My laptop has been upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)

Yup, just made the switch. Ubuntu 11.04 has a completely changed user interface, closer to a netbook than to a laptop.

So far, so good: no bad surprises, though I had to make an extensive use of the search function to find my often used applications (terminal, wireshark, octave and a few other tools), no crash and no problem yet.

I also read a few users totally frustrated by Gnome 3, which is more tied to relearning the interface than using the interface itself.

A morning with Kevin Mitnick

A vendor of my company sent us invitation for their annual innovation event. And this year, the speaker is ... Kevin Mitnick. Yes, _the_ Mitnick from back in the days.

He spoke passionately for a good two hours of different hacking techniques, from the known stuff - spear phishing, technical exploits, abusing autoruns and social engineering - to tomorrow's techniques: advanced social engineering, phone system-man-in-the-middle or asterisk-in-the-middle, keystrokes injection and so forth.

A few tendencies:

The bad guys have increasingly more time to spend on devising new ways of perpetrating their bad deeds;

The exploits shifted from hugely technical to more focused on the human side;

Most of the people still don't have a clue about what data concerns their privacy, and are willing to give that even for small rewards;

The rate at which computers take over all our life is greater than the rate at which people learn how to use it correctly.

The audience was mesmerized, and during the presentation I saw a few people turning their phone off or with round eyes. Possibly some memories back in mind or recollection of recent events.

Kevin is truly a Hacker (with a capital H - not a mistake) and a very good speaker. Two hours was way too short.

Kevin Mitnick's company

Google to provide free computer cycles to researchers

That's awesome. Google will provide access to its computer resources to a few researchers who will have access to over a billion hours of computer cycles! That opens a herd of possibilities. No doubt there will be really interessant results coming out of this.

Link to Google Enterprise Blog

Happy pi day!

Happy pi day everyone!

Jeopardy! The IBM challenge - Day 3 - Grand finale!

Tonight was the IBM challenge grand finale. With Rutter and Jenning "beaten to death" during day 2, the stake was high: would wetware have to concede the victory to hardware?

The first period was so-so: both human contestants made use of the 10-seconds delay allowed before answering when one presses the buzzer, and buzzed within a second of the end of the clue. In most of the cases, this proved enough to find the correct answer. Anyway, Watson managed to get some points there.

• Watson: $4,200
• Jennings: $3,400
• Rutter: $2,400

 The second period started with Jennings and Watson almost tied. A few curious mistakes, as the "Dorothy Parker" instead of "Elements of style" in a daily double, which costed the supercomputer $2,197, which gave Jennings a temporary advantage.

It's also interesting to notice that some of the questions Watson passed had the correct answer among the three "most plausible" choices, albeit not the first one and usually with a very low score.

End of second period:

• Watson: $4,800
• Jennings: $8,600
• Rutter: $2,400

The double jeopardy was a demonstration of the machine's superior ability when it comes to infer various pieces of a puzzle.

• Watson: $23,400
• Jennings: $18,200
• Rutter: $5,600

And the final jeopardy. Everybody had still in mind the "US annexation of Toronto" of Tuesday, when Watson answered the double jeopardy question. The correct answer was Bram Stocker (famous for Dracula and a few other stories). All three contestants ended with the correct answer. Watson bet $17,943, a consequent wager that brought him way above Jennings.

• Watson: $41,413
• Jennings: $19,200
• Rutter: $11,200

Congratulations to IBM and to the Watson team. This was a splendid demonstration and I bet many, many applications will emerge, probably not as fun as this one, but most likely as interesting.

Jeopardy! The IBM challenge - Day 2

Today could have been dubbed "let the spanking begin!": Watson really kicked asses.

During the first period, only one miss, which was also missed by all the players ("Picasso", "Impressionism" and "Cubism" were mentioned instead of "Modern Art").  By the end of it, the scores were as follow:

• Watson: $23,881
• Jennings: $1,200
• Rutter: $3,400

The second period was as flaming as the first one.

• Watson: $36,681
• Jennings: $2,400
• Rutter: $5,400

The Final Jeopardy clue was "U.S. City", and the enigma was to find the city was first airport was named after a WWII hero and the second after a WWII battle. If both contestants found the correct answer ("Chicago"), and bet most of their money, Watson went Canada ("What is Toronto???????"), but only bet $947.

The final scores for day 2 are

• Watson: $35,734
• Jennings: $4,800
• Rutter: $10,400

Jeopardy! The IBM challenge - Day 1

Watson is opposed to Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. These candidates won over two millions dollars each and are considered to be the best players in the world.

During the first period, Watson did incredibly well, being beaten to answer certain questions by only a fraction of a second.

During the first break the scores were:

• Watson: $5,200
• Rutter: $1,000
• Jennings: $200

The second period was however less fortunate. A close miss ("What is a leg?" instead of "What is a missing leg?"), some mistakes and several passes.

Day one achieved with:

• Watson: $5,000
• Rutter: $5,000
• Jennings: $2,000

Tomorrow will be exciting!