Top 100 blogs to read

The good people at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science have completed a study and compiled a top 100 list of the blogs to read in order to stay informed. The study asked "Which blogs should one read to be most up to date, i.e., to quickly know about important stories that propagate over the blogosphere?" Topping the list was Instapundit and rounding out was Scoble, also making an appearance are a number of the blogs that I frequent but I was surprised by the number of blogs I'd never heard of. In hindsight I guess not all blogs are technology related and I shouldn't have assumed the tech blogs would necessarily be the most popular, just goes to show their are many forms of geek! Check out the list here.

Breaking the black market

Here is a really interesting story from ars technica. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the International Computer Science Institute, and the University of California, San Diego are collaborating to disrupt the trade of malware and credit card information on black market web sites. Using economic theories the researchers are messing with the reputations of the traders and creating false identities to inject doubt into the market. It seems that those who trade in such commodities place as much stock in a black market traders reputation as you or I might in an eBay sellers reputation. Using this as a tool against the traders the researchers are injecting damaging misinformation about sellers into the markets and creating false identities so as to drop the trust levels and place doubt in the minds of the traders. I love it! It's kinda like stringing along those Nigerian scammers... well done.