Summary of 2008 – nothing is perfect

Two highlights as we ponder the end of 2008 and look forward to 2009:

Technology can fail, as this video from the DARPA Urban Challenge 2007 shows

People are fallible, too:
Crowdsourcing isn’t a panacea for identifying tough problems

And finally, Internet security is still broken (this one requires people and computers together)

For 2009, let’s be more careful out there. The best watchwords are: trust, but verify

The future history of the Education Commons

MIT Press has released a PDF version of the book “Opening Up Education“, which is a series of articles on open educational content.

I found the most interesting piece was David Wiley’s “the OpenCourseWars” – 2005-2012, some speculative fiction on what will happen with the open content movement over the next few years.

Software security is still a mess

Maybe it’s just a bad dream, but it seems like 2008 has been a year of serious security issues, which have the potential to cause major problems on the Internet.

First, there was the OpenSSL vulnterability, which seems to greatly affect Ubuntu Linux (there is exploit code in the wild)

Then the DNS cache poisoning vulnerability was disclosed on 7/8/2008. Most systems had patches available within 3 or 4 days. Microsoft’s fix for that broke many installations of the ZoneAlarm firewall on Windows.

The combined effects of these two vulnerabities are significant, you may not be able to verify you are connected to the correct web site, even if the SSL connection appears to be good.

Keep up with those patches, and remember:  Some user have even more basic problems