lindner writes "According to a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the United States No-Fly List uses a soundex algorithm to match names. Designed 'to quickly summon passenger names or to catch deal-hunting passengers making duplicate bookings.' The system has only managed to rack up a slew of false-positives, including everyone matching soundex ("J. Adams") at one point in time. The problem has gotten so bad that there is now a "Fly List" for chronically misidentified passengers." [Privacy Digest]

This should be a firing offense for the programmers. With millions of inputs even the (inevitable) slightest inaccuracy instantly means hundreds of false positives; using such an ancient, English-centric algorithm for a mission-critical instantly renders the system utterly useless, made more useless by the fact the system (software + people) is too arrogant to admit it is wrong.

Maresh had spent two years in front of the console, but, he says, "I had never seen anything like that." Fifty-five million meaningless database server requests were traversing the globe - and one of Akamai's Hong Kong locations was caught in the crossfire. Maresh was the first person on earth to spot the Internet worm that came to be known as Slammer. [Tomalak's Realm]

Pretty interesting piece. I remember when the "Warhol worm" idea was being mocked; Slammer technically wasn't such a worm but it got pretty close to implementing it and it didn't even take the pre-scan steps outlined in the Warhol worm paper.

Communication Ethics book part for Before Internet - Almost Attained Stasis. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for Final Diagram. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Chapter 3 of The Ethics of Modern Communication has been posted. As mentioned in yesterday's post, this is the most foundational chapter of the work, the Big Idea that I think everyone is missing. In theory you could derive the rest of the essay from this chapter, though in practice I think it would be difficult, or I wouldn't have written it ;-)

The PDF is now 302KB, 30 pages.

Communication Ethics book part for Telephones. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

I had thought that the next chapter of the essay would be available today, but I started working on it and ended up nearly completely rewriting the majority of it. Funny how the prospect of actually publishing something like this can cause your standards to suddenly rise.

This was probably the oldest chapter in the work, and it's also the most foundational, so a re-write is probably a good idea. The only bad news is now I have to propogate some of the changes through the rest of the chapters. Bleh. Writing bigs things with lots of dependencies stinks sometimes; programs are much easier to deal with, at least the way I write them.

Communication Ethics book part for Retail Distribution Networks. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for Radio and Television. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for Postal Service. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)