A new way to capture bugs
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008My new Prototype column in the New York Times looks at an innovation that came by analogy:
How Did Your Computer Crash? Check the Instant Replay
My new Prototype column in the New York Times looks at an innovation that came by analogy:
How Did Your Computer Crash? Check the Instant Replay
A piece drawn from the project I did as a Templeton-Cambridge journalism fellow last year is in this week’s Economist: Where angels no longer fear to tread.
My piece on Iceland’s hydrogen economy is out in the new issue of Fast Company.
I went on CNBC to talk about Iceland’s Hydrogen Economy.
But as they say, the book is better. Here’ s a link to my H Hotbed story.
The American Society of Journalists and Authors honored a feature I wrote on the hacker collective the l0pht, l0pht in Transition, with its Trade Writing Award. It’s a story I felt proud of, and I’m delighted to see it win this award.
My profile of legendary innovator Jeff Hawkins, From palmtops to brain cells, ran recently in The Economist’s Technology Quarterly. Aptly, The Economist calls the profile it does in the Technology Quarterly “Brain Scan.”
Jeff is something of a humble genius. The combination is striking.
This post from Alexandre Linhares of the Human Intuition Project is the only one I found in a quick search of the blogosphere.
I have a piece, Software that makes software better , in a recent issue of “The Economist.” (subscription required)
Here’s a post on the story, Indeed! The Economist on Computer Science as a Social Science by Jonathan Pincus, who is cited in the piece, with some interesting comments, including a link to this summary post by a Sun developer named Mark Davidson.
I also talked the other day with an MIT computer scientist who said some nice things about the piece. I noted that my editor for the piece majored in computer science at Oxford, which doesn’t hurt when framing a piece like this.
I got to be moderator of the l0pht reunion panel at Source Boston, a new security conference here in town.
(from the Source Boston site)
It was a blast. Aptly, we brought in beers (except me. I drank a shirley temple. and Sili — he had ginger ale).
Six of the eight made it:
Here they are, L. to R. in the photo, by handle, and how they picked it:
Weld Pond: he needed a handle to get on The Works, a bulletin board system, and pointed his finger at a map of boston. It hit Weld Pond, which he still hasn’t seen in person.
John Tan – John Tan safe co. makes the safes used to house the crown jewels
Mudge (who likes to tell people it’s his middle name, but in fact there was a guy he didn’t like and he picked it figuring if he got in trouble, the cops would go after tht guy first)
Space Rogue – was free associating to get a handle for The Works. He did not realize there awas a video game by the same name. (here’s his blog post on the conference)
Silicosis – had used it in a short story in 4th grade and thought it sounded cool. He didn’t realize it was the proper name for black lung disesase.
Dildog – He liked that it was the original name for Dogbert. It did not occur to him that if he took off a letter, it was ripe for abuse.
The last question: What scares the hell out of them?
UPDATE: here’s Chris Wysopal’s (weld pond’s) post on pre0wning from the veracode blog
http://www.veracode.com/blog/?p=82#comment-882
What scares the hell out of me:
That mudge thinks they could take the internet down in 2.5 to 3 hours, instead of 30 minutes. And that it doesn’t go down because the bad guys need it to stay up, so they can do their thing.
Innismir tweeted the panel.
Focal Intent’s Flicker photos of the panel.
Yahoo! is big in Japan, and Microsoft is big everywhere. My editor at Shukan Daiyamondo asked me to put a piece together looking at why, and what it might mean.
Here’s what I filed. Pre editing and whatever else might have happened — the story was changing a lot at that time, and more information might have added. This was published in Japan the week of February 23rd — I’ve been swamped and not posting much here. MS tries to buy Yahoo
That’s the gist of a piece I wrote for CSO on the future of anti-virus software.
Also see this related post by hellnbak, why not just tell the truth?
Update: Robin Bloor, an analyst mentioned in this article, has posted some comments on it, though they do not seem balanced. For instance, he praises Symantec and Kaspersky and condemns BitDefender, though all three would still seem to be using signatures.
The prolific and provocative Henry Jenkins has plenty to say on new media and old and their impact on culture.
“The difference between someone who’s got 24/7 broadband access at home and on the road compared to someone who got ten minutes of access a day in a school or public library…is going to have real effects on our society, which is why I’m concerned about new media literacy. It also has consequences globally, if Americans are regularly in correspondence with people around the world online, but only hearing from those who have access to these technologies. ”
We also talked about the idea of personalized media and whether it represents the future.
“Personalized media . . .would be any media that I could customize to my own particular needs. I’m increasingly interested not in personalized media but in socialized media, that is in a network society it’s our ability to use these tools in concert with others to mobilize large numbers of people toward a common cause or tackle a problem that the individuals couldn’t solve by themselves.”
He also thinks that media companies have lost control of their brand and content, with ongoing repercussions.
I talked with him for Shukan Daiyamondo in Japan.
Here’s the full text as I submitted it.
Henry Jenkins world voice