August 1, 2005
Wired News: Router Flaw Is a Ticking Bomb. In the aftermath, Lynn reached a legal settlement with Cisco and ISS in which he agreed to erase his research material on the vulnerability, to keep secret the details of the attack, and to refrain from distributing copies of his presentation, among other concessions.

August 2, 2005
Technology Review: What's (not) on the Telly? At least that's the idea behind a challenge issued in the research and development labs at the BBC, which has led to the unveiling of a prototype personal video recorder, called Promise TV, that successfully recorded and stored all the shows running for a week on all 12 channels in the UK.

August 3, 2005
IBM developerWorks: Oh, the pixel pickle. I sometimes wonder whether graphics wouldn't be better off if graphics designers and developers had stayed with vector-based graphics. For all that pixels are wonderful (I have nearly two million of them in front of me right now), they sometimes make Web designers do really stupid things.

Schneier on Security: More Lynn/Cisco Information. By attempting to muzzle Lynn, the two companies ensured that 1) the vulnerability was the biggest story of the conference, and 2) some group of hackers would turn the vulnerability into exploit code just to get back at them.

August 4, 2005
Adaptive Path: An Interview with Ludicorp's Eric Costello. The social network was built in just so that you could restrict access to your photos. But what has really taken off with Flickr is that it’s turned out to be a great platform for sharing with the masses, and not just with your small collection of friends.

eWEEK: The Good and the Bad of Self-Service Call Centers. Appropriately, one of the show's first panels featured a group of industry leaders discussing what makes for a successful speech recognition implementation, and why businesses should avoid infuriating customers with badly designed speech interfaces.

August 5, 2005

August 8, 2005
EE Times: Emerging tech lights up Siggraph. Star Wars and NASA's Mars rover landings have one thing in common: killer graphics. The two worlds they represent, of fantasy and fact, came together here at the annual Siggraph conference. Siggraph's popular Emerging Technologies pavilion offered a taste of how computer graphics and imaging will one day be used in interfaces, visualization and the presentation of content.

Wired News: Riding With the Urban Mappers. A9.com's trucks have been rolling for about a year now. They have already photo-mapped 20 major American cities (with a bank of 30 million images) as part of an aggressive rollout, capturing, by their estimate, storefront images for 1 million of the 14 million small businesses in the United States.

August 9, 2005
Useit.Com: International Sites: Minimum Requirements. Here instead are the minimum requirements for ensuring that international users can use your site. Just remember: To fully maximize your business potential in other countries, you should do much more.

August 10, 2005
USA Today: Electronic passports set to thwart forgers. The U.S. passport is joining the digital age. After three years of research and discussion, the State Department has finalized most of the technical and logistical details of new, supposedly tamper-proof passports embedded with a "smart-card" chip.

August 11, 2005
InfoWorld: The summer of PKI love. Jon Udell. But as we learned at the summit, there's been progress on both fronts. Growing adoption of hardware tokens is making cryptographic identities independent of machines. And emerging trust bridges are enabling those identities to be federated among universities, the federal government, and industry.

August 12, 2005
NY Times: Google Library Database Is Delayed. But a publishing trade association called the opt-out offer inadequate, saying it did not address the main concern of its members: the belief that the entire program, the Google Print Library Project, is built on a foundation of purposeful copyright violation.

August 15, 2005
Useit.Com: Putting A/B Testing in Its Place. For decades, this has been a classic method in direct mail, where companies often split their mailing lists and send out different versions of a mailing to different recipients. A/B testing is also becoming popular on the Web, where it's easy to make your site show different page versions to different visitors.

August 16, 2005
IBM developerWorks: Oh, the pixel pickle. I sometimes wonder whether graphics wouldn't be better off if graphics designers and developers had stayed with vector-based graphics. For all that pixels are wonderful (I have nearly two million of them in front of me right now), they sometimes make Web designers do really stupid things.

eWEEK: Intel Swaps Clock Speed for Power Efficiency. Intel's shift to processor numbers and its wholesale move to multicore processors—a multicore chip includes pack two or more processor cores in one package—sealed the deal for the architectural change, as power can be a limiting factor in fitting two or more processor cores together into a single chip.

August 17, 2005
Adaptive Path: Persona Non Grata. Done well, this is exactly what personas do. The problem is, most teams build personas from the wrong kind of user information, or worse, base them on assumptions. It’s no surprise that a Web search for personas brings up an amazing variety of persona sets, and most of them are terrible.

August 18, 2005
Scott Berkun: Work vs. Progress. Simple work, like mowing a lawn or washing a car has transparent progress: as each small unit of work is completed it’s visible to everyone. But with complex work, building software, running a business, writing a novel, it is harder to identify true progress.

August 19, 2005
NY Times: A New Arms Race to Build the World's Mightiest Computer. The new supercomputers will not be in use until the end of the decade at the earliest, but they are increasingly being viewed as crucial investments for progress in science, advanced technologies and national security.

August 22, 2005
Computerworld: Why People Don't Use Information. Think of the warehouse as a knowledge manifold. This is a structured information architecture supporting strategies for focusing on items or ignoring them. Like in the Google model, this is one vast pool of information that seems to shift its shape depending on what's asked of it.

August 23, 2005
HBS Working Knowledge: The Hard Work of Failure Analysis. It hardly needs to be said that organizations cannot learn from failures if people do not discuss and analyze them. Yet this remains an important insight. The learning that is potentially available may not be realized unless thoughtful analysis and discussion of failure occurs.

August 24, 2005
Technology Review: Holographic Memory. Unlike CDs and DVDs, which store data bit by bit on their surfaces, holographic discs store data a page at a time in three dimensions, enabling huge leaps in capacity and access speed. And InPhase, a 70-person startup spun out of Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, is leading a handful of companies racing to commercialize this optical storage breakthrough.

August 25, 2005
eWEEK: Researchers Chase Away Worms, Wi-Fi Bandits at Intel. The computer chip giant here at its Intel Developer Forum on Thursday discussed technology designed to head off computer worms and virus attacks in PCs, by stopping the agents before they can begin to spread and attack other systems.

August 29, 2005
Useit.Com: Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents. All these guidelines stem from the same underlying phenomenon: the non-Web documents are native PC formats. These formats have their own applications, each of which gives users a set of commands and navigation options that are completely different than the ones for browsing websites.

August 30, 2005
News.Com: Something fishy's going on. Bruce Schneier. This sounds great, but it's a double-edged sword. The same system that prevents worms and viruses from running on your computer might also stop you from using any legitimate software that your hardware or operating system vendor simply doesn't like.

August 31, 2005
NY Times: A Baby Step Toward Wi-Fi Photos. All this and more awaits the consumers who embrace the first fully functional wireless digital camera. Unfortunately, the Nikon P1 is not it. Incredibly, the P1 can't connect to the Internet at all, even when its Wi-Fi signal-strength indicator has more bars than a federal prison.

EE Times: Intel-led alliance stirs angst over future wireless spec. By working independently of the IEEE's 802.11n next-generation task group, Intel has angered task group members who accuse the Intel-led alliance of everything from co-opting the IEEE process to outright antitrust violations that could draw Federal Trade Commission scrutiny.