Bruce Schneier on security vs. privacy

Here is just a quick link to an article about privacy and security by Bruce Schneier at Wired. He explains the wrong perception regarding the trade-off between these two values.

The debate isn't security versus privacy. It's liberty versus control. [...] If you set up the false dichotomy, of course people will choose security over privacy - especially if you scare them first. But it's still a false dichotomy. There is no security without privacy. And liberty requires both security and privacy.

SPIEGEL archive freely accessible

As announced recently Europes biggest magazine DER SPIEGEL (trans. = "The mirror" - not to confuse with "The Mirror" in UK!) made today articles of SPIEGEL (including sub-magazines and their lexicon) and Manager Magazin at wissen.spiegel.de online available for the public. The material is still copyrighted but it is a huge knowledge dump as the archive contains articles since 1947. The keyword search results not only in a list of articles from SPIEGEL and/or Manager Magazin but also includes entries of the German Wikipedia. There are also dossiers like "Die Sprache des Lebens" (= "the language of life) that combine some articles about selected topics. You can get an overview about the content at the statistics page.

How about some biological treasure hunting?

Lars Juhl Jensen, another member of the Bork group, started his new blog Buried Treasure some days ago. As said in his first posting the main intension is to make some of his scientific loose ends public:

My primary goal with this blog is to make my never-to-be-published observations openly available. As I don’t plan on continuing these projects, anyone is welcome to pick up a project and continue where I left off.

I wish a happy treasure hunting.

Calais - get sematic into your content

It looks like the predictions come true and semantic web takes off in 2008. After Google another big player (one you wouldn't expect in the game at the first first glance), Reuters, made a nifty tool for semantic processing called Calais available.

The Calais web service automatically attaches rich semantic metadata to the content you submit – in well under a second. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais categorizes and links your document with entities (people, places, organizations, etc.), facts (person ‘x’ works for company ‘y’), and events (person ‘z’ was appointed chairman of company ‘y’ on date ‘x’). The metadata results are stored centrally and returned to you as industry-standard RDF constructs accompanied by a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID).

It seems to have quite some power under the hood.

Bio::Blogs#18 out now

Issue #18 of Bio::Blogs is available at Bioinformatics Zen and has some hot links regarding Open Notebook Science and other topics for the bio crowd.

Googles's Social Graph API

The Google Code Blog introduced today the Social Graph API which is meant to make the information of a social graph to be reused easily. It's based on the open standards XFN and FOAF data that is embedded into websites. You can find some simple toys to get the idea at the project page. It is real fun to play around with this! Tim O'Reilly asks for mechanism that enforce privacy about selected connections what I also really would like to see. I am not sure but I think it (actually not the Social API itself but XFN/FOAF/etc. in general) also offers new ways of spamming: An advertisement site could like to random profiles pages as friends and if the linked person checks their graphs (asking for people who linked to them) they see the link. Not sure if I got that wrong. Anyhow, this stuff looks really interesting and promising!