About a year ago, I left One Laptop per Child and decided to find a new adventure. Last August, I was admitted to the graduate program at MIT, and while I was fantastically excited to study with an extraordinary advisor, life had other plans. I did not enroll. But I’m still receiving quite a bit of e-mail asking what I’m up to these days, so perhaps a short update is in order.
I spent much of the last year devoted to my own research. I spun down various commitments, and took up a few others: I joined the advisory board for the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization, became a member of the technical working group for Harvard Berkman’s StopBadware, and joined the Security Response Team for Python, my programming language of choice.
Earlier this year I reprised my role chairing the Program Committee for the 2009 PyCon. I also added a small sideshow to the conference: a summit for dynamic language implementers, with participants from 12 different language groups. All my involvement with the Python community continues to be both humbling and inspiring; I have yet to find such a compelling mix of intelligence, humor and interpersonal warmth in another technical crowd.
But perhaps most importantly, I have — at long last — found my new adventure. After a great deal of deliberation, I moved to California and joined the local fruit vendor.
Today was my first day on the job, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.
Margaret Talbot’s long feature story in the current New Yorker, regarding the off-label use of prescription drugs as cognitive enhancers:
Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy. And they have a synergistic relationship with our multiplying digital technologies: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, and the more we need help in order to focus. The experience that neuroenhancement offers is not, for the most part, about opening the doors of perception, or about breaking the bonds of the self, or about experiencing a surge of genius. It’s about squeezing out an extra few hours to finish those sales figures when you’d really rather collapse into bed; getting a B instead of a B-minus on the final exam in a lecture class where you spent half your time texting; cramming for the G.R.E.s at night, because the information-industry job you got after college turned out to be deadening. Neuroenhancers don’t offer freedom. Rather, they facilitate a pinched, unromantic, grindingly efficient form of productivity.
The article is a good read covering a fascinating subject, and I’m only going to add two pieces of supplemental reading. If, like me, you found Talbot’s article overly anecdotal and painfully short on the science, you need to read Botox for the brain: enhancement of cognition, mood, and pro-social behavior and blunting of unwanted memories appearing in Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews 32 (2008) 760-776. Due to the epic pain in the ass that is closed-access academia, you or your academic institution need to pay a boatload of money to Elsevier to read the paper, so I’m sticking it right here (PDF) until I’m asked to take it down.
And if the specific phrase Talbot uses at one point in the article — “mind hacking” — made you pause and reflect on just how fascinating a concept that is, my second link for you is a story. Cory Doctorow explores mind/body hacks in 0wnz0red, and it’s convincingly one of my all-time favorite pieces of short science fiction.
Nils2Own
March 20, 2009 at 9:25 am
CanSecWest is a Vancouver security conference which, among other things, holds a browser exploitation contest called Pwn2Own. If you can demonstrate arbitrary code execution against a fully-patched browser, you win cash and — if you’re the first victor — a computer.
Ten days ago, comrade Nils e-mailed to let me know he was going to be at the conference. I couldn’t make it myself, being stuck in Europe for the moment, but ever since that e-mail, I’ve been giggling like a schoolgirl about what I expected Nils would do at Pwn2Own.
What he wound up doing far exceeded my expectations. First, Nils scored against Safari on OS X. Then he scored again, hitting Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 (despite ASLR, DEP, and friends), snapping everyone’s head to attention. I was anticipating this might take place; the hardcore Sotirov/Dowd paper set the stage for it last year and Nils is smart enough to do it, yet the fact he pulled it off is still indisputably impressive. But the part no one saw coming: he asked for a third slot and scored against Firefox 3 on OS X, leaving Chrome the only browser to escape unscarred.
One man, two operating systems, three fallen browsers? I have no choice but to officially award comrade Nils the Ivan Krstić Seal of Mad Fucking Props.
And we now return to your regularly scheduled programming.
(Update, March 23rd: I originally believed he scored against Firefox on Windows, which turned out not to be the case. It was on OS X.)
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