From breaking codes to collecting intelligence on terrorist organizations, the National Security Agency (NSA) is paid to be really paranoid. However, us mere mortals can still benefit from their recommendations on how to configure all kinds of operating systems, browsers, routers and the like. In NSA’s words, “this guidance can be used by US government and other entities as a security baseline.” Secure indeed. Visit the NSA National Security Center to browse through their collected wisdom…

After reading up so much on Macintosh security recently, I recognized the repeated reference to the Keychain application that not only stores passwords but can also hold all kinds of other confidential information. The ideal way to store all those passwords for various websites, but you may want to look at these articles before you do so:

Protect Data in Panther | The Keychain’s Hidden Powers

I went to see George Colbert’s exhibit Ashes and Snow this weekend - a real must-see for anyone in the area. The temporary space at Hudson River Park’s Pier 54 (West 13th St, New York City; March 5 - June 6, 2005) got crowded as the day went on, so be sure to buy tickets in advance.

Ashes and Snow is “a loving exploration into the nature of animals in their natural habitat as they interact with human beings. No longer shown as merely a member of the family of man, humans are seen as a member of the family of animals. Check out the site…

According to Brussels-based ScanIT, users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) were “unsafe” 98 percent of the time during 2004, while Mozilla users - which would include those using Mozilla and Firefox - were “unsafe” only 15 percent of last year.

ScanIT determined the unsafe periods by examining the life spans of vulnerabilities in IE, Mozilla, and Opera - a Norwegian browser that has a nearly insignificant share of the U.S. market - which could be exploited remotely by attackers. By documenting the time between the disclosure of the vulnerability and when a patch was issued, ScanIT calculated the total number of days each browser was vulnerable. It also matched those vulnerable dates against periods when out-in-the-wild exploits were making the rounds.

IE was vulnerable all but seven days of 2004, or 98 percent of the year. “There was only one period in 2004 when there were no publicly known remote code execution bugs,” said ScanIT’s report. “Between the 12th and the 19th of October. That means a fully patched Internet Explorer installation was known to be unsafe for 98 percent of 2004.”

Read more and decide if you should switch browsers…

Make digital cameras affordable. Have people take billions of pictures. Create explosive demand for venues to share your treasures. Find a perfect solution at Flickr.com. Seriously, I have no financial stake in the success of flickr.com, but those guys provide a much needed service.

Join Jennifer on her latest journey to India where she spent a few wonderful weeks in the largest ashram in Rishikesh. “Thousands of people are coming to this site every year, in search of spiritual awakening, healing, yoga, and a little peace of mind.”

Follow Jen to the banks of the Ganges, accompany her to the city’s spice markets, learn a few things about tying a sari, and admire the many pictures of this beautiful country and its people!

Read more at SkinnyChef.com …

Tagging as it is used at some of the Web’s most interesting and lively new sites is launching a revolution of self-organization on the Internet. You could call it the latest twist in the ongoing evolution of social networking software. Except there’s a difference: On social networking sites like Friendster, people join, and then declare their alliances to each other explicitly. On sites that employ tagging, the networks emerge, implicitly, out of the shared interests of users. Order isn’t proclaimed, it just happens.

What 43 Things does for personal goals, the bookmark-sharing site del.icio.us does for everything its users are interested in on the Net. Here, what people are looking at and saving from the Web becomes the basis for learning new things, and making connections with each other. “It’s like Friendster for knowledge as far as I’m concerned,” says Howard Rheingold. “I look to see who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think are important. Then, I can look and see what else they’ve tagged… And isn’t that part of the collective intelligence of the Web? You meet people who find things that you find interesting and useful - and that multiplies your ability to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off of you. Visit 43things.com …

The last in the trinity of blogs, wikis and podcasting is rather young, but I’ll predict will find a huge following as well - again giving the masses their own soap box. Here’s policy analyst Annalee Neitz with the low-down:

Blogging meets radio meets iPod. Subscribe to all the prerecorded radio shows you like. Podcasting apps download them to your computer and sync them to a portable player. Want to be a pod star? You can record your own podcasts and share them online - it’s almost as easy as blogging.

People podcast for a lot of reasons - to expound on obscure topics, showcase their best friends’ music or spoken word routines, and break into radio without buying an antenna tower. It’s also a haven for hobbyists. Geoghegan, host of Reel Reviews, says he never would have had the time for Internet broadcasting if it hadn’t been as easy as “clicking a button and talking.”

Although podcasts don’t conform to any formula, their hosts do share one passion: circumventing the restrictions imposed on traditional broadcasting by industry and government. Partly in political protest and partly out of legal necessity, podcast music tends to favor songs that aren’t policed by the Recording Industry Association of America. Because listeners download each show, producers aren’t eligible for the kinds of broadcast licenses available to radio stations and webcasters. They have to license each song the same way iTunes does. The upside is that they don’t have to conform to the FCC’s broadcast decency regulations: They’re downloads. As a result, they contain large doses of what George Carlin once dubbed the “seven dirty words you can’t say on television.” Read the full article…

Since I mentioned Wikis in the Spy Blog post (see above), I wanted to reference a great article by Daniel Pink. He related the story behind Jimmy Wales and his fantastic creation called Wikipedia - a free encyclopedia on the Internet. In it itself, an online encyclopedia is not necessarily something to get excited about but Wikipedia showcases the amazing power of millions of free contributors to create value at almost zero cost.

Four years ago, a wealthy options trader named Jimmy Wales set out to build a massive online encyclopedia ambitious in purpose and unique in design. This encyclopedia would be freely available to anyone. And it would be created not by paid experts and editors, but by whoever wanted to contribute. With software called Wiki - which allows anybody with Web access to go to a site and edit, delete, or add to what’s there - Wales and his volunteer crew would construct a repository of knowledge to rival the ancient library of Alexandria.

In 2001, the idea seemed preposterous. In 2005, the nonprofit venture is the largest encyclopedia on the planet. Wikipedia offers 500,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica’s 80,000 and Encarta’s 4,500 - fashioned by more than 16,000 contributors. Tack on the editions in 75 other languages, including Esperanto and Kurdish, and the total Wikipedia article count tops 1.3 million.

To many guardians of the knowledge cathedral - librarians, lexicographers, academics - that’s precisely the problem. Who died and made this guy professor? No pedigreed scholars scrutinize his work. No research assistants check his facts. Should we trust an encyclopedia that allows anyone with a pulse and a mousepad to opine about Jackson Pollock’s place in postmodernism? What’s more, the software that made Wikipedia so easy to build also makes it easy to manipulate and deface. A former editor at the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica recently likened the site to a public rest room: You never know who used it last.

In the beginning, encyclopedias relied on the One Smart Guy model. In ancient Greece, Aristotle put pen to papyrus and single-handedly tried to record all the knowledge of his time. Four hundred years later, the Roman nobleman Pliny the Elder cranked out a 37-volume set of the day’s knowledge. The Chinese scholar Tu Yu wrote an encyclopedia in the ninth century. And in the 1700s, Diderot and a few pals (including Voltaire and Rousseau) took 29 years to create the encyclopedie de Diderot et D’Alembert.

With the Industrial Revolution, the One Smart Guy approach gradually gave way to the One Best Way model, which borrowed the principles of scienitific management and the lessons of assembly lines. Encyclopedia Britannica pioneered this approach in Scotland and honed it to perfection. Large groups of experts, each performing a task on a detailed work chart under the direction of a manager, produced encyclopedias of enormous breadth. Late in the 20th century, computers changed encyclopedias - and the Internet changed them more. Today, Britannica and World Book still sell some 130-pound, $1,100, multivolume sets, but they earn most of their money from Internet subscriptions. Yet while the medium has shifted from atoms to bits, the production model - and therefore the product itself - has remained the same.

Now Wales has brought forth a third model - call it One for All. Instead of one really smart guy, Wikipedia draws on thousands of fairly smart guys and gals - because in the metamathematics of encyclopedias, 500 Kvarans equals one Pliny the Elder. Instead of clearly delineated lines of authority, Wikipedia depends on radical decentralization and self-organization - open source in its purest form. Most encyclopedias start to fossilize the moment they’re printed on a page. But add Wiki software and some helping hands and you get something self-repairing and almost alive. A different production model creates a product that’s fluid, fast, fixable, and free. Read the full article…

Over the past year or two, three internet technologies have really penetrated every corner of the planet - Blogs, Wikis and now Podcasting. I’ll explain in a minute what these terms mean. Though different in some aspects they nevertheless share one principle: thousands of unpaid “experts”, you might call them volunteers, join together to collaboratively create free content.

“Recovery may take 12 steps, but becoming a junkie requires only four. First comes chance - an unexpected encounter. Chance stirs curiosity. Curiosity leads to experimentation. And experimentation cascades into addiction.”

How is this relevant to the trinity of Blogs, Wikis and Podcasting ? To me, it is amazing how much time people spend on creating content and that it even motivates previously uncreative folks to come up with something. And something is certainly better than nothing!

Why do they do it for free? I call it the lure of everyone’s 15 minutes of fame. People have come to realize that the internet can provide them with a cheap soap-box. You’ll get on it, and say whatever you please. That’s the mundane part. What makes it addictive is that someone, maybe even someone you know, is reading your blog, listening to your podcast, and that illusive external validation brings on fullblown addiction.

Now that we have this part down - where’s the value to the broader population? It’s a tiny thing called comment feature - whatever your original opinion, anyone can post comments on your initial post and that gets a real discussion started, sometimes even providing valuable information in the aggregate. Personally, I’ve come to read a few select blogs of interest to me, and I appreciate the broad coverage, the many angles it brings to the original story. Invariably, the discussion thread provides a measure of balance that illuminates both supporting and opposing views.

But enough for now. The following three articles from the latest Wired magazine delve deeper into the three topics:

• We Need Spy Blogs
• What the Heck? Wikipedia?
• Podcasting: You’re the next Radio Star