inbox bankruptcy

My good friend Panagiotis Astithas wrote to me recently:

“Nowadays my INBOX is not what it used to be. I have incoming messages / news from GMail, EBS mail, NETMODE mail, NOC mail, Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Google Reader (and I am surely forgetting some) and I have made sure to minimize both duplication and polling effort (using .forward, gmail notifier and firestatus :-) ).”

With so many sources comprising our INBOX (and not just email) we should replace the term email bankruptcy with inbox bankruptcy.

The Tokeneer Project

Fresh from my INBOX:

The National Security Agency has released a case study showing how to cost-effectively develop code with zero defects. If adopted widely, the practices advocated in the case study could help make commercial software programs more reliable and less vulnerable to attack, the researchers of the project conclude.

The case study is the write-up of an NSA-funded project carried out by the U.K.-based Praxis High Integrity Systems and Spre Inc. NSA commissioned the project, which involved writing code for an access control system, to demonstrate high-assurance software engineering.

With NSA’s approval, Praxis has posted the project materials, such as requirements, security target, specifications, designs and proofs.

The code itself, called Tokeneer, has also been made freely available.

More on the Tokeneer project here.

Update: dds offers constructive criticism on the project’s source code after reviewing a single file!

[via Interesting-People]

connecting the dots…

Διαβάζοντας το “Told you so” και το “Connecting the Dots” σκέφτομαι πως όλοι αυτοί που στα δελτία ειδήσεων αναρωτιούνται για το ποιος είναι ο “ιθύνων νους” για το “ιερό real-estate” μπορούν να εφαρμόσουν social network analysis (ξεκινώντας π.χ. από αυτό το βιβλίο) αντί να εκφράζουν εικασίες και να αφήνουν το τοπίο θολό.

Μπα… που τέτοια τύχη.

The “this time is different” syndrome

From Eight hundred years of financial folly:

There is a view today that both countries and creditors have learned from their mistakes. […] the ability of governments and investors to delude themselves, giving rise to periodic bouts of euphoria that usually end in tears, seems to have remained a constant.

On a more positive note, our research at least raises the question of how a country might “graduate” from a history of serial default. Interesting cases include Greece and Spain, countries that appear to have escaped a severe history of serial default not only by reforming institutions, but by benefiting from the anchor of the European Union.

PDF document: This Time is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises (local copy).

[via Lispmeister]

Vista: Windows Mail and error 0x800CCC0B

I resolved this the other day together with a user: In Vista when Windows Mail fails to connect to the remote SMTP (outgoing) email server returning error code 0x800CCC0B, the reason is that the remote server requires you to have both SSL and SPA enabled:

  • Account Properties → Servers → Log on using Secure Password Authentication
  • Account Properties → Advanced → Incoming Mail / This server requires a secure connection (SSL)