really, you had to be there

But, Ralf Brown's pictures of my SCS day performance came out great.

Is 88.80.13.160 the new 09-f9-... ?

Remember the great Digg revolt of 2007, when takedown efforts for a key needed to decrypt HD-DVD led to numerous ways to publish or conceal said key? (I think my favorite was

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-bd
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-be
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-bf
[redacted]
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c1
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c2
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c3

but that's just me.) From Steven Bellovin via IP, the web site Wikileaks has been disabled due to a court order...by removing the site from the DNS registry. As Steven points out:

Not surprisingly, the NY Times article quoted the web site as noting the similarity of this case to the Pentagon Papers case. The Times also noted how ineffectual the censorship attempt actually was -- not only are there alternate names wikileaks.be, wikileaks.de, and wikileaks.cx -- but the site is still reachable via 88.80.13.160.

State Secret Abuses Come to a Boil

State Secret Abuses Come to a Boil - an interesting sidelight to my post below on asymmetric information is this story on how secrecy has been abused in the distant past by our government. Of course any abuses in the recent past would still be secret.

Two more papers out of the review tunnel

• Ramesh Nallapati and William W. Cohen (2008): Link-PLSA-LDA: A New Unsupervised Model for Topics and Influence of Blogs in ICWSM-2008.

To appear in April, probably after some minor revisions.

• Frank Lin and William W. Cohen (2008): The MultiRank Bootstrap Algorithm: SemiSupervised Political Blog Classification and Ranking Using SemiSupervised Link Classification in ICWSM-2008.

To appear in April, as a poster, in (I assume) abbreviated form.

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

Long ago, I remember reading a science fiction story where aliens nearly destroy the world by dumping devices that would copy anything - a book, a flashlight, a hamburger - given an original and a pile of sand (or any other raw matter). This doesn't actually wreck the world economy... in the story...but of course it's fiction. However, given how much of the expensive parts of the world is information, the premise is no longer that far-out.

Kevin Kelly gives an excellent analysis of why free information (or even free goods) doesn't mean the end of the world.