with each other, are fantasies that don't consider real world scenarios every developer knows: ususally users shouldn't be given the opportunity to express their ideas about this or that, because these ideas change frequently, as the code does not. To write code actually means to think, to think it over, then to think again.This takes time and consumes concentration, while every blinking icon ("User Sharky has a message for you!") and RSS feed about the project's advance ("I changed lines 10-12 in wtf.cc - HaX0r") will distract a developer from proceeding. No, Web2.0 is pure buzz, nick-nack for Thirtysomethings discovering the awesome possibilities of the Web, but not for serious developers. Have a question? Use a newsserver or a forum. Read the source code. Subscribe to the mailing list. Write an email. (Source)

If you're looking for female role models in science: Daphne Koller is the right one! (Source)

(The NYT article has quotes like "[S]he tries to persuade undergraduates to stay in academia and not rush off to become software engineers at start-up companies." - that brings tears in my eyes. BTW, her projects are commercially successesful - in contradiction to many windy startup enterprises.)

Another one-dimensional article about young people's inappetency on studying computer science and / or starting a career in IT, now seen in the eyes of folks from down under.

Briefly said: if studying IT means doing some kind of 'domestic' science, where a typical career path leads automatically to service providing (infrastructure jobs), so-so paid programmer / developer jobs, or to project management with good chances to get stomach ulcer, it will keep plainly boring. Without social prestige, without relevant subjects beyond profit-oriented IT, without all that rocket science that makes IT and CS sexy, young people will stay away. And they're right about that.

If you have read one article here about social networks or another, you have learned that that the MadScientist is not necessarily a friend of social networks because I'm just too paranoid to see that many advantages in leaving my personal data and preferences on any servers just to make the providers happy and to simplify their advertizement strategies.

But - and this is the technical part beginning here - you have to know your enemy and the technology he is using. It's not bad to know about weaponry even if you're a pacifist, so let's have a look about recent techniques and trends to come.

What's it about? It is understood that users of social network sites (take anyone you know) want to migrate their data to other network sites for various reasons: because they want to leave one portal and enter another, or they might want to merge their data because MySpace, Flickr, and Facebook just isn't enough and the user is too lazy to type in once more her user data. So what does the industry need, as always when it comes to exchanging data? A standard, right!

According to this article (paid subscription req'd) by Karen Heyman, several techniques are already available that might be part of a future standard for exchanging user profile data between various providers: RSS, the Really Simple Syndication for exchanging syndicated content; OpenID, an identity system supported by some big players (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft), in order to enable users to register accounts without having to re-enter account data; OAuth, a protocol for secure API authentication from various sources; Microformats integrate meta information in HTML containers, thus adding semantic data to it; RDF (Resource Description Framework), another method of modeling information that adds metadata to content; APML, "an XML-based format for capturing a person's interests and dislikes" (Wikipedia); SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project), a semantic technology for interconnecting web-based discussions (blogs, forums etc.); FOAF (Friend of a Friend), an RDF extension for "describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects".

Several of these technologies are used by the DPWG who wants to give to the users control over their data. A lot of the logos you might have seen at the Wikipedia links above can also be found on DPWG's homepage. But, according to their web site, they don't prefer one technology and neglect the other but they promote and moderate in the desired standardization process. No wonder you find them on a lot of conferences and barcamps. Microsoft and Google are already members of DPWG.

Emerging standards, international enterprises with profit-oriented long-term goals, careless users and a vanishing awareness for privacy issues will set up the scene for the next following years. This is not only a 'digital' phenomenon: debit cards that allow customers to save a few bucks are also a perfect means to collect customer data and use their preferences for creating profiles. With powerful standards the exchange of all these data will be made simple, giving web users and customers a feeling of being well-known and, maybe, liked. Difficulties when trying to hide your identity will amplify until it will be completely uncommon to have a desire for (online) privacy, at least recent developments in politics suggest this. The data collector's club is still growing and there are several good reasons not to give your data away.

Austria: a prison guard steals 8500 records about prisoners (name, address, photo, all the like) for an abstruse reason (helping some U.S. aid agency), a prisoner gets scent of this and tries to contact his lawyer but his mails get first cancelled by the prison administration (their statement: "We were responsible anyway, so we wanted to arrange that affair by ourselves."). Finally after his mail and a USB stick containing the prisoner's data had been tranmitted to the ministry of justice, the minister doesn't feel responsible for this. The prisoner and a helper are now sentenced, but so is the prisoned informer who discovered that scandal: his punishment extends to further 14 months, because the guard and his helper charged him with accompliceship. The 8500 prisoners and their families still don't know that their personal data are stolen and maybe already available for the public.

Just to get it straight: these 8500 people are now prisoners forever. Whoever was able to get access to these data will spread it. These people, their families and their problems are now transparent. Any head hunter, employer, landlord etc. will be interested in browsing through that data, maybe there's something interesting they would love to know. Blackmailers will have great opportunities to find new victims. This scandal is so big and complex - no wonder that authorities try to keep it low. Breathtaking and unbelievable. (Source)

"Use of the Ruby programming language is expected to quadruple over the next five years." - No, I don't get that Ruby hype. Like the irksome Java hype fifteen years ago, when everything before Java was called obsolete and nothing less than the whole world be revolutionized through Java, Ruby and its descendant Ruby on Rails claim to be the next cool kids on the block.

What's happening here? To quote Sun Microsystems engineer Chris Nutter: "Ruby is the classic pattern of how technology gets adopted - it's not one big company telling you what technology to use, the people using Ruby now are hackers - it's kind of an organic system." But this is true for many programming languages and there are many examples for grass-roots developments of the past, like Perl or Python, as well as there are accepted and usable languages like C# and Java, each provided by big companies. While these are major successes, many languages were not, who still knows COMAL (mainly a University project)? How (commercially) successful and widespread is ADA? Precisely.

So if a programming language becomes well-liked depends on factors like productivity and intuitive usability. This explains why Perl, a language with a quite steep learning curve, is that widespread and still fancied after 20 years. Powerful IDEs can support a language greatly: with completing keywords by pressing the tab key, an easily accessible help system, an easy-to-use debugger help you to get along even if you are uncommon with syntax and grammar of a programming language. That's only one reason why Delphi, Visual Studio and Eclipse and their accompanying languages (Object Pascal, C/C++, the .Net languages, and Java) are still the measure of choice for many. System administrators indeed like to get a lot of results for less code, but they also want to dig deeper than the common programmer who is used to his framework. This explains why command line tools (grep, awk, various shells) and powerful scripting languages (Perl, TCL, REXX, even VBScript) are fancied by admins.

But Ruby? Sorry folks, but if things get too simple and the development process becomes too 'agile', I draw my conclusions. Systems like Ruby, furthermore things like Ruby on Rails, are an employer's dream, as they promise to lower the learning curve and to get more productivity with less developers. So this way Ruby becomes the right toy for the 21st century in order to lower software development costs even more. Because there will be no need to employ costly application developers but just a few people with enough skills to learn a framework without having to know much about data types, algorithms, or anything else related to computer science. Thanks, but no thanks. (Source)

Considering software developers an endangered species will mean that a lot of untrained, even unskilled n00bs will get a big part of the software development cake. Even if there's enough work to do for the skilled software engineer - someone has to build the architecture, do the framework, write the compiler -, I doubt that this will be a welcome development. Thinking about security relevant parts in higgledy-piggledy web applications done by wannabee programmers cause me nausea. But okay, development will cost less, and the half-life of businesses betting on this kind of pseudo-engineering is short, so no surprises here. (Source)

No problem: NASA's Java Mission-planning and Analysis for Remote Sensing (JMars) program has been made available to Open Source by Arizona State University's Mars Space Flight Facility. (Source)

If you skip all the defence-from-terrorist-attacks blurb, Visual analytics from the National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC) is a nifty tool for discovering structure in the masses of everyday's unstructured data. Like these elegant "do-what-I'm-thinking" softwares that you can see so often in TV shows. But this one seems to work. (Source)

We can make work suck less.

I'm not really surprised. Telekom still is in part government property. Germany's minister of the interior constantly tries to convince people and politicians on his plans for online surveillance. There are also plans to build up a government agency that combines intelligence with executive power, thus endangering Germany's successful system of checks and balances. As if there has never been the judgement of Germany's constitutional court, Bavaria plans a comprehensive surveillance law including the implementation and clandestine installation of spy software on suspect's computers through police officers. No, I'm not surprised at all, to put it in a nutshell, spy country has come true. Spying has become folklore, it's penetrating our society from top to bottom.

Japan is running out of engineers. (Source - requires subscription)

Also known as

• government data collection,


• network neutrality,


• intellectual property, and


• patents

System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory is the current directory for a Windows service in .Net. Thank you!