Experimenting with the tech preview of Live Mesh was a curious experience – my first reaction was a mixture of “that’s cool!” and “so what?” – the kind of private techie moment where you do something pointless but technically impressive. So I ended up remotely controlling the laptop on my right from the netbook on my left and filmed it and er… blogged it and er…. so what?

Well the “what” isn’t very developed yet, but the thing that really jumps out at you (and the reason I sound a bit, surprised, in the vid) is how easy it is – this is consumer grade technology. Give a 7 year old a Windows Live id and administrative permissions over their equipment and they’d have it meshed in about 10 minutes per device – *that* easy – you just keep clicking “ok” until it works.

So I’ve got my Mesh now – big deal. What can I do with it? Well, I can connect into my work PC from anywhere and sync any files that I have access to on my local desktop to anywhere. As an experiment I logged into my work machine via the Mesh, browsed to a network location that contains the most confidential files I have access to (network config stuff) and tried to sync it – no go: the server they’re hosted on isn’t part of my Mesh. So I copied the folder down to my desktop (Mesh has allowed me to log-on authenticated to the domain) – right clicked, and bingo.

Cool – I work remotely, I can never know when I might need this information so I’ll add it to my Mesh, problem solved! Except. I set up the EeePC that’s part of my Mesh in a rush. It’s like my personal machine isn’t it – not connected to the domain, so……. I didn’t set a password on it ;) Boot it up – hit return and you’re in (not now of course, but you get my drift).

In security terms I think of this as “leakage” – there’s no intention to distribute the information outside it’s proper audience, it just ends up in places where it’s no longer protected by the mechanisms that we put in place to keep it restricted – and once it’s “free” of those restrictions you’re just trusting in luck to keep it safe.

Of course this isn’t new – pod slurping – usb keys – staff taking home or printing out confidentially supplied information all produce the same potential for leakage, but it seems to me that Live Mesh raises the bar a bit and challenges what I’ve always thought of as a security principle, which is:

“if remote access becomes trivial, then local access controls become meaningless”

These are initial thoughts because I’m still trying to understand the pragmatic utility of Live Mesh in a Cloud based world. I can see that it’s Groove v2 – but I never “got” Groove. I can see that as a domestic technology it will make it easy for people with Windows Live ID’s to share files in “private” (but why wouldn’t you just put your pictures on flickr?) and I can see people having fun with remote access “just because they can” but apart from that?

Bottom line is that I think it’s toxic to Microsoft’s enterprise security model – if there is anything that is going to convince you that storing precious information in a stand alone file format that can be copied willy-nilly around the globe is a bad idea, it ought to be this. Put your *secrets* in a safe place – and that safe place is the Cloud, not the Mesh.

I’ve never seen anyone play the theremin quite like this before – around 2.50mins she starts playing *Double Bass* lines on it – and such concentration – wow. from www.ted.com

Oh, and she’s on John Zorn’s label too :)

Know any Science teachers who want to borrow a cam?

via TheFischbowl

Nice – a full periodic table produced by 96 different printmakers, the elements rendered in every combination of woodcut, linocut, monotype, etching, lithograph, silkscreen, and collage. This one’s Tungsten (aka wolfram). Unfortunately they don’t all have that much scientific info attached to the images, but you can always get that here.

via Bionic Teaching

The Visible Body is a free virtual human anatomy website with detailed models of all human body systems. It requires an app to be installed to render the 3D views but it’s pretty awesome – this is a female skeleton showing urinary, respiratory and endocrine systems.

via thetumbldish

This video’s been around for ages but it was always a favourite of mine, and though it’s a bit cheesey and out of date now (anyone for the Ping of Death?) it had a lasting impact on the way I understand the net – it’s still basically the way I visualise “packets” and “headers” :)

from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod
When I first saw it I was still based at Lime Grove (it was released in 1999 to help up-skill telecomm engineers) and the idea of using a web-clip that was more than 70MB long in the classroom was ludicrous: how times have changed.

more info on the film – http://www.mundi.net/maps/maps_024/

A good example of how mixed technologies can pretty the place up a bit. It’s a macro display system that responds to mobile txt input with movement and sound.

In each installation, participants send their thoughts and questions via SMS and voicemail. The responses are then projected and added to a dynamic spatialized audio composition.

I think the voices would drive me nuts after not a very long time – but hey ho, it’s not aimed at me. It’s an immersive, multi-lingual, 2D multi-user virtual environment for kids, no less, (or an IMLMUVEFK as we say in the business).

Google have put up a resource page here, to help teachers use their tools (Search, Maps, Earth, Images and News). It’s got lesson plans, classroom ideas and links to other Google sponsored projects such as digitalexplorer and the Google UK Carbon Footprint Project (or GUKCFP as we call it :). It’s aimed at Secondary Educators but there’s some nice stuff there and some pretty innovative links – the CarbonGame for instance is a live – pan european simulation, where European schools compete against each other in a carbon trading game.

via OUseful Info

One of the things about putting an output (rss) on your web-presence is that people can do helpful/interesting/surprising things with it. This is a trivial example, but Andy Powell at Eduserve wanted to make an easy way to subscribe to all the blogs nominated for the Edublog awards. A few technical glitches later he realised that he could plug it into Tony Hirst’s OPML Dashboard and produce a single page that lists the last 5 posts by all the candidates. Easy-peasy – and as he said, cool.

The results are in, and no surprise Dy/Dan won best new blog: you should read him, he’s on fire.

via eFoundations.com