Is your Panther password really secure?

macosxhints: Fix password security in 10.3.x for upgraded accounts. A useful, and slightly scary, hint that points to some lingering issues in password handling in OS X. Briefly: old versions of the OS, from the public beta through 10.2.x, only allow passwords up to 8 characters in length, but the OS would silently accept any additional characters both at password creation and password entry time. Your password entry only had to match through the first 8 characters to be successful.

Panther (10.3.x) now allows much stronger passwords and uses all the characters, which is good; however, upgraded users are still authenticated under the old, weaker scheme. The hint provides a way to check which scheme is being used to authenticate your password and points out that changing your password in Preferences / Accounts is sufficient to change the scheme—even if you “change” your password to the exact same value it was before.

HTML competes with PowerPoint

librarian.net : steal my stylesheet. The redoubtable Jessamyn West shows how HTML + CSS can be used to make a pretty decent set of slides for a talk, and releases the stylesheet she uses for this purpose under a Creative Commons license.

There’s definitely something to be said for authoring content in forms that are easily consumed across multiple platforms.

What comes after warblogging?

Newsweek: The Alpha Bloggers. When a publication as mainstream as Newsweek runs an article that talks about the influence of the “alpha bloggers” (whom they don’t exhaustively list but who they say (and I agree) include Doc Searls, Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, and Dan Gillmor) and they mean technology pundits, not political pundits, you know the press is waking up to the fact that bloggers write about more than the war. Nice to see, and props to Steven Levy for a good article. Too bad it took years for someone in the press to write this story.

Other mentions of the article: Steve Rubel, Donna Wentworth.

Justin Rosolino at Club Passim

After the reception at the Hong Kong, I made my way to Club Passim in time to catch Justin Rosolino’s debut there. This wasn’t a solo show for Justin—he was sharing the stage with three other talented singer/songwriter guys—but it was the first time I had a chance to see him play his own material (leaving out the shows he played at both my reunions to date, which while good were kind of hard to hear over the roar of the crowd and also were far heavier on covers).

Justin was amazing. He managed four songs in the first half of the show (the format was round-robin), including “To Say Goodbye,” “29” (the instrumental that closes out Wonderlust), “Legacy,” and a deeply soulful version of “O Holy Night.” I was impressed by the other artists, Brian Webb, Rod Picott, and Steve Delopoulos, but even accounting for my bias I think Justin stole the show with his musicianship (he did improvised guitar parts to everyone else’s songs, even some really high-speed picking numbers) and humor.

Hanging out with Dave

After the conference ended on Saturday, I wandered around Harvard Square for a while and then made my way up to the Hong Kong, where I gathered with a few other folks. In addition to catching up with Dave, I met a few interesting people, including a guy who is working on his first podcasts; some of the software developers from DownhillBattle who are working on BlogTorrent, which aims to simplify posting BitTorrents; and Betsy Campbell of MIT’s Community Innovation Lab.

An aside about Betsy: she made what I felt was the most cogent point in a long afternoon of spiraling abstractions when she pointed out that the motivating force that gets most people involved in issues outside their family or community is shame. Her thesis (approximately, since I don’t see a good transcript of it in the conference sources) is that something has to make you feel that you won’t live up to your own image of yourself as a good person for you to do something about it. Which is, I think, spot on.

Incidentally, the work that Betsy is doing in making cross-boundary connections between non-profit community activist groups and people that could help them is enormously worthwhile. If anyone from Sloan is reading this, working with this lab could be a good Socially Responsible Business project…

Tools discussion notes

Joi points out that translation is a derivative work. I hadn’t thought about that. I think I need to change which Creative Commons license I’m using. (I currently have BY-NC-ND.)

Well, that was quick. I’m now under BY-NC-SA, which allows derivative works as long as they’re shared back.

New mix: “once I was dug up, I was sinking”

At Art of the Mix: once I was dug up, I was sinking. Also at the iTunes store with the usual caveats about missing tracks. This was going to be the third mix to follow the ones I made this summer before and during the move, but I have one more to come that might close on a more positive note. At least the mix ends on a hopeful note with the Richard Buckner song (which also gives it its title): “once I was dug up, I was sinking/I was longing to be saved.”

VBB: Citizenship – questions

A questioner points out that the Republican meetups are used to identify local candidates at the grass roots at least in New York.

Another questioner points out there are existing social institutions for conservatives (e.g. churches)—might that explain skew in MeetUp results?

Jeff jarvis asks Hoder what we should be doing to support international efforts. Hoder replies: localize blogging software! Blogger isn’t available in Chinese or other languages (true?) and this is a problem. Mixed blessing, I think. On the one hand this might mean that more people in these countries might be encouraged to write in English so we non-Chinese-speaking readers might get their perspectives. On the other hand, the ability to do blogs in double-byte characters—let alone what the text on the UI says—was the biggest complaint internally about the various ad hoc solutions available for Microsoft bloggers.

Q: Why are some voting technologies trusted and not others? A: (Pippa)—it’s not necessarily all about trust; there may be other factors.

Good comment about the influence of the campaigns on the liberal skew on Meetup.

VBB: Citizenship: e-voting and UK local elections

Pippa Norris: e-voting. She’s talking about remote voting, not Diebold, thank God. Compare with all-postal voting, which also eliminates polling stations. Advantage: convenience, reach immobiles, reduce costs, streamline administration… (really???) Problems: security, data protection, secrecy, integrity, accuracy, equality, reliability; social barriers including equality of access.

In the UK e-voting was done side by side with postal voting in a controlled experiment. Postal voting showed strong returns, an average of 10% increase; e-voting actually drove some declines, apparently. Young disinclined voters weren’t encouraged to vote by the new technology, but older voters were driven by the availability of postal ballots because the mail is a familiar technology.

So the internet is an enabler of these transactions, but it doesn’t necessarily encourage them. That shouldn’t be new to anyone except die hard technologists. This is an important case study, not just for e-voting buffs but also for anyone who wants to look at technology adoption.

VBB: Citizenship abroad—Hoder on Iran

Hoder talks about the influence of the Internet and blogging in Iran being largely social rather than political right now. But the former VP of Iran is a blogger—trilingual. Blogging can also route around media censorship. Interesting discussion—I’m going to have to go back and read his blog to catch up.

VBB: Citizenship—Tom Sander on Meetup

Tom Sander on MeetUp: 1. Meetup.com is succeeding in building social ties despite being in unsociable environment. 2. It attracted different users than expected. 3. Political meetups, which are relatively rare would be better if they focused more on social ties, and in the future we may get to the point where they’re not an automatic part of the process but a considered part. Is technology part of the problem or part of the answer to helping individuals build social capital (trust and reciprocity)?

Meetup has grown from 0 to over a million members, driven largely by political meetups (though that segment is now declining). Interesting prospect because expected to attract younger unengaged folks and has low barrier to entry. BUT—not a young person’s phenomenon—young people were represented approximately proportionately. It is attracting highly educated, engaged folks, and not attracting newcomers—and there appears to be a lot of turnover from meetup to meetup. How do you build real social bonds there?

Aside: I think the value of meetups is what happens outside them. Once a month isn’t enough to get anything done anyway—look at the networks that people build, the new blogs they follow.