Law X.0

TechPresident's 2007 Campaign Web Index

TechPresident's 2007 Campaign Web Index is an opinion survey that asked 13 questions to determine which presidential campaigns were best at using the various elements of the web. The panel judged Ron Paul and Barack Obama to have the best overall web presences, and they also led their respective fields in the most individual categories. Mike Huckabee and John Edwards followed, with each earning strong support from our panel. But while these four campaigns were the leaders, there were many surprises in specific categories. For example, Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney scored the most points for their online rapid response work.

The survey asked the following questions:

1. Which campaign has made the best use of online video?
2. Which campaign has made the best use of email?
3. Which campaign has made the best use of online social networking?
4. Which campaign has made the best use of its blog?
5. Which campaign has done the best work engaging online political activists?
6. Which campaign has made the best use of "Web 2.0" techniques like RSS, widgets and tagging?
7. Which campaign is doing the best work spending money on online advertising?
8. Which campaign is making the best use of mobile technology?
9. Which campaign is doing the best work raising money using online tools?
10. Which campaign has done the best job of informing voters about their candidate's position on issues?
11. Which campaign has done the best "rapid response" work online?
12. Which campaign has made the best use of the web to decentralize power?
13. Which campaign has the best overall web presence?

[JH]

Fighting the War on File Sharing

Fighting the War on File Sharing
by Aernout Schmidt, Wilfred Dolfsma and Wim Keuvelaar

List Price: $117.00
Hardcover: 230 pages
Publisher: Asser Press; 1 edition (2007)
ISBN-10: 9067042382
ISBN-13: 978-9067042383

Book Description: Fighting the War on File Sharing aims at a multi-faceted understanding of why peer-to-peer services currently fail to gain their full potential in our society. The analysis focuses on music-file sharing. Three parts of the book (The Morality of Regulation by Architecture, The Economics of Peer-to-Peer in Music, and Intellectual Property Rights for Music File Sharing) investigate the positions and opinions that individual disciplines can offer. As these analyses yield partial solutions, the final part of the book provides an institutional framework and applies it to produce new and crisp results on a tough, otherwise almost comprehensively researched subject. The framework recognizes the influence of outstanding work from law and information technology (Lessig), political anthropology (Douglas, Geertz, Smits), new institutional economics (Coase, North, Greif) and jurisprudence (Fuller, Bobbitt, Tamanaha). Its application allows a glimpse of veritable multidisciplinary co-operation concerning the perplexities of regulating the regularities in our social behaviour.

About the Authors: Professor Doctor A. H. J. Schmidt is Director of eLaw(at)Leiden, Centre for Law in the Information Society, Leiden University. Wilfred Dolfsma is an an Associate Professor at the Utrecht School of Economics and a Professorial Fellow at Maastricht University (UNU-MERIT). Wim Keuvelaar is managing director of Sdu E-Grant.

Johnny Long's Google Hacking for Penetration Testers

Johnny Long, "The Google Guy," is a professional hacker and author on a number of well-known IT security books including the 2005 edition of Google Hacking for Penetration Testers and Google Talking (2006)(with Joshua Brashars). He maintains the Google Hacking Database, probably the largest db of its kind. For background see Why Johnny Long Hacks. In Google Hacking for Penetration Testers, Long reveals basic and advanced search techniques, basic and advanced hacking techniques, multi-engine attack query morphing, and zero-packet target foot printing and recon techniques. Long also demonstrates Googles search-blocking tactics (and see them bypassed). Highly recommended. [JH]

Google Hacking for Penetration Testers, Volume 2
by Johnny Long

List Price: $49.95
Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Syngress; (November 2, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1597491764
ISBN-13: 978-1597491761

Book Description: Googles search capabilities are so powerful, they sometimes discover content that no one ever intended to be publicly available on the Web including: social security numbers, credit card numbers, trade secrets, and federally classified documents. Google Hacking for Penetration Testers, Volume 2 shows the art of torqueing Google used by security professionals and system administrators to find this sensitive information and self-police their own organizations.

Electronic Privacy Information Center's 2007 International Privacy Ranking

From the Report's overview:

Each year since 1997, the US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center and the UK-based Privacy International have undertaken what has now become the most comprehensive survey of global privacy ever published. The most recent report published in 2007 is probably the most comprehensive single volume report published in the human rights field. The report runs over 1,100 pages and includes 6,000 footnotes. More than 200 experts from around the world have provided materials and commentary. The participants range from eminent privacy scholars to high-level officials charged with safeguarding constitutional freedoms in their countries. Academics, human rights advocates, journalists and researchers provided reports, insight, documents and advice.

The new 2007 global rankings extend the survey to 47 countries (from the original 37) and, for the first time, provide an opportunity to assess trends.

The intention behind this project is two-fold. First, we hope to recognize countries in which privacy protection and respect for privacy is nurtured. This is done in the hope that others can learn from their example. Second we intend to identify countries in which governments and privacy regulators have failed to create a healthy privacy environment. The aim is not to humiliate the worst ranking nations, but to demonstrate that it is possible to maintain a healthy respect for privacy within a secure and fully functional democracy.

[JH]

Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code

Dreaming in Code has been out for about a year but I only started reading it last week. Rosenberg is doing for software what Tracy Kidde did for telling the story of the development of a minicomputer in his now classic Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award work, The Soul of a New Machine. I recommend both books. [JH]

Dreaming in Code:
Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
Scott Rosenberg

List Price: $25.95
Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Crown (January 16, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1400082463
ISBN-13: 978-1400082469

Book Description: Scott Rosenberg spent three years following a group of men and women--led by Lotus 1-2-3 creator Mitch Kapor--who are developing a novel personal information manager named Chandler (as in Raymond) meant to challenge market-leader Microsoft Outlook with elegant innovations. Their goal: to build something truly different--an application versatile enough to allow you to take emails, appointments, and notes and effortlessly transform one into another, organizing and displaying them as you please. The team included legendary programmer Andy Hertzfeld, author of much of the original Macintosh operating system, and Lou Montulli, the Netscape cofounder who invented the Web browser "cookie." Chandler's first manager, Michael Toy, dreamed of speedy releases but found himself stuck in quicksand; its second, Katie Parlante, resolutely held together a crew of gifted but stubborn programmers--including John Anderson, a philosophical coder who frequently found himself chasing elusive bugs down "ratholes," and Andi Vajda, a database expert who once hacked open his high school's minicomputer and found his future inside.

Their story takes us through a maze of dead ends and exhilarating breakthroughs as they and their colleagues wrestle not only with the abstraction of code but with the unpredictability of human behavior, especially their own. Along the way, we encounter black holes, turtles, snakes, dragons, axe-sharpening, and yak-shaving--and take a guided tour through the theories and methods, both brilliant and misguided, that litter the history of software development, from the famous "mythical man-month" to Extreme Programming.

Not just for technophiles but for anyone captivated by the drama of invention, Dreaming in Code offers a window into both the information age and the workings of the human mind.

About the Author: Scott Rosenberg is an award-winning journalist and the cofounder of Salon.com, where he served as technology editor, then managing editor, and is now vice president for new projects. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, The San Francisco Examiner, and other publications.