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The Few. The Proud.
Although some branches of the military are actively using social networks for mission-related work, the US Marines have
decided against them. Last week, the USMC officially banned social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter from military networks, although individual marines are still welcome to use them on their own time, with their own hardware. The reason? The official directive says "the very nature of these sites creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage." Hard to argue with that.
It's a not new concern, of course. Since at least World War II, military personnel have been warned about revealing too much in their letters home. And the risk of leaks increases as technology
becomes more portable. Earlier this year, someone found sensitive military information on a used MP3 player purchased in Oklahoma. Now, it will be interesting to see if the other services follow the Marines’ lead, or continue to use these tools to communicate internally and with the public. And if the military does move away from social networking, will corporate America follow?
The Virtual Panhandler
As the Web evolves, it's only natural that more and more human activities will be reinvented in
some kind of virtual counterpart. Unfortunately, they won't always be good ones. Certainly spammers deserve to be considered "organized" criminals, not to mention phishers and the owners of
botnets and various other kinds of ne'er do well. But we've noticed a new kind of independent agent, working through Skype, that's managed to virtualize
the experience of panhandling.
You can reach Knowledge Street through Skype, as shown by the buttons on our profile page. Since we've got that contact point just hanging out there, and since we haven't
opted to block strangers, we occasionally get a cold call, generally in the form of an Instant Message. These panhandlers almost always present themselves as young women from the developing world,
although they could just as easily be geezers in Teaneck. They're nice folks, really, and just want to chat with someone. In Skype's early days, this was actually suggested as a benefit -- a way to meet
new people in other parts of the world and thereby broaden your horizons. Theoretically, that's still true.
With the panhandlers though, the chats escalate pretty quickly to sad stories about not
having a computer at home, or needing money for an operation. For a time, Skype had its own Send Money feature, which made it really easy. Now, the panhandlers also have to coax you over to PayPal. But
if they're good, that's probably not too hard...
Where the Money Goes
If you like graphical displays of complex information -- and hey, who doesn't -- you should take a
look at the recently launched Federal IT Dashboard. It's a layered graphic interface that displays cost, schedule and milestone information on
everything IT within the Federal Government. Everything that's happening is described as an "investment," which may be a bit of spin doctoring, but assuming it's telling the truth this is an
impressive level of transparency. According to US CIO Vivek Kindra, "the entire country can now look at how we’re spending money and give us feedback… We’re going to tap into some of the best ideas
and the best thinking.”
The site itself is a mash-up of existing technology and was built in only six weeks, which is pretty impressive all by itself. At the top level, you can identify
investments that are in trouble, and then drill down to see what's wrong. (The Department of Veterans' Affairs Blood
Bank Modernization Program isn't doing too well.) There are some cool analytic displays to show how departmental budgets have changed relative to each other over the last five years. It's easy to spot projects that are behind schedule and/or over budget, but there's not much that would tell you why, or what's being done about it. There are also quite a few places where standard links take you to "match not found" messages.
Still, it's just a beta version, and it's certainly a good start. The Senate
likes it.
Your Own Personal Card Catalog
Speaking of tools, we stumbled across one that inspired a deep sense of gadget lust. Sadly,
it's only available for the Mac, but we're passing it on for what it's worth. We know there are some Mac users among our readership. Quite a few, actually.
The product is called Delicious Monster, for somewhat mystical reasons, and it's a library/inventory system designed for books, movies, music, software, toys, tools,
electronics and video games. If the item in question has a Universal Product Code, you just point it at your Webcam. Or if you have a lot of stuff in a lot of different places, you can use a wireless
barcode scanner instead. Once Monster recognizes the UPC, it finds the appropriate image on the Web, downloads other pertinent information and displays the results on photorealistic shelves. You can also
enter items by hand, so it could be used to catalog pretty much anything.
There are also hooks that track the current value of what you own, and ways to manage the lending of your stuff to family
and friends (with a calendar function to remind you when things are due back). If you just want to be more organized, it’s a cool tool, although this kind of inventory can be very handy if you need to
file an insurance claim. As far the underlying data, you can print it, export it or synch it to your iPhone. What more could anyone ask? Besides a Windows version.
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