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[ By Melissa Riofrio, PC World | Security, CISPA, privacy April 25, 2013, 12:16 PM - Cybersecurity and online privacy are two critical interests that seem destined never to get along. Sure, you want malicious hackers, spammers, and other Internet lowlifes brought to justice--but you also want to protect your online data. ...]

Direct P2P encrypted file syncing, no cloud intermediate, which should translate to far more secure exchange of files, with less opportunity for snooping by governments or others, than with cloud-based services. 

Re: Google. I don't know if it's the 'kiss of death" but they're definitely going to take a hit, particularly outside the U.S. BTW, I'm remembering from a few years back when the ODF Foundation was still kicking. I did a fair bit of research on the bureaucratic forces in the E.U. that were pushing for the Open Document Exchange Formats. That grew out of a then-ongoing push to get all of the E.U. nations connected via a network that is not dependent on the Internet. It was fairly complete at the time down to the national level and was branching out to the local level and the plan from there was to push connections to business and then to Joe Sixpack and wife. Interop was key, hence ODEF. The E.U. might not be that far away from an ability to sever the digital connections with the U.S. Say a bunch of daisy-chained proxy anonymizers for communications with the U.S. Of course they'd have to block the UK from the network and treat it like it is the U.S. There's a formal signals intelligence service collaboration/integration dating back to WW 2, as I recall, among the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Don't remember its name. But it's the same group of nations that were collaborating on Echelon. So the E.U. wouldn't want to let the UK fox inside their new chicken coop. Ah, it's just a fantasy. The U.S. and the E.U. are too interdependent. I have no idea hard it would be for the Zoho folk to come up with desktop/side encryption/decryption. And I don't know whether their servers are located outside the reach of a U.S. court's search warrant. But I think Google is going to have to move in that direction fast if it wants to minimize the damage. Or get way out in front of the hounds chomping at the NSA's ankles and reduce the NSA to compost. OTOH, Google might be a government covert op. for all I know. :-) I'm really enjoying watching the NSA show. Who knows what facet of their Big Brother operation gets revealed next?

ZOHO is an Indian company with USA marketing offices. No idea where the server farm is located, but they were not on the NSA list. I've known Raju Vegesna for years, mostly from the old Web 2.0 and Office 2.0 Conferences. Raju runs the USA offices in Santa Clara. I'll try to catch up with him on Thursday. How he could miss this once in a lifetime moment to clean out Google, Microsoft and SalesForce.com is something I'd like to find out about. Thanks for the Wuala tip. You sent me that years ago, when i was working on research and design for the SurDocs project. Incredible that all our notes, research, designs and correspondence was left to rot in Google Wave! Too too funny. I recall telling Alex from SurDocs that he had to use a USA host, like Amazon, that could be trusted by USA customers to keep their docs safe and secure. Now look what i've done! I've tossed his entire company information set into the laps of the NSA and their cabal of connected corporatists :)

" Ernesto on September 18, 2016 C: 4 Opinion Not all anti-piracy vendors play fair when it comes to removing copyright-infringing content from the Internet. In fact, there is clear and convincing evidence that several companies 'make up' links that have never even existed, perhaps in part to boost their own numbers."

"from the this-is-a-bad,-bad-idea dept Some bad ideas never seem to die. It appears that the French government is working to enlist other countries to try to undermine encryption and put us all at much greater risk. "

"Posted: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 12:00 am Marcus Williams | 0 comments For the vast majority of us who have never read the iTunes Terms of Service Agreement after downloading - for what seems like the 100th update - it may come as a surprise that we do not, in fact, own any of this "purchased" music."

A series of eleven pages discussing Bitcoin and the extraordinary impact it will have on the world economy. Excellent article and a worthy follow up to the previous Marc Andressen discussion of Bitcoin.

A series of eleven pages discussing Bitcoin and the extraordinary impact it will have on the world economy. Excellent article and a worthy follow up to the previous Marc Andressen discussion of Bitcoin.

This morning Google announced Google Docs Ad Ons using server side JavaScript. The Ad-Ons are available at the Google Apps Store. The short videos provide a glimpse at some of the new Ad-Ons, including the mail (Avery) and email (MailChimp) MERGE features. Yes, this is what Cloud Productivity has been waiting for; mail merge and data merge that the Office desktop productivity suites first featured in 1992! Still, better late than never. MERGE is a critical feature for office productivity, and now the Cloud has it in a general purpose productivity platform. Good stuff. Now, how about getting a Diigo Ad-On for the Bibliography MERGE feature set!!!!

"If there was ever any doubt about whether Microsoft or Google would win the war of office suites, there should be no longer. Within the last several weeks, Microsoft has pulled so far ahead that it's game over. Here's why. When it comes to which suite is more fully featured, there's never been any real debate: Microsoft Office wins hands down. Whether you're creating entire presentations, creating complicated word-processing documents, or even doing something as simple as handling text attributes, Office is a far better tool. Until the last few weeks, Google Docs had one significant advantage over Microsoft Office: It's available for Android and the iPad as well as PCs because it's Web-based. The same wasn't the case for Office. So if you wanted to use an office suite on all your mobile devices, Google Docs was the way to go. Google Docs lost that advantage when Microsoft released Office for the iPad. There's not yet a native version for Android tablets, but Microsoft is working on that, telling GeekWire, "Let me tell you conclusively: Yes, we are also building Android native applications for tablets for Word, Excel and PowerPoint." Google Docs is still superior to Office's Web-based version, but that's far less important than it used to be. There's no need to go with a Web-based office suite if a superior suite is available as a native apps on all platforms, mobile or otherwise. And Office's collaboration capabilities are quite considerable now. Of course, there's always the question of price. Google Docs is free. Microsoft Office isn't. But at $100 a year for up to five devices, or $70 a year for two, no one will be going broke paying for Microsoft Office. It's worth paying that relatively small price for a much better office suite. Google Docs won't die. It'll be around as second fiddle for a long time. But that's what it will always remain: a second fiddle to the better Microsoft Office."

Google acquired "Writely", a small company in Portola Valley that pioneered document editing in a browser. Writely was perhaps the first cloud computing editor to go beyond simple HTML; eventually crafting some really cool CSS-JavaScript-JSON document layout and editing methods. But it can't edit native MSOffice documents. It converts them. There are more than a few problems with the Google Docs approach to editing advanced "compound" documents, but two stick out and are certain to give pause to anyone making the great transition from local workgroup computing, to the highly mobile, always connected, cloud computing. The first problem certain to become a show stopper is that Google converts documents to their native on-line format for editing and collaboration. And then they convert back. To many this isn't a problem. But if the document is part of a workflow or business process, conversion is a killer. There is an old saw affectionately known as "Reuters Law", dating back to the ODF-OXML document wars, that emphatically states; "Conversion breaks documents." The breakage includes both the visual layout of the document, and, the "compound" aspects and data connections that are internal to the document. Think of this way. A business document that is part of a legacy Windows Workgroup workflow is opened up in gDocs. Google converts the document for editing purposes. The data and the workflow internals that bind the document to the local business system are broken on conversion. The look of the document is also visually shredded as the gDocs layout engine is applied. For all practical purposes, no matter what magic editing and collaboration value is added, a broken document means a broken business process. Let me say that again, with the emphasis of having witnessed this first hand during the year long ODF transition trials the Commonwealth of Massachusetts conducted in 2005 and 2006. The business process broke every time a conversion was conducted "on a busines

Awesome article describing the history of Microsoft as seen through the lives of it's three CEO's: Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella

"...Being locked out of your own possessions is not a side effect - it was the central point of the legislation and its core purpose...."

"...Being locked out of your own possessions is not a side effect - it was the central point of the legislation and its core purpose...."

"from the the-future's-here-if-you-want-it dept Musician and producer Steve Albini has never been a fan of the recording industry. He posted the definitive essay on how labels screw artists over 20 years ago, and it's just as relevant today as it was then. The internet (read: file sharing) has been public enemy #1 for the recording industry (and now the motion picture industry), despite offering a host of benefits to artists and labels. "

"Congress is voting this week on dangerous legislation to "Fast Track" secret trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) that threaten free speech, innovation, and online privacy. Decisions that impact the future of the Internet should NEVER be made in secret. Contact your Representatives before it's too late! "

" Ernesto on September 21, 2015 C: 105 Breaking Late last year The Pirate Bay was pulled offline after Swedish police raided a datacenter near Stockholm. The police confiscated dozens of servers which many believed to belong to the notorious torrent site. Today, the TPB team reveals that this is not the case."

" Ernesto on September 21, 2015 C: 105 Breaking Late last year The Pirate Bay was pulled offline after Swedish police raided a datacenter near Stockholm. The police confiscated dozens of servers which many believed to belong to the notorious torrent site. Today, the TPB team reveals that this is not the case."

"The bill also allows the head of a federal agency or department "to disclose to the Secretary or a private entity providing assistance to the Secretary…information traveling to or from or stored on an agency information system, notwithstanding any other law that would otherwise restrict or prevent agency heads from disclosing such information to the Secretary."" Let's see: if your information is intercepted by the NSA and stored on its "information system" in Bluffdale, Utah, then it can be disclosed to the Secretary of DHS or any private entity providing him/her with assistance, "notwithstanding any other law that would otherwise restrict or prevent agency heads from disclosing such information to the Secretary." And if NSA just happens to be intercepting every digital bit of data generated or received in the entire world, including the U.S., then it's all in play, "notwithstanding any other law that would otherwise restrict or prevent agency heads from disclosing such information to the Secretary.". Sheesh! Our government voyeurs never stop trying to get more nude pix and videos to view.  

" Rick Falkvinge on August 2, 2015 C: 215 Opinion In the still-ongoing debate over sharing it's paramount to realize that sharing and copying was always the natural state, and that restricting of copying is an arbitrary restriction of property rights."

"US tells EU's highest court not to interfere with its data-slurping-with-impunity agreement. by Glyn Moody - Sep 29, 2015 4:00pm CEST"