I loaded the 3DNA demo off a gaming magazine CD just for the heck of it. It replaces your desktop with a 3D environment you can navigate to find your files and applications. This appeals to me because lo these many years ago (i.e., around 1992), for comic relief at a users conference I hacked together a demo of what the Interleaf desktop might look like someday. I replaced Wolfenstein 3D’s bitmaps with my own document management ones so you could stroll down a corridor, enter rooms that were the equivalent of file folders, visit the poor saps stuck in the FrameMaker jail cell, and at the end get shot by a Nazi representing the Secure Computing Environment. Hmm, maybe I can sell the idea to Microsoft.

Anyway, 3DNA is just about completely unappealing to me, and since I can’t find a lot specifically wrong with itI guess it’s the 3D-ness of it that bothers me. There are certainly some nice touches: your Web favorites list becomes a wall of TVs, each showing what’s up on the site. But moving through space rather than “teleporting” via mouse seems like a lot of work with no particular pay-off. It’s a bad way to traverse lots of information.

There’s a free version and one without ads and some additional features for $30.00.

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John Luke, reading my ramblings about selves, recommends Robert Kegan’s work: The Evolving Self and In over Our Heads. But I ask: Why read people who have thought deeply about this topic and have developed ideas based on observation and research when I can make up whatever I want? I mean, really!

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From Risk Digest, via a mailing list:

ATM vulnerabilities and citibank’s gag attempt

Ross Anderson
Thu, 20 Feb 2003 09:58:47 +0000

Citibank is trying to get an order in the High Court today gagging public disclosure of crypto vulnerabilities:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/citibank_gag.pdf

I have written to the judge opposing the order:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/citibank_response.pdf

The background is that my student Mike Bond has discovered some really horrendous vulnerabilities in the cryptographic equipment commonly used to protect the PINs used to identify customers to cash machines:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/TechReports/UCAM-CL-TR-560.pdf

These vulnerabilities mean that bank insiders can almost trivially find out the PINs of any or all customers. The discoveries happened while Mike and I were working as expert witnesses on a `phantom withdrawal’ case.

The vulnerabilities are also scientifically interesting: http://cryptome.org/pacc.htm

Source URL: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/go/risks/22/58/6

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Scott Rosenberg, editor of Salon, reports that the ‘zine isn’t about to fold. It will if it can’t come up with any new sources of funds.

One of those sources is you. If you’re already a subscriber, you can give a one year gift subscription for a mere $20, 33% off the usual. You can sign up a pal here.

(You can read here Scott’s comments about how the Online Journalism Review got the story wrong. One lesson: Don’t trust a source who refers to himself as “Bay Aryan” and to Scott as “Rosenkike.” The discussion thread is lively. )

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Before approaching me in the real world, please certify that you have read Jonathan Rauch’s “Caring for Your Introvert.” It’ll save us both a lot of heartache and misunderstanding.

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David Spector, on a mailing list, points us to some parodies of the inadvertently absurd Homeland of Office Security site, Ready.gov.

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I just spent some pain-in-the-butt time updating my list of recent publications. Conclusion: My ratio of ideas to output is currently running about 1:6. Yes, we’re upgrading to an Orange Alert status.

Well, I’d like to chat more about this, but I have a column at Darwin Mag due.

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Anyone with a grain of sense is at least conflicted by Halley‘s Alpha Male series. If you hate what it says, I’m not going to argue with you, although I will tell you that Halley isn’t writing it because she’s anti-feminist. Hah! I know Halley. Something much more interesting is going on.

Read the latest. Two memories vividly recounted, connected by the outwardness of day trips and the inwardness of casual love. Told through details. Personal and specific yet illuminating beyond its subject. Risky in Halley’s exposure of herself. Risky even in its style. It’s brave writing. If nothing else, give Halley that.

And then read today’s entry about how and why she writes.

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Too bad Happy Tutor’s reappropriation of the Cluetrain Manifesto (see below) didn’t take the opportunity to fix #74, the most obviously wrong thesis in the batch:

We are immune to advertising. Just forget it. [original]

We are immune to advertising, whether corporate or political. Just forget it. [Tutor]

If only. Yesterday the guy behind the desk at the auto repair store complained lightly, “People think I’m the Shell Answer Man.” It has to be at least 20 years since the Shell Answer Man ads were on TV, but there he is, still stuck in our heads. Marketing shrapnel. And when my wife and I went to buy a new washing machine, I entered the process sure that Maytag is a reliable brand.

No, we’re not immune. But the Internet does give us a way to check whether we’re thinking clearly or it’s just the shrapnel talking.

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The Happy Tutor has posted a remix of the Cluetrain Manifesto, applying it to democracy in corporate America. Democracy is a conversation and — just as important — corporations aren’t citizens. (And if they were, we’d hate them.)

The Tutor’s rendition tends towards the hyperbolic — unlike the staid and measured tones of the original. He doesn’t think corporations are capable of reform, and thus he replaces the chiding tone of the original with a call for heads on pikes. And the truth is that the four authors of the original varied on whether “the end of business as usual” (the book’s subtitle) meant reform or revolution. (I personally didn’t think, and still don’t think, that we’re going to see the collapse of the large corporation as a form of business life, but I’ve never been right about anything.) Ultimately, I think the theses ended up calling for corporate change and not corporate dismemberment mainly for rhetorical reasons, although I’m not sure I’m speaking for my co-authors on this: the manifesto tried to express some thoughts latent in the Web body politic about what was going on, and you don’t get to explain yourself to someone if you’re also screaming “Die, you bastard!” at him.

Anyway, take a look at what the Tutor hath wrought.

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