I don't know if you know the name Christopher Soghoian, but he's the Ph.D. student at Indiana University who created a website that allowed visitors to create a fake Northwest Airline Boarding Pass as a way of pointing out the flaws in the security system for preventing non-passengers from getting through the security screening.
My wife and I discussed how easily creating a fake boarding pass is as soon as the requirement was implemented. It is just another step in creating the perception of security in the minds of the public. (As a possible justification, since most people won't try using fake passes, it does decrease the number of people that are under surveillance in the boarding areas. I still think it's mostly perception management because a hijacker wouldn't balk at using a fake pass.)
When I first heard about this site, I was shocked at the boldness of Christopher. I applauded his commitment to exposing the truth of this "security measure" while fearing the worst for his personal wellness. Apparently, he had good legal counsel from the outset because he won't be prosecuted by the federal government. Hooray! Check his blog for more information: http://slightparanoia.blogspot.com/2006/11/good-news-and-bad-news.html
First number portability and now this! Today, the Wall Street Journal had a fantastic article on services that let you sell your contract instead of breaking it saving up to $250 in early termination fees. (Check CellSwapper.com for a breakdown in costs: http://cellswapper.com/swapout.aspx) Here's a great quote: "Roughly 47% of cell customers would switch or consider switching cellphone companies if early-termination fees were abolished, according to a July 2005 survey by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund. However, because of the fee, only 3% of customers go ahead with terminating the contract, the survey found."
The services mentioned in the article include:
- CelltradeUSA.com - $19.99 to transfer a contract and no fee to take over one
- Wirecracker.com - No trading. Instead $50 flat cancellation fee if you sign up for a new service through their site
- Resellular.com - $14.99 to transfer and no fee to take over
- CellSwapper.com - Transferring for free.
The one thing I find curious is that people would actually want to take over an existing contract. The promotions offered by the carriers are so good that the people getting out of the contracts must be offering significant discounts. It makes sense if my choice is between eating $200 and eating $100 that I might be offering a better deal than the carriers.
As a little bit of holiday entertainment, enjoy this video from glumbert.com. It's a very creative use of a whiteboard.
(Click the link below instead of the picture because it doesn't appear that I can insert an image in vox and control the URL destination upon clicking the image.)
http://www.glumbert.com/media/whiteboard
I'm tempted to buy the $140 SeV by Scottevest. http://www.scottevest.com/v3_product_info/overview.shtml It looks like a reasonably stylish solution to the problem of too much gear and not enough pockets. I think the price is a bit more than it should be. I'm sure they figure if you have enough gadgets to need the vest, you probably can afford a bit more and really want the pockets. For the price, it should shield me from radiation, too.
You may have heard about freecycle, if not you should. http://freecycle.org/ It's a great network of people who are dedicated to giving things away instead of having them go to the landfill. You can post to give away anything that would otherwise end up in the dump and you can post for things you're looking for. Check it out. I'm a member of the local San Franciso chapter: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SFFN/
Today, I read an article about a man who used and mp3 player that can record sound, to record the phone line transmissions from ATMs in shops and bars. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/18/mp3_player_atm_hack/ While the headline is catchy because it uses the term "mp3 player," the important thing is that the phone line was accessible and the tones recorded. The recorded tones were then decrypted and used to clone cards, complete with the PIN numbers.
This type of fraud isn't unique to the machine itself. There are many scams for ATMs (as you can see from the Register's associated links). Even more scary was the coverage of a Russian crime ring a while back that legitimately licensed a chain of independent ATMs (the kind you find all of the place that aren't associated with a specific bank and have steep transaction fees) and turned out to be swiping all of the customer data for ATM card cloning & identity theft.
I think that given the relative ease to commit fraud, a simple rule of thumb to lower exposure to risk is to only withdraw funds from established bank ATMs except in the rare "emergency."
I recently discovered this posting on the Urilift: http://www.johnchow.com/the-worlds-most-high-tech-urinal/ The Urilift is a reasonable solution to the problem of public urination. It's a men's urinal that stays below ground during the day and rises at night (with the help of an attendant).
I live in San Francisco where the homeless population is depressingly large and the lack of public restrooms is a huge problem (especially where I live in the Mission District). The city decided to install these really expensive self-cleaning enclosed bathrooms that cost money to use. I've noticed that when used by the homeless population, it's more of an office for dirty dealings than a restroom. I think the Urilift needs to come to San Francisco and help mitigate some of the problems that are an unfortunate reality here.
For more on this and other products by Urilift International, visit their homepage: http://www.urilift.com/products.php
Cellphone security is something that I'm not very knowledgeable about, but there are some folks who know a lot about it. Read this article for information on how easily someone can reprogram your phone to make it call them every-time it gets a call, and you'll never know.
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/7216/127/
I would say that the attacker could take it a step further and have the 800 # called go to a voicemail service that simply logs every call. Suddenly, there are audio file transcripts of every call you've made. Send this through a voice to text filter and they've got an easily searchable transcript of every call you've made. SCARY!
It seems the system SMS process is broken and needs a layer of authentication and phone user approval to prevent this exploit.
As a consultant, tracking my time is vitally important. I've recently decided to make it easier to track my time by getting software that works on my Pocket PC and can synchronize with a desktop application. After evaluating a few products and reading many reviews, I think I have a winner. TimeTTracker MX2 from R&F consulting (http://www.rfcons.com) is a fantastic tool that has a great feature set, a great UI on both the PC and Pocket PC, synchronizes between instances, and can integrate with Quickbooks. If you're thinking about getting software of this sort, definitely check this tool out. If you find something better, please let me know.
This post is an excerpt from an email with one of cool guys I met at the Ruby on Rails unconference (http://www.rubyonrailscamp.com) that I attended last Thursday.
Over dinner after the conference we touched on the topic of text mining so I brought up a Matlab application that made the news a while back. It’s the Matlab Topic Modeling Toolbox. You can get more info on it here: http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/programs_data/toolbox.htm Here’s a great article about the tool: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060802-7408.html
In response to an email about the Topic Modeling Toolbox, I received the great question: "Interesting articles you sent – how do you think they are useful to the consumer?"
Following is part of my response email.
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It’s an interesting question that you pose. I think there are really two questions about usefulness. How is this technology useful to society and how is this technology useful to consumers (i.e. how can it be monetized)? Clearly current text processing technologies are revolutionizing our ability to share knowledge through search, but I think that topic modeling will open a new dimension for ways to visualize text based knowledge.
Have you seen the liveplasma interface for music and movies (http://www.liveplasma.com)? It’s a wonderful data visualization that I think could be powered by a good topic modeling interface. Instead of being limited to music or movies, the user could search for any arbitrary text element and find topically related elements, even if the relationship is one that might not be typically thought of. Think of a celebrity that produces music, is in the news for fashion, is getting married and was found in a plushie suit with her priest. All of these aspects could be brought to light in an easily viewed fashion. This is just one quick idea of how the data generated through topic modeling could be exposed to users.
Regarding usefulness: I’m a big believer in information as the ultimate tool for solving the world’s problems. I think many problems result from ignorance or else from what the economists call “information asymmetry.” Since topic modeling could provide whole new ways to systematically display relationships between text (relationships that are often already present in how real people conceptualize information) then it will be easier for people to discover relevant information.
An interesting approach for monetizing this technology for consumers is to provide a better information set than other information providers. There’s a new company called Monitor110 (http://www.monitor110.com) that is focused on culling data from many varied sources and providing the most relevant information to institutional investors. I think that topic modeling could provide a fantastic way to develop a more holistic view of market happenings. In a sense, monetizing this technology would actually create more information asymmetry because only those who pay for the service will have that information.
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During the course of dinner, we also stumbled upon the topic of plushophiles (plushies). So I included this little notion:
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Regarding plushies, If you’re interested in a rather fascinating map of deviant sexual desires check this out: http://www.deviantdesires.com/map/map06b.jpg There are many, many things that are astounding to me, but are part of the human experience. Through topic modeling, a map like this could be generated by crawling the internet and would be constantly updated to have the latest in deviant lingo exposed to the lay person…
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My question for you (my blog reader): what would you do if you could apply topic modeling to a large corpus of text?
