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This is especially interesting after attending an IC3 talk on Tuesday morning on the various common types of online fraud. It's true that most of the victims of these scams are complicit in the get-rich-quick schemes, but barring the ones who commit criminal acts such as money laundering or forwarding shipments to Nigeria, it would be difficult to classify them as criminal.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

THE Nigerian high commissioner says people who are ripped off by so-called Nigerian scams are just as guilty as the fraudsters and should be jailed.

*  *  *
"People who send their money are as guilty as those who are asking them to send the money," he said. [From smh.com.au: Jail the 'greedy' scam victims, says Nigerian diplomat]

This is a couple of years old, but I just saw it for the first time and got a good laugh about it.

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Audio recordings from the Last HOPE conference are available online here. It's a long and diverse list of topics that really reflects the history of both the conference and 2600 magazine. I'm sure you can find something that matches your interests and skill level.

I've tossed some onto an iPod for listening this week.

Today at OSCON, hell froze over.

According to The Register, Microsoft has decided to embrace (some) free/open source software and has joined the Apache software foundation to the tune of $100k a year.

From The Register:

After years of hostility towards Free Software Foundation (FSF) licensing (here and here) Microsoft has announced the first in a series of PHP patches - and it's using an FSF license.

Microsoft told The Reg it's submitted a patch to the community for the ADOdb database abstraction library for PHP to add support for the PHP SQL Driver developed with PHP shop Zend Technologies. The patch is under the FSF's Lesser GPL (LGPL).

And, in a further move towards greater support of open source, Microsoft is becoming a platinum member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), paying $100,000 annual membership. The move follows work between the two to support the Office Open XML file formats in Apache's POI project. [From Microsoft pledges love and money to open source | The Register]

This is a smart move on Microsoft's part. There is an enormous amount of innovation going on in the open software communities, and rather than fighting that innovation, Microsoft can now leverage it. This move will make the Windows platform more compatible for open source projects and open a new marketplace for the core operating environments such as Windows Server and SQL server.

More importantly, though, it makes it much easier for many developers to jump back and forth between platforms, coding in whichever environment makes the most sense for a project.

One has to wonder if this is Ray Ozzie's first major change as the new Chief Software Architect at Microsoft. If so, he's started out on the right foot

Information Security Magazine's online portal, points to a study released today by Fortify Software software about the security of open source projects.

From Search Security:

Enterprises often rely on open source software to save development time and money, but they should rely on open source for good security, according to a study released today. The review of 11 popular projects revealed numerous vulnerabilities and a general absence of sound security practices.

* * *

The study discovered thousands of vulnerabilities, including nearly 23,000 cross-site scripting flaws and more than 15,000 SQL injection flaws. Of more concern, perhaps, is that there's little evidence open source projects have made finding and remediating security issues a priority. The number of flaws stayed about the same or even increased through each of three new versions of six of the packages tested. (CRM/groupware Hipergate had by far the most issues, more than 14,000.) [From Open source projects fall short on security]

Linus Torvalds doesn't think that security issues are any more important than other bugs. I think that attitude is reflected in results like these. The vulnerabilities in the study were located via an automated scanner then verified by hand. These are the types of bugs that an attacker can find with minimal effort.

With proprietary software, massive vulnerability such as this would express its urgency in the stock price, forcing management to expedite patching. At Microsoft, the security team has the power to stop software from shipping if there are significant vulnerabilities that put their customers at risk.

In open source software, bug fixes are prioritized according to the interests of charismatic leaders instead of being driven be the needs of the end user. Linus is, in effect, making Steve Balmer's case for him.

The full text of the study can be found here.

The United States was ranked 48th in press freedom by Reporters Without Borders 2007 index. Countries with greater freedoms include Estonia, Boznia, Ghana, and Taiwan.

From the announcement:

There were slightly fewer press freedom violations in the United States (48th) and blogger Josh Wolf was freed after 224 days in prison. But the detention of Al-Jazeera's Sudanese cameraman, Sami Al-Haj, since 13 June 2002 at the military base of Guantanamo and the murder of Chauncey Bailey in Oakland in August mean the United States is still unable to join the lead group. [From Reporters sans frontières - Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index - 2007]

Here's a link to the index itself, and its methodology.

Yesterday Linus Torvalds called the OpenBSD developers a bunch of "masturbating monkeys." Seriously, he did.

Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can't stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them. [From Re: stable Linux 2.6.25.10]

While OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt has a reputation for brusqueness, he makes arguments and doesn't result to simple name-calling. Linus wasn't making an argument in that e-mail, simply expressing on opinion (and an offensive one at that).

Paired with Free Software Foundation Richard Stallman's recent unwarranted vilification of Bill Gates, the charismatic leaders of the free software world are going to destroy it with their posturing and strutting.

Or maybe it's just time for both of them to step down. Gates recognized that the time was right. Will they?

Christopher Hitchens writes about a need for English-language technical (and other) books at the American University of Iraq in Slate.com:

I recently received a progress report from Sulaymaniya from Thomas Cushman, who is a professor in the sociology department at Wellesley College and the founding editor of the Journal of Human Rights. He tells me that the American University attaches very special importance to the establishment of a library in English. An initiative has been set up to furnish the campus with the most up-to-date books that can be provided.

As Cushman writes:

What I did was ask colleagues to donate books, which they did in good numbers. We sent thirty cartons of first-rate books, especially on global affairs, history and literature and they are housed in the new library. ... The university is especially in need of technical books, social science books, software even. ... Nathan Musselman, the Prefect of the University who is teaching a class, wrote to me thrilled to tell me that the students were now writing their term papers in English and using many of these books as their main sources for research. He is greatly desirous of receiving more, now that the initial library is set up. ... So the idea is to get people to donate in a more micro way; to send one or two new, current and important books (perhaps they have review copies, extra copies, etc) to the new library of the University. All of these small polyps could yield a substantial coral reef of knowledge for the new generation of students there.

So here's what to do. Have a look at the university's Web site. Get some decent volumes together, pass the word to your friends and co-workers to do the same, and send them off to:

Nathan Musselman
Building No. 7, Street 10
Quarter 410 Ablakh Area
Sulaimani, Iraq
(+964) (0)770-461-5099

It's important to include the number at the end. [From Send a book, build democracy. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine]

This is an amazing opportunity to help shape a nation's technology. Students can only read books that are available to them, so if you're of a particular religious persuasion, start sending them those Ruby or C# or Cobol (if that's your thing) texts. In addition to looking through my library for relevant books I don't use any more, I'm ordering Restful Web Services, Secure Coding: Principals and Practices, and a couple of others.

It's a sad day -- the Star Trek-themed section of the Las Vegas Hilton is closing. I've never been -- I've always visited Vegas with non-Trek types and assumed that I'd have another opportunity. I had been leaning against going to Defcon this year (mostly due to the cost of an urgent and unplanned home improvement), but this may push me over to the line.

From Wil Wheaton's blog:

It was bound to happen sooner or later, and though I've known this was coming for a few months now, I was still really sad to read confirmation that Star Trek: The Experience is closing September first. [From WWdN: In Exile: Star Trek: The Experience is closing]

Make sure to follow the link to Wil Wheaton's blog -- he has a more personal experience posted, excerpted from his excellent book, Dancing Barefoot.

While I'm thinking about Microsoft, here's an interesting bit for computer historians.

Mithun Dhar's MSDN blog has posted a couple of interesting photos from Microsoft history.

There was a recent reunion of the original eleven Microsoft employees where they re-created a much earlier photo taken just before they moved from Albuquerque to Bellevue (which is about 5 miles west of the current Redmond campus).

First, the Albuquerque photo:

Have I mentioned how much I love TED? I can't think of a better way to spend a spare five to twenty minutes than listening to important thinkers talk about interesting ideas.

This evening I listened to a couple of recent posts that together paint a dystopian picture of the future. If you extrapolate from one talk to the other, we may quickly have Cylons/Terminator/insert favorite scifi disaster here.

First, a 2003 talk by George Dyson on the birth of the computer. While he entire talk is fascinating and entertaining, you'll need to pay close attention to the section on Nils Aal Barricelli and his universe at the end.

Susan Blackmore is a memeticist, and the first portion of her talk is an introduction to memetics. After this she proposes a new type of meme, a techno-meme (or teme as she calls it), that is self replicating independent of human activity.

Apple's front page today links to a ComputerWorld article about the rise of OS X in business computing environments:

Part two of Howard Rheinghold's Smart Mobs, Collective Action, Media, and Democracy has been posted on his vlog. I mentioned the first part about a week ago.

On to the video:

 

Howard Rheingold has posted work related to his 2003 book Smart Mobs that is as relevant today as his classic The Virtual Community was in 1995

Here's the summary that he's provided:

Smart Mobs, Collective Action, Media, and Democracy, Part 1 In Fall, 2007, James Fishkin's Center for Deliberative Democracy and Jim Lehrer's Newshour program brought together 300 Americans to talk about democracy. By The People, was broadcast on PBS in January, 2008. I was invited to address this assembly. I talked about Smart Mobs in relation to the public sphere--the citizen discourse that undergirds democracy. The following video, first of two parts, courtesy MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. Site implementation by Ideacodes [From Howard Rheingold's Vlog]

And here's the video: