Archiv der Kategorie: English

Posts in English

New last.fm feature

English, Freundlich zum Nutzer, Risiko, Zeitmaschine,

Looks like last.fm can predict future listening:

Of course this is really just a time calculation bug, the music listed itself properly represents my recent past listening. What amazes me, though, is the smoothness of this bug from a user interface perspective. It does not look like a bug at all. It does not say: »-1 minute ago,« or anything obviously faulty. It rather appears as if the Web site calmly and confidently states a fact that it knows is true and accurate. Only that it isn’t.

I reckon that behind the scenes some generic library function does a good job of translating time stamps into natural-language relative descriptions such as those that we see above. This seems like a good thing in general, but we should use this opportunity to remind ourselves that bugs may not always look like bugs.

Will better risk management make this world a better place?

English, Propaganda, Risiko, , ,

»A world in which cancer is normalized as a manageable chronic condition would be a wonderful thing, but a risk-factor world in which we all think of ourselves as precancerous would not. It might decrease the incidence of some forms of malignancy while hugely increasing the numbers of healthy people under medical treatment. It would be a strange victory in which the price to be paid for checking the spread of cancer through the body is its uncontrolled spread through the culture.«

(Stephen Shapin, via)

Soziale Kontrolle, technisch unterstützt

English, Security, Trusted Computing, Vertrauen

»Lance Maggiacomo was out of work, bored and lonely when he started hiding his online relationships from his wife.

There was no affair, only chatting through e-mail, yet it felt like cheating just the same.

A few years later, a reformed Maggiacomo has an in-house check on his impulses. He and his wife Lori, like other Christian couples around the country, share one e-mail account as a safeguard against the ever-expanding temptations of the Internet.«

(USATODAY.com:
Christian couples share e-mail addresses to stay faithful)

ECRYPT II Yearly Report on Algorithms and Key Lengths

English, IT, Security, , ,

For those who aren’t aware of it yet: the ECRYPT II Network of Excellence maintains »a list of recommended cryptographic algorithms (e.g. block ciphers, hash functions, signature schemes, etc) and recommended keysizes and other parameter settings (where applicable) to reach specified security objectives.« This list is available as a public report, one can download the current version from their web site. If you need to assess the security and suitability of an algorithm used somewhere, this might be a valuable source.

 

47 ways of manipulating people

English, Freundlich zum Nutzer, Hackmeck, Propaganda, Security, , ,

Successful games manipulate people, creating artificial tasks and challenges that people love to spend time on. This is hard but one can learn it. Hard it is because one need to carefully balance difficulty. A game must pose a challenge to be interesting but avoid being too hard and thus frustrating. Guess why so many games come with some concept of levels of difficulty?

The learnable part is game mechanics. Game mechanics is about the building blocks of a game, design patterns for artificial tasks and challenges that engage the player. The SCVNGR Game Dynamics Playdeck documents 47 such patterns. Their use is not limited to recreational games. Applications and Web sites may employ some of the elements, and con artists and social engineers are exploiting some very similar strategies to trick people into compliance.