From NY Times article Sentenced to be Raped:
In June 2002, the police say, members of a high-status tribe sexually abused one of Ms. Mukhtaran's brothers and then covered up their crime by falsely accusing him of having an affair with a high-status woman. The village's tribal council determined that the suitable punishment for the supposed affair was for high-status men to rape one of the boy's sisters, so the council sentenced Ms. Mukhtaran to be gang-raped.As members of the high-status tribe danced in joy, four men stripped her naked and took turns raping her. Then they forced her to walk home naked in front of 300 villagers.
In Pakistan's conservative Muslim society, Ms. Mukhtaran's duty was now clear: she was supposed to commit suicide. [....] But instead of killing herself, Ms. Mukhtaran testified against her attackers and propounded the shocking idea that the shame lies in raping, rather than in being raped. The rapists are now on death row, and President Pervez Musharraf presented Ms. Mukhtaran with the equivalent of $8,300 and ordered round-the-clock police protection for her.
Ms. Mukhtaran, who had never gone to school herself, used the money to build one school in the village for girls and another for boys - because, she said, education is the best way to achieve social change. The girls' school is named for her, and she is now studying in its fourth-grade class.
"Why should I have spent the money on myself?" she asked, adding, "This way the money is helping all the girls, all the children."
Unfortunately, the money is running out and the Pakistani government has reneged on promises to provide more funding. Members of the "high-status" tribe are allegedly planning on murdering Bibi and her whole family as soon as the police protection leaves.
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
This is a book about a system which purports to make you more efficient and productive in all that you do. I kept hearing about it, and I've been following a new web site 43 Folders that talks a lot about implementing the system especially from a Mac OS X using geek's viewpoint (hey, that's me!). I feel like I'm joining a cult.
S.K. Chang was responsbile for bringing science fiction to China. He started in the 50's translating the works of authors like P.K. Dick and Asimov, and later began creating his own works. The City Trilogy is considered his masterpiece. In Hollywood-speak, it's Crouching Tiger meets Star Wars.
<sigh> /me stares dreamily. "Google, is there -anything- you can't do?".
Google Local Upgrade (Google Weblog)
* Enhanced user interface - a new, cleaner design that now includes maps on results pages displaying the location of businesses in the search results
* New mapping capabilities - users can now zoom and pan different directions on the maps without reloading the page
* Improved comprehensiveness - search results provide links to even more web pages like business homepages and related ratings and reviews
* More relevant results - improved relevance technology returns even more precise results
Demo: take me to geek heaven.
Dave Weinberger's Sunday session at FOO Camp was an introduction to his book in progress with a working title of Lumps and Splits (working subtitle is Messiness as a Virtue). It was an example of what I consider to be the most prevalent track at this conference: categorization/tags/pivot points/ontologies.
Here's my notes from the session:
- Lumps and Splits [Messiness as a Virtue], Dave Weinberger
- [way cool email address deleted]
- How we draw lines defines culture (romans didnt have dff word for baby/adolescent)
- book is about changes in how we classify
- typical
step 1 arrange items (books)
step 2 make index (card catalog)
- new
step 3 - the owners of the info no longer control the organization of the info
- no penalty for having multiple tags
- job of librarian changes from coming up with useful taxonomy to building as much meta
data as possible into object so users can catalog as has meaning to them
- chapters
- lumps and splits, why isn't everything miscellaneous?
- dewey decimal system, why is it so racist? (less digits for christianity than "other")
- Classifications are tools, not mirrors of reality
- Steven Pinker (is 64 more even than 4? people say yes)
- worst classification system: the colon system (facted classification)
- better to have a wrong system than waste time fixing it
- bar codes and rfids as transitional elements between real world and digital
- value of implicit meta data
- history of spaces between worlds and history of capitalization
- trees (branching trees)
(google kicked yahoo's ass but there are places for trees
- (game of 20 questions, 20 hops gets you anywhere))
- farce of knowledge, attempts to make universal taxonomies
- Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge
- perhaps history of SGML will go here
- how do you knit disparate ontologies together
- del.icio.us tag choice as popularity contest
- historical controversy of the introduction of alphabetization as an affront to God's Plan
- object model of OWL as differnt sort of obj model than that of a programming language
- people cluster around prototypes (name a bird, unlikely to name an ostrich)
- dow jones had a boolean search engine which failed because it was too exact, what worked
better was a fuzzier search that lets the human skim more results
- scientific name for blue whale means "winged little mouse" ...all that matters is it has a name
Friday afternoon soon after I arrived at FOO Camp I opened up my powerbook and logged onto bloglines.com. I quickly realized that I'd forgotten to set my browser to proxy through a ssh tunnel like I usually (always) do on public wifi networks, meaning my password just got sent in the clear. I set up the secure tunnel immediately and hoped for the best. On Saturday afternoon I went again to check bloglines and found out all of my feeds were missing. On one hand I figured I got what I deserved for being a dumbass, on the other hand I thought deleting all my feeds was a pretty shitty way to teach me a lesson. If -I- had been sniffing passwords and wanted to teach someone a lesson I think the most I could have brought myself to doing would be to add a feed to a dodgeit.com address with a message explaining the virtues of ssh tunnelling, or something like that.
Still, it could have been worse. I immediately set about looking at all of the other websites where I use the same password, and I didn't find any other damage. I started changing all of the sites to a new password, but of course I was still using the same password on each site. Who can remember a different password for all the damn websites they use? It actually felt good to be changing my password all over the place because I'd been meaning to change it for -years-. I'm going to remove all doubt of my dumbass-ness right now with this revealing fact: I'd been using the same usual password for over 10 years. I first used it on a MUD back in the 80's.
Saturday night someone mentioned the Password Generator Bookmarklet and I realized that this was exactly what I needed, a solution so devastatingly obvious and simple that it took 10 years of web existence for someone to think of it.
The creator of this clever morsel of ingenuity, Nic, had the same problem we all do. He didn't want to use the same password for every web site, and he didn't want to have to remember dozens of different ones. Says Nic:
So, I wrote a bookmarklet to make up passwords for me. It asks for my master password, which is all I have to remember, and uses it to make a unique password for each site. It even types the password into any password fields on the current page for me, whether I'm registering for a new account or logging in on a subsequent visit.How does it work? It gets the hostname from the page's URL and mixes it together with your personal master password using a little cryptographic magic we call MD5. It will always get the same result if given that hostname and master password, but will never get that result if either changes. (Well, once in a few billion times it might.)
So now I use a bookmarklet to create and enter my password for all my different web accounts. Each one is different but I only have to remember one master password which never gets stored on any remote server. This doesn't -solve- web security, but it's leaps and bounds better than what most of us have been doing. It's a breeze to install and use assuming you're not using Internet Explorer (but if you are you've got bigger problems to address anyhow).
Highly recommnded: Password Generator Bookmarklet
Oh, and on Sunday when I checked bloglines again, suddenly all my feeds were back. I hadn't taken the time yet to start rebuilding them, so I guess bloglines just had temporary problems! I'm glad the password issue was forced to resolution though, so no regrets.