...more recent posts
I bought David Chalmers book "The Conscious Mind" when it came out in 1996. It was right up my alley, but frankly, just a little too hard. A lot of the science got pretty technical, and my schooling was all on the philosophy side. But Chalmers is a philosopher, and those parts of the book where he actually makes his argument (especially the concluding chapter) really made a huge impact on me. Still, I was always a little frustrated at not being able to digest the whole thing. A few days ago I found this link to a paper he wrote that is like a shorter version of the book. All the philosophy, without all of the backing scientific examples. Now, don't get me wrong, this guy is out of his mind smart, and he's very deep into a highly specialized field full of jargon, so I can't exactly recommend this as a quick read. Probably it's not even interesting. But if you happen to like any of the more popular people in the field (like maybe Daniel Dennet) then Chalmers is where to go from there. He is laying the groundwork for the type of thinking that will be needed to tackle the questions our technology, and especially our information processing systems, are going to present. And oh yeah, I found the link through a review on Hedweb in which the reviewer finds him both lazy and facile. Well, I wonder what he'd make of me, because I think Chalmers is hard at work on something very ambitious.
Another security hole exposed - this time in Navigator. Apparently, the way Navigator validates SSL sessions is not totally secure. It's not generally as bad as the IE cookie problem, but it's a problem nonetheless (and possibly it's worse in a very circumscribed set of circumstances.) It's not as bad becasue a) it is very difficult to exploit this problem and b) the problem is already fixed in the latest 4.73 version of Navigator. If you use Netscape (especially when making secure e-commerce connections over https:,) go download the latest version!