Sat 23 January 2010 | tags: archive, art, cancer, chess, china, computers, csrf, css, dailylinks, foreignpolicy, google, hillaryclinton, javascript, kasparov, mutatation, secondlife, smoking, statedepartment, websecurity, xss, -- (permalink)

What I've been reading lately:

• Hillary Clinton Extends Foreign Policy To The Internet And Wants Your Help
  • I wondered in a recent post how the State Department felt about Google being the leader in recent developments in our foreign policy with China. Judging by this post, the answer is "left out."
• The Chess Master and the Computer - The New York Review of Books - A fantastic article from Garry Kasparov about the interactions of humans and computers in the world of chess. Favorite quote: "The moment I became the youngest world chess champion in history at the age of twenty-two in 1985, I began receiving endless questions about the secret of my success and the nature of my talent. Instead of asking about Sicilian Defenses, journalists wanted to know about my diet, my personal life, how many moves ahead I saw, and how many games I held in my memory.

  I soon realized that my answers were disappointing. I didn't eat anything special. I worked hard because my mother had taught me to. My memory was good, but hardly photographic. As for how many moves ahead a grandmaster sees, Russkin-Gutman makes much of the answer attributed to the great Cuban world champion José Raúl Capablanca, among others: "Just one, the best one." Via Tyler Cowen.

• New World Notes: Wanted: an SL World Trust for Great Builds in Jeopardy
  • Hamlet Au argues that we need some kind of preservation society to prevent virtual world content from disappearing forever when the servers power down. I think of it as an archive.org for virtual worlds. The problem: anytime someone comes up with a tool for making something like this possible (like Rezzable's tool for saving an entire region state), people get all up in arms about the possibilities for "content theft". The fact is that archive.org doesn't ask for permission before making copies of sites across the web. Technically, what they do is almost certainly copyright infringement. It's also a valuable public service.
• Web Security: Are You Part Of The Problem? - Smashing Magazine
  • A dauntingly-comprehensive explanation of all (or most of) the ways that you may be part of the security problem.
• One Mutation per 15 Cigarettes Smoked « bunnie's blog - From Bunnie Huang, an awesome summary of an article in Nature explaining the cumulative carcinogenic effects of smoking. And a very, very pretty graph.