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Archive for November, 2007
Data Portability and the Open Standards Stack
There finally appears to be an organized initiative coalescing around the need for data portability. David Recordon has spoken about the mix of existing open standards that could be used to accomplish this goal, and, in so doing, establish the foundation for something like a social network operating system. DataPortability.org sez: Standardized Data Portability [...]
ShiftSpace: An Open Source Layer Above the Web
While the Internet’s design is widely understood to be open and distributed, control over how users interact online has given us largely centralized and closed systems. The web has followed the physical transformation of the city’s social center from the (public) town square to the (private) mall. ShiftSpace attempts to subvert this trend by providing a new public space on the web.
23andMe: Personal Genome Service
23andMe is a genetics company founded by Sergey Brin’s wife, Ann Wojcicki. The company is “a web-based service that helps you read and understand your DNA. After providing a saliva sample using an at-home kit, you can use our interactive tools to shed new light on your distant ancestors, your close family and most of all, [...]
Shift Coordinate Points
For years, short-wave radio enthusiasts have monitored so-called “numbers stations” – transmissions of random numbers and words spoken in a variety of languages that begin and end abruptly. “The messages are irreversibly encrypted, their contents unintelligible to anyone but the designated receiver. Radio amateurs and fanatics who have been monitoring the phenomenon for many years are [...]
NSA Offers New Encryption Standard with Handy Backdoor Exploit
Bruce Schneier writes that the U.S. government released a new standard for random number generators this year. Random numbers are used in creating encryption keys and in other aspects of cryptography. One of those new standards, championed by the NSA, has been demonstrated to have a back door exploit. It uses a list of constants [...]
Jeremy Blake Memorial Exhibition
Kinz, Tillou + Feigen is opening a memorial exhibition of Jeremy Blake’s work on November 10th. Blake and his girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, died this summer in a tragically surreal and untimely fashion. I’ve been a huge fan of Blake’s videos (or “time-based paintings” as he called them) since seeing his Winchester Trilogy in the Whitney’s [...]
Comcast, AT&T and Verizon Will Decide What You Can Do With Their Series of Tubes
Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent users’ bandwidth seems to be reigniting the Network Neutrality debate. Privileging certain types of transmissions to meet network traffic shaping targets is one thing; intentionally interfering with all peer-to-peer traffic is something else altogether. But hey, if Verizon can censor text messages sent over their wireless network, then why shouldn’t AT&T [...]
Opening the Social Graph
With the rapid proliferation of social networking sites and applications that leverage social graph data, a social graph aggregator (or operating system as Tim O’Reilly has termed it), is quickly becoming both necessary and inevitable. By providing the ability to push personal data out, in addition to consuming it from third-party sites, Google’s model will [...]