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It explains how to store personal information so it can be used correctly. http://wayner.org/node/46

Yup. Google is sending O'Reilly and No Starch searchers to the torrent sites. http://wayner.org/node/80

It looks like O'Reilly and No Starch-- two sites that went dark-- get to watch Google send the traffic to the torrent sites. http://wayner.org/node/80

Or read the original source: _Disappearing Cryptography_.

http://www.wayner.org/node/13

You can also use the software to hide information in the order of a list:

http://www.wayner.org/node/17

Or even in the interior letters of a word:

http://www.wayner.org/node/14

Or read the original source: _Disappearing Cryptography_.

http://www.wayner.org/node/13

You can also use the software to hide information in the order of a list:

http://www.wayner.org/node/17

Or even in the interior letters of a word:

http://www.wayner.org/node/14

Or read the original source: _Disappearing Cryptography_.

http://www.wayner.org/node/13

You can also use the software to hide information in the order of a list:

http://www.wayner.org/node/17

Or even in the interior letters of a word:

http://www.wayner.org/node/14

Several years ago, I was thinking in the same general vein and decided to experiment with an Invention Disclosure . I wonder how Apple structured their patents-- if they did-- because it's a pretty simple idea. I'm surprised that more cell phones haven't implemented it. Maybe they have. Does anyone know if others are experimenting with it too?

This one is filled with open source images and written in jQTouch so it doesn't need the App Store: http://www.wayner.org/node/69

Let me first thank everyone who's submitted an article to Slashdot with a link to something I've written. The comments are almost always a great gift and I look forward to reading most of what people write, especially the ones who RTFA.

My only request is for everyone to be open to new ways of paying for the synthesis of information. It is very difficult for humans to compete with the robot link farms and the casual content created on places like Facebook. If we want people to synthesize we have to find some way to come together as a society and fund them.

I realize that it's attractive to look at the almost non-existent distribution costs of digital content and imagine a world where information can be completely free, but this avoids dealing with the costs of creating it in the first place. We need to find a good way for everyone who consumes content to effectively share the costs of creating it. If we don't, the information ecosystem will collapse.

Please be open to the writers and publishers who are going to try out more mechanisms for distributing the costs among the consumers. Try them out and reward the ones that deliver something of value. Ignore the ones that aren't worth your time. But please don't dismiss them out of hand.

Finally, I want to point out a piece I've written about some of the downsides of the free ecosystem for information. Perhaps this might suggest that there are some advantages in embracing a paywall, at least occasionally.

http://www.wayner.org/node/67

I took up Cory's offer and created an iPhone version of _Makers_:

http://www.wayner.org/node/66

Please send along any comments about the interface.

This is the major problem with the free-only ecology. A friend of mine sat me down when I first started writing a book and explained that it was a very different process than writing a long, long magazine article. The newspapers and magazines, he explained, have two loyalties: the subscribers and the advertisers. Both pay the bills. The job for a newspaper or magazine writer is to attract the kind of audience that will make the advertisers happy.
A book, however, is sold directly to the reader. The writer's loyalty is to the audience first and last. There's no complicated dance with an advertiser. That's why books continue to be the preferred ways for someone who really has a strong message to deliver. It's a medium built for Anne Coulters, the Dan Browns and the Popes. There's no editorial hand wringing or demands for "balance" to get in the way. There's a very tight feedback loop.
The free information ecology is the exact opposite. The same picky consumer who could make book authors dance has very little leverage over the free ecology. The free economy can only be dominated by those who get their rent money from other sources. Sometimes this won't affect their writing, but many times it will. The problem is that the free ecology doesn't have the feedback loop. The reader doesn't have the same leverage with the creator. Sometimes it may work out well, but in most cases, the creator will take care of the one who pays the bills first. It's just how the world has to work.

This is much too extreme. There are many good examples of useful data that is for almost all intents and purposes anonymous. Consider the example of anonymous lending libraries from my book, Translucent Databases.

The simplest version just pushes the book title through a one-way function. The more complex version also hides the name in a similar way.

Can the anonymity be stripped away? There are coincidences and connections as Sweeney's examples and the Netflix examples show, but they can be fought by adding some salt/nonce to the one-way function. We can also add passwords.

There are so many different ways to add bits of complexity to the results that there are many tradeoffs we can make between effective privacy and the complexity of using the systems. I think it's good to keep the weaknesses in mind, but I think it's more of a feasible engineering problem than something that should be dismissed out of hand. (The law review piece is also worth reading in its entirety because it's more concerned with the legal issues created by the existence of privacy-enhanced databases. It would be simpler for some issues if they didn't exist and so it helps to argue seriously.)

I think the URL should work on Android because it's also a webkit phone.

http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/webkit/

This is the same author once again using slashdot to advertise one of his books, by blaming someone else for destroying it. First he was whining that pirates were sharing his book on the internet (dubious at best that very many were even interested in downloading it in the first place); now he's whining that Apple won't distribute his book in a cheesy UI software that he wrote without following Apple's guidelines (software that appears useless for anything other than reading his book). Forgive me for thinking it looks an awful lot like he intentionally violated Apple's rules to get the software rejected from the App store so he could use slashdot to plug a book about free software that's almost a decade old -- something people otherwise probably wouldn't go looking for on the App store in the first place.

By the way, according to this page, the book is already available for free on the App store. Is there a compelling reason the store should have copies of this book in two different display formats?

Yes, I did consider that and I may still follow that route in the future. But I like to experiment with new platforms and the iPhone has been one of the shiniest ones around. So I wanted to code it myself.

While I can see why you wouldn't want another app cluttering the springboard, I don't mind it. I picked up a number of books from other devs and liked the experience. So I figured I would go ahead.

Also, you'll notice, for instance, that the book has been available from SiSU archive for some time. http://www.wayner.org/node/5 So that's sort of a solved problem. :-) Not that it can't be revisited.

If you read deeper, you'll find the answers to some of your questions. First, the AppStore has proven to be worthless for driving any interest in my books. You can't even find the book by typing the name of the book into the search field. It doesn't help to add quotes around the name. You get other apps with odd names. Don't ask me what's going on.

Second, this isn't about free advertising. I paid Apple to be included in their dev program. You can't even submit free apps without paying.

There's been a healthy debate about the best ways to distribute books for the platform. I like many of the readers. They offer more features than I was able to hack together. But the readers add another layer between the author and the user. They deserve to be compensated. I'll probably experiment with them in the future too. But this was all about experimenting with the AppStore.

Finally, I did build an HTML version and it works reasonable well. You can find it here:

      http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/webkit/

But it has limitations too. The marked up version of the book is more than a megabyte. Anyone can read it on their iPhone by hitting this URL. But the caching isn't great and they may need to reload it. The performance is much better as a direct App.

In any case, I still think that iPhone users and iPhone developers should be able to find each other without waiting for Apple's clearly overburdened team to approve the interaction. That makes a good platform.

Oh, I'm sure that this may work for a short window of time when it's new and hypeworthy, but don't think it's a sustainable model for most of the authors. It's only been said to work for fiction and even then I'm not sure it's really worked. There's no way to do any

  Nor do I think it's something that really helps the audience. See my suggestions toward the bottom of this about the difference between free and paid information:

http://www.wayner.org/talks/gtalk.html

And here is what the author thinks of updating taken from his own blog "I can't justify putting any time into creating another draft unless I'm going to earn something back." http://www.wayner.org/node/55 I'd say this fits exactly the phrase, "Publish or perish." The author in this case has clearly chosen to perish.

Okay, maybe they're not perfect, but for the record I searched out the guy who complained about the errors on Amazon. Then I asked him to help me correct the errors. All of the errors that I've heard about are right here .

While I think everyone has a right to an opinion, I was very disappointed that the guy couldn't point out something really boneheaded given the tone of his comment.

I continue to offer financial rewards to the first person to report errors in my book. There's a printed offer in the front of each book. I circulate new rewards before I print new versions. I pay them and I haven't had to pay very many.

I do this with my book Free for All . It's a great success if you measure success by the number of people who read my work. But it's contributed zero to my income since I released it in electronic form. No one asks if they can buy printed versions.

I took a look at that page, and thought the book looked interesting. I saw the price, decided "I'd buy that to support the author", and then was stopped dead by the notice at the bottom stating, "Out of Stock".

I do this with my book Free for All . It's a great success if you measure success by the number of people who read my work. But it's contributed zero to my income since I released it in electronic form. No one asks if they can buy printed versions.

There is a slight way to measure the effect. Used versions trade on Amazon and they've stayed at roughly the same price.

BTW, I've read the electronic version on a Palm and it's very easy to read. This may have been a viable strategy during the TRS-80 years, but not during the iPhone years. I wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone has better resolution than some of the sketchy laser printers I've seen.

This is a great challenge and an active area of research for some time. Many researchers would like to build databases that protect the users without creating some huge pile of aggregated personal information.

Encrypting the data at the client is a good solution. I've posted several good case studies from my book, Translucent Databases .

Here's what I wrote for a library and here's a case study of helping an online store.

Let me know if you have questions or suggestions.

This is a great challenge and an active area of research for some time. Many researchers would like to build databases that protect the users without creating some huge pile of aggregated personal information.

Encrypting the data at the client is a good solution. I've posted several good case studies from my book, Translucent Databases .

Here's what I wrote for a library and here's a case study of helping an online store.

Let me know if you have questions or suggestions.

For more information, you can find the Table of Contents, FAQ and a few other case studies at my site.

The Third edition of the book just came out. I think Amazon just got their copies from the printer.

I've always liked the way to hide information in a list of things. Peter Wayner wrote a Java thingee that starts with a list of top disco songs. Talk about ambiguous. Any order would make sense. But you can use any list. Here's my favorites: Barry White: Barry White's Greatest Hits (20th Century, 1975) KC & The Sunshine Band: KC & The Sunshine Band (TK, 1975) Gregg Diamond Bionic Boogie: Hot Butterfly (Polydor, 1978) The Jimmy Castor Bunch: Butt Of Course (Atlantic, 1974) Silver Convention: Save Me (Midland International, 1975) Voyage: Voyage; Fly Away (Marlin, 1978) First Choice: Delusions (Gold Mind, 1977) Beautiful Bend: Beautiful Bend (Marlin, 1978) Candi Staton: Young Hearts Run Free (Warner Bros., 1976) Loleatta Holloway: Loleatta (Gold Mind/Salsoul, 1976) Trammps: The Trammps (Golden Fleece/CBS, 1975) Giorgio Moroder: From Here to Eternity (Casablanca, 1985) Cerrone: Love In C Minor (Cotillion, 1977) Santa Esmeralda: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (Casablanca, 1977) Chic: Chic (Atlantic, 1977) Taana Gardner: Taana Gardner (West End, 1979) LaBelle: Nightbirds (Epic, 1974) B.T. Express: Do It ('Til You're Satisfied) (Roadshow, 1974) Salsoul Orchestra: The Salsoul Orchestra (Salsoul, 1975) Michael Zager Band: Let's All Chant (Private Stock, 1977) Donna Summer: The Donna Summer Anthology (Casablanca/Chronicles, 1993) Linda Clifford: If My Friends Could See Me Now (Curtom, 1978) Direct Current: Direct Current (TEC Records, 1979) Cloud One: Atmosphere Strutt (P&P, 1976) Gloria Gaynor: Never Can Say Goodbye (MGM, 1975) Kano: Kano (Emergency, 1980) France Joli: France Joli (Prelude, 1979) Village People: Village People (Casablanca, 1977) Diana Ross: The Boss (Motown, 1979) Tantra: The Double Album (Importe/12, 1980) Cerrone: Cerrone 3 - Supernature (Cotillion, 1978) Hamilton Bohannon: Summertime Groove (Mercury, 1978) Love And Kisses: Love And Kisses (Casablanca, 1977) Ashford & Simpson: So So Satisfied; Send It (Warner Bros., 1977) Isaac Hayes: Chocolate Chip (HBS, 1975) Love Unlimited: Under The Influence Of . . . (20th Century, 1973) Disco-Tex & The Sex-O-Lettes: Disco Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes (Chelsea, 1975) Kool & The Gang: Wild And Peaceful (De-Lite, 1973) Sister Sledge: We Are Family (Cotillion, 1979) Sylvester: Step II (Fantasy, 1978) Change: The Glow Of Love (Warner Bros./RFC, 1980) Sister Sledge: Circle Of Love (Cotillion, 1975) Grace Jones: Portfolio (Island, 1977)

I've used LaTeX (specifically TeXShop) lately for my latest books ( Translucent Databases , Disappearing Cryptography , and Policing Online Games . It does a remarkably good job with handling equations and it's easy to understand --- if you think like a programmer. You can just insert macro codes whenever you feel and you can also redefine the markup language whenever it strikes your fancy.

That being said, it takes some time to understand because errors in one section can trigger error messages in very different places. You need to think like a programmer to find them.

I've also used CVS to store the various versions of the document. LaTeX uses pure text files and so most of the features of CVS/SVN cross over.

I can say that I've used InDesign and come away impressed. You may also consider using MS Word because the copy editors and others who work with you on the project will probably insist that it's the only word processor that they know how to use. Sigh.

I've used LaTeX (specifically TeXShop) lately for my latest books ( Translucent Databases , Disappearing Cryptography , and Policing Online Games . It does a remarkably good job with handling equations and it's easy to understand --- if you think like a programmer. You can just insert macro codes whenever you feel and you can also redefine the markup language whenever it strikes your fancy.

That being said, it takes some time to understand because errors in one section can trigger error messages in very different places. You need to think like a programmer to find them.

I've also used CVS to store the various versions of the document. LaTeX uses pure text files and so most of the features of CVS/SVN cross over.

I can say that I've used InDesign and come away impressed. You may also consider using MS Word because the copy editors and others who work with you on the project will probably insist that it's the only word processor that they know how to use. Sigh.

I've used LaTeX (specifically TeXShop) lately for my latest books ( Translucent Databases , Disappearing Cryptography , and Policing Online Games . It does a remarkably good job with handling equations and it's easy to understand --- if you think like a programmer. You can just insert macro codes whenever you feel and you can also redefine the markup language whenever it strikes your fancy.

That being said, it takes some time to understand because errors in one section can trigger error messages in very different places. You need to think like a programmer to find them.

I've also used CVS to store the various versions of the document. LaTeX uses pure text files and so most of the features of CVS/SVN cross over.

I can say that I've used InDesign and come away impressed. You may also consider using MS Word because the copy editors and others who work with you on the project will probably insist that it's the only word processor that they know how to use. Sigh.

1) If you click through to the site supporting the book, you'll see a table of contents and an FAQ:

http://www.wayner.org/books/pog/

2) Search inside the book is a bad solution for anyone who writes a book that might be used as a reference. I regularly find that Google or Amazon lets me read 10-20 pages of a book and get everything I need.

One day there might a solution that lets us sell books by the page, but that has its own problems.

In general, an information transaction can't be reversed like the purchase of a car. You can't return the information and say, "Gosh, it's not exactly what I wanted." Even if you try desperately to get something out of your brain, it's nearly impossible. Try not to think of bananas. Try really, really hard not to think of bananas. Did you succeed?

The book is very cheap in the scheme of things. It's far from perfect--I can enumerate a number of flaws-- but it would take you more than $30 of your time to reassemble the same information. Even at minimum wage. I dare say it's a good deal for a peasant making $1/day.

3) Feel free to write me with any questions. p3 aaattt wayner.org.

Indeed there are. I wrote a book on this:

Policing Online Games

It's far from the last word.

For more information:

http://www.wayner.org/books/pog/

To look up on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0967584426/myhomepage0bc

My question was "wrong according to who?". I don't know what your answer means in this context.

I'm using the same weighted average of society to measure good as you are. I'm not assuming that there's some central force. That's just your assumption because I'm complaining about market failure.

Here's another way of articulating how the free economy is different from the micropayment. In other words, this is how a price of zero is different from epsilon pennies.

When an information producer creates and sells something for n cents, then every consumer sends a message back to the producer when they pay n cents. That is how the consumers communicate with the producers. This is how the market helps producers discover what the world as a whole wants.

When you have free information, that feedback loop is broken. The consumers don't send a message back to the producer when they consume it. Oh, maybe the producer can gain some information from log files, but that doesn't happen in a P2P world. The consumer stops driving the production of knowledge. The consumer's definition of "good" becomes less influential. The game changes.

I think I did a better job of explaining this in my talk.

IT' needs access to do its job. We need *total* access to all systems and data or we cant be effective and might as well not goto work.


While I disagree with the whole of this statement, I disagree most vehemently with the part in bold, so I'll address that.

In world that cared about data security, NO EMPLOYEE WOULD EVER BE GIVEN ACCESS TO CUSTOMER DATA THAT WAS ONLY USED TO DRIVE THE APPLICATION. Take a look at the ideas in the book Translucent Databases (actually, even just read the summary on that page) and you'll get an idea of what can be done to minimize the risks posed by insiders. If your company deals with a lot of customer data.. let's say it has an ordering system like Amazon's.. there is NO employee in the company, not the CEO nor the CTO, who needs to know what your customer's credit card number is, or needs to be able to find out. Encrypt it so that only the customer's password can retrieve it (and that password, btw, is only in the customer's brain, because you're only storing a hash of it) and you've just eliminated the single biggest privacy threat in information systems today. The same goes for a wide variety of information about the customers which no employee ever needs to know.

The same guy also came up with a scheme for hiding messages in lists. The applet uses disco songs, but any ordered list will do.

The book Translucent Databases describes much of the same ideas. The website is here .

YOu might want to check out Peter Wayner's website for his book, Disappearing Cryptography . There are several applets that let you hide information in a list of disco songs or even in the order of letters in a word.

"It is possible to put a secret password on the .mdb file to prevent Metamor from opening it with Access. I've threatened to put a password on the .mdb before when dealers/customers/support have done stupid things with the GEMS database structure using Access. Being able to end-run the database has admittedly got people out of a bind though. Jane (I think it was Jane) did some fancy footwork on the .mdb file in Gaston recently. I know our dealers do it. King County is famous for it. That's why we've never put a password on the file before.

Note however that even if we put a password on the file, it doesn't really prove much. Someone has to know the password, else how would GEMS open it. So this technically brings us back to square one: the audit log is modifiable by that person at least (read, me). Back to perception though, if you don't bring this up you might skate through Metamor.

There might be some clever crypto techniques to make it even harder to change the log (for me, they guy with the password that is). We're talking big changes here though, and at the moment largely theoretical ones. I'd doubt that any of our competitors are that clever."

Chapter 12 of Free for All analyzes the differences between Microsoft's version of charity and the open source's version. It sort of anticipated this debate by a few years and it also asks the very interesting question about tax deductions. Just how much did M$ write off for these deductions? The full cost of the software? The list price? Or just the amortized cost of development? Or perhaps the most honorable, nothing at all. That's how much the FSF takes off their taxes.

The DMCA was probably intended to fight piracy of digitized movies and songs, but is there any reason why it can't apply to many other things? Could a car company copyright the design of the parts and then use it against anyone who made aftermarket replacement parts? Just how broad is the scope of this law? If you listen to this link , even sex is suspect because DNA is practically a digital file format.

I joined Netflix, one of the first of the DVD rental mailer companies, a long time ago and like it a lot. I was interested, then, to read a rough calculation that, in terms of 190,000 MPEG-2 format DVDs, Netflix's daily bandwidth totals 1.5 TB. This is a sizable fraction of the current total estimated Internet daily bandwidth: somewhere between 2-4 TB. Of course, Peter Wayner's calculations do not allow for the online delivery of movies in more compression-efficient formats, such as the MPEG-4-derived DIVX, where a typical 4-7 GB DVD can be reduced to around 700 MB with minimal quality loss.

I guess the CD manufacturers also thought they were safe, when a typical CD occupied 700MB of data in an era of mainly dialup connections. Then along came MP3 with its one-tenth compression ratio and so much for that idea. Netflix's current success is a temporary artifact of our restricted bandwidth and lack of suitable MPEG-4 hardware players.

And I found out from some surfing that some Netflix competitors, such as CafeDVD, QwikFlicks, and DVD Avenue, are cheaper and offer porn, something Netflix avoids.

Hiding information in the least significant bits of images is okay if you keep the bit rate low. If it gets too high, the statistical profiles of the image changes and that can set off detectors.

I currently like the list of disco songs tool because it doens't have the same statistical problems.

The book's website ( http://www.wayner.org/books/td/ ) has an FAQ , the table of contents and more. Feel free to write me (p3@wayner.org) if you have more questions.

The book's website ( http://www.wayner.org/books/td/ ) has an FAQ , the table of contents and more. Feel free to write me (p3@wayner.org) if you have more questions.

The book's website ( http://www.wayner.org/books/td/ ) has an FAQ , the table of contents and more. Feel free to write me (p3@wayner.org) if you have more questions.

I wrote "Couch Wars" more than a year. It's a good introduction to the current world of satellite smartcard hacking.

http://www.wayner.org/books/f7.pdf

You're free to circulate it now because I've turned it into advertising ware for my latest two books Translucent Databases and Disappearing Cryptography .

If anyone has thoughts, comments, or suggestions, write me at p3@wayner.org.

I wrote "Couch Wars" more than a year. It's a good introduction to the current world of satellite smartcard hacking.

http://www.wayner.org/books/f7.pdf

You're free to circulate it now because I've turned it into advertising ware for my latest two books Translucent Databases and Disappearing Cryptography .

If anyone has thoughts, comments, or suggestions, write me at p3@wayner.org.

I wrote "Couch Wars" more than a year. It's a good introduction to the current world of satellite smartcard hacking.

http://www.wayner.org/books/f7.pdf

You're free to circulate it now because I've turned it into advertising ware for my latest two books Translucent Databases and Disappearing Cryptography .

If anyone has thoughts, comments, or suggestions, write me at p3@wayner.org.

Here's a book (Translucent Databases) written by Slashdot regular, Peter Wayner. It might be informative and helpful to those who face the same problems with insiders abusing information. From my understanding, the techniques aren't always useful, but they can help in many cases. http://www.wayner.org/books/td/

I don't think this is the exact answer to the question, but I think it's related. This book is just appearing. The FAQ makes it clear that it's focuses on locking up some of the data but leaving some in the open, hence the title Translucent Databases .

I don't think this is the exact answer to the question, but I think it's related. This book is just appearing. The FAQ makes it clear that it's focuses on locking up some of the data but leaving some in the open, hence the title Translucent Databases .