Arriving Somewhere

Only eleven books this year, but it was a busy school year and my daughter was born on May 24 as well! In the fall I actually did a ton of reading in researching the paper I submitted to JCDL (Toward a Design Space for Categorized Overviews of Search Results) – but of course it was mostly journal articles, thus not reflected on this list.

2006

Five Stars
There is actually a five star book on this list, The New Father: A Dad’s Guide to the First Year by Armin Brott. A fabulous month-by-month guide to what to expect from your baby during the first year, as well as other good fatherly advice. I’ll be reading this again when the next kid comes along.

Non-Fiction
HTML & XHTML Pocket Reference by Jennifer Niederst Robbins (3)
Just Enough Project Management by Curtis R. Cook (4)
Pregnancy Sucks for Men by Keff Kimes (4)
Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One by Julie C. Meloni (3)

Library & Information Science
Introduction to Reference Work by William A. Katz (1)
Understanding Digital Libraries by Michael Lesk (3)
How to Build a Digital Library by Ian H. Witten and David Bainbridge (3)

Science Fiction & Fantasy
Elven Star by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (3)
Knife of Dreams by Robert Jordan (4)

Other Fiction
Megatokyo, Vol. 4 by Fred Gallagher (3)

According to the New York Times, it’s cool to be a librarian. A Hipper Crowd of Shushers

Google recently implemented a new feature for their popular map service called “street view”. Using it you can have a ground level panoramic view of streets and neighborhoods. Currently it is only available for a few major cities (San Francisco Bay area, Las Vegas, Denver, Miami, and New York City) but I’m sure that more are on the way. In fact the Volkswagen Bug with its roof mounted cameras has already been spotted in Washington, D.C. In an odd twist of fate a blogger took a picture of the car taking pictures of Washington. Immersive Media is the company Google contracted to produce the digital images of cities around the country – other than San Francisco, which Google did itself.

The resolution of many images are clear enough to make out faces, license plates, and cats sitting on window sills. I was able to locate the house I lived in as a young child in San Jose, CA and the clarity is stunning. Having something personal show up in this publicly available service really drives home the issue of privacy. As all of the images were taken in public spaces there does not seem to be any legal questions to consider. However there are certainly ethical issues we must think about.

If a person was captured in a digital image there is a good chance that we can make out his face. Google did not take any measure to protect the privacy of individuals by perhaps blurring their faces. Certainly legal, but ethical? Kevin Bankston, a privacy advocate for the Electronic Frontier Foundation often shares his personal story of being caught on camera by another now defunct service smoking outside his work place – a habit he had been trying to hide from his family. Whether his case is a critical one isn’t important, it is the principal that matters. Even though it is entirely up to chance whether you are caught on camera or not, it is certainly possible to caught doing something you might want to keep legitimately hidden. Google did have the foresight to remove women’s shelters from the service before launch.

Even if we accept Google’s street view feature as is, we need to be concerned about what similar services might appear in the future. I spend a lot of time in Washington and I know that there are security cameras all over town. Will the next step be to have real time images on a Google Maps-like service? I may not have much faith in the objectivity of our government, but I certainly don’t want my movements to be traceable by any John, Jane or Joe who has a decent internet connection.

As it is right now, I must admit that I am looking forward to the day Google adds Washington to its street view service. The ability to scope out unfamiliar businesses and location before metro their sure will be handy. I just hope I don’t find myself in a compromising situation for all of the world to see.

In May Estonia experienced what might be considered the first case of state-sponsored cyber warfare. It began with the Estonian government’s decision to remove a World War II-era monument to a Soviet soldier from a park, sparking riots by ethnic Russians within Estonia as well as an official protest by the Russian government. Two days of rioting followed, but the real excitement was the three week siege of Estonia’s information infrastructure.

The attacks used a method called “distributed denial of service” in which web sites and servers are flooded with data that obstructs legitimate access and can even overwhelm servers, effectively shutting them down. They targeted the web sites of the national government, banks, and news agencies. Estonia maintains that the attacks were orchestrated by Russia, however it is likely that the perpetrators will never be revealed. One method used in the attack was the use of “botnets”. Botnets are an example of distributed computing in which computers have been unknowingly infected with a virus that enables the botnet’s controller to remotely access that computer. In the case of a distributed denial of service attack the botnet is used to simultaneously send data or requests for data en masse at a common target, thus overwhelming it as well as routers and servers along the way.

While these methods of cyber attacks are not new what is interesting about this situation is coordinated attack on a nation’s government, economy and press. As we become more and more reliant on the internet for conducting government, our daily business and for information this reveals what might be an Achilles’ heel for modern society. The potential for terrorists, activists, even nations to target our information infrastructure becomes greater the more integrated it becomes in our lives.

What would happen if entire networks were shut down in this country for a single week? Certainly the impact on the economy would be dramatic if trading on Wall Street were interrupted. If banks couldn’t process electronic transactions then ATM’s wouldn’t dispense cash, credit cards wouldn’t make purchases and salaries wouldn’t be deposited. Communications would be disrupted as email servers might be clogged, perhaps even cellular phones would not be able complete calls. Certainly the information gathering techniques that we have become accustomed to would be prevented as news reporting websites and perhaps other information sites would be shut down or inaccessible. I wonder how important the information is that is exposed on government websites and whether important decisions could be made without access to those sites.

I would estimate that once every few months we loose internet access for the day at work. As I work in a library this means that we are not able to access the catalog or any of the electronic databases to which we subscribe. Not only does this put a serious crimp in our productivity but it makes difficult to serve our patrons since we rely so heavily on electronic access to information. These outages only last for a day at the most, and they probably are not malicious. I hope that the federal government is doing some hard work to prepare a defense for our information infrastructure. Librarians also need to consider their reliance on electronic information systems when planning future collections.

In 2005 I began graduate school in the summer which is reflected by the books that I read. It also resulted in a dramatic drop in book reading for pleasure… however I felt like I was actually reading more than normal because of all of the journal articles I read for class. Anyways, here’s the 2005 list.

2005

Non-Fiction
Adventures in Missing the Point: How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel by Brian D. McLaren and Tony Campolo (4)
CSS Pocket Reference by Eric A. Meyer (4)
HTML Pocket Reference by Jennifer Niederst (3)
Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Office Access 2003 in 24 Hours by Alison Balter (2)

Library & Information Science
The Bibliographic Record and Information Technology by Ronald Hagler (3)
A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel (3)
Library Information Systems by T.R Kochtanek and J.R. Matthews (2)
The Organization of Information by Arlene Taylor. (2)
The Smithsonian Book of Books by Michael Olmert (4)
Systems Analysis for Librarians and Information Professionals by L.N. Osborne and M. Nakamura (2)

Science Fiction & Fantasy
Dragon Wing by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (4)
New Spring by Robert Jordan (3)
Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card (3)

Other Fiction
Megatokyo, Vol. 3 by Fred Gallagher (3)