Persuasion is the act of inducing action or belief in others.

I asked myself the question, “what’s the difference between honest and dishonest persuasion?”. Someone who honestly persuades builds trust, and is trustworthy. They love others, have integrity, and seek to empower others — to build them up, to strengthen them. It is selfless, although it doesn’t preclude deriving joy from helping others.

Someone who dishonestly persuades (manipulates) destroys trust through deception and intimidation. They may withhold information, utilize evasion, character attacks, and impersonation. They attempt to impede critical thinking. Manipulation is selfish. The object of manipulation is power or possessions.

Laws of persuasion include

• Reciprocation
• Commitment & Consistency
• Social Proof (aka conformity)
• Likability (trust, friends, I’m like you, image)
• Authority
• Scarcity (urgency)

I’d add:

• Diffusion of responsibility

That last one can help an individual stand up to pressure from peers. At one point during my LDS mission, I had a companion that was a challenge to work with. My mission president told me that if I felt pressured to do something I knew was wrong, to call him and ask permission. His answer would be “no”, and I could put the responsibility of the decision on his shoulders. Normally, I like to take the responsibility of decisions, but in one case, I felt more pressure from my companion than I wanted to stand up to myself. Making that phone call diffused the responsibility somewhat. I appreciated being able to lean on a trusted authority.

Charlie Miller, in a repeat performance of last year, used a prepared exploit to crack the Safari web browser on a MacBook running the latest version of Mac OS X in a matter of seconds.

Following Miller, a 25 year old computer science student at the University of Oldenburg in Germany, who went by the name of 'Nils', used an exploit on Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 circumventing the latest Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and Address Space Layout Randomisation (ASLR)... he then demonstrated an exploit for Safari and Mozilla's Firefox.

What does this mean for me and you? That if a well organized group or well funded organization wants to, they can and will hack your machine.

I think there's an extremely high likelihood that these hackers exploited a hole in JavaScript or Flash, not in the web browser's rendering of HTML itself. Running untrusted code from random sites never has been, and never will be, without security risk. That's why I use the NoScript Firefox extension. Unfortunately, it makes many sites confusing by reducing the "richness" of the web browsing experience, and can even break online shopping.

Is there a moral of the story here? Life is risky. Surfing the web is risky. By avoiding all risk, there is no opportunity, no life.

Scientists have developed what appears to be a safer way to create a promising alternative to embryonic stem cells, boosting hopes that such cells could sidestep the moral and political quagmire that has hindered the development of a new generation of cures.

Read more...

The other day, a co-worker handed me an OpenSolaris 11 Live CD. I booted it, expecting to be underwhelmed like I was with the Solaris 10 JavaDesktop. I was pleasantly surprised, however. Sun’s “Nimbus” GNOME theme knocks the socks off of the boring Fedora window manager themes. The experience felt like I was running Linux. It was responsive, supported my newer hardware, and the system was built with GNU utilities on the command line so I get my favourite options to ‘ls’, ‘grep’, etc. It supported my NVidia card out-of-the box, and had Compiz eye-candy as an option. The only thing I missed (in my superficial test) was the familiar ‘yum’ and ‘rpm’ for package management. I suspect that if I used it from day to day, I’d find other things I miss. Does OpenSolaris support encrypted file systems? Does it have as much optional software as I can get with Fedora Extras?

I’ll keep my eye on OpenSolaris a little more closely in the future.

It’s not usually a problem, and when it is, we don’t smell it from inside the office. Today is a overpowering exception, and it makes my stomach churn. It’s never been this bad before.

Being in control of my blog has its costs. I am the person responsible to make sure the blog software (wordpress) stays up-to-date, which takes time — valuable time that I’d rather spend doing something else (and usually do).

Most people I know that blog have already out-sourced the their blogging platform, whether they realize it or not. Should I capitulate (i.e. surrender control) and do the same thing?

In some sense, my ability to function in this high tech world requires that I rely on others. I rely on a third party to provide the blogging software (wordpress), host my web server (digitalspace.net), another to provide bandwidth, another to provide a domain name (joker.com). On and on the list goes. I am not an island unto myself. My ability to succeed depends on being a part of civilized society.

I’d capitulate control of my blog, except that I still want a canonical location for my blog to live — one that is a little bit less subject to the whims of a single corporate entity. The best place is at jaredrobinson.com. If I need to switch to a new hosting provider or switch to a different domain name registrar, the canonical URL doesn’t have to change.

I’m not ready to capitulate yet. I like my canonical blog URL.

Becoming a Great Manager: Five Pragmatic Practices by Esther Derby

• Decide what to do and what not yo do. Not everything is of equal value. Focus on those things that generate the most value.
• Limit multitasking so that you can be more productive.
• Keep people informed.
• Provide frequent feedback and make feedback specific, so people can act on it.
• Develop people.