in other news... R.V. Guha, the original author of RDF document recently joined Google..
it was Guha who also created TAP.. the effort to OWLize all Web content
On September 22, Bruce E. Bernstein, President of the New York Software Industry Association (NYSIA), testified in writing to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs during a Hearing on "Examining the Financial Services Industry's Responsibilities and Role in Preventing Identity Theft and Protecting Sensitive Financial Information", mentioning Prof. Malkin project analyzing the security configuration of TLS-protected servers.
Part of the testimony read:
"The most pertinent is a project undertaken by Dr. Tal Malkin and her team in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, in partnership with researchers from IBM, related to the cryptographic security of Internet servers. Cryptography is an essential component of modern electronic commerce. With the explosion of transactions being conducted over the Internet, ensuring the security of data transfer is critically important. Considerable amounts of money are being exchanged over the Internet, either through shopping sites (e.g. Amazon, Buy.com), auction sites (eBay), online banking (Citibank, Chase), stock trading (Schwab), and even the government (irs.gov).
Dr. Malkin and her team made a systematic study of the cryptographic strength of thousands of "secure" servers on the Internet. Servers are computers that "host" the main functions of the Internet, such as Web sites (Web servers), email (mail servers), and other functions. Communication with these sites is secured by a protocol known as the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or its variant, Transport Layer Security (TLS). These protocols provide authentication, privacy, and integrity. A key component of the security of SSL/TLS is the cryptographic strength of the underlying algorithms used by the protocol. Dr. Malkin's study probed 25,000 secure Web servers to determine if SSL was being properly configured and whether it was employed in the most secure way. Improper configuration can lead to attacks on servers, stolen data identity theft, break-ins, etc. Dr. Malkin's project is the most extensive study of actually existing server security on the Internet.
The team's findings, relevant to these hearings, included some serious weaknesses in how Web servers, including eCommerce servers employed by financial service companies, are currently being configured.
The most prevalent is that an old, outdated version of SSL, known as SSL 2.0, is still being supported on over 93% of these "secure" servers. SSL 2.0 has many flaws, including a vulnerability to "man in the middle" attacks, which are commonly used for identity theft. While most of these servers also employ a more advanced version of SSL, the incoming communication can choose to use Version 2.0 and thus breach the defenses of the server.
Another serious problem is the use of 512 bit "public keys" (1,024 bits are recommended), which can be broken readily, thus compromising all of the data on the server using this key length. Over 5% of the "secure" servers are using this key length.
These security shortcomings are quite serious, and pose risks both to the consumers and the providers in the financial services industry. Financial server security can be increased both by popularizing the correct configurations and, possibly, by greater government oversight in this area.
The semantic web expects everyone to agree on one ontological framework (one master ontology)
WRONG ! Semantic Web expects minimal agreement within communities and domains, for example all camera companies agree on a 'camera ontology' and TV companies create a 'TV ontology', such domain specific ontologies may or may not be linked to a 'master ontology'.
SW is very much out there.. and is already weaved in to the Web of today..
- ALL the PDFs and Adobe documents that you use have RDF embedded in them
- ALL social networking sites data is marked up using the FOAF ontology
Well again these may sound just 'specifications' and less of an 'ontology'.. then look in to the rapidly growing billion dollar industry.. bio-chem-pharmaco informatics.. ontologies are becoming backbone of their entire computing, data collection and analysis infrastructure..
- There is BioPAX for pathway data
- Gene Ontology is now ported into RDFS/OWL
Whats more..
Flip through last month's Nature Biotech and you ll find articles talking about ontologies, RDF & Semantic Web.. Yes, its already here
Remember, these Biologist are those people who finished the Genome project 2-3yrs earlier than it was orignally planned.. They are very good at collaboration, strong proponents of open-source and very hard workers.. Semantic Web is the right platform for them that gives them tools and a standard to share data seamlessly.. Lets just wait and watch what these people do with it...
AND...yes there's more.. 5 days ago NIH approved a 20million grant to group at Stanford to create a NATIONAL CENTER for BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGY. Its the same group which developed the only OWL editor (Protege) available out there !
I just hope that those guys at NIH are not fools to give away hard earned tax payers money on something thats not gonna work
The Google Mini - New lower price, search more documents
How many vital documents are buried and forgotten somewhere on your website or corporate intranet?
How much faster could your business grow if your employees and prospective customers could find product, support or sales information, instantly and on demand?
Meet the Google Mini. Designed to help small and medium-sized businesses make the most of their digital assets, the Mini is a hardware and software search appliance that delivers the power and productivity of Google search across your organization's documents and websites.
The Google Mini:
* Now indexes and searches up to 100,000 documents -- 2X its previous capacity.
* Works with over 220 different file formats, including HTML, PDF and Microsoft Office.
* Can be set up in under an hour and requires minimal ongoing administration.
* Now costs just $2,995 for all hardware and software, including a year of support and hardware replacement coverage.
Just point the Google Mini at your content, add a search box to your site and you're set. It's that simple to make your public website or intranet as easy to search as Google.com. View an online product tour.
Well, you have gotta understand that Google and NASA work on entirely different types of data:
Google = Web pages/multi-media content that is hyperlinked NASA = Large relational tables storing petabytes of data from sensors and telescopic readings...
The techniques for mining are different in both cases.. when they talk about "Bio/Nano" it refers to entirely new domain.. Its not as easy as plug-n-play with different domains. Agreed, Google has mastered the algorithms for ranking and extracting data from Web-pages but mining data out of relational streams of data is entirely a different ball game.
Could Google stop delivering Web Search ? Could Bill Gates go back and finish his school? Could Bush remove troops from Iraq ? Could AlQaeda stop bombing places ? Could Indian Programmers demand American equivalent Salaries ? Could Chris Rock stop doing comedy ?
If Answer to any of above is YES ? well that might happen.. but MS Windows going Open Source..never gonna happen..
Java is very important in the research community. I have been a grad student for past 3-4-5 yrs (..have lost count by now:) but I have never used any language other than Java for my projects/experiments . Be it simulation requiring a Knowledgebase of million RDF triples or be it a Medical Imaging Software to be used by Physicians.. it does it all.
Somehow 'application researchers' like me are fascinated by the extent of its use.. (drawing nice GUIs or plotting graph with existing Jars)
With regards to question of scaling..lately companies like IBM have been working towards creating optimized JIT compilers for Java.. I had benchmarked one during my internship at IBM Research.. and it gave nearly similar performance to native C/C++ apps.
SW 2003 Challenge was in October, W3C-OWL standard wasnt yet finalized (It was a Recommendation Standard in Aug 2003, http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/#L151) and to my knowledge no reasoner (Fact/Racer) supported full OWL/DAML+OIL reasoning. So I guess the 'semantics' aspect was not a big concern then..
Today OWL is formalized. Several OWL based api/reasoners are in place. Using such 'RDF only' applications misguides people and the community. My only request to you all Semantic Web Gurus is to preach right message and best practices:)
The most basic aspect for any application to qualify as a "Semantic Web" app (from SW challenge, http://www-agki.tzi.de/swc/swapplication.html) is that the application should use "some formal description of the meaning of the data" ! RDF by itself doesnt give any *meaning* or *semantics* to the data. You need to associate your RDF data to RDFS/OWL for that purpose (TAP doesnt have a published OWL ontology http://tap.stanford.edu/tap/tapkb.html)
Also given that you dont have any 'meaning' to nodes and links in your RDF, I presume your searching again boils to 'keyword' based searching ! People find it cool to term their search as "Semantic Search" but I find it difficult to see any 'semantics' in the current application.
Computer Science is just another science like Maths and Physics. In Science, researchers try to discover *generalizations* and *laws* that are like *ultimate truth* by means of experimentation and validation.
Maths and Physics have discovered those *laws* and hence people are now more interested in applying them to different fields e.g. biophysics, nanotech etc. similary basic research in CS has peaked the moores law and hence researchers need to focus more on the applications like Bioinformatics, GIS etc
Darpa has made a timely move to focus more on application of the technology rather than invest further on basic science which infact is the job of NSF like agencies.
Allah allows the Muslims to take up a sword _only_ as a last resort.
Well, Muslims arent allowed to use 'sword' however, they can use Dynamite, Explosives and 'Planes' ?
Slashdot Mirror
in other news... R.V. Guha, the original author of RDF document recently joined Google.. it was Guha who also created TAP.. the effort to OWLize all Web content
On September 22, Bruce E. Bernstein, President of the New York Software Industry Association (NYSIA), testified in writing to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs during a Hearing on "Examining the Financial Services Industry's Responsibilities and Role in Preventing Identity Theft and Protecting Sensitive Financial Information", mentioning Prof. Malkin project analyzing the security configuration of TLS-protected servers.
Part of the testimony read:
"The most pertinent is a project undertaken by Dr. Tal Malkin and her team in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, in partnership with researchers from IBM, related to the cryptographic security of Internet servers. Cryptography is an essential component of modern electronic commerce. With the explosion of transactions being conducted over the Internet, ensuring the security of data transfer is critically important. Considerable amounts of money are being exchanged over the Internet, either through shopping sites (e.g. Amazon, Buy.com), auction sites (eBay), online banking (Citibank, Chase), stock trading (Schwab), and even the government (irs.gov).
Dr. Malkin and her team made a systematic study of the cryptographic strength of thousands of "secure" servers on the Internet. Servers are computers that "host" the main functions of the Internet, such as Web sites (Web servers), email (mail servers), and other functions. Communication with these sites is secured by a protocol known as the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or its variant, Transport Layer Security (TLS). These protocols provide authentication, privacy, and integrity. A key component of the security of SSL/TLS is the cryptographic strength of the underlying algorithms used by the protocol. Dr. Malkin's study probed 25,000 secure Web servers to determine if SSL was being properly configured and whether it was employed in the most secure way. Improper configuration can lead to attacks on servers, stolen data identity theft, break-ins, etc. Dr. Malkin's project is the most extensive study of actually existing server security on the Internet.
The team's findings, relevant to these hearings, included some serious weaknesses in how Web servers, including eCommerce servers employed by financial service companies, are currently being configured.
The most prevalent is that an old, outdated version of SSL, known as SSL 2.0, is still being supported on over 93% of these "secure" servers. SSL 2.0 has many flaws, including a vulnerability to "man in the middle" attacks, which are commonly used for identity theft. While most of these servers also employ a more advanced version of SSL, the incoming communication can choose to use Version 2.0 and thus breach the defenses of the server.
Another serious problem is the use of 512 bit "public keys" (1,024 bits are recommended), which can be broken readily, thus compromising all of the data on the server using this key length. Over 5% of the "secure" servers are using this key length.
These security shortcomings are quite serious, and pose risks both to the consumers and the providers in the financial services industry. Financial server security can be increased both by popularizing the correct configurations and, possibly, by greater government oversight in this area.
WRONG ! Semantic Web expects minimal agreement within communities and domains, for example all camera companies agree on a 'camera ontology' and TV companies create a 'TV ontology', such domain specific ontologies may or may not be linked to a 'master ontology'.
- ALL the PDFs and Adobe documents that you use have RDF embedded in them - ALL social networking sites data is marked up using the FOAF ontologySW is very much out there.. and is already weaved in to the Web of today..
Well again these may sound just 'specifications' and less of an 'ontology'.. then look in to the rapidly growing billion dollar industry.. bio-chem-pharmaco informatics.. ontologies are becoming backbone of their entire computing, data collection and analysis infrastructure..
- There is BioPAX for pathway data- Gene Ontology is now ported into RDFS/OWL
Whats more..
Flip through last month's Nature Biotech and you ll find articles talking about ontologies, RDF & Semantic Web.. Yes, its already here
Remember, these Biologist are those people who finished the Genome project 2-3yrs earlier than it was orignally planned.. They are very good at collaboration, strong proponents of open-source and very hard workers.. Semantic Web is the right platform for them that gives them tools and a standard to share data seamlessly.. Lets just wait and watch what these people do with it...
AND...yes there's more.. 5 days ago NIH approved a 20million grant to group at Stanford to create a NATIONAL CENTER for BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGY. Its the same group which developed the only OWL editor (Protege) available out there !
I just hope that those guys at NIH are not fools to give away hard earned tax payers money on something thats not gonna work
The Google Mini - New lower price, search more documents
How many vital documents are buried and forgotten somewhere on your website or corporate intranet?
How much faster could your business grow if your employees and prospective customers could find product, support or sales information, instantly and on demand?
Meet the Google Mini. Designed to help small and medium-sized businesses make the most of their digital assets, the Mini is a hardware and software search appliance that delivers the power and productivity of Google search across your organization's documents and websites.
The Google Mini:
* Now indexes and searches up to 100,000 documents -- 2X its previous capacity.
* Works with over 220 different file formats, including HTML, PDF and Microsoft Office.
* Can be set up in under an hour and requires minimal ongoing administration.
* Now costs just $2,995 for all hardware and software, including a year of support and hardware replacement coverage.
Just point the Google Mini at your content, add a search box to your site and you're set. It's that simple to make your public website or intranet as easy to search as Google.com. View an online product tour.
Well, you have gotta understand that Google and NASA work on entirely different types of data:
Google = Web pages/multi-media content that is hyperlinked
NASA = Large relational tables storing petabytes of data from sensors and telescopic readings...
The techniques for mining are different in both cases.. when they talk about "Bio/Nano" it refers to entirely new domain.. Its not as easy as plug-n-play with different domains. Agreed, Google has mastered the algorithms for ranking and extracting data from Web-pages but mining data out of relational streams of data is entirely a different ball game.
I just love this one..
"One day we decide those chinese sons of bitches are going down"
"Shit guz fire our shiitt, but I m Le Tired.. Take a nap then fire ze missiles"
"Now the US is like fuck we are dumb asses"
"Australia is like WTF ? but they ll be dead soon, f**ing kangarooos"
The announcement comes just after a week of Yahoo releasing http://news.com.com/Yahoo+hears+call+of+audio+sear ch/2100-1026_3-5818480.html/ their Audio Search, http://audio.search.yahoo.com/
/. ? this just doesnt work <URL:http://blahblah>anchor text</URL>
I guess Yahoo beat Google on this.. but Google will double-cross Yahoo by integrating with worlds best music service, iTunes ! Bravo Google !
PS: can anybody teach me how the heck url formatting works in
Could Google stop delivering Web Search ?
Could Bill Gates go back and finish his school?
Could Bush remove troops from Iraq ?
Could AlQaeda stop bombing places ?
Could Indian Programmers demand American equivalent Salaries ?
Could Chris Rock stop doing comedy ?
If Answer to any of above is YES ? well that might happen.. but MS Windows going Open Source..never gonna happen..
Java is very important in the research community. I have been a grad student for past 3-4-5 yrs (..have lost count by now :) but I have never used any language other than Java for my projects/experiments . Be it simulation requiring a Knowledgebase of million RDF triples or be it a Medical Imaging Software to be used by Physicians.. it does it all.
Somehow 'application researchers' like me are fascinated by the extent of its use.. (drawing nice GUIs or plotting graph with existing Jars)
With regards to question of scaling..lately companies like IBM have been working towards creating optimized JIT compilers for Java.. I had benchmarked one during my internship at IBM Research.. and it gave nearly similar performance to native C/C++ apps.
SW 2003 Challenge was in October, W3C-OWL standard wasnt yet finalized (It was a Recommendation Standard in Aug 2003, http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/#L151) and to my knowledge no reasoner (Fact/Racer) supported full OWL/DAML+OIL reasoning. So I guess the 'semantics' aspect was not a big concern then..
:)
Today OWL is formalized. Several OWL based api/reasoners are in place. Using such 'RDF only' applications misguides people and the community. My only request to you all Semantic Web Gurus is to preach right message and best practices
The most basic aspect for any application to qualify as a "Semantic Web" app (from SW challenge, http://www-agki.tzi.de/swc/swapplication.html) is that the application should use "some formal description of the meaning of the data" ! RDF by itself doesnt give any *meaning* or *semantics* to the data. You need to associate your RDF data to RDFS/OWL for that purpose (TAP doesnt have a published OWL ontology http://tap.stanford.edu/tap/tapkb.html)
Also given that you dont have any 'meaning' to nodes and links in your RDF, I presume your searching again boils to 'keyword' based searching ! People find it cool to term their search as "Semantic Search" but I find it difficult to see any 'semantics' in the current application.
Computer Science is just another science like Maths and Physics. In Science, researchers try to discover *generalizations* and *laws* that are like *ultimate truth* by means of experimentation and validation. Maths and Physics have discovered those *laws* and hence people are now more interested in applying them to different fields e.g. biophysics, nanotech etc. similary basic research in CS has peaked the moores law and hence researchers need to focus more on the applications like Bioinformatics, GIS etc Darpa has made a timely move to focus more on application of the technology rather than invest further on basic science which infact is the job of NSF like agencies.
Allah allows the Muslims to take up a sword _only_ as a last resort. Well, Muslims arent allowed to use 'sword' however, they can use Dynamite, Explosives and 'Planes' ?