Highly recommended read
I am not one to post book reviews on my blog, but given how much I enjoyed this book and seeing how the author self-published it, I am going to make an exception. G33k Mafia is an incredibly fun high-tech caper novel set in present time on the West coast. It tracks the adventures of a group of high tech criminals that survive off the grid (fake identities, no taxes, etc.) and use modern technology and ingenuity to plot small, but profitable capers. A recently fired game developer is sucked into their world and falls in love with the de-facto leader and the lifestyle. I think Dakan nails the off-the-grid subculture and certainly captures the excitement and anticipation of the groups exploits. I'm recommending it to all my techie friends.
Warren Ellis to write on SL for Newsweek...
“Second Life is not only the biggest digital art installation in the world, but potentially the most radical shift yet in the way communities are formed online, and possibly also the germ of the next great operating system,” Ellis said. “It’s not only a place where people get as strange as they can, but an incubator for the future.” Link ---->
They don't have bodies, but they do leave footprints...
I am not sure the math isn't a little flawed, but an interesting, if not brilliant analysis:
If there are on average between 10,000 and 15,000 avatars "living" in Second Life at any point, that means the world has a population of about 12,500. Supporting those 12,500 avatars requires 4,000 servers as well as the 12,500 PCs the avatars' physical alter egos are using. Conservatively, a PC consumes 120 watts and a server consumes 200 watts. Throw in another 50 watts per server for data-center air conditioning. So, on a daily basis, overall Second Life power consumption equals... 60,000 kilowatt-hours....
Which, annualized, gives us [an average avatar consumption of] 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year..... [T]he average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.
Which means, in turn, that avatars aren't quite as intangible as they seem. They don't have bodies, but they do leave footprints. Link--->
End of an Era
I've been reading Bruce Sterling in Wired magazine since their first issue. Over a few beers in the early 90's he pushed my analytical focus in a few very cool directions, for which I have always been grateful. I'll miss reading his articles in Wired, but his blog is still on my daily RSS sync.
One upshot is that futurism itself has no future. Once confined to an elite group, the tools and techniques of prognostication are all widely available. As for pundits: The world used to be full of workaday journalists, with just a thin sprinkling of opinion mongers. Now a TypePad account is a license to deliver nose-to-the-pavement perspective with an attitude. The very word futurism is old-fashioned, way too 1960s. Today's Internet-savvy futurist is more likely to describe himself as a strategy consultant or venture capital researcher. That development doesn't surprise me. Frankly, I saw it coming.
Another prediction of mine has come true: I've always known that one day I'd write my last column for Wired. You're reading it now. I'll continue to report my peregrinations via my blog at www.wired.com, where I'll continue to focus on harbingers of things to come.
As a futurist, I've often licked my chops over rather grim possibilities. But my lasting fondness for the dark side is a personal taste, not an analysis. I'm frequently surprised, and when I consider the biggest surprises, I'm heartened that they were mostly positive. The Internet, for instance, crawled out of a dank atomic fallout shelter to become the Mardi Gras parade of my generation. It was not a bolt of destructive lightning; it was the sun breaking through the clouds. Link
Second Life featured in the Economist
Including a rather interesting quote from Mitch Kapor:
It promises to be “disruptive”, says Mitch Kapor, the inventor of the Lotus spreadsheet that played a big role in the personal-computer revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. He is now chairman of Linden Lab. To him, Second Life is comparable to both the PC and the internet itself, which started as something “quirky” for geeks, and then entered and transformed mainstream society. “Spending part of your day in a virtual world will become commonplace” and “profoundly normal,” says Mr Kapor. Ultimately, he thinks, Second Life will “displace both desktop computing” and other two-dimensional “user interfaces”. As “a hothouse of innovation and experiment,” he says, Second Life may even “accelerate the social evolution of humanity.”
You can read the full article here.
Targeted malicious code from devest@terrorism.com!
I am not sure whether to be worried or flattered, but it appears that someone is going through the trouble of creating targeted malicious code attacks by spoofing an email from me. They've even gone so far as to use the correct signature, return phone numbers, and to pick a topic that i am likely to actually send an email on. The only issue is that they've spelled my name wrong...probably to prevent any bounces from coming to me and alterting me. The message looks like this:
From: Matt Devest
Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 09:05:27 -0600
To: < ****@terrorism.com>
Subject: How China Steals US Military Secrets !Dear,
FYI-
http://www.usa.tmsasia.com/collections/prc/How_China_Steals_US_Military_Secr
ets.htmlMatt Devest
CEO
Terrorism Research Center, Inc.
Tel: (703)***-****
Email: Devest@terrorism.com
Obviously, if you get this message, don't click on the attachment. My good friend Eric took a look at the target web page and provided this assessment:
Basically, the link is for a page that's just javascript. What's interesting is that it uses the javascript 'unescape' function to set values to a couple vars. the unescape function takes what looks like gibberish and when unescaped, is plain javascript code. The last part of the initial script does an 'eval' on the variable, which runs the code. What the code does is run another set of javascript which was previously decoded and attempts to use a VERY new IE vulnerability to cause a buffer overflow and then allows running any program as administrator on the box. More details on the actual exploit can be found at:
http://www.us-cert.gov/current/index.html#exwbfldr
As such, only Windows users running IE 6 are vulnerable to this 'link'. From what I can find on the Microsoft website, it looks like this vulnerability might only apply to Windows 2003 Server, but that remains unclear. Microsoft did indicate they would have an update released by October 10.
In summary, whoever did this cleverly crafted email wanted to maximize his/her chances of getting a 'hit'. The exploit is considered a 0-Day and the way it was escaped took sometime to sort through and decode. If it wasn't for the misspelled Devost, it could almost be considered 'perfect'...
For what it's worth, the email came directly from a server in Utah.
IP: 205.118.75.84
OrgName: Utah Educational Network
OrgID: UEN-1
Address: 101 Wasatch Drive, Rm 215
City: Salt Lake City
StateProv: UT
PostalCode: 84112
Country: USProbably just a poorly patched server that was hacked and used as a jump-point...