Joi Ito's Web

As I struggle to get gnupg working on my XP box, this is great news! Thanks for pointing this out Sen.

The Register - PGP is back!
By Andrew Orlowski in London
Posted: 19/08/2002 at 13:20 GMT

Phil Zimmermann's PGP is back in the hands of an independent company, after Network Associates agreed to sell the technology it mothballed back in March to a start-up specially created to market PGP.

Jon Callas, the former PGP chief scientist, becomes the CTO of the new company, PGP Corporation. Will Price, former Director of Engineering at NAI, becomes VP of engineering.

I just got the beta of opencola. (Thanks Howard!) On the surface, it looks like a bookmarking, meta-searching relevance tracking front end. Very useful just for meta-searching various search engines and news sources and filing your information. You have various folders for different topics and you mark the relevance of various documents and you can continue to search for more stuff similar to what you like. The cool thing is that you can add peers that can look at your public folders and share recommendations with. It is similar to a company we invested in that unfortunately didn't end up making it past "beta" called FatBubble... Howard talks about opencola in Smartmobs. I think it was started by Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing. Anyway, so far it looks great. The only problem is I have no PEERS! If someone else can download the beta and post their id here as a comment or email me their id we can be peers. (I do have the choice of rating the relevance of peers. ;-0 ) Anyway, definitely worth a look.

Welcome To Opencola

I had dinner tonight with Barak, Michiel (who started today as an intern from Hitotsubashi Biz School) and 4 students from Stanford's ATI program. Michiel said that he thought that I was unfocused. (I've been called this before. Jun called me "scatterbrained" when asked about me after he first met me.) Michiel said he felt my blog was too unfocused. I guess that's true, but I thought it was a feature, not a problem. Michiel admitted that he was often negative. (Jun said the other day that he thought people sounded 30% smarter when they were negative.) Anyway, I had been actually been worried about this in my blog, but I didn't admit it to Michiel. So, I wonder. Do people care what I care about or is focus and order more important than my random thoughts. I guess it depends. (Doesn't everything.) At the Fortune brainstorm meeting former congressman Jack Kemp said, "People don't care how much you know until they know that you care." So I guess I wonder whether people are reading primarily for 1) entertainment, 2) because they care about what I think, 3) they are looking for information... Again, I'm sure it's a combination. Maybe I should do a cluster analysis on my readers. Maybe I shouldn't care. As 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web says, (I found this site on Blogdex.) "write for yourself; you are, in the end, your most important reader." So there you go. I'm justified.

So I've been blogging for 54 days now and I'm definitely addicted. I know I've said this before, but it is DEFINITELY different than just having a web page. As Frank warned me, all day long I think about things to blog. Everything I read on the web is potential blog material and I find I am reading much more and chasing all kinds of ideas a lot further than I used to. Also, since I have a Japanese section, I find I have started to try to read Japanese much more. (Even though I still suck.) I write almost every day. Web surfing has taken on a whole new meaning. I have had 4,652 distinct hosts visit the site since I started. Since many people are behind firewalls that appear as single hosts, the number of people who have visited is probably higher. I check my access log and look at the referral list and graphs of the requests to see what events trigger what sort of accesses and see who is sending my how many people. I find myself spamming my friends, messing around with google and doing all sorts of things to try to increase the traffic to the site. (This obsession with traffic may be a subconscious yearning from helping run Infoseek Japan for so long and always trying to catch up. We are in 3rd place after Yahoo and MSN now... But at least we have outlasted the parent. Anyway...) It is kind of like sitting in front of my computer with a bunch of my friends looking over my shoulder. At the same time, I surf around and read other people's blogs looking over their shoulders.

Japan's suicide rate tops 30,000 / yr. Over 3X the 10,000 or so automobile related deaths. Most of the suicides are men in the 50's and 60's and often due to job related and financial stress. So, while many Silicon Valley ventures were built buy people who had lost their jobs in the defense industry. Japanese tend to commit suicide instead. Japan's suicide rate is among the top 10 in the world. It is said that Japanese mental health medicine is 30 years behind the US (Although Kurokawa-sensei is trying to do something about that.) So it makes sense that cleaning up after a suicide is as common as cleaning up after a traffic accident and people are being billed the costs. The original article below is from 1998, but suicides have increased since then, making it more relevant.

Waiwai is the Mainichi Daily News summary of articles from Japanese Weeklies. This one is from Shukan Hoseki (10/1/98) a bit old. Relevant sections quoted below. See original article for full text.

ClassicWaiwai
Paying for suicide costs more than the ultimate price
By Ryann Connell
Staff Writer
August 17, 2002

"Trains don't usually stop too long after a suicide, there's rarely much damage to carriages and we rarely have to send anyone off to catch trains on different lines. In that regard, train suicides probably don't cost too much," says an employee of a commuter line. "But to make sure we can cover the costs incurred when a suicide leads to a derailment, we have to ask the bereaved families of suicide victims to compensate us. The costs are usually in the range of 100 million yen, but I've heard of a case where a family was billed 140 million yen after someone killed themselves by jumping in front of a train."

"As soon as the news hits that someone's committed suicide in one of our apartments, rents have to drop by about half or we can't get anyone else to live there," laments a Tokyo real estate agent. "In one case a few years ago, an agent sued the father of a man who slaughtered his girlfriend then killed himself in one of the agent's apartments. The agent won the case and the father ended up having to fork out a few million yen."

"We can get a room back into shape in a couple of days (after a suicide), at a cost of only a few million yen in even the worst cases," says a hotel employee. "We don't usually charge renovation costs, but if the suicide is of a famous person and the hotel's reputation is damaged, the hotel'll sue the bereaved family for whatever they're worth."

found on Slashdot
An article in Popular Science about what a national ID would look like and contain. On the issue of social security numbers on ID card, they mention that even though social security numbers on ID cards have been rejected by the federal government, "it's a good guess the Department of Homeland Security would manage it".

On smart card technology, they say:

For example, an ER doctor could view medical information and enter data about treatment (if the card's data storage device is read-write capable), but could not see security-related data (such as a traveler's flight history, or a non-citizen's visa status) that an airport or INS official might require. But how secure are smart cards? Detailed instructional hacking sites can be found on the Web, many focusing on European cards. And the more data on a card, the more valuable the card becomes to an identity thief.

found on POLITECH. My comments in italics

NASA plans to read terrorist's minds at airports
By Frank J. Murray
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Airport security screeners may soon try to read the minds of travelers to identify terrorists.

Officials of the National Aeronautics and space Administration have told Northwest Airlines security specialists that the agency is developing brain-monitoring devices in cooperation with a commercial firm, which it did not identify.

Space technology would be adapted to receive and analyze brain-wave and heartbeat patterns, then feed that data into computerized programs "to detect passengers who potentially might pose a threat," according to briefing documents obtained by The Washington Times.

Now this is scary... oops. That thought would probably set off a alarm... Aren't these polygraph sort of technologies notoriously inaccurate? Linked with all of the horrible things we are hearing about treatment in airports and the new database of fingerprints and photos they are making, are we going to end up with a database and a jail full of all of the people who would be nervous about having their brains scanned?

NASA wants to use "noninvasive neuro-electric sensors," (Sounds like an oxymoron.) imbedded in gates, to collect tiny electric signals that all brains and hearts transmit. Computers would apply statistical algorithms to correlate physiologic patterns with computerized data on travel routines, criminal background and credit information from "hundreds to thousands of data sources," NASA documents say.

The notion has raised privacy concerns. (duh...) Mihir Kshirsagar of the Electronic Privacy Information Center says such technology would only add to airport-security chaos. "A lot of people's fear of flying would send those meters off the chart. Are they going to pull all those people aside?"

Kenji Eno ( Justin wrote about him ) is guest blogging on my Japanese blog.

translated by me from Kenji Eno's entry

In 1987 JALECO (which PCCW Japan reverse merged into) made a game called "Moero!! Pro Baseball" for the Nintendo Famicon. It was an amazing game. At the time, Namco had a very popular game called Famista which sold very well. Morero!! Pro Baseball tried to make a very realistic game to compete against the very popular, but rather game-like Famista. The graphics were the only part that was realistic. You could bunt home runs, the strike zone was a complete mess... It was a horrible game. There was something twistedly special about the game that you really couldn't experience anywhere else. One could only love how bad it was. So I don't know if this guy is one of these types of fans, but this guy collects these 15 year old game cartridges of this game. There are many maniacs in the game community, many people buy 10 of their favorite games. That pales in comparison to this guy. So now you have to see his web site. "The agony!!MoePro Getters"

A Satirewire article for some comic relief...

MORE DELAYS: IRAQ NOW SAYS U.S. MUST PUBLISH "INTENT TO ATTACK" NOTICE IN BAGHDAD PAPER
U.S. Also Needs Invasion, Demolition, Military Housing Permits
Washington, D.C. (SatireWire.com)

Already frustrated by seemingly endless delays, U.S. officials today conceded a confusing knot of new Iraqi regulations that require "non-resident aggressors" to obtain hundreds of federal and provincial pre-invasion permits and licenses will further postpone any attack on Saddam Hussein.

"I keep saying we haven't set a date for an attack on Iraq, and now I think you can all see why," complained U.S. President George W. Bush, who was busily typing up an "Intent to Overthrow" notice that must be published in an Iraqi newspaper of record for two weeks.

"I'm starting to think all the hassle is just not worth it," added U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has been shuttling back and forth between Washington and the Iraqi consulate in Paris trying to get the appropriate paperwork. "They say we have to get temporary military lodging permits, heavy equipment usage permits. We even have to submit an environmental impact study before we can destroy any buildings."

First spotted on David Farber's IP List

So it sounds like the 300 students who receive this grant have to take the MS C# class which replaces the C++ course. Pretty sleazy...

There is a student site about this. Following is a quote from CNET and a link to the CNET article.

Microsoft's grant has strings attached?

By Margaret Kane
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
August 16, 2002, 9:59 AM PT

update A collegiate grant from Microsoft has created an uproar after one of the recipients agreed to require a class in a Microsoft programming language as part of the deal.