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[Microsoft has announced that if computer makers wish to distribute machines with the Windows 8 compatibility logo, they will have to implement a measure called "Secure Boot." However, it is currently up for grabs whether this technology will live up to its name, or will instead earn the name Restricted Boot. When done correctly, "Secure Boot" is designed to protect against malware by preventing computers from loading unauthorized binary programs when booting. In practice, this means that computers implementing it won't boot unauthorized operating systems -- including initially authorized systems that have been modified without being re-approved. ...]

NSA as the cause of the next major disruption in the social networking service industry?  Grief ahead for Google? Note the point made that: "It's impossible to do a cloud-based ad supported service" where the encryption/decryption takes place on the client side. 

# ! as if they weren't more important issues... # ! ... but let's see 'The Plan'.. # ! "follow the money" is good... # ! ... and let the #culture #thrive... "The EU Commission will next week announce new strategies for dealing with online piracy and counterfeiting. These non-legislative measures will include an EU action plan aimed at fighting IP infringement, plus a strategy to protect and enforce IP rights in third countries. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the aim is to "follow the money"."

# ! as if they weren't more important issues... # ! ... but let's see 'The Plan'.. "The EU Commission will next week announce new strategies for dealing with online piracy and counterfeiting. These non-legislative measures will include an EU action plan aimed at fighting IP infringement, plus a strategy to protect and enforce IP rights in third countries. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the aim is to "follow the money"."

"When it was released in 2011, Drupal 7 was the most accessible open source content management system (CMS) available. I expect that this will be true until the release of Drupal 8. Web accessibility requires constant vigilance and will be something that will always need attention in any piece of software striving to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 guidelines."

"Here's a simple FFmpeg how to that will cover just a portion of the framework's abilities. We will see how you can use the terminal to perform simple conversions of various audio file types including all popular and widely available formats"

"Here's a simple FFmpeg how to that will cover just a portion of the framework's abilities. We will see how you can use the terminal to perform simple conversions of various audio file types including all popular and widely available formats"

Another take on it from EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/europes-court-justice-nsa-surveilance Expected since the Court's Advocate General released an opinion last week, presaging today's opinion.  Very big bucks involved behind the scenes because removing U.S.-based internet companies from the scene in the E.U. would pave the way for growth of E.U.-based companies.  The way forward for the U.S. companies is even more dicey because of a case now pending in the U.S.  The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is about to decide a related case in which Microsoft was ordered by the lower court to produce email records stored on a server in Ireland. . Should the Second Circuit uphold the order and the Supreme Court deny review, then under the principles announced today by the Court in the E.U., no U.S.-based company could ever be allowed to have "possession, custody, or control" of the data of E.U. citizens. You can bet that the E.U. case will weigh heavily in the Second Circuit's deliberations.  The E.U. decision is by far and away the largest legal event yet flowing out of the Edward Snowden disclosures, tectonic in scale. Up to now, Congress has succeeded in confining all NSA reforms to apply only to U.S. citizens. But now the large U.S. internet companies, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Dropbox, etc., face the loss of all Europe as a market. Congress *will* be forced by their lobbying power to extend privacy protections to "non-U.S. persons."  Thank you again, Edward Snowden.

The NeuroCommons project seeks to make all scientific research materials - research articles, annotations, data, physical materials - as available and as useable as they can be. This is done by fostering practices that render information in a form that promotes uniform access by computational agents - sometimes called "interoperability". Semantic Web practices based on RDF will enable knowledge sources to combine meaningfully, semantically precise queries that span multiple information sources.

Working with the Creative Commons group that sponsors "Neurocommons", Microsoft has developed and released an open source "ontology" add-on for Microsoft Word. The add-on makes use of MSOffice XML panel, Open XML formats, and proprietary "Smart Tags". Microsoft is also making the source code for both the Ontology Add-in for Office Word 2007 and the Creative Commons Add-in for Office Word 2007 tool available under the Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) at http://ucsdbiolit.codeplex.com and http://ccaddin2007.codeplex.com,respectively.

No doubt it will take some digging to figure out what is going on here. Microsoft WPF technologies include Smart Tags and LINQ. The Creative Commons "Neurocommons" ontology work is based on W3C RDF and SPARQL. How these opposing technologies interoperate with legacy MSOffice 2003 and 2007 desktops is an interesting question. One that may hold the answer to the larger problem of re-purposing MSOffice for the Open Web?

We know Microsoft is re-purposing MSOffice for the MS Web. Perhaps this work with Creative Commons will help to open up the Microsoft desktop productivity environment to the Open Web? One can always hope :)

Dr Dobbs has the Microsoft - Creative Commons announcement; Microsoft Releases Open Tools for Scientific Research ...... Joins Creative Commons in releasing the Ontology Add-in

CIO Magazine has an extensive interview with Craig Mundie, the man responsible for nailing down the next generation of monopolist profits: "You talk about technology waves. What will be the next big wave? What happens in waves is the shift from one generation of computing platform to the next. That platform gets established by a small number of killer apps. We've been through a number of these major platform shifts, from the mainframe to the minicomputer to the personal computer to adding the Internet as an adjunct platform. We're now trending to the next big platform, which I call "the client plus the cloud."

That's one thing, not two things. Today, we've got a broadening out of what people call the client. My 16 years here was in large measure about that. And then we introduced the network. The Internet was a place where you had Web content and Web publishing, but other than being delivered on some of those clients, the two things were somewhat divorced.

The next thing that will emerge is an architecture that allows the application developer to think of the cloud plus the client architecturally as a single thing. In a sense, it is like client/sever computing in the enterprise. It was the homogeneity that existed between some of the facilities at the server and the client end that allowed people to build those applications. We've never had that kind of architectural homogeneity in this cloud-plus-client or Internet-plus-smart-devices world, and I'm predicting that will be the next big thing.

There are two theories about Google Apps (Spreadsheet, Word-processor, GMail, etc.): Google Apps will rapidly become a multi-billion dollar business that will diversify Google's dependence on search Google Apps will kill Microsoft The first of these theories, a source outside Google familiar with Apps tells us, is laughable.

The reason Google-Docs is failing to crack the iron grip Microsoft has on business enterprises is the same reason that Linux desktops running OpenOffice failed :: It's the Business Process's that are bound to the Microsoft Office productivity environment that block the shift to Open Web computing. See, It's the Business Process!

Hey, maybe web apps will after all be able to hold two-way conversations some day? :-)

KODAXIL To Replace XML?

File this one under the Universal Interoperability label. Very interesting. Especially since XML document formats have proven to fall short on the two primary expectations of users: interoperability and Web ready. Like HTML+ :) Maybe KODAXIL will work?

The recent Web 2.0 Conference was filled with new web services , portals and wiki efforts trying their best to mash data into document objects. iCloud, MindTouch, AppLogic, 3Tera, Caspio and Gazoodle all deserve attention. although each took a rather different approach towards solving the problem. MindTouch in particular was excellent.

"A Montreal-based software and research development company has developed a markup solution and language-neutral asset-descriptor that when fully developed, could result in a universal computer language for representing information in databases, web and document contents and business objects."

"While still at a seminal stage of development, the company Gnoesis, aims to address the problem of data fragmentation caused by semantic differences between developers and users from different linguistic backgrounds."

Gnoesis, the company that has developed the language called KODAXIL (Knowledge, Object, Data, Action, and eXtensible Interoperable Language), a data and information representation language, says the new language will replace the XML function of consolidating semantically identical data streams from different languages, by creating a common language to do this.

The extensible semantic markup associated with this language will be understood worldwide and is three times shorter than XML.

Excellent article on Cloud Computing and the need for an Open API from Dion Hinchcliffe. Solid analysis, deeply linked, with some good graphics: "....The final outcome of this struggle, as it's been in many earlier platform battles over personal computer hardware, operating systems, databases, and even the Web itself, will be the result of a fairly predictable and oft-repeated cycle of events (see diagram below) for which a small number of large winners are likely to emerge victorious...." "When we look back many years from now, it's probable that cloud computing will be regarded as both a momentous and major change of course in the history of software; many future computing platforms will be created and operated by what seemingly amount to utility companies. While this might seem like a boring future for computing, it's a necessarily pragmatic evolution as the very size and scope of modern software requires new economic models in order to remain cost effective. Virtually any online application these days has to scale to a few million users as quickly and inexpensively as possible....."

Javascript has a major advantage of being (likely) the most installed programming language in history. It's experiencing a renaissance lately where people actually learning it, not just copying code found on someone's website. ECMAScript Harmony will bring some much needed fixes to the language (although I think ECMAScript 4 would have been a true game-changer for the web). Regardless, until we have more mature tools for sever- and DB-side javascript, Javascript is really a browser language (and faces an army of entrenched programmers who'd rather use some other language). To the second argument, I say: Javascript is an amazing language, but you can't declare it off limits to people who prefer other languages. Programming is about choice. On the server we get to use whatever combinations of web server, database, programming language, and development environment we like. Not so for the browser. We're stuck with Javascript whether we like it or not. We can't stay away from it, we can't use something else. Everyone who dislikes working in Javascript is perfectly justified because he has no other avenue. When all browsers support and are prepackaged with VMs for many languages, I'll be the first to sound the clarion: if you don't like JS, get the hell away from it. Until then, you're stuck with us and we're stuck with you. To the third: again, it's really all about to choice. If you prefer Javascript keep using it, make it better, steal ideas from other languages, and seed the community with new ideas of your own. Nobody will complain about a better overall development community. If you'd like to see Red in Python, PHP, C#, or language X then steal Jesse's code. Red was a herculean effort on Jesse's part. I know he's worked on nothing else for two months and future ports of Red to other languages will benefit from this effort.

# ! The bigger the Media Companies,the smaller the freedom of expresion... of choice... the lowerthe culture levels... "by Nathan Mattise - May 19 2014, 12:15am CEST Telecom 50 Today, AT&T announced that it will acquire DirectTV in a stock-and-cash transaction for $95 per share based Friday's closing prices, a transaction worth nearly $48 billion. The deal merges the second largest US wireless company with the second largest US pay-TV distributor."

# ! The bigger the Media Companies,the smaller the freedom of expresion... of choice... the lowerthe culture levels... "by Nathan Mattise - May 19 2014, 12:15am CEST Telecom 50 Today, AT&T announced that it will acquire DirectTV in a stock-and-cash transaction for $95 per share based Friday's closing prices, a transaction worth nearly $48 billion. The deal merges the second largest US wireless company with the second largest US pay-TV distributor."

The Internet continues to harden in the wake of the NSA revelations. This is a nice nudge by Google.