I attended this panell discussion on Internet security yesterday. By far, the most interesting thing about the panell was Dave Del Torto of CryptoRights Foundation. He is among the handful of guys out there who are trying to develop tools that may protect activists online. Dave has a brilliant mind, is incredibly knowledgable about security and loves talking about it. He also has, as he describes it a 'highly educated paranoia' about the potential abuse of technology. All these make him a great talker. I haven't had so much fun listening to someone for a while.
He pointed me to 'Your 802.11 network has no clothes'. If you are interested in the emerging wireless standards and worry about security, this is essential reading.
(About his website ..umm..well..he said its going to get better soon).
Packing away your books is a slightly melancholy exercise. It is hard to decide which are the ones you are going to keep on your shelves and which are the ones going to be locked away for quite some time. You (or at least I) also can no longer avoid recognizing the increasing number of 'Important' books that have been bought and not read.
I felt slightly foolish browsing through the business bestsellers from the 1999-2000 time frame championing the dawn of a new era. I think 'Information Rules' is one of the most brilliant books in that genre that came out in the last few years. 'Blown to bits' is also very good, if slightly dizzy. But a lot of authors produced stuff that is now almost redundant.
I blew way too much money in books. The new motto in my life is, love thy library. Hopefully, if and when I start making decent money again, the motto will not change.
We are busy packing with gusto. Moving house at the end of stuff. It is amazing the amount of stuff we accumulated in only a few months. And how much it hurts to let them go.
I know this is all over the net. But I simply can't resist this. From 'Washington Post', Nixon, holding forth on homosexuality:
"You know what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. ....Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags. . . . You know what happened to the popes? It's all right that popes were laying the nuns. ....That's been going on for years, centuries, but when the popes, when the Catholic Church went to hell in, I don't know, three or four centuries ago, it was homosexual. . . . Now, that's what happened to Britain, it happened earlier to France. And let's look at the strong societies. The Russians. Goddamn it, they root them out, they don't let 'em hang around at all. You know what I mean? I don't know what they do with them. ....Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no. Not if they can catch it, they send them up. You see, homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: These are the enemies of strong societies. That's why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing it. They're trying to destroy us."
Vincent Laforet's website has some very good photographs. He is a staff photographer on NYT. The website is not very well designed. But dont get put off by that. He also has some of the best photography links that I have seen recently.
Google has been sending a fair amount of traffic to my Jan 25's post on Anderson Consulting's role in the Enron affair. I kinda feel I owe them an update of sorts.
NYT has by far the best coverage on the subject. Its yesterday's story on why the government chose to indict Anderson makes interesting reading. While I relate to the employee indignation inside Anderson, I think the accounting firms had it coming for some time. I feel it would be really unfortunate if the indictment puts AC out of business. What is really called for is far reaching structural reforms. Of course, thats' one beast no one probably wants to touch. Mr. Harvey Pitt's (the current SEC chair) clientale (via mefi) and choice of cases before he joined SEC leaves one with the feeling that structural reform of accounting industry may not be his highest priority.
Incidentally, NYT today outlined the measures that Volcker proposed and what AC is doing about it. They are not very different from Levitt has been trying to do industrywide when he was running SEC.
For those who live in the Bay area, Bayimproviser's Calendar is a great resource for discovering independent live music acts. I got there via KZSU's resource page which has all sorts of interesting links just waiting to be explored.
I have this habit of being intensely obsessed with something for some time and then losing interest in it for a long time. But I was thinking today of interests that have stayed with me - books, travel, photography, travel, politics, travel, Internet technology. It is a good think that I work in the tech sector. But the other stuff eats up way too much of my time. I have been trying very hard over the last few weeks to discipline myself and to focus completely on functional reading and work. Because if there has ever been a time when I needed to, this is it. I think I am getting there. This doesnt mean there wont be updates on the weblog. I am just going to be more structured and focused about how I spend my time.
On a different note: World Press Photo awards have been announced. You must go and check them out.
Photography links:
'With these hands' is an interesting site that chronicles the lives of four very different farming families through photos and audio commentary. I hate it when I dont have control over how I want to view images. But otherwise its good site to browse through.
PDN has profiled 30 emerging photographers in its website. There are some amazing photographs out there. And some great links. I am still going through them.
Raffaele Ciriello was killed by Machine gun fire by Israeli troops in Ramallah (via mefi). I didn't know his name. But I knew of 'Postcards From Hell', a site created by him. You have to go see the site (I linked to an archived version, the actual site is down) to realize why its such a great loss for humanity.
I would be out of circulation for the rest of this week too. I would try to pop in and update the weblog now and then. But mostly there wont be any new entry this week:(.
Have a good week everybody.
Two photogalleries about Kashmir in camera works (Washington Post). Without getting into a discourse on the subject, it does a very good job of showing you what is going on in there.
The plight of the French photo agencies seems to have been largely ignored by the press here. ?Le photojournalisme agonise' (in French) chronicles the layoff and the other problems at three of the most legendary French photo agencies Sygma, Gamma and Sippa. (A bad English translation is available here). The French press and the Sygma photographers are of course blaming Bill Gates, big business, American greed at al. But the decline of the great photojournalism agencies seem to be a worldwide phenomenon. Russell Miller pointed out in 'Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History' , how increasingly hard it has been for photoagencies to stay sustainable doing just journalism. I would be curious to know whether there are photo agencies out there that are making money doing great photojournalism work.
(PDN has good coverage of this in their print edition)
On Freedom of expression:
Ted Rall's rather tasteless cartoon on '9/11 widows' created a controvery. New York Times pulled it off its site. People have been quite upset pretty much all round. John Scalzi seems to be the only well known writer who defended Rall's position in his column. (Scalzi has some great writing in that site, worth exploring).
Incidentally, Rall antagonized a lot of people some time back too by taking on Art Spiegelman, The doyen of the cartoon world in New York. It precipitated a very nasty and very public legal brawal with Danny Hellman, another cartoonist (Hellman's take here and Rall's here). Rall doesnt appear to be a very pleasant guy. I went through some of his cartoons. Most of the time, he isn't very funny. He seems to use cartoons as a tool for social commentary. But I do feel that he has every right to publish bad cartoons so long as someone is ready to publish them. Similarly, NYT has the editorial right to take these off their site if they offends their sensibilities. No big deal there.
In another totally unrelated event, Arundhati Roy, the Pulitzer prize winning author was jailed for a day and fined Rs. 2000 on contempt of court charges in India. Yesterday, in Mefi, I kind of got blinded on the related issue of the Sardar Sarovar Dam controversy and my own views on Arundhati Roy's politics. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that this has less to do with Arundhati Roy and more to do with her right to express her opinion however strident, theatrical or attention grabbing those opinions may be.
This is one cliche that is worth repeating again and again and again: Freedom of speech is one of the most sacred and inalienable rights in any democracy and we should all go out of our way to preserve it.
(Most of the links are derived from mefi. I dont feel very good about that. But I spent whatever spare time I got yesterday in mefi. So, no surprises there).
PS: My today's presentation got cancelled. All that hard work ......
Talking of music: This application indexes mp3 samples from Philip Glass compositions. The interface takes some getting used to, but its cool enough to spend a little time learning it. (via Mefi)
I love good female singer-songwriters. Most of my friends tend to like edgier music or go for triphop, ambient, Jazz etc. I like that stuff too. But what moves me is strong vocalists, powerful lyrics and rock. I think I jive to the conviction in the voice, the sound of words rolling off rather than to the meaning per se. For the longest time, I was totally into Thick As A Brick before I checked out the lyrics. Felt a little foolish later.
Unfortunately, as singers get famous the edge seems to go off. For me, nothing that Tori Amos ever did afterwards beats the impact of 'The Little Earthquakes'. I went to this Ani DiFranco concert in Veil last year and felt sad when she asked rather forlornly, 'I haven't been producing great stuff lately, have I'?
One musician whose voice, lyrics, quality of music actually got better with time is Marianne Faithful. Listening to 'Vagabond Ways' for the first time, I got goose pimples. You have to really really live and die and live again to be able to do a song like that.
The singer-songwriter that I have the most respect for is Sinead O'Connor (I am not talking about her politics). If she had done only 'The Lion and the cobra' and nothing else, I would still be in awe of her. Its a little uneven at places. But its a great album to drive to. I was browsing through the recently published 'Q's 100 best rock photographs' (a small gallery from the collection is available here) and ran into Sinead O'Connor's photograph there. It really captures her spirit. (I wish I could point to it somewhere on the net. But it doesnt appear to be available online). This was shot thankfully before the shaved head, but after she has caused such a huge uproar after tearing the pope's photograph onstage. So, by then she knew all about the mortality of public adoration. It is a good photograph. Its a good book to browse through too - if you like rock photographs.
(By the way, I listen to Live365 for discovering new music. If you haven't tried it before, you should check it out. The advertisements are annoying, but I don?t grudge them whatever little money they make through that)