Hacking You

Worthy of Hollywood, or at Least Cable Access Hijinks

For a couple of hours on Sunday last You Tube IP Address was hijacked. Below is a link for the stories. There is an excellent link in the article of this story marked "Time Line"(http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/pakistan_hijacks_youtube_1.shtml).

The basics of this hack is that by order of the Pakistan Government false ads were put up by Pakistan Telecom. Pakistan Telecom responded by broadcasting the false claim that it was the correct route for 256 addresses in You Tube's 208.65.153.0 network space. Because that was a more specific destination than the true broadcast from You Tube saying it was home to 1,024 computers, within a few minutes traffic started flowing to the wrong place.

Within the space of less than a minute a large portion of You Tube traffic was sent off the trail to a dead end. To put this in simple terms legitimate hosts of the You Tube broadcasts were cut out by a bogus claim of Pakistan's ISP hosting the broadcasts.This is not the first time that such a quick switch has been accomplished (http://www.renesys.com/blog/2005/12/internetwide_nearcatastrophela.shtml).

The opinion is that measures should be in affect to double check all changes in addresses. One example suggested is the following: One way to handle this is for network providers to be automatically notified when the virtual location of an Internet address changes, which is what some researchers have suggested in the form of a "hijack alert system." Another is to treat broadcasts with changes of addresses as suspicious for 24 hours and then accept them as normal. Simple filtering of broadcasts may not always work because some networks provide connectivity to customers with thousands of different routes.

Probably the most extensive countermeasure would be a technology like Secure BGP, which uses encryption to verify which network providers own Internet addresses and are authorized to broadcast changes. But Secure BGP has been around in one form or another form since 1998, and is still not a widely-used standard, mostly because it adds complexity and routers that understand will add additional cost.If there is a way to fool people or disrupt service some people of a less democratic frame of mind will find it and use it.

When ideology clashes with human exchanges the result is often something as ugly as terrorism and in a very small way this is terrorism. Granted it is not the murder of innocents people, but it is a violation of the open concepts of the Internet and as librarians is just another in an endless list of reasons for librarians to be defenders and keeps of that which is virtual and not only the print.

Any thoughts?

Here is a link:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9878655-7.html?tag=nefd.lede

New Custom Ideas from Thomson

Thomson Scientific to Use Collexis’ Knowledge Dashboard in Custom Solution

Thomson Scientific (www.scientific.thomson.com) and Collexis Holdings, Inc.

(www.collexis.com), a developer of search and knowledge discovery software, announced plans to join together Collexis’ Knowledge Dashboard with Thomson Scientific’s Web of Science to create a custom data mining solution for the research community. Called the Thomson Collexis Dashboard, it is designed to provide enhanced knowledge discovery for the academic and government R&D communities. By merging Thomson Scientific’s Web of Science data with the Collexis Knowledge Dashboard, users will have the ability to identify and search for documents, experts and trends, and to make new discoveries more quickly, accurately, and deeply than via conventional search engines.

The Thomson Collexis Dashboard is a custom software and information solution that enables scientists to analyze large numbers of publications concerning a defined topic swiftly and efficiently and filter the essential information. Additionally, it allows researchers to explore existing knowledge concepts and provides proactive suggestions about the direction of research across a topic or by category. It also includes multiple thesauri that allow different points of view on the same data and subject navigation. A time-saving solution for scientists, the Thomson Collexis Dashboard includes summarized information, which reportedly is not to be found in any system currently available, and it provides identification of experts across categories on multiple subsets of the literature instantly—including their relevant social network.

Source: Thomson Scientific

Any thoughts?

Here is the link:

http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/wndReader.asp?ArticleId=41005

New Additions to OCLC

OCLC NEWS

NetLibrary announces agreements with 21 international publishers

DUBLIN, Ohio, USA, 1 February 2008—NetLibrary, OCLC's platform for eContent and the leading provider of eBooks for the institutional library market, has announced agreements with 21 leading publishers that will add thousands of new eBooks and eAudiobooks to NetLibrary's growing catalog of more than 160,000 titles.

This international agreement will be a great source of free documents for scholars and students. Score one for open source!

I sometimes wonder if Americans cares at all about education. The opening of the market further shows that financial profit need not be the motivation behind publishers when working with libraries. Libraries everywhere need more of this.

Any thoughts?

Here is the link to the full story:

A Man, a Guitar, a Librarian

Minstrel Kiss and Tell

About Time!

Yeah!

This is a very interesting article on the recent movement in libraries to hire and maintain full time software developers to handle the e needs of cataloging collections. Long outsourced the waste and frustration of living with and depending on databases not designed under the direct supervision or by librarians is changing. There is some reason for the complaints which have been so common. While the third party solutions have been a crutch, a movement to resolve these issues in the profession has been slow in development. As Andy Guess points out in this article:

Still, some libraries, fed up with software that doesn’t fully meet their needs, have decided to take matters, figuratively, into their own hands. With a bit of grant money and some eager developers, institutions have begun creating their own open-source solutions that are fully customizable, free for others to use and compatible with existing systems. The result has been a whole crop of projects that, when combined, could serve as a fully integrated, end-to-end open-source solution for academic libraries, covering the interface, search mechanism, database system, citations and even course management.


Meanwhile, the increasing availability of open-source software has nudged some libraries to reconsider the role of their in-house technology gurus, and to wonder whether it would make more long-term financial sense to hire more developers than to continue paying for products over which they have limited control.

The name of the game is open source and saving money. It's all about finding solutions that work and will not lead to crippling investments and subscription and maintenance fees. For example:

Open-source Web catalogs like VuFind tend to look a lot like search engines that people who work online are already used to. VuFind (and, eventually, XC) adds Web 2.0 functionality on top of the traditional interface, allowing users to e-mail search results and save results to their favorites. One feature Nagy said was a high priority for library developers is “faceted navigation,” which allows users to drill down and refine searches by, for example, author, topic or format. The VuFind interface is also completely compatible with the open-source citation management tool Zotero, a plugin for the Firefox browser.


Another piece of the puzzle is federated search: an engine that sifts through numerous different databases for each user query. One tool being developed at Oregon State University, LibraryFind, combines federated search with a simple, Google-like interface that lets users sort by relevance, save items, refine searches and view electronic documents.



Any thoughts?



Here is the link to the story:



http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/19/opensource

Not So Social

Decrease in Traffic at Piczo Social Networking Site

CNET News.com reporter Caroline McCarthy co-wrote this article.

Three former Piczo employees described a company grappling with the meteoric rise of competitors Facebook and Bebo and internal squabbles over the direction of the 3-year-old start-up. The company has also struggled to convince skeptical advertisers of the effectiveness of social networking as an effective ad vehicle--a tough sales pitch for the entire social-networking sector, say insiders. Know for its target audience of teen girls, this social site is now in what management is terming a restructuring as it branches out into a more mature European market. While use of FaceBook is growing this company saw a decline in the past year after a promising start in 2006.

Jeremy Verbo, acting CEO of Piczo, sites the nature of the industry, software development, seasonal changes, and most importantly competition from other big players in the market."We were in the United Kingdom early, and certainly as (Bebo and Facebook) came on, that affected us," Verba said. "Our growth started slowing. But it's a time-spent issue. Our users didn't move on to these other sites. What we're seeing is a lot of overlap. What happened is some of our engagement decreased."

The lay off of employees is like the platuea that occurs in many industries in computer related fields. The saturation of the market leads to a burn out. The ubiquity of these services make them common place.I know that people will often open a Facebook account, Myspace, and play around with other scenes to get a sense of where the flow is. Then the account often sits unattended. Users are simply tired of it, some blog pundits have argued, and they won't stay on any one site too long before moving on to the next big thing. In part the number of visits a site gets is a number factors including last but not least its indexing in a search engine. It should be no wonder that that novility can get you far, but then you better keep getting your name out.In the long run there is no sense of loyalty, but instead an iconographic association occurring in some web places. For example, You Tube is often copied but still remains the largest in an ever growing sea of video playing platforms where for nothing people can get their 15 minutes. People think of it like they do Craig’s List. Its like Googling. You turn your computer on and just do it.

The lesson may be that there is a limit to the market size and smart web developers are coming up not with the latest template but riding the next social software wave.

Any thoughts?

Here is the link:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9877437-7.html?tag=nefd.lede

What Do You Mean It Won't Work?!

I Hate My Computer!

Everyone who has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous compatibility issues will tell you their story about how all their buddies were playing World of War Craft and then they logged on to find the version they purchased is not compatible with their system or the computer they inherited from their second cousin twice removed after he married (sorry about the example-this happened to someone I know) isn't powerful enough to handle e-mails. So it isn't surprising that in a world where gaming is typically the province of gaming systems there are compatibility issues.

Lets face it, until someone makes the universal grail of a consumers information and entertainment needs, I mean a tool that is a computer, home entertainment system, office system, and will play any game you plug into it, there will be a kind of raw distrust that manufactures of PC's will be forced to suffer through. But now the PC Gaming Alliance is moving to do something about it.

The nonprofit PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA) aims to unite hardware and software creators, game developers, publishers and others committed to the PC gaming market with the common purpose of advancing the PC as a gaming platform. The group's founding members include Acer/Gateway, Activision Publishing, AMD, Dell/Alienware, Epic, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia and Razer USA. Together, member companies plan to cooperate on accelerating innovation, improving the gaming experience for consumers and serving as a collective source of market information and expertise on PC gaming, the group said.

It should be no surprise that in an age where gaming platforms like Playstation, Wii, and Xbox are as powerful as some low end PC's, that such a standardization of PC's would help manufacturers keep their consumers happy.

The PCGA has a long haul ahead of them. Among the many challenges ahead is to produce a set of minimum expectations as to what game developers should be targeting in terms of minimum system requirements for their games.

Uniformity of system standards would be a great boon to game designers who would like to see everyone playing their games. I know that the first time I saw the price of the Playstation 3 when it was released last year was to gulp and assign myself to not being one of the cool kids on the block. It was too expensive. As for my friend with the junk from his cousin’s yard sale I can only offer him my sympathy. Hang in there man, he may be upgrading to Vista soon.

Any thoughts?

Here is the link to this story:

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Can-the-PC-Survive-as-a-Gaming-Platform-61760.html