RTFA: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1912485…

Albert Hofmann was born at Baden, Switzerland, on January 11 1906, the elder of two children. Having graduated from Zürich University with a degree in chemistry in 1929 he took a doctorate on the gastro-intestinal juice of the vineyard snail.

After leaving university, he went to work for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals where he researched the medicinal properties of the Mediterranean squill (Scilla maritima), before moving on to the study of Claviceps purpurea (ergot).

Albert Hofmann RIP

RTFA: http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/l…

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Nice numbers, and an astute observation.

RTFA: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/0…

Kids as young as 10 were posing as predatory paedophiles on Bebo and MSN to frighten schoolmates they had fallen out with.

The rozzers started investigating what they thought was just another case of a local nonce trying to groom children by befriending them online and arranging to meet up. But an anonymous tip-off revealed that kids were trying to settle playground rivalries by posing as perverts to frighten their victims.

A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall police told the Manchester Grauniad:

“Information from the public has highlighted a possibility that the offenders could be children aged 10 and over, masquerading as a paedophile.

Ha! Rag posing as newspaper uncovers children posing as paedophiles.

RTFA: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120942873506551291…

Mazda saw no easy way to guard against these outcomes. So it decided to destroy approximately $100 million worth of factory-new automobiles. “We couldn’t run the risk of damaging the brand name that Mazda worked so hard over the years to develop,” says Jeremy Barnes, the company’s corporate-affairs director for North America.

It turns out that wrecking cars isn’t a simple matter. “We had to create a disassembly line, basically,” says Bob Turbett, the Mazda executive overseeing the destruction process.

It took more than a year to devise a plan that satisfied everyone. The city of Portland wanted assurance that nearly 5,000 cars’ worth of antifreeze, brake fluid and other hazardous goop wasn’t mishandled. Insurers covering Mazda’s losses wanted to be sure the company wouldn’t resell any cars or parts — thereby profiting on the side. So every steel-alloy wheel has to be sliced, every battery rendered inoperable, and every tire damaged beyond repair. All CD players must get smashed.

The new fad that’s sweeping the world: destroying things!

RTFA: http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/470

Even the clumsy, rudimentary risk pricing using Annualized Loss Expectancy (ALE) that estimates the projected cost of recovery using the number of likely occurrences makes worm defense worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for a bank, hospital or large enterprise. When the costs of recovery projected by risk models for IT security are compared with the amounts being paid for 0-day vulnerabilities, there is a big scary gap that shows one of the following:

1. according to the market prices for 0-day exploits, the security risk from 0-day vulnerabilities is vastly overestimated,
2. according to IT risk models, vulnerabilities are completely underpriced, or
3. most 0-day developers lack basic negotiation skills.

Totally wild concept: the damage from software vulnerabilities costs dramatically more than the labor that uncovers those vulns. Therefore, should undisclosed vulns sell for more?