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There's no doubting the cloud invasion. But the research firm Gartner believes the personal cloud will replace the PC as the center of our digital lives sooner than you might think: 2014. "Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices," Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement on Monday. "Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life."

Let's say you have two hosts, somewhere out on the Internet: Maybe dedicated servers, maybe Amazon EC2 or Rackspace instances, maybe a mix of the above. Now assume it's your job to provide secure, encrypted connectivity between two services running on those hosts. If those services do not use an encrypted protocol by themselves - such as non-SSL capable SMTP mail servers - then the standard answer has always been: "Use stunnel or OpenVPN!". While both of those are good, cross-platform solutions which can forward unsecure traffic over an encrypted tunnel, I believe that they come not only with administrative overhead, but also introduce a significant performance hit. I believe that there are now solutions that are easier to use, more flexible and most importantly, deliver much better performance. In this article, I will compare stunnel performance  characteristics with vCider's virtual private network solution (sign up for use with up to 8 nodes is free). You will see that vCider not only offers more flexibility and is easier to use, but also provides significantly better network performance and reduced CPU load. For my test, I have created two Ubuntu instances on Rackspace. Please note that both stunnel as well as vCider can work across network and cloud provider boundaries.

Last week as part of its glitzy annual conference in Long Beach, California, TED awarded its $1 million prize to Sugata Mitra to support his wish to build a "School in the Cloud," a self-organized learning environment based on his "Hole in the Wall" and "Granny Cloud" research. Next week Pearson, the largest and most powerful education company in the world, will publish Dale Stephens' book Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will, a personal experience narrative and guide about dropping out of college and making it in Silicon Valley.

One of the enabling technologies for a quantum internet is the ability to store and retrieve quantum information in a reliable and repeatable way.  One of the more promising ways to do this involves photons and tiny clouds of rubidium gas. Rubidium atoms have an interesting property in that a magnetic field causes their electronic energy levels to split, creating a multitude of new levels. Switching the field off, returns the atoms to their normal state.

The Shared Learning Collaborative, a Gates Foundation-funded initiative, rebranded itself this week. There's a new name - inBloom, Inc. - but the mission and plans remain the same, the new non-profit insists. That mission is to build an open source, cloud-based education data infrastructure in the hopes of addressing a number of problems schools face: the lack of data interoperability between the various databases and software systems that they utilize and the merits of spending money to update outdated administrative IT (versus, say, buying instructional - or other - tech and/or versus spending money on something altogether non-tech).

""In a case decided on Wednesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that accessing someone's online e-mail without their permission doesn't violate the 1986-era Stored Communications Act (SCA). Though they differed in their reasoning, the justices were unanimous in ruling that e-mail stored in the cloud (like Gmail or Yahoo Mail) does not meet the definition of electronic storage as written in the statute."

Results from FIA Aalborg: The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most important fundaments for the smart cities, and is becoming slowly but steadily one of the core elements of the Future Internet (FI). In fact, various architectures and approaches from Future Internet such as Cloud Computing (Software as a Service - SaaS), which are being linked with the Web of Things, which is also allowing to define Sensors as a Service (SaaS) are clear examples of this relation between Future Internet and IoT architectures. At this particular point, where the IoT is a reality, where several IoT-based high scale deployments are being carried out such as Rome, and Santander. It is essential to discuss what are the IoT-specific aspects that the FI architecture has to take into account, in order to efficiently map the IoT architectures into an overall FI architecture, and particularly, how to manage rights of the individual (i.e. privacy) and its interaction with IoT objects taking into account aspects like delegation, access control as key aspects in the inclusion of the Internet of Things in the common lives with its total inclusion in the city of the future.

Email27ShareViews 5309 PRESS RELEASE Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast Projects 18-Fold Growth in Global Mobile Internet Data Traffic From 2011 to 2016 Mobile Cloud Traffic to Account for 71 Percent, or 7.6 Exabytes per Month, of Total Mobile Data Traffic by 2016, Compared to 45 Percent, or 269 Petabytes per Month, in 2011