Yearly Archives: 2007

Links for 2007 07 05

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The “nature”al social network for researchers

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After reading this article on the Guardian introducing it as the Facebook for professors, postdocs and PhDers in the sciences, I decided to spend some minutes and creating an identity on Nature Network. Here is my profile on Nature Network.The goal is to get people from different institutions and different research fields to talk to one another about the thing they have in common: a love of science. Check the flash quick tour video.
The article quotes Frank Norman saying

One of the nice things is the absence of markers to indicate status. When you read a contribution, you don’t know whether it is from a professor or a student, you just judge it by whether it makes sense.

It is interesting how Guardian stresses this “democratic” aspect of the Web, very wikipedian, very everyone-is-an-expert. It obviously totally resonates with me. In fact, on the other hand of the scope

One lecturer, who does not want to be named, says the scientific community is concerned that Nature Network and other Facebook-style academic communications could be “dangerous” because comments are not peer-reviewed.

Interestingly the more everything we do becomes digital, the more it seems everyone is concerned in measuring it:

Dr Timo Hannay, director of web publishing at Nature Publishing Group, predicts that scientists who post comments, blogs and data from experiments on sites like Nature Network will eventually be allowed to count these as part of their research output. “There should be a way of measuring the impact of a scientist who posts comments on a site like Nature Network. These could be added to their publishing record”.

And Matt Brown adds

Our vision for Nature Network is that every scientist in the world will have a personal profile on the site. Likeminded people and potential collaborators could then be easily found through a tagging system. Ideas can be discussed in the forums. Who knows, many years from now, traditional activities such as writing an academic paper could be peer-reviewed online.

And the article closes with the usual oh-gosh-some-more-content-to-monitor information overload fear:

Some see it another way. “If sites like these can increase awareness of research and provide easier ways to forge collaborative links, that is good,” says Brown. “If they provide more text that needs to be read, digested and responded to, that might not be so good.

By the way, you can check my profile on Nature Network and, if you are in there as well and read this, connect to me, friend me, or do how-they-call-it-on-Nature to me. I’m waiting. Somehow.

UPDATE: I created a group called “Trust Research” on Nature. Join in.

New Fiat 500

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The new Fiat 500 is available! It was presented yesterday in Torino. I love this advertisement.

UPDATE Aug 19,2007. In order to make justice to the comments of Martina, I embed a mashup of the fiat ad. This is for the v-day: on September 8, 2007, Italians will say to Italian politicians “Enough is enough”. It will be an interesting day.

I think I’ll embed also a video from the recent history of Italy just as a reminder: April 30, 1993, Friday, 18.00. A mob gathered in largo Febo in front of the hotel Raphael waiting for Craxi. When he exits, people start throwing at him coins and other objects. Craxi was one of the biggest politicians in Italy and one of the biggest thieves in Italy.

Medieval christian politician and failed censorship

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UPDATE: the medieve tried to censor Luca Volonte’ in his domain lucavolonte.eu, but Luca Volonte’ is stronger than censorship and reappeared at luca-volonte.com. Once more, let us yell all together: Liberte’, Egalite’, Volonte’.
Luca Volonte’, a narrow minded Italian politician, leader of the Christian Democratic Party, tried to censor the videogame “Operation: Pedopriest” by MolleIndustria. Paradoxically the christians politicians are exploiting a law against pedophilia to ban a satirical game that point the finger to child abuses committed within the clergy. I understand Italy is the last stronghold of the medieval church but they are really passing the mark. Anyway the videogame is now available on many sites and even on Luca Volonte’ site. Liberte’, Egalite’, Volonte’.

Another randomly generated paper accepted in a Journal

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Scigen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations.
According to Scigen blog, the randomly generated article “Cooperative, Compact Algorithms for Randomized Algorithms” by Rohollah Mosallahnezhad of the Iran Institute of Technology was accepted for publication in the Applied Mathematics and Computation journal. You can check by yourself on the publisher site which admits it was accepted and now removed. What is even more sad is that the reviewer provided many corrections to be resolved without realizing that the paper was just 8 pages of randomly generated text, figures, graphs and citations. How depressing is that, eh?
You can generate a paper and check previous random papers accepted in conferences. But for even more fun, be sure not to miss the randomly generated presentation these crazy folks gave during one of these bogus conferences. They presented slides which they were never seen before, which incidentally I think it is a great exercise for a presenter, if you can make it over presenting slides that have no meaning and you have never seen before, nothing can stop you. And I really love the guy dressed up as Einstein with fake mustaches.

I’ll be at New Network Theory Conference since tomorrow

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I’m going to be at the New Network Theory Conference in Amsterdam from tomorrow until 1st July. Check the program, it is gorgeous. And if you are going to be there as well, it would be great to speak network a bit. Of course hospitality will be courtesy of Couchsurfing once more, and this is amazingly networky by itself.

Report of conference on e-Identity, social issues in social networking, trust and reputation.

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Past week I’ve been in Paris for the The European e-Identity Conference 2007 and ENISA Workshop
“Security Issues in Social Networking”. It has been very interesting.
There was a keynote by Kim Cameron, Microsoft’s chief identity architect. It has not been impressive, of course he is a good speaker and even funny, but he tried to make a pitch for Microsoft CardSpace. While he tried to be friendly and open stating more than once that he built it on gnu/linux, with php and mysql, I’m not impressed at all. I’m not an expert at all in identity but I bet that there are so many patents on Cardspace that Microsoft can control its evolution and use as it wishes.
On a general level I was very very surprised that in 2 days I heard nobody ever mentioning OpenID, probably because it is simple and mainly because it works and solves the issue it is devoted to solve. I guess lots of serious researchers have to consider it just a toy, we have to create things much more complicated otherwise how can we justify stellar budgets and years of … research? And what are we going to do later if we just find a simple solution that can be implemented in 1 week? This is a bit depressing I think.
Instead of simple solutions and discussions about what we could improve in OpenID, there were a lot of vendors basically saying “host all the identities of your firm, government, service in our servers and everything will work”. All of them with the same trivial techniques.
Well actually, I liked a lot the presentations of the workshop “Security Issues in Social Networking”. You can check the presentations. So, besides the many pitches (actually all of them during the second day when luckily I have to leave early to catch the flight, there were interesting talks and super cool people.

Alessandro Acquisti , Carnegie Mellon University, delighted us with great insights about “Imagined communities: awareness, information sharing and privacy: the Facebook case” (presentation). His research is in the economics of privacy and he revealed interesting facts about Facebook, for example, 89% of Facebook users reveale their real name. And 87% of CMU Facebook profiles reveale birthday, 51% reveale the address, 40% reveale their phone number (40%!). 61% of the posted images are suited for direct identification. Remember that this information will never disappear, it will stored forever in many computers (facebook servers, google servers, archive.org servers and … as the following discussion easily revealed, governments servers, secret agencies servers and probably many companies who can just afford to save everything and decide in future what to do with this information). There is an evident privacy risk of re-identification: 87% of US population is uniquely identified by {gender, ZIP, date of birth} (Sweeney, 2001), Facebook users that put this information up on their profile could link them up to outside, de-identified data sources
Facebook profiles often show high quality facial images, Images can be linked to de-identified profiles using face recognition. Some findings on Facebook: Non members rate privacy (concerns, worries, importance) statistically significantly (although only slightly) higher than members. Members deny they use Facebook for dating, however they state they think other members use it for dating. Majority agrees that the information other Facebook members reveal may create a privacy risk for them (mean Likert 4.92). They are significantly less concerned about their own privacy (mean Likert 3.60). Respondents trust the Facebook… more than they trust unconnected Facebook users. The survey about how much users know about Facebook’s privacy policy is interesting as well: “Facebook also collects information about you from other sources, such as newspapers and instant messaging services. This information is gathered regardless of your use of the Web Site.” 67% believe that is not the case. “We use the information about you that we have collected from other sources to supplement your profile unless you specify in your privacy settings that you do not want this to be done.” 70% believe that is not the case.

Another interesting presentation was presentation (pdf) “Security recommendations for social network communities” by Maz Nadjim of Rareface. He offered us six techniques for building and running safer social networking sites: Craft your guidelines, Build automated filters, Embrace your technology, Enlist your users, Make moderation actions visible, Moderation tools need love too. And he pointed us to their partner emoderation.com.

Other interesting presentations were “Social networking security issues for children” by Josephine Fraser of Childnet, “Implications of Social Networking behaviour for tomorrow’s citizens & workforce” by Mathieu Gorge of VigiTrust (I think he is the one who introduced that social networking sites are used by terrorists for recruting new members) and “Netlog – Experiences from a large-scale social networking application” by Lien Louwagie of Netlog (birth date is very often the secret question for getting back your forgotten bank password so it is not very sage to ask it and to show it on a social site). Thanks to this presentation I discovered Netlog, leader in Europe, multilanguage, to which I registered few minutes ago and, wow, there are thousands of people from Trento registered there, quite amazing the fact I missed it.

In the afternoon there was a great presentation by Tarvi Martens , National Certification Centre, Estonia about “Authentication in Estonia” (presentation in, warning, powerpoint). Estonia is surely the most tech-advanced country in Europe, they in fact call it E-stonia. Some facts: Population: 1.35M Internet usage: 56% Internet banking: 88% Mobile penetration: >100%. 1000+ Free Internet Access points. PKI penetration: >80%. Biggest national eID card roll-out in Europe. With your eID card you get an email address such as Forename.Surname@eesti.ee and a certificate for digital signature. You can login in banks with E-id card given by the state. You pay taxes online as well. And you can vote in election. They are rolling out the Mobile-ID, i.e. your ID is your mobile. With an ID card, you also have an OpenID and the state is your OpenID provider. During the coffee break I asked him how is it possible for me to get an Estonian ID card and the answer is that it is enough to work/study there for 3 months, I guess
this is one of my goals now, I would like to have a European government backed identity.
What I didn’t like about the conference was the dress code, can you imagine? There was a dress cose (casual smart or something like that, I don’t even know what this is and don’t bother to follow how other people tell me to dress). I had red trousers and an Electronic Frontier Foundation shirt while almost all the other people wear tie and suit, well I like to be different. And the EFF shirt was very useful, did I mention that there were many seller of biometric stuff for getting DNA information so that your identity can be checked by anyone anytime and anonymity is finally estirpated?
Last but not least I met Nicolas Debock, a guy who basically works as coolhunter (as in the Pattern Recognition novel by William Gibson) for La Poste, the french postal organization. His work is to track down what is trendy and to envision how La Poste can exploit it, embrace it and ultimately profit from it. We had 2 travel back from the hotel at the Charles De Gaulle airport to the center of Paris in which we share a lot of ideas about cool technologies but also alternative monetary systems, he is one of the founder of BarCampBank. This was really amazing. Actually he found the job by looking on the Web for “cool trends” or similar keywords, I think I need to do the same and to propose a similar position to the Italian postal organization, we’ll see.
What I also liked about the workshop is that after the workshop I’ve been invited to join a virtual group which is writing a collective paper about “Security of reputation and web-of-trust authentication systems”. The purpose of the exercise is to give relevant advice on important trends and threats to policy and decision makers in Europe. Of course I’ll try to push the usual mantra “trust is subjective, don’t squash controversial opinions and minorities but consider them opportunities” and such. I actually like the fact I can put in some way my activity at service of the European community, of course I’m not that naive to think that it will be really read by anybody or high level politicians and influence decisions but it is still better than nothing.
The last part of this long post (did I write somewhere that these posts are useful to me as memory of what the event was like, what I learned and how I felt? Then if this is useful to someone else as well, this is better but such a long post is primarily for me so that in one year I come back and I see what I was thinking and I learnt) is about the amazing hospitality I got via CouchSurfing.
Since the conference was at the CDG airport I tried to find something close to it and not in Paris. And in fact I was hosted by Heloïse et Laurent in Meaux. They were uber-kind! We met in the center of Paris and they offered to have a tour of Paris by car (never had it, and the traffic doesn’t seem too bad). And then they offered to bring me from their house to the conference hotel every morning, wow, amazing really! The second day we met in the center of Paris and we went to a concert of Mademoiselle Ka in a huge club in Pigalle and then to wander in a sexy shop (I never had as well!). Well they were amazing and they are also musicians (Heloïse has 906 friend on MySpace and she sings in the Cartel Couture that is basically the french Scissor Sisters, the genre is, uhm, pop punk sexy et eurodance déviante, but they also have a group together in which Laurent plays drums.
Well, just to conclude, the people I met via Couchsurfing surprise every time more. Every time I think this is the most amazing thing and then something overtakes this. Amazing. Really.

Wikipedia trust network

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I just discovered that there is (was?) a proposal for implementing a trust network in Wikipedia.
The proposal originated from a posting of Jimbo Wales himself on a mailing list in February 2004.
Some exerpts from the Wikipedia article follow:

The proposed system has the three key ideas: (1) giving users a formal way of declaring their confidence in other users, (2) a way of seeing which users have declared their trust of a particular user, and (3) the resulting structure of trust-relationships formed between all users.
It provides an additional piece of information that may be useful when coming across another user for the first time. The Wikipedia user base is so large that two well-established and respected editors, concentrating on different areas of Wikipedia, may have no contact between each other for some time. Reading an editor’s user page, browsing through their contributions, and reading the threads in their talk are valuable but time-consuming methods of getting to know someone. Discovering that several reputable users, or users that you have particular regard for, have expressed their trust in an editor is a strong indicator of that editor’s value to Wikipedia. However, the sheer number of editors who trust a user should not be taken as a clear measurement of that user’s trustworthiness: the fact that a user is trusted by dozens of suspected sockpuppets would only harm their reputation.
There are a variety of reasons to express trust in another user: you may have worked together on a proposal or article, reviewed many of their edits in articles on your watchlist, or know them personally. Liking another user should not generally be enough; trusting somebody requires being confident that their contributions are civil, constructive and of generally high quality.

Of course distrust is a tough topic as usual.

Additionally, it would be wise to consider carefully any thoughts of writing explicit statements of distrust, bearing in mind the no personal attacks policy.

It is important to remember that the trust network is not a popularity contest, and so there is no need to actively seek out declarations of trust. The fact that another user has not made a declaration of trust in your favour is by no means a declaration of distrust.

And which trust metric is most suited is tackled as well:

The network itself can be analysed using a trust metric to rate individual users. There are very many different ways to do this, which will produce quite different results, and it is important to note that no metric is endorsed by this proposal.
The simplest trust metric is to count the number of users who trust the rated user, but this system is vulnerable to attack (for instance, the use of sockpuppet accounts to trust oneself).
Another is to count how many links there are in the chain of trust between yourself and another user: if I trust A, who trusts B, who trusts C, and this is the shortest path from myself to C, then C is three links away from me. I might decide that I explicitly trust anybody one link away from me, and implicitly trust anybody up to three links away. This is very different to the previous case: the measurement is personal, not absolute, and will not be affected by sock puppetry.

Since “who trusts you?” is more important than “how many people trust you?” there is little point in creating sock puppets to declare trust in yourself.

The original post of Jimbo is precious as well.

But most would adopt a personal policy of giving mostly positives or abstaining, reserving negatives for worst case scenarios.
Newcomers would have no rating at all, obviously. Very prominent people would have lots of ratings, mostly positive I would have to assume. I would probably have 95% positive rating, but not perfect, since beloved though I am and obviously deserve to be (*wink*), I am a target.
We’d likely see perfect positive ratings for people like Michael Hardy, who keeps his nose to the grindstone editing topics that aren’t controversial, and who stays out of internal politics almost
completely as far as I know.
Some sysops have taken enormous and weighty responsibilities on themselves to do important but controversial work like VfD or banning trolls or mediating disputes or editing articles about the Middle East. We’d naturally expect them to get mixed reviews, but we might be surprised… lots of people would give them positive ratings just for doing those jobs, acknowledging the difficulty and risk involved.

And then Jimbo lists advantages and disadvantages, very interesting!

Well, I’m phauly on Wikipedia, I think you should trust me.

Fact: the entire Internet could be served from Google machines

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This is probably obvious to you but I discussed this with some friends recently and they seemed to not have considered the eventuality so I thought I might post it here as well.
Straight to the point: it is already technically possible for Google to host the entire Internet and serve it from their machines.

Google already offers an email service (2 Gigabytes of emails they mantain on their servers and serve it from their machines). Google already mantains a copy of (almost) the entire Web (and they serve it from their machines, through their Web cache service). While not all the people in the world at the moment use them, they surely can scale them to all the people of the world; in short they can host all the email boxes and all the Web sites and serve them from their machines.
Just imagine what will happen if tomorrow Google announces that you can register a domain for free with Google and can use their hosted services (hosted email, blog and web page). They can afford the cost of domain registration. Actually, if they are able to get all the domains in the world, they can even outrule and substitute the ICANN (the fact I agree to pay some organization for being in control of paolomassa.com means I agree with a social-technical convention, involving domain names and how they can be found in a decentralized system; social-technical conventions can be changed of course. But I’m digressing.)
95% of the people will prefer to have everything working and for free from Google instead of investing a lot of time and money in setting up servers, DNS, backups, replication, etc. There will be no more need for email servers or web servers, basically all the servers in Internet will be Google ones, our computers will just be dumb terminals able to run a Web browser (the free software Firefox probably). We will move from a network of computers connectig each other (decentralized) to a star topology (centralized) with all the dumb terminals connected to Google central server. Google will be able to even change HTTP since all the servers will be theirs. Actually there will be no more need for the protocols I studied at the University (SMTP, HTTP, FTP, GOPHER, NNTP): all emails will move from Google machines to other Google machines (so they will be able for instance to completely change the protocol, I consider spam a feature and not a bug of a decentralized system but, if you don’t, in this way Google will be able to stop spam as well), all web sites will be served by Google machines, the only protocol remaining us would be anything able to send data to our Web browser and it could be anything.

I’m not arguing that Google will do it soon or that it is in their best interest, now. But it might be and in few years there might even be more companies technically able to host (and take control) of the entire Internet. On a related note, it is interesting to mull over how much would be worth such a company, the recipient and holder of all the knowledge created by anyone in the world.
So would this be good for the world? Of course I think not, it will be the end of the world of ends and of innovation happening on the edges. And when there is no more concurrency and a single point of failure, it will be no more in Google’s interest to stand by their “don’t be evil” motto but they will have to stand by the interests of their shareholders and the governments which will easily hunt for information in one single place.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, what if you can have all the people of the world directly creating this information in your hard disks? This is technically possible today, will it happen? Time will tell.