Another Way to Blog

By | November 22, 2011
6 Comments

I’m always trying to rethink what a blog is, and in particular what this blog is, and we’re now probably past the five year mark, so maybe it’s time to take stock. Here are five conclusions I’ve reached about how to Blog Thoughtfully:

  1. It’s no longer about feeding the beast. I’ve tried to post once a day, but I think the abundance of blogs nowadays makes a nonsense of that. People nowadays have so much to read they don’t want space filled up for the sake of it. (That’s what a newspaper is for.) Don’t be afraid to not post. No one unsubscribes from a feed because it’s silent for a few days; they unsubscribe because it’s too noisy.
  2. Comments are great, but so is silence. Loose Wire has never been about lots of comments (or, come to think of it, lots of readers) and sometimes I wonder whether I’d prefer lots of comments. Some blogs, the discussions in comments are better than the original post. But that’s not the only way to go. Some people aren’t just the commenting type, and that’s cool. The only readers aren’t the ones that comment; commenters aren’t the only people to write for.
  3. Forget link-love, link-bait and all that balarney. It’s great to be high on the rankings, and pointing to other people’s sites helps that, but ultimately it’s a disservice to the reader if those links aren’t incidental to the subject matter of the post. Respect the reader’s time and don’t post something if it’s just a back-scratching exercise.
  4. Blogs are people, but they shouldn’t be egos. I think blogs differ from publications in that they ooze the soul of the person(s) writing it and keeping it going, but that doesn’t mean letting the ego run free. So many posts I read nowadays on otherwise thoughtful blogs are all about what awards/coverage/junket the writer just experienced. Give me your brain, not your ego. Save that for your Twitter stream.
  5. Brevity is the friend of clarity. It doesn’t mean all posts should be short, but no writing has ever suffered from being edited down. If there’s a simpler and quicker way of saying what you want to say, say it. Which is probably a good place for me to stop.

And thanks, everyone, for reading anything I’ve written over the past five years. I have to say I really enjoyed it and don’t intend to stop. (And thanks to Dow Jones for not standing in my way when I asked permission back in 2002, or since.)

Tags:  ,

Cyberwar, Or Just a Taste?

By | November 22, 2011
1 Comment

Some interesting detail on the Estonian Cyberwar. This ain’t just any old attack. According to Jose Nazario, who works at ARBOR SERT, the attacks peaked a week ago, but aren’t over:

As for how long the attacks have lasted, quite a number of them last under an hour. However, when you think about how many attacks have occurred for some of the targets, this translates into a very long-lived attack. The longest attacks themselves were over 10 and a half hours long sustained, dealing a truly crushing blow to the endpoints.

There’s some older stuff here, from F-Secure, which shows that it’s not (just) a government initiative. And Dr Mils Hills, who works at the Civil Contingencies Secretariat of the UK’s Cabinet Office (a department of government responsible for supporting the prime minister and cabinet), feels that cyberwar may be too strong a term for something that he prefers to label ‘cyber anti-social behaviour’.

Indeed, what surprises him is that such a technologically advanced state — which uses electronic voting, ID cards and laptop-centric cabinet meetings — could so easily be hobbled by such a primitive form of attack, and what implications that holds:

What IS amazing is that a country so advanced in e-government and on-line commercial services has been so easily disrupted. What more sophisticated and painful things might also have already been done? What else does this indicate about e-security across (i) the accession countries to the EU; (ii) NATO and, of course, the EU itself?

Definitely true that this is probably just a little blip on the screen of what is possible, and what governments are capable of doing.

(Definition of Cyberwar from Wikipedia here.)

 

Tags: , , , ,

Russia Declares Cyberwar?

By | November 22, 2011
2 Comments
The Guardian reports on what some are suggesting may the first outbreak of official cyberwar between one country and another, after Russian hackers, official or not, have flooded Estonian websites with Denial of Service attacks (DDoS):

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

Without naming Russia, the Nato official said: “I won’t point fingers. But these were not things done by a few individuals.

 

“This clearly bore the hallmarks of something concerted. The Estonians are not alone with this problem. It really is a serious issue for the alliance as a whole.”

Art, the Internet and the Rise of Symbiosis

By | November 22, 2011
0 Comment
Great piece from the NYT on the decline of mystery and the rise of symbiosis for artists, who find there’s a living of sorts to be made by engaging with fans online and allowing the community that emerges to choose the direction their musical careers take — even to the point of how much to charge for their creations. But it leaves some doubts:

clipped from www.nytimes.com

“I vacillate so much on this,” Tad Kubler told me one evening in March. “I’m like, I want to keep some privacy, some sense of mystery. But I also want to have this intimacy with our fans. And I’m not sure you can have both.”

Anticipative Computing

By | November 22, 2011
1 Comment
Robert Vamosi of Webware quotes MIcrosoft’s research czar Craig Mundie as saying computers need to get smarter about what we do and use their CPU to do stuff before we sit down to work. I’m all for it, but shouldn’t we have already got here?

clipped from www.webware.com

Mundie says current software poorly utilizes the full CPU potential of any PC; most of the time our screensaver kicks in and performs no background operations. Mundie predicts new software on the PC will utilize the full potential, being capable of anticipating tasks performed frequently (such as downloading Web mail) and perhaps executing these before we sit down to the computer in the morning