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Silicon Valley Veteran Bill Coleman on The Business Of Disruption . . . - 0 views

www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/...thought_leader_6.php Tom-foremski bill-coleman Cloud-Computing disruptive-technologies
shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Cloud computing doesn't need government incentives because it is a disruptive technolo
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Mar 09
     
    Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher interviews Bill Coleman of VisiCorp-Sun-BEA fame with questions about the economy and disruptive technologies. Coleman references noted business guru Peter Drucker when he claims that a platform ill be successful if it has three characteristics. First, it has to be able to commoditize a market. Secondly, it has to obey the 10x better/cheaper rule - providing at least ten times the value of what it's displacing. And thirdly, a platform must allow you to add value with custom additions.

    In the interview, Coleman backs up his assertions with bullseye examples. Clearly his passion is for Cloud Computing, especially the next generation.

    ......"As the cloud computing platform becomes more sophisticated, he predicts that there will be an acceleration in the use of the cloud driven by a "quadruple conversion." Video, audio, and IT data all become IP based, and productivity applications become integrated with social networks.

    "As we move forward from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, all your productivity tools become integrated with your social networking, which becomes your business networking. Your mobile life and your online life will become the same. So now the client moves into the cloud and that's when we'll see a dramatic change in the cost structure of computing and of the capabilities you can have."....

    Good interview. I hope Tom publishes the rest of the session soon.
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APIs, not apps: What the future will be like when everyone can code | Opensource.com - 1 views

opensource.com/...apis-not-apps world apps opensource apis everyone code
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 16 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 16 Sep 15
     
    Navigating a world that that demands APIs, not apps "... Despite this hype, I do think that coding will become a more widespread and routine skill in the years to come. Programmable technology will continue to pervade more parts of our life, computers will continue to become more accessible to a wider population, and the world will continue to become more complex. Understanding coding (and debugging) will naturally go with it. ..."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 16 Sep 15
     
    Navigating a world that that demands APIs, not apps "... Despite this hype, I do think that coding will become a more widespread and routine skill in the years to come. Programmable technology will continue to pervade more parts of our life, computers will continue to become more accessible to a wider population, and the world will continue to become more complex. Understanding coding (and debugging) will naturally go with it. ..."
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10 important tips for living a multi-platform life | CITEworld - 0 views

www.citeworld.com/...ing-a-multi-platform-life.html multi-platform
shared by Gary Edwards on 03 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Sep 14
     
    "With the rise of different mobile platforms and content ecosystems over the past decade, the technology world is becoming increasingly fragmented. Fifteen years ago, there were only a handful of platforms that mattered -- Windows PCs, Macs, and perhaps Linux on the desktop, and primarily BlackBerry in the mobile space. Today, the number is far greater -- Windows (further divided into the pre- and post-Windows 8 offerings), OS X, Linux, Chrome OS, Android (in many varying incarnations), iOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Amazon's Kindle and Fire products, to name the most common. Each of these platforms has become increasingly insular, making lock-in to a specific vendor, device, or OS much more common.  Featured Resource Presented by Citrix Systems 10 essential elements for a secure enterprise mobility strategy Best practices for protecting sensitive business information while making people productive from LEARN MORE Although it is possible to switch from an iPhone to Android, or from Windows to Mac, there is often a trade-off in making the switch. Apps, music, ebooks, and other content may need to be re-purchased. There will likely be some learning curve. The offerings in the new ecosystem -- apps or content -- may not match the experience to which we've become accustomed, and some may not be available at all.  Here's some guidance on how to switch platforms."
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Strike Becomes Totally Dynamic With No Torrents to Takedown | TorrentFreak - 1 views

torrentfreak.com/no-torrents-to-takedown-150404 strike dynamic torrents sharing
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 05 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 05 Apr 15
     
    " Andy on April 4, 2015 C: 0 Breaking In response to being overwhelmed by DMCA takedown notices, new torrent site Strike now stores no data whatsoever - no torrents, no magnets, no categories and no indexing. The site has become totally dynamic and only fetches data requested by the user. But will these drastic steps be enough?"
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 05 Apr 15
     
    " Andy on April 4, 2015 C: 0 Breaking In response to being overwhelmed by DMCA takedown notices, new torrent site Strike now stores no data whatsoever - no torrents, no magnets, no categories and no indexing. The site has become totally dynamic and only fetches data requested by the user. But will these drastic steps be enough?"
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Assange Keeps Warning Of AI Censorship, And It's Time We Started Listening - 0 views

medium.com/...started-listening-e05d371ef120 AI Internet-censorship Google Twitter Facebook
shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Where power is not overtly totalitarian, wealthy elites have bought up all media, first in print, then radio, then television, and used it to advance narratives that are favorable to their interests. Not until humanity gained widespread access to the internet has our species had the ability to freely and easily share ideas and information on a large scale without regulation by the iron-fisted grip of power. This newfound ability arguably had a direct impact on the election for the most powerful elected office in the most powerful government in the world in 2016, as a leak publishing outlet combined with alternative and social media enabled ordinary Americans to tell one another their own stories about what they thought was going on in their country.This newly democratized narrative-generating power of the masses gave those in power an immense fright, and they’ve been working to restore the old order of power controlling information ever since. And the editor-in-chief of the aforementioned leak publishing outlet, WikiLeaks, has been repeatedly trying to warn us about this coming development.
  • In a statement that was recently read during the “Organising Resistance to Internet Censorship” webinar, sponsored by the World Socialist Web Site, Assange warned of how “digital super states” like Facebook and Google have been working to “re-establish discourse control”, giving authority over how ideas and information are shared back to those in power.Assange went on to say that the manipulative attempts of world power structures to regain control of discourse in the information age has been “operating at a scale, speed, and increasingly at a subtlety, that appears likely to eclipse human counter-measures.”What this means is that using increasingly more advanced forms of artificial intelligence, power structures are becoming more and more capable of controlling the ideas and information that people are able to access and share with one another, hide information which goes against the interests of those power structures and elevate narratives which support those interests, all of course while maintaining the illusion of freedom and lively debate.
  • To be clear, this is already happening. Due to a recent shift in Google’s “evaluation methods”, traffic to left-leaning and anti-establishment websites has plummeted, with sites like WikiLeaks, Alternet, Counterpunch, Global Research, Consortium News, Truthout, and WSWS losing up to 70 percent of the views they were getting prior to the changes. Powerful billionaire oligarchs Pierre Omidyar and George Soros are openly financing the development of “an automated fact-checking system” (AI) to hide “fake news” from the public.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • To make matters even worse, there’s no way to know the exact extent to which this is going on, because we know that we can absolutely count on the digital super states in question to lie about it. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was asked point-blank if Twitter was obstructing the #DNCLeaks from trending, a hashtag people were using to build awareness of the DNC emails which had just been published by WikiLeaks, and Dorsey flatly denied it. More than a year later, we learned from a prepared testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism by Twitter’s acting general counsel Sean J. Edgett that this was completely false and Twitter had indeed been doing exactly that to protect the interests of US political structures by sheltering the public from information allegedly gathered by Russian hackers.
  • Imagine going back to a world like the Middle Ages where you only knew the things your king wanted you to know, except you could still watch innocuous kitten videos on Youtube. That appears to be where we may be headed, and if that happens the possibility of any populist movement arising to hold power to account may be effectively locked out from the realm of possibility forever.To claim that these powerful new media corporations are just private companies practicing their freedom to determine what happens on their property is to bury your head in the sand and ignore the extent to which these digital super states are already inextricably interwoven with existing power structures. In a corporatist system of government, which America unquestionably has, corporate censorship is government censorship, of an even more pernicious strain than if Jeff Sessions were touring the country burning books. The more advanced artificial intelligence becomes, the more adept these power structures will become at manipulating us. Time to start paying very close attention to this.
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SOPA Censorship is back - 0 views

cms.fightforthefuture.org/sopas-back censorship SOPA back fight freedom free speech
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 27 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 27 Aug 13
     
    "SOPA censorship is back. Last year the Internet defeated SOPA, but now the U.S. government wants to bring back one of its worst parts: jail time for streaming copyrighted content. Soon, uploading a YouTube video of you singing karaoke could become a felony. Tell Obama: "No SOPA-style censor"
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 27 Aug 13
     
    SOPA Censorship is back Last year the Internet defeated SOPA, but now the U.S. government wants to bring back one of its worst parts: jail time for streaming copyrighted content. Soon, uploading a YouTube video of you singing karaoke could become a felony.
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 27 Aug 13
     
    "SOPA censorship is back. Last year the Internet defeated SOPA, but now the U.S. government wants to bring back one of its worst parts: jail time for streaming copyrighted content. Soon, uploading a YouTube video of you singing karaoke could become a felony. Tell Obama: "No SOPA-style censor"
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The Next Battle for the Desktop : Portable RiA Runtime Engines - 0 views

ajax.sys-con.com/548350 ria
shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Nov 08 - Cached
  • The choices for desktop runtimes will be more flexible and will largely be driven by the type of applications rather than the type of platform. It’s likely that desktop computers will eventually ship with two or three different runtimes and that consumers will be more or less ignorant of which one they are using. What will determine the success of one desktop runtime over others will be the execution and development environment. Desktop runtimes that provide the most processing power, speed of execution, and security will dominate. In this scenario the end-user is no longer the customer, it's independent software developers and Integrated Software Vendors that are of primary importance. It’s the developers who will choose the platform on which they create cross-platform applications – the consumer will be largely ignorant of the choices made.  With the exception of download and install differences, the applications will look the same to end-users.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 06 Nov 08
       
      "It's independent application developers and integrated software vendors that determine which RiA platforms will prevail. Will this group value "cross-platform" RiA? Or will they go for integrated cloud services designed to drive down the cost of development and implementation? Integration into existing business systems i think will trump cross-platform concerns. For sure Microsoft is betting the farm on this.
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Nov 08
     
    The computer desktop - as was the case with newspapers before there was radio and radio before there was television - has become the high ground from which empires are built. While dominance of the desktop has been maintained for the last decade or more by Microsoft, which at one point represented 95% of the desktops used by all consumers, the future is less certain.it will not be a single operating system that prevails. In the end it will be desktop runtimes that become the most important platforms A desktop runtime is a platform that provides a consistent runtime environment regardless of the underlying operating system. Desktop runtimes are already extending beyond their primary target platform, the desktop, to the Fourth Screen - smart phones.
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How Twitter Use Has Changed, From 2009 to 2010 - 1 views

www.readwriteweb.com/..._changed_from_2009_to_2010.php via:packrati.us from:cohnwolfe
shared by Alyn William on 23 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Alyn William on 23 Dec 10
     
    The number of Twitter users who provide personal information in their bios has more than doubled since last year; 82% of Twitter users now provide a name, compared with only 33% in 2009. And 73% provide location information, compared to 44% in 2009. Forty five percent give a website address, up from 22% a year ago. This seems to indicate that Twitter users are becoming more comfortable disclosing personal information on the site, but more importantly perhaps, that having a profile on Twitter is becoming increasingly important.
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Wary of Upsetting Mighty Microsoft, Acer Limits Use Android for Phones, Not Netbooks. - 0 views

news.google.com/...url webkit android acer microsoft netbooks smartphones iphone
shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Apr 09
     
    "For a netbook, you really need to be able to view a full Web for the total Internet experience, and Android is not that yet," Jim Wong, head of Acer's IT products, said Tuesday while introducing a new line of computers."

    Right. Android runs the webkit/Chromium browser based on the same WebKit code base used by Apple iPhone/Safari, Google Chrome, Palm Pre, Nokia s60 and QT IDE, 280 Atlas WebKit IDE, SproutCore-Cocoa project, KOffice, Sun's javaFX, Adobe AiR, and Eclipse "Blinki", Eclipse SWT, Linux Midori, and the Windows CE IRiS browser - to name but a few. Other Open Web browsers Opera and Mozilla Firefox have embraced the highly interactive and very visual WebKit document and application model. Add to this WebKit tsunami the many web sites, applications and services that adopted the WebKit document model to become iPhone ready.

    Finally there is this; any browser, application or web server seekign to pass the ACiD-3 test is in effect an effort to become fully WebKit compliant.

    Maybe Mr. Wong is talking about the 1998 Internet experience supported by IE8? Or maybe there is a secret OEM agreement lurking in the background here. The kind that was used by Microsoft to stop Netscape and Java way back when.

    The problem for Microsoft is that, when it comes to smartphones, countertops and netbooks at the edge of the Web, they are not competing against individual companies pushing device and/or platform specific services. This time they are competing against the next generation Open Web. An very visual and interactive Open Web defined by the surge the WebKit, Firefox and the many JavaScript communities are leading.

    ge
  • David Corking on 09 Apr 09
     
    The Information Week page bookmarked says "NON-WORKING URL! The URL (Web address) that has been entered is directing to a non-existent page" Try this instead http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/handheld/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=216403510 Acer To Use Android For Phones, Not Netbooks April 8, 2009
  • David Corking on 09 Apr 09
     
    Microsoft conspiracies have happened in the past and we should watch for them. However, another explanation is that Android does not (yet) support many browser plugins. No doubt that is what the Microsoft drones remind Acer each time they meet with them, along with a pitch for Silverlight 2 !! For me, Silverlight 2 is so rare that I would not, personally, make it a requirement for a "full web". A non-Android Linux distribution on a netbook that ran Adobe Flash, Acrobat Reader, OpenOffice.org and AIR when necessary would suit me fine. One day Android may do all these things to, but for now Google has bigger fish to fry!
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Mashups turn into an industry as offerings mature | Hinchcliffe Enterprise Web 2.0 | Z... - 0 views

blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe OpenWeb mashup enterprise20 web20 dion-hinchcliffe
shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Apr 09
     
    Dion has lots to say about the recent Web 2.0 Conference. In this article he covers nine significant announcements from companies specializing in Web based mashups and the related tools for building ad hoc Web applications. This years Web 2.0 was filled with Web developer oriented services, but my favorite was MindTouch. Perhaps because their focus was that of directly engaging end users in the customization of business processes. Yes, the creation of data objects is clearly in the realm of trained developers. And for sure many tools were announced at Web 2.0 to further the much needed wiring of data objects. But once wired and available, services like MindTouch i think will become the way end users interact and create new business productivity methods. Great coverage.

    "...... For awareness and understanding of the fast-growing world of mashups are significant challenges as IT practitioners, business strategists, and software vendors attempt to grapple with what's facing up to be the biggest challenge of all: The habits and expectations of the larger part of a generation of workers who don't yet realize mashups are poised to change many things about the software landscape on the Web and in the workplace. Generational changes can be difficult for businesses to embrace successfully, and while evidence that mashups are remaking the business world are still very much emerging, they certainly hold the promise..."

    ".... while the life of the average Web developer has been greatly improved by the availability of a wide variety of useful open APIs, the average user of the Web hasn't been a direct beneficiary except through the increase in Web apps that are built on the mashup model. And that's because the tools that empower users to weave together existing Web parts and open APIs into the exact solutions they need are just now becoming easy enough and robust enough to readily enable these scenarios. And that doesn't include the variety of
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Director Wants His Film on The Pirate Bay, Pirates Deliver... | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/ate-bay-pirates-deliver-140724 film director want does share is culture Internet business freedom
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 25 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 25 Jul 14
     
    " Ernesto on July 24, 2014 C: 38 News A few days ago a Dutch movie director asked people to upload a copy of one of his older films onto The Pirate Bay. The filmmaker had become fed up with the fact that copyright issues made his work completely unavailable through legal channels. To his surprise, pirates were quick to deliver. suzyDutch movie director Martin Koolhoven sent out an unusual request on Twitter a few days ago. "
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 25 Jul 14
     
    " Ernesto on July 24, 2014 C: 38 News A few days ago a Dutch movie director asked people to upload a copy of one of his older films onto The Pirate Bay. The filmmaker had become fed up with the fact that copyright issues made his work completely unavailable through legal channels. To his surprise, pirates were quick to deliver. suzyDutch movie director Martin Koolhoven sent out an unusual request on Twitter a few days ago. "
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 26 Jul 14
     
    " Ernesto on July 24, 2014 C: 38 News A few days ago a Dutch movie director asked people to upload a copy of one of his older films onto The Pirate Bay. The filmmaker had become fed up with the fact that copyright issues made his work completely unavailable through legal channels. To his surprise, pirates were quick to deliver. suzyDutch movie director Martin Koolhoven sent out an unusual request on Twitter a few days ago. "
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The Latest Rules on How Long NSA Can Keep Americans' Encrypted Data Look Too Familiar |... - 0 views

justsecurity.org/...s-hold-encrypted-data-familiar surveillance state NSA IAA-2015 Sect-309 legislation
shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Does the National Security Agency (NSA) have the authority to collect and keep all encrypted Internet traffic for as long as is necessary to decrypt that traffic? That was a question first raised in June 2013, after the minimization procedures governing telephone and Internet records collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were disclosed by Edward Snowden. The issue quickly receded into the background, however, as the world struggled to keep up with the deluge of surveillance disclosures. The Intelligence Authorization Act of 2015, which passed Congress this last December, should bring the question back to the fore. It established retention guidelines for communications collected under Executive Order 12333 and included an exception that allows NSA to keep ‘incidentally’ collected encrypted communications for an indefinite period of time. This creates a massive loophole in the guidelines. NSA’s retention of encrypted communications deserves further consideration today, now that these retention guidelines have been written into law. It has become increasingly clear over the last year that surveillance reform will be driven by technological change—specifically by the growing use of encryption technologies. Therefore, any legislation touching on encryption should receive close scrutiny.
  • Section 309 of the intel authorization bill describes “procedures for the retention of incidentally acquired communications.” It establishes retention guidelines for surveillance programs that are “reasonably anticipated to result in the acquisition of [telephone or electronic communications] to or from a United States person.” Communications to or from a United States person are ‘incidentally’ collected because the U.S. person is not the actual target of the collection. Section 309 states that these incidentally collected communications must be deleted after five years unless they meet a number of exceptions. One of these exceptions is that “the communication is enciphered or reasonably believed to have a secret meaning.” This exception appears to be directly lifted from NSA’s minimization procedures for data collected under Section 702 of FISA, which were declassified in 2013. 
  • While Section 309 specifically applies to collection taking place under E.O. 12333, not FISA, several of the exceptions described in Section 309 closely match exceptions in the FISA minimization procedures. That includes the exception for “enciphered” communications. Those minimization procedures almost certainly served as a model for these retention guidelines and will likely shape how this new language is interpreted by the Executive Branch. Section 309 also asks the heads of each relevant member of the intelligence community to develop procedures to ensure compliance with new retention requirements. I expect those procedures to look a lot like the FISA minimization guidelines.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • This language is broad, circular, and technically incoherent, so it takes some effort to parse appropriately. When the minimization procedures were disclosed in 2013, this language was interpreted by outside commentators to mean that NSA may keep all encrypted data that has been incidentally collected under Section 702 for at least as long as is necessary to decrypt that data. Is this the correct interpretation? I think so. It is important to realize that the language above isn’t just broad. It seems purposefully broad. The part regarding relevance seems to mirror the rationale NSA has used to justify its bulk phone records collection program. Under that program, all phone records were relevant because some of those records could be valuable to terrorism investigations and (allegedly) it isn’t possible to collect only those valuable records. This is the “to find a needle a haystack, you first have to have the haystack” argument. The same argument could be applied to encrypted data and might be at play here.
  • This exception doesn’t just apply to encrypted data that might be relevant to a current foreign intelligence investigation. It also applies to cases in which the encrypted data is likely to become relevant to a future intelligence requirement. This is some remarkably generous language. It seems one could justify keeping any type of encrypted data under this exception. Upon close reading, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these procedures were written carefully to allow NSA to collect and keep a broad category of encrypted data under the rationale that this data might contain the communications of NSA targets and that it might be decrypted in the future. If NSA isn’t doing this today, then whoever wrote these minimization procedures wanted to at least ensure that NSA has the authority to do this tomorrow.
  • There are a few additional observations that are worth making regarding these nominally new retention guidelines and Section 702 collection. First, the concept of incidental collection as it has typically been used makes very little sense when applied to encrypted data. The way that NSA’s Section 702 upstream “about” collection is understood to work is that technology installed on the network does some sort of pattern match on Internet traffic; say that an NSA target uses example@gmail.com to communicate. NSA would then search content of emails for references to example@gmail.com. This could notionally result in a lot of incidental collection of U.S. persons’ communications whenever the email that references example@gmail.com is somehow mixed together with emails that have nothing to do with the target. This type of incidental collection isn’t possible when the data is encrypted because it won’t be possible to search and find example@gmail.com in the body of an email. Instead, example@gmail.com will have been turned into some alternative, indecipherable string of bits on the network. Incidental collection shouldn’t occur because the pattern match can’t occur in the first place. This demonstrates that, when communications are encrypted, it will be much harder for NSA to search Internet traffic for a unique ID associated with a specific target.
  • This lends further credence to the conclusion above: rather than doing targeted collection against specific individuals, NSA is collecting, or plans to collect, a broad class of data that is encrypted. For example, NSA might collect all PGP encrypted emails or all Tor traffic. In those cases, NSA could search Internet traffic for patterns associated with specific types of communications, rather than specific individuals’ communications. This would technically meet the definition of incidental collection because such activity would result in the collection of communications of U.S. persons who aren’t the actual targets of surveillance. Collection of all Tor traffic would entail a lot of this “incidental” collection because the communications of NSA targets would be mixed with the communications of a large number of non-target U.S. persons. However, this “incidental” collection is inconsistent with how the term is typically used, which is to refer to over-collection resulting from targeted surveillance programs. If NSA were collecting all Tor traffic, that activity wouldn’t actually be targeted, and so any resulting over-collection wouldn’t actually be incidental. Moreover, greater use of encryption by the general public would result in an ever-growing amount of this type of incidental collection.
  • This type of collection would also be inconsistent with representations of Section 702 upstream collection that have been made to the public and to Congress. Intelligence officials have repeatedly suggested that search terms used as part of this program have a high degree of specificity. They have also argued that the program is an example of targeted rather than bulk collection. ODNI General Counsel Robert Litt, in a March 2014 meeting before the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, stated that “there is either a misconception or a mischaracterization commonly repeated that Section 702 is a form of bulk collection. It is not bulk collection. It is targeted collection based on selectors such as telephone numbers or email addresses where there’s reason to believe that the selector is relevant to a foreign intelligence purpose.” The collection of Internet traffic based on patterns associated with types of communications would be bulk collection; more akin to NSA’s collection of phone records en mass than it is to targeted collection focused on specific individuals. Moreover, this type of collection would certainly fall within the definition of bulk collection provided just last week by the National Academy of Sciences: “collection in which a significant portion of the retained data pertains to identifiers that are not targets at the time of collection.”
  • The Section 702 minimization procedures, which will serve as a template for any new retention guidelines established for E.O. 12333 collection, create a large loophole for encrypted communications. With everything from email to Internet browsing to real-time communications moving to encrypted formats, an ever-growing amount of Internet traffic will fall within this loophole.
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Jan 15
     
    Tucked into a budget authorization act in December without press notice. Section 309 (the Act is linked from the article) appears to be very broad authority for the NSA to intercept any form of telephone or other electronic information in bulk. There are far more exceptions from the five-year retention limitation than the encrypted information exception. When reading this, keep in mind that the U.S. intelligence community plays semantic games to obfuscate what it does. One of its word plays is that communications are not "collected" until an analyst looks at or listens to partiuclar data, even though the data will be searched to find information countless times before it becomes "collected." That searching was the major basis for a decision by the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. that bulk collection of telephone communications was unconstitutional: Under the Fourth Amendment, a "search" or "seizure" requiring a judicial warrant occurs no later than when the information is intercepted. That case is on appeal, has been briefed and argued, and a decision could come any time now. Similar cases are pending in two other courts of appeals. Also, an important definition from the new Intelligence Authorization Act: "(a) DEFINITIONS.-In this section: (1) COVERED COMMUNICATION.-The term ''covered communication'' means any nonpublic telephone or electronic communication acquired without the consent of a person who is a party to the communication, including communications in electronic storage."       
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Pirate Party Becomes Iceland's Most Popular Political Party | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/popular-political-party-150319 iceland pirate party most popular after incarcelating corrupted one the way
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 19 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 19 Mar 15
     
    " Andy on March 19, 2015 C: 0 Breaking The results of a new poll published today in Iceland indicates that the Pirate Party has just become the country's most popular political party. According to the results, almost a quarter of all citizens would vote Pirate today. Speaking with TF, movement founder Rick Falkvinge describes the result as an "extraordinary accomplishment.""
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American cultural imperialism has a new name: GAFA - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...mperialism-has-a-new-name-gafa culure american imperialism GAFA Google Apple Faacebook Amazon quartz
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • In France, there’s a new word on everyone’s lips: GAFA. It’s an acronym, and it has become a shorthand term for some of the most powerful companies in the world—all American, all tech giants. GAFA stands for Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 02 Dec 14
     
    [In France, there's a new word on everyone's lips: GAFA. It's an acronym, and it has become a shorthand term for some of the most powerful companies in the world-all American, all tech giants. GAFA stands for Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. ...]
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 02 Dec 14
     
    [In France, there's a new word on everyone's lips: GAFA. It's an acronym, and it has become a shorthand term for some of the most powerful companies in the world-all American, all tech giants. GAFA stands for Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. ...]
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One world, one container: Open Container Project - 0 views

mobile.linuxtoday.com/...er-open-container-project.html one container world open container project open source infrastructure
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 29 Feb 16
     
    Today, containers are becoming the default way that people put apps on clouds. In no small part, that's because containers didn't become standardized until libcontainer appeared in 2014. But then Docker headed in its own direction, and others, starting with CoreOS, started splitting off. Fortunately, instead of forking themselves into irrelevance, almost all the containers powers got back on the same page with the Open Container Project (OCP).
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Cy Vance's Proposal to Backdoor Encrypted Devices Is Riddled With Vulnerabilities | Jus... - 0 views

www.justsecurity.org/...evices-riddled-vulnerabilities surveillance state encryption-backdoors Vance
shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Less than a week after the attacks in Paris — while the public and policymakers were still reeling, and the investigation had barely gotten off the ground — Cy Vance, Manhattan’s District Attorney, released a policy paper calling for legislation requiring companies to provide the government with backdoor access to their smartphones and other mobile devices. This is the first concrete proposal of this type since September 2014, when FBI Director James Comey reignited the “Crypto Wars” in response to Apple’s and Google’s decisions to use default encryption on their smartphones. Though Comey seized on Apple’s and Google’s decisions to encrypt their devices by default, his concerns are primarily related to end-to-end encryption, which protects communications that are in transit. Vance’s proposal, on the other hand, is only concerned with device encryption, which protects data stored on phones. It is still unclear whether encryption played any role in the Paris attacks, though we do know that the attackers were using unencrypted SMS text messages on the night of the attack, and that some of them were even known to intelligence agencies and had previously been under surveillance. But regardless of whether encryption was used at some point during the planning of the attacks, as I lay out below, prohibiting companies from selling encrypted devices would not prevent criminals or terrorists from being able to access unbreakable encryption. Vance’s primary complaint is that Apple’s and Google’s decisions to provide their customers with more secure devices through encryption interferes with criminal investigations. He claims encryption prevents law enforcement from accessing stored data like iMessages, photos and videos, Internet search histories, and third party app data. He makes several arguments to justify his proposal to build backdoors into encrypted smartphones, but none of them hold water.
  • Before addressing the major privacy, security, and implementation concerns that his proposal raises, it is worth noting that while an increase in use of fully encrypted devices could interfere with some law enforcement investigations, it will help prevent far more crimes — especially smartphone theft, and the consequent potential for identity theft. According to Consumer Reports, in 2014 there were more than two million victims of smartphone theft, and nearly two-thirds of all smartphone users either took no steps to secure their phones or their data or failed to implement passcode access for their phones. Default encryption could reduce instances of theft because perpetrators would no longer be able to break into the phone to steal the data.
  • Vance argues that creating a weakness in encryption to allow law enforcement to access data stored on devices does not raise serious concerns for security and privacy, since in order to exploit the vulnerability one would need access to the actual device. He considers this an acceptable risk, claiming it would not be the same as creating a widespread vulnerability in encryption protecting communications in transit (like emails), and that it would be cheap and easy for companies to implement. But Vance seems to be underestimating the risks involved with his plan. It is increasingly important that smartphones and other devices are protected by the strongest encryption possible. Our devices and the apps on them contain astonishing amounts of personal information, so much that an unprecedented level of harm could be caused if a smartphone or device with an exploitable vulnerability is stolen, not least in the forms of identity fraud and credit card theft. We bank on our phones, and have access to credit card payments with services like Apple Pay. Our contact lists are stored on our phones, including phone numbers, emails, social media accounts, and addresses. Passwords are often stored on people’s phones. And phones and apps are often full of personal details about their lives, from food diaries to logs of favorite places to personal photographs. Symantec conducted a study, where the company spread 50 “lost” phones in public to see what people who picked up the phones would do with them. The company found that 95 percent of those people tried to access the phone, and while nearly 90 percent tried to access private information stored on the phone or in other private accounts such as banking services and email, only 50 percent attempted contacting the owner.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Vance attempts to downplay this serious risk by asserting that anyone can use the “Find My Phone” or Android Device Manager services that allow owners to delete the data on their phones if stolen. However, this does not stand up to scrutiny. These services are effective only when an owner realizes their phone is missing and can take swift action on another computer or device. This delay ensures some period of vulnerability. Encryption, on the other hand, protects everyone immediately and always. Additionally, Vance argues that it is safer to build backdoors into encrypted devices than it is to do so for encrypted communications in transit. It is true that there is a difference in the threats posed by the two types of encryption backdoors that are being debated. However, some manner of widespread vulnerability will inevitably result from a backdoor to encrypted devices. Indeed, the NSA and GCHQ reportedly hacked into a database to obtain cell phone SIM card encryption keys in order defeat the security protecting users’ communications and activities and to conduct surveillance. Clearly, the reality is that the threat of such a breach, whether from a hacker or a nation state actor, is very real. Even if companies go the extra mile and create a different means of access for every phone, such as a separate access key for each phone, significant vulnerabilities will be created. It would still be possible for a malicious actor to gain access to the database containing those keys, which would enable them to defeat the encryption on any smartphone they took possession of. Additionally, the cost of implementation and maintenance of such a complex system could be high.
  • Privacy is another concern that Vance dismisses too easily. Despite Vance’s arguments otherwise, building backdoors into device encryption undermines privacy. Our government does not impose a similar requirement in any other context. Police can enter homes with warrants, but there is no requirement that people record their conversations and interactions just in case they someday become useful in an investigation. The conversations that we once had through disposable letters and in-person conversations now happen over the Internet and on phones. Just because the medium has changed does not mean our right to privacy has.
  • In addition to his weak reasoning for why it would be feasible to create backdoors to encrypted devices without creating undue security risks or harming privacy, Vance makes several flawed policy-based arguments in favor of his proposal. He argues that criminals benefit from devices that are protected by strong encryption. That may be true, but strong encryption is also a critical tool used by billions of average people around the world every day to protect their transactions, communications, and private information. Lawyers, doctors, and journalists rely on encryption to protect their clients, patients, and sources. Government officials, from the President to the directors of the NSA and FBI, and members of Congress, depend on strong encryption for cybersecurity and data security. There are far more innocent Americans who benefit from strong encryption than there are criminals who exploit it. Encryption is also essential to our economy. Device manufacturers could suffer major economic losses if they are prohibited from competing with foreign manufacturers who offer more secure devices. Encryption also protects major companies from corporate and nation-state espionage. As more daily business activities are done on smartphones and other devices, they may now hold highly proprietary or sensitive information. Those devices could be targeted even more than they are now if all that has to be done to access that information is to steal an employee’s smartphone and exploit a vulnerability the manufacturer was required to create.
  • Vance also suggests that the US would be justified in creating such a requirement since other Western nations are contemplating requiring encryption backdoors as well. Regardless of whether other countries are debating similar proposals, we cannot afford a race to the bottom on cybersecurity. Heads of the intelligence community regularly warn that cybersecurity is the top threat to our national security. Strong encryption is our best defense against cyber threats, and following in the footsteps of other countries by weakening that critical tool would do incalculable harm. Furthermore, even if the US or other countries did implement such a proposal, criminals could gain access to devices with strong encryption through the black market. Thus, only innocent people would be negatively affected, and some of those innocent people might even become criminals simply by trying to protect their privacy by securing their data and devices. Finally, Vance argues that David Kaye, UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression and Opinion, supported the idea that court-ordered decryption doesn’t violate human rights, provided certain criteria are met, in his report on the topic. However, in the context of Vance’s proposal, this seems to conflate the concepts of court-ordered decryption and of government-mandated encryption backdoors. The Kaye report was unequivocal about the importance of encryption for free speech and human rights. The report concluded that:
  • States should promote strong encryption and anonymity. National laws should recognize that individuals are free to protect the privacy of their digital communications by using encryption technology and tools that allow anonymity online. … States should not restrict encryption and anonymity, which facilitate and often enable the rights to freedom of opinion and expression. Blanket prohibitions fail to be necessary and proportionate. States should avoid all measures that weaken the security that individuals may enjoy online, such as backdoors, weak encryption standards and key escrows. Additionally, the group of intelligence experts that was hand-picked by the President to issue a report and recommendations on surveillance and technology, concluded that: [R]egarding encryption, the U.S. Government should: (1) fully support and not undermine efforts to create encryption standards; (2) not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial software; and (3) increase the use of encryption and urge US companies to do so, in order to better protect data in transit, at rest, in the cloud, and in other storage.
  • The clear consensus among human rights experts and several high-ranking intelligence experts, including the former directors of the NSA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and DHS, is that mandating encryption backdoors is dangerous. Unaddressed Concerns: Preventing Encrypted Devices from Entering the US and the Slippery Slope In addition to the significant faults in Vance’s arguments in favor of his proposal, he fails to address the question of how such a restriction would be effectively implemented. There is no effective mechanism for preventing code from becoming available for download online, even if it is illegal. One critical issue the Vance proposal fails to address is how the government would prevent, or even identify, encrypted smartphones when individuals bring them into the United States. DHS would have to train customs agents to search the contents of every person’s phone in order to identify whether it is encrypted, and then confiscate the phones that are. Legal and policy considerations aside, this kind of policy is, at the very least, impractical. Preventing strong encryption from entering the US is not like preventing guns or drugs from entering the country — encrypted phones aren’t immediately obvious as is contraband. Millions of people use encrypted devices, and tens of millions more devices are shipped to and sold in the US each year.
  • Finally, there is a real concern that if Vance’s proposal were accepted, it would be the first step down a slippery slope. Right now, his proposal only calls for access to smartphones and devices running mobile operating systems. While this policy in and of itself would cover a number of commonplace devices, it may eventually be expanded to cover laptop and desktop computers, as well as communications in transit. The expansion of this kind of policy is even more worrisome when taking into account the speed at which technology evolves and becomes widely adopted. Ten years ago, the iPhone did not even exist. Who is to say what technology will be commonplace in 10 or 20 years that is not even around today. There is a very real question about how far law enforcement will go to gain access to information. Things that once seemed like merely science fiction, such as wearable technology and artificial intelligence that could be implanted in and work with the human nervous system, are now available. If and when there comes a time when our “smart phone” is not really a device at all, but is rather an implant, surely we would not grant law enforcement access to our minds.
  • Policymakers should dismiss Vance’s proposal to prohibit the use of strong encryption to protect our smartphones and devices in order to ensure law enforcement access. Undermining encryption, regardless of whether it is protecting data in transit or at rest, would take us down a dangerous and harmful path. Instead, law enforcement and the intelligence community should be working to alter their skills and tactics in a fast-evolving technological world so that they are not so dependent on information that will increasingly be protected by encryption.
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Smartphone innovation: Where we're going next (Smartphones Unlocked) | Dialed In - CNET... - 0 views

www.cnet.com/...oing-next-smartphones-unlocked smartphone future smartphone
shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • With his shaggy, sandy blond hair and a 5-o'clock shadow, Mark Rolston, the creative director for Frog Design, has studied technology for the better part of two decades. As he sees it, smartphones are just about out of evolutionary advances. Sure, form factors and materials might alter as manufacturers grasp for differentiating design, but in terms of innovative leaps, Rolston says, "we're at the end of gross innovation for smartphones." That isn't to say smartphones are dead or obsolete. Just the contrary. As Rolston and other future thinkers who study the mobile space conclude, smartphones will become increasingly impactful in interacting with our surrounding world, but more as one smaller piece of a much large, interconnected puzzle abuzz with data transfer and information. We'll certainly see more crazy camera software and NFC features everywhere, but there's much, much more to look forward to besides.
  • You may have never given two thoughts to the sensors that come on you smartphone. They don't mind. They're still there anyway, computing data on your phone's movement and speed, rotation, and lighting conditions. These under-appreciated components -- the gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, and so forth -- are starting to get more friends in the neighborhood. Samsung, for instance, slipped pressure, temperature, and humidity sniffers into the Galaxy S4. They may not be the sexiest feature in your phone, but in the future, sensors like accelerometers will be able to collect and report much more detailed information.
  • If you've made it here, you'll start seeing a general theme: in the forward-looking smartphone environment of our future, our devices are anything but isolated. Instead, smartphones will come with more components and communications tools to interact more than ever before with people and other devices. We already see some communication with Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth, and NFC communications protocols, plus newcomers like the Miracast standard. In short, the kind of innovation we see in the mobile space may have more to do with getting your smartphone to communicate with other computing devices in the ecosystem than it will have with how many megapixels or ultrapixels your camera lens possesses or what kind of leather was used to finish the chassis.
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  • An extension of the smartphone as medical device is what Ideo's Blakely terms "appcessories," a set of highly specialized peripheral software that fulfills very targeted needs, stuff that most people wouldn't want their everyday phone.
  • . Let's say you're in a bar or at a conference and you want to meet people, he says. Extremely precise sensors track exactly where you are indoors. Point the phone toward a person in the crowd and her pertinent information pops onto the screen: who she is, what she does, and maybe some backgrou
  • Into the coffee shop of tomorrow walks a techie of tomorrow. He or she is decked out in wearable tech from head to toe -- the Bluetooth earring or ear cuff tucked into a lobe; Google glasses beaming up maps and directions; a smartwatch that takes your vitals, deals with mobile payments, and serves as a console for the most important functions. Then there's the smartphone slipped into the pocket for more complicated tasks or to serve as a "big" screen, and the smart shoes that calculate distance, underfoot conditions, and analyze your gait. Your smartphone is still there, still essential for communicating with your environment, but it becomes only one device in a collection of other, even more personal or convenient gadgets, that solve some of the same sorts of problems in different or complimentary ways.
  • The scenario above isn't all that outlandish, especially given the rise of smartwatches, which still have a ways to go before becoming truly well-rounded devices. Crazy tech that interacts with your body has been in development for some time. To illustrate the point, Frog's Rolston brought a pair of Necomimi Brainwave Cat Ears to our interview. The fuzzy "ears," which have been on sale for about two years, sit atop a headband. A sensor protrudes from the band onto your forehead and a dangling clip closes the circuit when you attach it to your earlobe. The cat ears swivel and twitch in concert with your brain waves, a bizarre and surprisingly giddy sensation. Necomimi's contraption isn't particularly useful or flattering, but its brain-reading sensors underscore the kind of close, personal interaction that can occur when tech "talks." Paired with a smartphone app, what could this contraption share about our brains when we wake or sleep?
  • The point is this: smartphones aren't going anywhere. But instead of a focusing on the world within the phone's screen, the smartphone will be tuned more than ever before to the world around you.
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Rightscorp Revenues Collapse, Pirates Too Hard to Track - TorrentFreak - 1 views

torrentfreak.com/rates-too-hard-to-track-160517
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 19 May 16 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 19 May 16
     
    " By Andy on May 17, 2016 C: 118 Breaking Anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp has just turned in another set of dismal results. During the past three months revenues plummeted 78% versus the same period last year with the company recording a net loss of $784,000. Pirates, it appears, are becoming harder to track and threaten."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 19 May 16
     
    " By Andy on May 17, 2016 C: 118 Breaking Anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp has just turned in another set of dismal results. During the past three months revenues plummeted 78% versus the same period last year with the company recording a net loss of $784,000. Pirates, it appears, are becoming harder to track and threaten."
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Using open document formats could create a domino effect | Opensource.com - 1 views

opensource.com/...open-formats-academic-content ODT ODF open document format Domino Effect educational research resources interchange
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 15 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 15 Sep 16
     
    "Higher education is increasingly embracing different concepts of openness, from open access to open education resources (OER). But where does that other open concept-open source-fit into this model? Open source represents the best way to ensure these materials can be easily modified, without risk of material suddenly becoming unchangeable or inaccessible."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 15 Sep 16
     
    "Higher education is increasingly embracing different concepts of openness, from open access to open education resources (OER). But where does that other open concept-open source-fit into this model? Open source represents the best way to ensure these materials can be easily modified, without risk of material suddenly becoming unchangeable or inaccessible."
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Is being open worth the effort? | A recap of the August 25 #OpenOrgChat | Opensource.com - 0 views

opensource.com/...being-open-worth-effort #OpenOrgChat recap do being open worth it open source effort way satisfaction
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 09 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 09 Sep 16
     
    "Becoming (or remaining) an open organization is challenging. This month, the open organization community at Opensource.com discussed those challenges-and so much more-during our #OpenOrgChat on Twitter. If you missed it, check out the recap below as you prepare for our next chat."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 09 Sep 16
     
    "Becoming (or remaining) an open organization is challenging. This month, the open organization community at Opensource.com discussed those challenges-and so much more-during our #OpenOrgChat on Twitter. If you missed it, check out the recap below as you prepare for our next chat."
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