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2003-01-22Industry NotesSecurity's next steps. There is an indication that security tools are becoming simpler and easier to understand, while responding to greater threat complexity. It is hard to piece out, but something I want to keep an eye on. It looks like I should install that IIS download that XP Automatic Update keeps advising me about.A business's network is its castle. Looking at alternatives to the fortress model for system security. More on the ever-expanding search for an adaptive response to intrusion and perpetrations without closing down access and the ability to engage a networked community. ACM News Service: Job-Rich Silicon Valley Has Turned Fallow, Survey Finds. Still more on changes in the demographics of software-development work, in a region where software is the product. Two interesting factor: typical software company size is 20, not the 200 for a hardware company, and there is a shift to software along with all of the stagnation. And this intriguing ending: "The long-term prospects of these little companies once they enter the global arena is difficult to predict." The full article is available through the New York Times site. Wired News: Scientists Giddy About the Grid. More still on grid computing. Important wrinke: It provides a self-interest in collaboration, relying on common standards, and some other positive notions. The return of artificial intelligence - Tech News - CNET.com. A June 2002 article that is interesting in the context of UIAM or whatever it is, blogged below. CNET.com Tech News: IBM aims to get smart about AI. "In the coming months, IBM will unveil technology that it believes will vastly improve the way computers access and use data by unifying the different schools of thought surrounding artificial intelligence." This appears to be a natural component of the autonomous computing initiative at IBM. The article is interesting with regard to UIMA, the Unstructured Information Management Architecture. The idea is to combine two kinds of AI technology: statistical learning and rules-based intelligence. Whether this opens up an era of functional artificial intelligence is open to question, and we will have to wait and see. It may be as dramatic as other initiatives that are altering our view of what it is to employ computation and automation in the service of human activities, and there is much to learn. digitalMass at Boston.com: In software industry, a passage to India. More on the trent to take basic software development off shore. In looking at industry patterns, this trend is very clear. It is likely not reversible. Whether or not things even out as standards of living increase elsewhere, life for the domestic IT employee is forever changing. Now what? It's still a wonderful, productive field. Can you love it and find a successful livelihood in it still? Spam Issue Viewed As IT Security Failure - Computerworld. An earlier article that raises some important issues around trust. There are also some hints at ways to personalize processes in such a way that mass-mailing will be easily segregated. I like the observation that users will raise the bar. The relationship to security as an experience is not one I expected. And I wonder what the liability issues will be around automatic, silent spam blocking that makes that false rejection of a communication that is valuable and urgent. Uh-oh: Spam's getting more sophisticated - Computerworld. Here is an interesting follow-up and gathering evidence for how spam detection is not something that there will be an algorithm for. That is an example I use to distinguish some processes that we write programs for as distinct from those programs that are written as expressions of algorithms and that are the subject matter of the Church-Turing thesis, broadly or narrowly. That is what has me intrigued by what is happening here. One thing I find useful about this is that these elaborate measures being taken by spammers will make it easier to gain indictments and convictions whenever it comes to that. ACM News Service: Recording Firms Win Copyright Ruling Washington Post (01/22/03) P. E1; Krim, Jonathan. Another skirmish in the IP wars" "In a triumph for music labels, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates upheld the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) yesterday when he ruled that Verizon Communications had to disclose the name of a customer who had downloaded a large volume of songs using the Kazaa music-file-sharing service to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)." Learning by Redoing By Trevis J. Rothwell. lead-in: "The availability of components that do a myriad of tasks could lead programmer complacency" And the basic tension in the article is identified in these two paragraphs: "It is certainly true that components have some very good properties. Software developers can save substantial amounts of time by using previously-written components. Also, as Joshua Bloch pointed out in "Effective Java," these components probably consist of high quality code written by professionals. "On the other hand, components might come with an undesireable side-effect. The availability of components that can do such a myriad of typical tasks could lead us programmers to a place of complacency where we do not know how the code in the components was written." This as an age-old question. It is not about make versus buy, though that must certainly be considered. It is about maintaining some mastery. The question is an useful one to ask. ACM: Ubiquity - Intellectual Property Rights of Multimedia Enriched Websites. By Charles Adetokunbo Shoniregun. This Week inUbiquity: Volume 3, 47 (January 21, 2003). I think this is important but I have trouble making sense of it. First, here's the famous Ubiquity-ed lead: "Can original print and music survive the multimedia technology hoax?" I can't find the term "hoax" anywhere in the article. I still can't figure out who writes these little squibs, and, more to the point, why? Either way, the article itself is puzzling. Here is the first paragraph: "Generally speaking, over the past two centuries copyright has survived numerous technological advances such as the player piano, phonograph recordings, motion pictures, television, radio, cassettes and compact discs. Often, these new technologies have posed challenges to copyright law's applicability. Although copyright has not always adapted immediately and smoothly, it has not prevented any of these technologies from thriving. Crime is crime, whether committed in the physical world or on the Internet [1]. And: "[1] Power, R (2002), Tangled Web, Que Corporation."
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