Google CEO says privacy doesn't matte...
FROM Boing2 Google CEO Eric Schmidt says privacy isn't important, and if you want to keep something private, "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" (in other words, "innocent people have nothing to hide.")
Bruce Schneier calls bullshit with eloquence: "For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable."
But JWZ has the kicker, when he reminds us that Eric Schmidt's Google blackballed CNet's reporters after CNet published personal information about Schmidt's private life: ""Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story..." "To underscore its point about how much personal information is available, the CNET report published some personal information about Google's CEO Eric Schmidt -- his salary; his neighborhood, some of his hobbies and political donations -- all obtained through Google searches...."
Hey, Eric: if you don't want us to know how much money you make, where you live, and what you do with your spare time, maybe you shouldn't have a house, earn a salary, or have any hobbies, right?
Schneier points out the difference between “greed sales” and “fear sales”,
PaperJam
As well as being Chief Security Technology Officer at BT, Bruce Schneier is also the author of several books on the topics of security and cryptography with a particular, if not exclusive, focus on the IT industry, which has led The Economist to describe him as a "security guru". And when discussing security he is refreshingly candid and forthright, not dissimilar in tone to Freakonomics author Steven Levitt, while sharing with Levitt the ability to view his chosen field from an angle less ordinary.
"Security is hard to sell for two reasons, economic and psychological," he says. The industry is not necessarily logical: it is by nature complex, and as a consequence easy to get wrong. The average buyer doesn't necessarily understand the products on offer, while the industry player often cannot explain them adequately, meaning that "new companies with good ideas often end up floundering because they cannot communicate those ideas." Psychologically, security is also complicated: Schneier points out the difference between "greed sales" and "fear sales", where the former is a simple question of wanting something, while the latter is being afraid of the consequences of not having that thing.
He highlights the concepts of loss aversion and prospect theory and applies them to security, whereby people are much more amenable to avoiding losses than acquiring gains, and are risk-averse for gains, but risk-seeking for losses. As an example, when asked if they would prefer a guaranteed gain of 500 euros or to toss a coin for a gain of 1,000, the vast majority will choose the former. A similar choice, slightly adjusted, shows an interesting contrast regarding risk: faced with a straight loss of 500 euros or a coin toss for the loss of 1,000, people will nearly always choose the latter. This is where the problem for "selling" IT security lies. It is sold through fear of loss, and yet some companies attempt to turn it into a greed sale. As Schneier states, this is somewhat nonsensical: security keeps things as they are if it works properly. It brings no actual value in itself, and thus advertising campaigns portraying a return on investment by a security product are a complete fiction.
Schneier believes that "IT security takes advantage of a rare after-market for making things better." Usually, a consumer will buy a product because it is already "good", yet the IT industry seems fundamentally flawed in that the applications we buy are ostensibly not good. If they were, we wouldn't need the additional security, it would be a standard feature like, as Schneier says "brakes or airbags on a car. You don't buy a car without brakes and then get told you need to fit them afterwards." So why is security in IT like this, when it is not in other industries? Schneier does not blame the IT industry, stating that "this is an effect of how new the IT industry is: it has developed very quickly, and security was ignored in the beginning."
"Computing is becoming infrastructure. It is something taken for granted in the work place, like a desk or electricity," says Schneier. So how can the problem of security sales be addressed? Schneier believes it should not be sold as a separate entity, but included in an overall computing package. He once again brings up the example of cars, which are sold with airbags and brakes included, or houses which are sold with lockable doors. These features are expected on those products, and it should be the same with IT products. Furthermore, it seems the IT industry as a whole is coming around to this way of thinking: "now we are seeing non-security companies buying or taking over security companies. These companies are recognising that security needs to be part of what they do. Users do not necessarily have to understand what the security features do, but at the same time they like to know they are there. Thus, security should become embedded into a greed sell."
Please read full at PaperJam
Over 40% of Twitter is pointless babble...
A study released by Pear Analytics, a research firm that specializes in website analysis, shows that 41% of all traffic on Twitter is pointless babble, as in “I just combed my hair.” But the more interesting statistic is by how little it actually won out. A very close second, at 38%, were conversational tweets, followed distantly by tweets that had information with real pass-along value (8.7%).
Among the surprises in the study were the low numbers for tweets labeled as corporate self-promotion (5.8%), spam (3.8%) and general news (3.6%). The results were eye opening for the researchers (pdf), who "thought the news category would have more weight than dead last, since this seems to be contrary to Twitter’s new position of being the premier source of news and events.” - Source ohmygov
How To Go To MIT For Free
The businessinsider has written before about the foolishness of pursuing a graduate degree during an economic recession. This popular move--waiting out a recession in school--is actually dumb (see above). Under no circumstances should anyone spend an economic downturn piling on more debt for a degree.
The reason why Sloan is an exception is because you can take nearly every course offered at Sloan without paying a dime, without quitting your job, without finding a new place to live in ultra-expensive Cambridge.
And that's because MIT now gives away its curriculum to anyone smart enough to learn it. It has posted its curriculum on-line for free. These days, this means a staggering 1900 courses. This number will grow.
You are probably skeptical about this. The so-called "Open-Course Ware" doesn't grant any degrees, and MIT says it doesn't count as an "MIT Education." You won't be able to hang a diploma on your wall. But here's what you will be able to do: learn almost everything an MIT student is being taught.
But why are you after that? Is it because you think it's valuable to employers? That might be the case on a temporary basis. But this over-valuation of a degree will eventually be arbitraged away. The smartest employers will quickly figure out how valuable it is to hire an applicant who can demonstrate he took all the MIT Sloan Business School courses online, by himself, and mastered them. And ten years from now, no one will know or care whether you got the degree.
Are you a follower or a leader? How you go to business school--paying through the nose or going for free--tells you all you need to know.
Read more at Business Insider
Average Gamer Is 35, Fat and Bummed
SLASHDOT - 
Worst at the skills we need the most... 75% not ready for college
WSJ: 
About 1.48 million of the 3.3 million members of the high school class of 2009 took the ACT, typically in their junior year. ACT said its report was based on comparing students' ACT test scores in English, reading, math and science with the grades they earned in related courses during their first year in college.
Of course, improving high schools (something that everyone's in favor of) is more easily said than done. The aversion to any kind of accountability in schools doesn't hep the matter. But until these numbers come up, it's premature to keep talking about expanding college opportunities, as politicians tend to do. Merely pushing them into secondary education just represents a waste of time and human capital.
IT Glory days over
"The NY Times reports that computer science students with the entrepreneurial spirit may want to look for a different major, because if Thomas M. Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, is right, IT is a mature industry that will grow no faster than the larger economy, its glory days having ended in 2000. Addressing Stanford students in February as a guest of the engineering school, Siebel called attention to 20 sweet years from 1980 to 2000, when worldwide IT spending grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 17 percent. '
All you had to do was show up and not goof it up,' Siebel says. 'All ships were rising.' Since 2000, however, that rate has averaged only 3 percent. His explanation for the sharp decline is that 'the promise of the post-industrial society has been realized.'
In Siebel's view, far larger opportunities are to be found in businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy. Though Silicon Valley was 'where the action was' when he finished graduate school, he says, 'if I were graduating today, I would get on a boat and I would get off in Shanghai.'"
From SlashDot
How big is the internet?
News, Australia - internet has permeated everything from buying to banking to bonking.
But just how big is it?
Microsoft's Bing team puts the amount of web pages at "over one trillion".
And Google has already indexed more than one trillion discrete web addresses.
There are more addresses than there are people on Earth. The current global population stands at more than 6.7 billion.
That means there are about 150 web addresses per person in the world.
Translated: If you spent just one minute reading every website in existence, you'd be kept busy for 31,000 years. Without any sleep. . .
Mark Higginson, director of analytics for Nielsen Online, said the global online population had jumped 16 per cent since last year.
"Approximately 1.46 billion people worldwide now use the internet. . . The largest internet population belongs to China, which claimed this week to have more users online – 338 million - than there were people in the US.
However InternetWorldStats.com a website that combines multiple data sources, claims China's online population is more like 298 million, just a few million shy of overtaking the US population. . .
Measuring the online population can be tricky. There are servers, users, per capita numbers, and penetration percentages to evaluate. It's an epic-scale guessing game using a series of sources to get just one number.
IWS combines data from the UN's International Telecommunications Union, Nielsen Online, GfK and US Census Bureau.
Its latest global figures puts the number of internet users in the world at 1,596,270,108.
Read full from news.com.au
Chrome to be virus-free "It's an idiotic claim,"
Making an Operating System Virus Free
Google's claim that Chrome was designed to be virus-free, I said:
Bruce Schneier, the chief security technology officer at BT, scoffed at Google's promise. "It's an idiotic claim," Schneier wrote in an e-mail. "It was mathematically proved decades ago that it is impossible -- not an engineering impossibility, not technologically impossible, but the 2+2=3 kind of impossible -- to create an operating system that is immune to viruses."
What I was referring to, although I couldn't think of his name at the time, was Fred Cohen's 1986 Ph.D. thesis where he proved that it was impossible to create a virus-checking program that was perfect. That is, it is always possible to write a virus that any virus-checking program will not detect.
This reaction to my comment is accurate:
That seems to us like he's picking on the semantics of Google's statement just a bit. Google says that users "won't have to deal with viruses," and Schneier is noting that it's simply not possible to create an OS that can't be taken down by malware. While that may be the case, it's likely that Chrome OS is going to be arguably more secure than the other consumer operating systems currently in use today. In fact, we didn't take Google's statement to mean that Chrome OS couldn't get a virus EVER; we just figured they meant it was a lot harder to get one on their new OS - didn't you?
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