Minding the Planet

Rogue Nodes Turn Tor Anonymizer Into Private Listening Post

A security researcher has figured out a novel way to compromise the security of messages traveling in the Tor anonymizer network. Messages in the Tor network are encrypted as they travel from node to node to their final destination. But the last node has to decrypt the messages before it can deliver them to their final destination on the Internet. Many Tor users mistakenly believe their message remains encrypted through the entire Tor network, when in fact this is not the case: the last node must decrypt them. The researcher simply ran a few of these nodes and was able to read all unencrypted last-node traffic that came through them. This included sensitive communications of many government embassies around the world. The researcher believes that intelligence agencies around the world are already taking advantage of this weakness to eavesdrop on Tor traffic. Interestingly, when he pointed this security hole out to some of the embassies that were sending non-secure message they didn't respond or even appear to understand the problem. Read more here.

Envisioning the Whole Digital Person

Another article of note on the subject of our evolving digital lives and what user-experience designers should be thinking about:

Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized—from the ways we communicate, to our entertainment media, to our e-commerce transactions, to our online research. As storage becomes cheaper and data pipes become faster, we are doing more and more online—and in the process, saving a record of our digital lives, whether we like it or not.

(snip...)

In the coming years, our ability to interact with the information we’re so rapidly generating will determine how successfully we can manage our digital lives. There is a great challenge at our doorsteps—a shift in the way we live with each other.

As designers of user experiences for digital products and services, we can make people’s digital lives more meaningful and less confusing. It is our responsibility to envision not only techniques for sorting, ordering, and navigating these digital information spaces, but also to devise methods of helping people feel comfortable with such interactions. To better understand and ultimately solve this information management problem, we should take a holistic view of the digital person. While our data might be scattered, people need to feel whole.

How the WebOS Evolves?

Here is my timeline of the past, present and future of the Web. Feel free to put this meme on your own site, but please link back to the master image at this site (the URL that the thumbnail below points to) because I'll be updating the image from time to time.

This slide illustrates my current thinking here at Radar Networks about where the Web (and we) are heading. It shows a timeline of technology leading from the prehistoric desktop era to the possible future of the WebOS...

Note that as well as mapping a possible future of the Web, here I am also proposing that the Web x.0 terminology be used to index the decades of the Web since 1990. Thus we are now in the tail end of Web 2.0 and are starting to lay the groundwork for Web 3.0, which fully arrives in 2010.

This makes sense to me. Web 2.0 was really about upgrading the "front-end" and user-experience of the Web. Much of the innovation taking place today is about starting to upgrade the "backend" of the Web and I think that will be the focus of Web 3.0 (the front-end will probably not be that different from Web 2.0, but the underlying technologies will advance significantly enabling new capabilities and features).

See also: This article I wrote redefining what the term "Web 3.0" means.

See also: A Visual Graph of the Future of Productivity

Please note: This is a work in progress and is not perfect yet. I've been tweaking the positions to get the technologies and dates right. Part of the challenge is fitting the text into the available spaces. If anyone out there has suggestions regarding where I've placed things on the timeline, or if I've left anything out that should be there, please let me know in the comments on this post and I'll try to readjust and update the image from time to time. If you would like to produce a better version of this image, please do so and send it to me for inclusion here, with the same Creative Commons license, ideally.

Study: Blackberry Addiction Similar to Drugs

Blackberry email devices can be so addictive that owners may need to be weaned off them with treatment similar to that given to drug users, experts warned today.

They said the palmtop gadgets, which have been nicknamed 'crackberries' because users quickly become hooked on them, could be seriously damaging to mental health.

 

The study, carried out by New Jersey's Rutgers University School, claims the Blackberry is fuelling a rise in email and internet addiction, with sufferers able to survive only a few minutes without checking for new mail.

One key sign of a user being addicted is if they focus on their Blackberry ignoring those around them

Scale-Free Networks and Mobile Services

Here is an interesting article about an analysis of SMS messaging versus e-mail messaging on mobile networks. The conclusion is that e-mail messaging is more efficient for mobile consumers because email networks are scale-free networks. The article predicts that services based on scale-free topologies will ultimately win out over less optimal alternatives. Thanks to Murli.

My "A Physics of Ideas" Manifesto has been Published!

Change This, a project that helps to promote interesting new ideas so that they get noticed above the noise level of our culture has published my article on "A Physics of Ideas" as one of their featured Manifestos. They use an innovative PDF layout for easier reading, and they also provide a means for readers to provide feedback and even measure the popularity of various Manifestos. I'm happy this paper is getting noticed finally -- I do think the ideas within it have potential. Take a look.

Spam now 60% of Emails

Spam is now 60% of Emails, according to recent measures.

Bulk unsolicited emails account for over 60 per cent of all email traffic on the internet, according to the Office of Fair Trading. That is up from under half in 2003 and under 10 per cent in 2001.

Kinda makes me wonder if we should start just referring to email as "spam" -- since it's now the majority of what it is used for.

Google's Browser Project...And Ours...

So, rumor has it that Google is working on a browser and/or other software to challenge Microsoft. And, what's more, this may be based on Mozilla.... interesting.... If true, the folks at Google should get in touch with me... without disclosing too much (yet), we are working on a project (with SRI, for DARPA) to build a Java-based fully-semantic open-sourced PIM that grafts Mozilla onto my company's Semantic Applications Platform. The result is an integrated cross-platform OWL-ontology-based PIM suite...Basically it's "Semantic Mozilla" and will set the stage for Mozilla to become the platform for the Semantic Web. Public open-source release date is set for summer 2005, but it's already working now in the lab. You won't believe how cool it is...working on this feels like NCSA and the early days of Mosaic... to be continued....