Peer-to-peer and other decentralized,distributed systems are known to be particularly vulnerable to sybil attacks. In a sybil attack,a malicious user obtains multiple fake identities and pretends to be multiple, distinct nodes in the system. By controlling a large fraction of the nodes in the system,the malicious user is able to "out vote" the honest users in collaborative tasks such as Byzantine failure defenses. This paper presents SybilGuard, a novel protocol for limiting the corruptive influences of sybil attacks.Our protocol is based on the "social network "among user identities, where an edge between two identities indicates a human-established trust relationship. Malicious users can create many identities but few trust relationships. Thus, there is a disproportionately-small "cut" in the graph between the sybil nodes and the honest nodes. SybilGuard exploits this property to bound the number of identities a malicious user can create.We show the effectiveness of SybilGuard both analytically and experimentally.

If you're going to be "hyperlocal," that is not what blogs look like. Some of my favorite blogs are anonymous, others are attached to real people's names, but they generally: share information; aggregate information; analyze information. And the best do all three, but they are not generally breaking news. [Take a look at some of the blogs that will be on the parenting section of Ann Arbor.com; they are well-written and interesting, but they are not news breaking.] In addition, although some of the most credible bloggers I know do use their real names, others don't. They seem credible to me because their voice comes through (yes, as in "writing voice"), they provide thoughtful analysis, they cite verifiable sources.

Just noticed (now that I’m using del.icio.us again) that at some point last year, Brian Kerr sent me a link to this sobering blog posting entitled Is Librarianship A Profession? Raises some eyebrow-knittingly uncomfortable questions that everybody who’s in or thinking about “library school” needs to read. It’s not all doom and gloom, and I’ll be a spoiler by quoting from Ms. Salo’s conclusion:

1. Fly to a posh hotel. 2. Twitter that you are at a posh hotel, and ask if anyone is nearby.

There once was an X from place B,
That satisfied predicate P,
He or she did thing A,
In an adjective way,
Resulting in circumstance C.

Have you ever sat down and actively tried to think of a cool username? As some of you know, I use the name liberty4all on twitter. It's great and all, but I use it in other places too and I run into two problems. The first problem is that someone else also uses liberty4all as a username. This means that I sometimes I have to think of another username, which increases my chances of forgetting it and never logging in again by about 80%. The other problem is that people refer to me by my username. This drives me nuts for this particular name. I don't know why.

By now some of you are aware of the stress-inducing book we are working on, Graphic Design Referenced. This week I had the pleasure of writing the entry of German designer Otl Aicher. Unfortunately I got carried away and wrote much more than the word count I knew I had to meet. So, since the book will only have a 285-word version I wanted to share the extended one for anyone that might be interested in learning more about this great designer or just getting an abridged version of his story — this post also combines a segment of what we are writing for our entry on Summer Olympic identities. Most of the information here is taken from the wonderful monograph, Otl Aicher, written by Markus Rathgeb. And don't miss the Otl Aicher Flickr Pool.

Home
The Exhibition
Otl Aicher
Vitsoe / Bibliotheque
Exhibition Posters

YOU are the ultimate brand. just take care for when the iron hits - ow - it sizzles

working my way through old, abandoned, or otherwise mostly forgotten web sites to make sure that whatever remnant "presence" I have there is consistent with current reality (or, if not, then clearly marked as a historical artifact). very tedious work, these internets.

By contrast, so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption. They flunked sixth grade but met a wonderful counselor and made honor roll in seventh. They were laid low by divorce, only to meet a wonderful new partner. Often, too, they say they felt singled out from very early in life — protected, even as others nearby suffered.

So, the danger in a depression now is not so much that people will starve but that we will be deprived of the usual consumerist tokens we have come to depend on to express our identity. We won’t be able to afford to spend on brand distinctions and will in effect feel declassed. Chances are we wouldn’t get “homey” or immediately snap into those virtuous behaviors I occasionally tout as replacements to consumerism—being more active and creating things for ourselves, etc. More likely we just feel disoriented, transformed from a somebody into a nobody without the trinkets that grant us self-knowledge, the things we are accustomed to that let us make manifest and material what we want to believe about ourselves. We would have to learn to make those things for ourselves, and this would be a painful adjustment.

You all don’t know your lingo. A community organizer is the same thing as an community outreach minister in a church. The former is yankee and the latter is southern. The last church I belonged to did exactly what a community organizer does: got the (church) community to put a roof on an elderly (poor) lady’s house, put a floor in a poor man’s trailer, clothed a family whose home had burned down, and organized a group of families who lived on a dirt road to petition their senator for C-funds to pave the road so that the school bus could come up it and get their children. So what is your problem? Ignorance?

He fretted about how to write his self-descriptive summary at one of the many job-networking sites he belonged to. “I am professional (still have all my teeth!),” he wrote as filler text to keep his fingers busy while he thought, “stable (no longer living out of a hotel!), competent (kung-fu coder still can’t code his ex-girlfriend back), and motivated (as big as an ogre and twice as bright).” Then a migraine took over and he closed his laptop without saving.

In a world full of data that is quickly being accessed by mobile devices, ownership over that information — and over one’s own reputation and identity — rises in priority. Searls speaks with Jeremiah Owyang at the recent Mobile Identiy Workshop/ Unconference, produced by the Berkman Center and hosted by CNET in San Francisco.

A talk on the use of mobile technology as infrastructure for next-generation electronic identity, using the Consult Hyperion "utility model" for identity.

Online Identity Management - sometimes referred to as Reputation Management - is all about how you manage the way you are presented and perceived on the internet and the effects that your online presence has on your real-world activities. It is to the 21st century what traditional offline PR was to the 20th. In practice, it's an aggregation of hundreds of different processes and theories, encompassing how people find you through search engines (SEO and Paid Search), how they engage with the image you've created for yourself online (social-networking and web development et al) and how your supporters react to and represent their perception of you when they converse and communicate with other people (viral marketing, SMO and online PR). OIM is a technical science in as much as it's an ideology; this article hopes to explore some of the basic questions around it and help you understand its relevancy a little better.

So I started writing out some of the posts, and every time I tried to fit in something that said, you know, "the spacecraft is traveling at such and such miles per hour," I'd have to cut it down because it was too many characters. So then I'd have, you know, "Phoenix is..." and sometimes I couldn't even fit "Phoenix," so eventually I just switched it so it said "I am traveling at such and such miles per hour." Really, it was mostly to save on the characters posted to Twitter [Twitter has a 140 character limit on posts]. I waited to see how people would react, and a part of me thought that somebody was going to write back and say, "don't do that, that's silly." Instead, it just took off, and people really liked it. They liked the first-person aspect of it, even though they knew that somebody at JPL was doing it

race results, confirming an identity

a two minute pitch

The ridiculous thing about OpenID is that it has no value unless loads of people buy in, which I assume is why there have been so many "we will support OpenID mumble-mumble" announcements in recent months. If it gains any traction at all, it's going to be just like the consumer credit system without all that pesky government oversight getting you a free personal report once a year and going after abusers. It's a cute technical approach to a big, hairy social status quo, and I'm sitting here writing a big-ass diatribe about it because I don't want to find myself forced into signing up for a SomeBigCo account two years from now and getting all my shit stolen or sold, ChoicePoint-style.

OpenID is on tenterhooks as it is, and cannot withstand any more efforts to splinter its adoption. Never mind the fact that almost all the big names adopting OpenID are joining only as providers and not as relying parties (rendering the whole basis of OpenID useless) – now even the provider side of things is chaos.

To which I thought, "Yes, you scrofulous maroon, she's going to be there at the same time as me. It's not a coincidence, it because I'm married to her. And thank you for the offer to relay a message, but not only do I have her on speed-dial, but she'll be sitting in the window seat next to me, which means she's going to arrive at quite nearly the same time as I do."

That pretty much sums it up. You can't swing a tweet around here anymore without having it mashed up into some new social network, and none of them have even a junior-high school clue about human relationships. You can have friends and secretly rank them by how good a friend they are, but not indicate the relationship that is by definition a public declaration. You can say you're in a relationship and not looking for dates, but you can't put in a link to whom. You can give testimonials, but you can't use a joint checking account in two PayPal accounts.

Even though though we don't know who each of these visitors are [the actual people representing their organization], their behavior reveals much about what is important in their organization and what they are trying to learn. Just like the networks of Amazon purchase data reveal interesting political patterns without revealing who the actual purchasers are, these "choice & search" networks reveal much about the organizations our individually unknown visitors are from.

reminds me of friend who keeps empty bottles from a high status winery in his wine cellar, and sometimes fills them with other wine

For the first year after joining Google, with some exceptions, people honored the personal nature of the blog, but no longer. When other blogs or news stories refer to the blog, the inevitable opening sentence now is: "William Patry, Google's Senior Copyright Counsel said," or "Google's top copyright lawyer said... ." There is nothing I can do to stop this false implication that I am speaking on Google's behalf. And that's just those who do so because they are lazy. Others, for partisan purposes, insist on on misdescribing the blog as a Google blog, or in one case involving a think tank, darkly indicating also a la Senator Joe McCarthy, that in addition to funding from Google, there may be other sources of funding too. On Blogger, blogs are free. The blog had no funding because it doesn't cost anything, because I don't run ads, and because it was my personal blog, started before I joined Google.

i suspect that cyberspace exists because it is the purest manifestation of the mass (masse) as Jean Beaudrilliard described it. it is a black hole; it absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as spectacle.

Katherine Dawn Lang grew up in Consort, Alberta, a Canadian prairie town

Multiculturalists, on the other hand, exhibit a self-conscious desire to preserve cultures. Such ‘self-consciousness traditionalism’, as Brian Barry calls it, is a peculiarly modern, post-Enlightenment phenomenon. In the modern view, traditions are to

recipe for social network: user verbs noun. pick your nouns and verbs carefully, and find some early users who have domain relevance

Public relations for individuals is steadily emerging as a significant area of practice, yet little research and theoretical development is currently undertaken in this area. Within this article public relations for individuals, referred to in this stud

"The identity of the snarky voice behind the popular blog Ann Arbor is Overrated has been a mystery for the past six years."

You could regard this as a sad development — the whole Brand Called You meme brought to its grim apotheosis. But haven't our lives always been a little bit public and stage-managed? Small-town living is a hotbed of bloglike gossip

First, socioeconomic and aesthetic influences on taste are considered, and the expressivity of interest tokens is analyzed using a semiotic framework.

what resources can help? Crucial resources for sensemaking are summarized by the acronym, SIR COPE: Social, Identity, Retrospect, Cues, Ongoing, Plausible, Enactment.

no user authentication! Any user can forge anybody else’s identity when interacting with any OpenSocial application. As it currently stands, it is not possible to write secure social applications on the platform

security, usability, and privacy issues with openid.

The OpenID fanboys want OpenID to work on any old platform using only standard software, and so therefore are doomed to live in the world of broken authentication. This is fine if what you protect with your OpenID is worthless, but it seems clear that the

In the last month, I've received almost a dozen panicked emails from people who had commented on my blog at one point or another and were horrified to find that their comment was at the top of Google's search for their name. In each case, I have respectfu

Identity is not a performance or a toy on Facebook; it is a fixed and orderly fact. Nobody does anything secretly: a news feed constantly updates your friends on your activities. On Facebook, everybody knows you're a dog.

pirillo gets p0wned on p0wnce

Personally, if del.icio.us offered some kind of SXIP/OpenID implementation, I'd use it in a flash... I already have all my bookmarks there, along with my tags. I've always said, my tag cloud says more about me than any customer survey I've ever taken... D

if you have identified a customer need in your enterprise, but you are stuck because of some limitations of current technology, you may try to establish or join a network of people, perhaps around the world in different organizations and capacities, who c

awesome Facebook demographics of Jon's high school, showing the steep transition from < 1% use in his cohort to 50%+ use in 2007

Identity provision will increasingly be tied to social networks. Our lives are being lived online more and more, our friends will be living their lives online too. There will be a whole class of people who are un-provenanced, their lives are not online.

you don't know what it is you do? neither does anyone else.

social software uxagons! must dig into this.

Research by security firm Symantec suggests that the raw value of a WoW account is now higher than a credit card and its associated verification data.

he was in fact Ryan Jordan, 24, a college student from Kentucky who used texts such as Catholicism for Dummies to help him work.

"I'm a big fan of forgetting," says Frank Nack, a German computer scientist who published a critique of lifelogging experiments last winter. "It's how we make sense of life, how we interpret things.

papers please (not in Maine)

NEC faces "corporate identity theft" from pirates in China.

We report on techniques that are employed by authors,
artists, editors, and readers to ensure they promote their agendas
while they build their identities as experts. We suggest a framework
for discussing the changes of the categories of authorship,
c

see also Andy Bichlbaum interview on Teeter Talk

starts today in Michigan, 1x/yr. hope this isn't a free one-stop shopping for identity theft too...

another misuse of drivers licenses. "papers please"