Copacetic

Chokers!

Amazon have release a cool Firefox extension for managing your EC2 Instances. Very Nice.

The official Barcamp Dublin site is at http://barcamp.org/BarCampIreland3 please add your name their if you are planning to attend and especially if you are planning to speak.

Tonight on TV, a new entrant, Pro-Tensium.

Full details on the blog. Kick off is Saturday 21st of April at the Digital Hub, just off Thomas St on Crane Street.

This non-story from Silicon Republic is a classic re-release press release number. UK workers are apparently walking out with valuable data on USB Keys, and before that floppy disks and before that printouts.

Stealing your employer’s data has always been trivially easy, USB Keys don’t make it harder or easier, they are just another one of many leaky channels in every employer workplace.

If you want to be secure you could give everyone a Compartmented Mode Workstation. A steal at 100k+…

Clay Shirky (I’m a fanboy) deconstructs Second Life in a great article that debunks the Second Life numbers and then goes on to juxtapose the success of games worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft and Everquest) with real virtual worlds (such as Second Life).

Interesting statistic : 85% of Second Life users abandon the game within three months.

I quote a great closing paragraph,

More generally, I suspect that the cases where 3D immersion works are, and will continue to be, those uses that most invite the mind to fill in or simply do without missing detail, whether because of a triggering of sexual desire, the fight or flight reflex (many games), avarice (gambling), or other areas where we are willing and even eager to make rapid inferences based on a paucity of data.

 Infoworld reports that PA Semi launched its first product today. These are the ex-Digital guys that brought you the Alpha chip.

Underpacking Mini Rolls

Originally uploaded by Joe Drumgoole.

No, I haven’t eaten one, this is what you get inside a pristine pack. More chocolate, less mini-rolls.

Damien linked to this excellent video talk given by Van Jacobson entitled “A New Way to Look At Networking“. In it Jacobson gives a lightening history of the birth of telephony networks (its all about wires), the advent of packet switching (a way to evade circuit setup times) and our modern Internet (a mechanism for information dissemination).  He then predicts how the web will have to change and how existing content will no longer have an authoritative location but will live “everywhere” on the web.

He then points out that all existing security models depend on securing the route, but say nothing about the content, which is why spam and phishing attacks are so successful. In the future the content itself will be secured, hence the ability to live anywhere rather than being delivered by a authoritative host (e.g. nytimes.com) or its proxies.

He concludes by pointing out some of the issues around incentivising the “content everywhere” model of operation.

Important lessons for anybody involved in developing modern web applications. I’ll be watching this one again.