Install software, become a felon

13 teenagers face felony charges by installing un-approved software on school supplied laptops.

This is just sad from every angle. Hopefully, since formal charges are still pending, a rampant endemic of common sense will break out and a more appropriate level of punishment will be declared.

I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of these 'felons' were also on the honor role.

This police department is saying that installing wireless network card drivers, IM software, and porn (teens w/ porn? shocking!) is of greater harm to the community than wreckless endangerment with a firearm or driving in excess of 25mph over the speed limit.

Connectedness and Booya

I don't know if this was/is a prepped stunt. Lord knows Mr. Pirillo is never one to turn down free publicity (a good thing imho). Still, the fact I heard about this indirectly while viewing the latest Joel vs. Scoble steel-cage-smack-down does give me pause about the wonders/horrors of uber-connectivity.

Where did the whole 'Booya!' thing start anyways? My earliest recollection was an SNL skit featuring Tim Meadows and Ray Romano as sports casters.

Follow-up: It's not clear what the correct spelling of "booyah", "boo-yah", "boo-ya", "booya", or "boo-yaa" is. I choose Booyah since it seems to capture all of the sounds of the word and I deal with waaaay too many hyphenated words in lisp/scheme code anyways.

Market Salamander

I had the distinct pleasure of visiting this boutique of food excellence nestled in the lush green hills of Middleburg, Virginia this weekend. I can highly recommend their herb-crusted goat cheese and girlfriend can highly recommend their tiramisu. This place really strives to get the details right.

This morning I'm going to break open a bag of their private label Mayorga coffee roast.

Man, I am such a foodie.

Warning: ID Rant

<rant>

When, oh when will institutions, both large and small, come to the understanding that having an identification requirement does, in no way, prevent/deter/alter the fundamental security of a system.

We're talking mere identification here, not authentication.

Sooo many systems conflate the two.

The fundamental use of identification in systems is to establish a point in the space/time/money transaction stream for later post-event auditing and analysis. Identification itself, does, in no way establish/enable security. Having the right mix of surveilance (i.e logging), auditing, and throttling/feedback for transaction governance does.

I suspect this mis-guidance is somehow deeply rooted in our hunter/gatherer-100-person-village brain's inner software. Unfortunately, the safety hueristics (not trusting strangers/unknowns) which scale reasonably well to village-sized populations of hundreds utterly fall apart in our global-village of billions.

• Identification is not Authentication
• Authentication does not SCALE
• Surveilance does scale
• Auditing does scale

People should get their security system engineering inspirations from the stock market, not a bank vault, prison cell, passport or driver's license. An i.d. is only as good as the authentication system (i.e. network) it is tied to.

</rant>

*Sigh*

Browsing, Sampling, and Consumption

This essay/confessional by a music fan who has started 'stealing' music is--poetic. The passage regarding the lack of long-samples for artitsts whom, for whatever reason, have compositions which far exeed the typical 3min. pop hit was particularly keen.

For many years I have enjoyed reading comic books and graphic novels. In my occasional ventures to local comic/book shops, I can, at my leasure, sample as much or as little as I like of a new title by doing nothing more complicated than picking it from the shelf and thumbing through it.

Without signing any agreements and without any additional software/hardware combination, I can sample-at-will. I admit to, on more than one occasion, actually reading and finishing an entire issue while browsing in the store. Thus, my initial sampling turns into full-blown consumption. Yet, the irony is IF I end up consuming in the store, I almost always buy not only that issue but many, many subsequent issues of the same title. Imagine if comic shops and bookstores did not display the full works on their shelves, but merely a title page and, perhaps the first 5 pages of the work. Browsing (i.e. sampling) at your local vendor becomes the analog equivalent of shopping at Amazon. Not a happy prospect at all.

This is the state of music retailing today—sad. And people wonder why all the local Mom & Pop record stores have closed and even megoliths such as Tower are suffering while local bookstores and chains such as Borders are thriving.

Saw Sith

I finally got around to seeing Revenge of the Sith yesterday. It's definitely the best of the prequels. Like the previous one, it suffers horribly from the lack of on-screen chemestry between Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen. The movie's otherwise blistering pace and dramatic tension somehow grinds to a halt whenever the pair are alone on-screen--which is often.

Props go out to the animators who turned Yoda into a totally believable, life-like character. I got the most entertainment from watching him and R2 kick butt.

Anil's social photo hack

Oh man, this is just too schweet. Anil Dash's big photograph in the NY Times wearing the Goatse t-shirt from Threadless. A nice summary regarding the whole event. This reminds me I should order Darth Gardening and finally get around to seeing Sith. I hear it doesn't suck as much as the previous two movies--which doesn't really say much *sigh*.

Chipless RFID "Tags"

It took a bit longer than I thought it would, but it appears as if a company has finally put together all the right "ideas" to get a patent on chipless-RFID tags. I first mentioned the physical possibility of these in a position paper I wrote back in 2000.

The basic idea here is to use the natural resonanting properties of a conductive antenna to do the "id" part. This operates in reverse from a normal RFID tag. The reader sends a series of psudo-unique "id pulses" and only the tags with the correct RF ressonance will respond. This bypasses the tag having to have any on-board Aloha protocol anti-interference logic (the chip). Essentially the 'tag' is nothing more than a RF resonant cavity reflector and will only have significant backscatter (i.e. return signal) if hit by the right analog waveform at the correct series of frequencies.

These tags will never have the mass-bulk-reading capabilities of their 5-10 cent relatives, any kind of read/write security, or EPC-sized unique identity namespace.

The read process itself is also much slower, since the reader has to cycle through the various ID classification signals (in a similar fashion to how some univeral remotes work). Nevertheless, their ultra-cheap cost would enable automated product authentication/classification--though typically not a unique enough identity to support holonic systems. Think of these aa RF-Classifiers rather than true IDs. Also, the typical coke-can application wouldn't stand a chance here--way too much interferance from that OTHER nearby resonator (the can) and that RF energy sink (the cola).

Of coarse, a patent is not a product and I have yet to finish reviewing the literature enough to determine how/if they've addressed the "resonance-creep" issues (think out-of-tune) with the manufacturing process and over the anticipated useful lifetime of the tags. This is your classic sword-based patent so the details are extremely, uh, detailed.