What began as a 24-hour test a year ago will become business as usual on Wednesday as a range of big-name Internet companies permanently switch on the next-generation IPv6 networking technology.
And now there's no turning back.
"IPv6 is being enabled and kept on by more than 1,500 Web sites and ISPs in 22 countries," said Arbor Networks, a company that monitors global Internet traffic closely.
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Hyperlinking is Not Copyright Infringement, EU Court Rules | TorrentFreak - 0 views
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Does publishing a hyperlink to freely available content amount to an illegal communication to the public and therefore a breach of creator's copyrights under European law? After examining a case referred to it by Sweden's Court of Appeal, the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled today that no, it does not.
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One such case, referred to the CJEU by Sweden’s Court of Appeal, is of particular interest to Internet users as it concerns the very mechanism that holds the web together. The dispute centers on a company called Retriever Sverige AB, an Internet-based subscription service that indexes links to articles that can be found elsewhere online for free. The problem came when Retriever published links to articles published on a newspaper’s website that were written by Swedish journalists. The company felt that it did not have to compensate the journalists for simply linking to their articles, nor did it believe that embedding them within its site amounted to copyright infringement. The journalists, on the other hand, felt that by linking to their articles Retriever had “communicated” their works to the public without permission. In the belief they should be paid, the journalists took their case to the Stockholm District Court. They lost their case in 2010 and decided to take the case to appeal. From there the Svea Court of Appeal sought advice from the EU Court. Today the Court of Justice published its lengthy decision and it’s largely good news for the Internet.
Microsoft Office Web Apps vs. Google Docs CIO.com - 0 views
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excellent comparison!
Dropbox: Condoleeza Rice appointment won't alter privacy pledge - CNET - 0 views
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Dropbox CEO Drew Houston sought to quell the uproar over the appointment of former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the company's board of directors, saying in a blog post Friday that Rice's appointment won't change its stance on privacy. "There's nothing more important to us than keeping your stuff safe and secure. It's why we've been fighting for transparency and government surveillance reform, and why we've been vocal and public with our principles and values," Houston wrote. "We should have been clearer that none of this is going to change with Dr. Rice's appointment to our Board." The cloud storage service is trying to grow its international presence -- something Rice should be able to help with. However, after Dropbox announced her appointment earlier this week, a Web site dedicated to the "Drop Dropbox" movement called her selection "deeply disturbing" and said her board role was "problematic on a number of deeper levels, and invites serious concerns" about management's commitment "to freedom, openness, and ethics."
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The movement said it objected to her role in the US decision to go to war in Iraq, as well as her position on the use of torture against prisoners. What's more, they said Rice supported the George W. Bush administration's "warrantless wiretap program and expansive domestic surveillance program."Houston responded in his brief note today, saying that Dropbox "should have been clearer that none of this is going to change" in the aftermath of Rice's appointment. "Our commitment to your rights and your privacy is at the heart of every decision we make, and this will continue," he wrote.
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"We're honored to have Dr. Rice join our board -- she brings an incredible amount of experience and insight into international markets and the dynamics that define them," Houston wrote. "As we continue to expand into new countries, we need that type of insight to help us reach new users and defend their rights. Dr. Rice understands our stance on these issues and fully supports our commitments to our users."In her only public comments about Dropbox since being named to the board, Rice didn't get very detailed in speaking with Bloomberg on Wednesday. "As a country, we are having a great national conversation and debate about exactly how to manage privacy concerns," Rice said in the interview. "I look forward to helping Dropbox navigate it."
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The straw that broke this camel's back. On top of having an absolutely horrible security model, Dropbox elects Condi Rice to its board of directors. I just completed transfer of my files to another service (in the E.U. where U.S. court orders don't reach) and deleted my Dropbox account.
Yahoo breaks every mailing list in the world including the IETF's - 0 views
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DMARC is what one might call an emerging e-mail security scheme. There's a draft on it at draft-kucherawy-dmarc-base-04, intended for the independent stream. It's emerging pretty fast, since many of the largest mail systems in the world have already implemented it, including Gmail, Hotmail/MSN/Outlook, Comcast, and Yahoo.
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The reason this matters is that over the weekend Yahoo published a DMARC record with a policy saying to reject all yahoo.com mail that fails DMARC. I noticed this because I got a blizzard of bounces from my church mailing list, when a subscriber sent a message from her yahoo.com account, and the list got a whole bunch of rejections from gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Comcast, and Yahoo itself. This is definitely a DMARC problem, the bounces say so. The problem for mailing lists isn't limited to the Yahoo subscribers. Since Yahoo mail provokes bounces from lots of other mail systems, innocent subscribers at Gmail, Hotmail, etc. not only won't get Yahoo subscribers' messages, but all those bounces are likely to bounce them off the lists. A few years back we had a similar problem due to an overstrict implementation of DKIM ADSP, but in this case, DMARC is doing what Yahoo is telling it to do. Suggestions: * Suspend posting permission of all yahoo.com addresses, to limit damage * Tell Yahoo users to get a new mail account somewhere else, pronto, if they want to continue using mailing lists * If you know people at Yahoo, ask if perhaps this wasn't such a good idea
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Short story: Check your SPAM folder for email from folks who email you from Yahoo accounts. That's where it's currently going. (They got rid of the first bug but created a new one in the process. Your Spam folder is where they're currently being routed.)
FCC Putting Comcast/Time Warner Cable Investigation On Hold - 0 views
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On Friday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said that it has extended its time to file responses and oppositions for the Comcast/Time Warner merger from October 8 to October 29. This is due to a motion filed by DISH Network, which said that Comcast didn't fully respond to the Commission's Request to Responses and Oppositions. The FCC is taking 180 days to determine if the Comcast and Time Warner merger will be in the best interest of the public. As of Friday, the investigation was at day 85, and it will resume once October 29 arrives. Originally, the investigation was expected to be complete on January 6, 2015. According to Reuters, a number of competitors and consumer advocates have rejected the merger, stating that the combined entity will have too much power over American consumers' viewing habits. Comcast disagrees of course, indicating that Time Warner is not a competitor and that their combined forces would bring better subscription services to a larger consumer audience.
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Back in August, the FCC sent questions to both Comcast and Time Warner Cable asking for additional information about their broadband and video services, such as their Web traffic management practices. However, the FCC said on Friday that both companies failed to provide enough answers to please the merger reviewers. Comcast disagrees but said it will work with the reviewers to provide the missing information. "We will work with the staff to determine the additional information the FCC is seeking (including the document production that the FCC had asked us to delay filing) and will submit supplemental answers and documents quickly thereafter so that the FCC can complete its review early in 2015," Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice told Reuters.
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Currently, the FCC is trying to retrieve Comcast's programming and retransmission consent agreements, but media companies have objected to the collection, saying that these documents are highly confidential. However, the documents have made their way to the Justice Department, which is conducting its own review for antitrust issues. The delay in the FCC's deadline also stems from a large 850-page document supplied by Comcast. The FCC indicated that this volume of information is critical to the investigation.
First Look Publishes Open Source Code To Advance Privacy, Security, and Journalism - Th... - 0 views
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today we’re excited to contribute back to the open source community by launching First Look Code, the home for our own open source projects related to privacy, security, data, and journalism. To begin with, First Look Code is the new home for document sanitization software PDF Redact Tools, and we’ve launched a brand new anti-gag order project called AutoCanary.
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AutoCanary A warrant canary is a regularly published statement that a company hasn’t received any legal orders that it’s not allowed to talk about, such as a national security letter. Canaries can help prevent web publishers from misleading visitors and prevent tech companies from misleading users when they share data with the government and are prevented from talking about it. One such situation arose — without a canary in place — in 2013, when the U.S. government sent Lavabit, a provider of encrypted email services apparently used by Snowden, a legal request to access Snowden’s email, thwarting some of the very privacy protections Lavabit had promised users. This request included a gag order, so the company was legally prohibited from talking about it. Rather than becoming “complicit in crimes against the American people,” in his words, Lavabit founder Ladar Levison, chose to shut down the service.
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Warrant canaries are designed to help companies in this kind of situation. You can see a list of companies that publish warrant canary statements at Canary Watch. As of today, First Look Media is among the companies that publish canaries. We’re happy to announce the first version of AutoCanary, a desktop program for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that makes the process of generating machine-readable, digitally-signed warrant canary statements simpler. Read more about AutoCanary on its new website.
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The internet continues to fight back against the Dark State. On the unsettled nature of the law in regard to use of warrant canaries in the U.S. see EFF's faq: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/warrant-canary-faq (it needs a test case).
CPU Wars - Intel to Play Fab for an ARM Chipmaker: Understanding What the Altera Deal M... - 0 views
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Intel wants x86 to conquer all computing spaces -- including mobile -- and is trying to leverage its process lead to make that happen. However, it's been slowed by a lack of inclusion of 4G cellular modems on-die and difficulties adapting to the mobile market's low component prices. ARM, meanwhile, wants a piece of the PC and server markets, but has received a lukewarm response from consumers due to software compatibility concerns. The disappointing sales of (x86) tablet products using Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) Windows 8 and the flop of Windows RT (ARM) product in general somewhat unexpectedly had the net result of being a driver to maintain the status quo, allowing neither company to gain much ground. For Intel, its partnership with Microsoft (the historic "Wintel" combo) has damaged its mobile efforts, as Windows 8 flopped in the tablet market. Likewise ARM's efforts to score PC market share were stifled by the flop of Windows RT, which led to OEMs killing off ARM-based laptops and convertibles.
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Both companies seem to have learned their lesson and are migrating away from Windows towards other platforms -- in ARM's case Chromebooks, and in Intel's case Android tablets/smartphones. But suffice it to say, ARM Holdings and Intel are still very much bitter enemies from a sales perspective.
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III. Profit vs. Risk -- Understanding the Modern CPU Food Chain
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Excellent article explaining the CPU war for the future of computing, as Intel and ARM square off. Intel's x86 architecture dominates the era of client/server computing, with their famed WinTel alliance monopolizing desktop, notebook and server implementations. But Microsoft was a no show with the merging mobile computing market, and now ARM is in position transition from their mobile dominance to challenge the desktop -notebook - server markets. WinTel lost their shot at the mobile computing market, and now their legacy platforms are in play. Good article!!! Well worth the read time ................
NSA head: We need bulk collection | TheHill - 0 views
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The head of the National Security Agency on Thursday told Senate lawmakers that preventing his agency from collecting Americans’ information in bulk would make it harder to do its job.Under questioning before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Adm. Michael Rogers agreed that ending bulk collection would “significantly reduce [his] operational capabilities.”ADVERTISEMENT“Right now, bulk collection gives us the ability ... to generate insights as to what’s going on,” Rogers told the committee.The NSA head also referenced a January report from the National Academy of Sciences that concluded there is “no software technique that will fully substitute for bulk collection” because of the ability to search through the storehouse of old information. “That independent, impartial, scientifically-founded body came back and said no, under the current structure there is no real replacement,” Rogers said.Rogers was questioned on Thursday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Intelligence Committee who has become its most vocal privacy hawk.
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In response to the NSA head’s comments, Wyden pointed to a 2013 White House review group, which found that one controversial NSA bulk collection program “was not essential to preventing attacks” and that the information obtained by the NSA “could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using” other means.The debate follows on a congressional clash earlier this year over the NSA’s bulk collection of records about the phone calls of millions of Americans. The records contained information about whom people called and when but not what they talked about.
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After a brief lapsing of some portions of the Patriot Act, Congress eventually reined in the NSA by forcing it to go through the courts to search private phone companies’ records for a narrower set of records. Many privacy advocates treated the new law, called the USA Freedom Act, as a significant victory, through national security hawks worried that it would make it harder for the NSA to track terrorists.Under the new system — which has not gone into effect yet — the amount of time it takes to obtain those records “is probably going to be longer I suspect,” Rogers said.Though the phone records database has been the NSA’s most prominent bulk collection program, it is not the only one. The agency’s collection of vast amounts of Internet data has alarmed many privacy advocates and is the target of a current lawsuit from Wikipedia and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Belgium sues Facebook over illegal Privacy Violations of Users and Non-Users | nsnbc in... - 0 views
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The Belgian government will be suing Facebook. The Commission for the Protection of Privacy states that Facebook violates Belgian and EU law by tracking systems that target both Facebook users as well as non-Facebook users. Facebook is known for cooperating with the U.S.’ National Security Agency.
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The Belgian privacy watchdog’s case against the internet giant Facebook will be heard at a court in Brussels on Thursday. The Commission has repeatedly requested that Facebook should comply with Belgian and EU law. Facebook failed to comply, and the Commission has no power to enforce the law; hence the decision to sue Facebook to attain a a court ruling. The President of the Commission for the Protection of Privacy, Willem Debeuckelaere, told the press that: “Facebook treats its users’ private lives without respect and that needs tackling. It’s not because we want to start a lawsuit over this, but we cannot continue to negotiate through other means. .. We want a judge to impose our recommendations. These recommendations are chiefly aimed at protecting internet users who are not Facebook members.”
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The Belgian privacy watchdog alleges that Facebook tracks the web browsing of all visitors, including those who have specifically turned the tracking function off; This gathering of private information allegedly also includes those who do not have a Facebook account. Moreover, the Commission claims that Facebook has the capability to surveil computers without consent, even when users are logged out; and Facebook can monitor every PC of users that use websites with Facebook plugins. The capability to monitor both Facebook users and non-Facebook users allegedly functions via Cookies that store information about user’s internet activities, including preferential settings of websites and which websites internet users have visited. The Commission claims that Facebook installs these Cookies on all computers that visit websites that for example have a Facebook plugin to share internet content. That includes the computers of persons who do not make use of Facebook’s “share” or “like” button.
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Facebook's Deepface Software Has Gotten Them in Deep Trouble | nsnbc international - 0 views
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In a Chicago court, several Facebook users filed a class-action lawsuit against the social media giant for allegedly violating its users’ privacy rights to acquire the largest privately held stash of biometric face-recognition data in the world. The court documents reveal claims that “Facebook began violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (IBIPA) of 2008 in 2010, in a purported attempt to make the process of tagging friends easier.”
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This was accomplished through the “tag suggestions” feature provided by Facebook which “scans all pictures uploaded by users and identifies any Facebook friends they may want to tag.” The Facebook users maintain that this feature is a “form of data mining [that] violates user’s privacy”. One plaintiff said this is a “brazen disregard for its users’ privacy rights,” through which Facebook has “secretly amassed the world’s largest privately held database of consumer biometrics data.” Because “Facebook actively conceals” their protocol using “faceprint databases” to identify Facebook users in photos, and “doesn’t disclose its wholesale biometrics data collection practices in its privacy policies, nor does it even ask users to acknowledge them.”
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This would be a violation of the IBIPA which states it is “unlawful to collect biometric data without written notice to the subject stating the purpose and length of the data collection, and without obtaining the subject’s written release.” Because all users are automatically part of the “faceprint’ facial recognition program, this is an illegal act in the state of Illinois, according to the complaint. Jay Edelson, attorney for the plaintiffs, asserts the opt-out ability to prevent other Facebook users from tagging them in photos is “insufficient”.
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Red Hat's CEO: Clouds can become the mother of all lock-ins | Cloud Computing - InfoWorld - 0 views
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Cloud architecture has to be defined in a way that allows applications to move around, or clouds can become the mother of all lock-ins, warned Red Hat's CEO James Whitehurst. Once users get stuck in something, it's hard for them to move, Whitehurst said in an interview. The industry has to get in front of the cloud computing wave and make sure this next generation infrastructure is defined in a way that's friendly to customers, rather than to IT vendors, according to Whitehurst.
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The cloud certification program was announced last year, and Amazon Web Services was the first cloud provider to get certified. Since then, NTT and IBM have been added to the list of certified partners and more are on the way, according to Whitehurst.
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To be able to move a workload from a data center to a cloud or between two clouds, a connecting API (application programming interface) is needed, and there are a plethora of different ones being developed. Fewer would be better, according to Whitehurst. However, the real challenge isn't the API, but ensuring that the application will run with the same performance when it has been moved.
Microsoft Unveils 'Turnkey' Cloud Appliance -- InformationWeek - 0 views
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Microsoft on Monday unveiled a preconfigured system designed to help businesses move to cloud computing quickly and efficiently without disrupting existing IT operations. The Windows Azure platform appliance consists of the Windows Azure cloud operating system, Microsoft SQL Azure, and, according to the company, "a Microsoft-specified configuration" of network, storage, and server hardware.
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Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Fujitsu have signed agreements to offer versions of the Windows Azure platform appliance based on their own gear, Microsoft said. eBay, meanwhile, has successfully tested the offering and is moving some of its Web pages to Microsoft's cloud.
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Microsoft announcement is at http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2010/jul10/07-12CloudComputingPR.mspx
NoSQL Pioneers Are Driving the Web's Manifest Destiny - 1 views
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Good Chart comparing four types of Data Stores: Key-Value, Tabular/Columnar, Document Store, Relational excerpt: The bottleneck is no longer around performance or the cost of computing - it's about quickly getting the information to thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of nodes trying to act as one computer delivering a service. Google and IBM both have written about the data center as a computer, and Facebook says it thinks of adding hardware at the rack level rather than at the server level. But the current means of storing and accessing data have not made this leap from a single server to a rack - let alone an entire data center. As programmers attempt this leap, they face several difficulties, which include working with existing software and programming languages and figuring out what problems and bottlenecks the new services built on these monolithic computer platforms will encounter. Plus, the IT world doesn't all move at once, which means plenty of jobs and workloads will continue with the old way of doing things - that is, relational databases such as Oracle's offerings and the open source MySQL, which Oracle now has a stake in thanks to its purchase of Sun. The result is not a steady movement to non-relational databases or other methods of storing data, but a back-and-forth as programmers and businesses figure out what kind of architecture they need and what problems they want to solve. For a closer look at the issue and a bunch of charts detailing how the landscape is currently laid out, analyst Matt Sarrel, has penned a report over at GigaOM Pro (sub. req'd.) on the NoSQL movement called "NoSQL Databases - Providing Extreme Scale and Flexibility."
Yahoo Could Be A Big Winner In The Battle For Developers - 0 views
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Last year Bartz vented to me about Yahoo's infrastructure problems - the company, she explained, was a compilation of fundamentally disconnected vertical silos, each with its own P&L, codebase, infrastructure, and culture. It was nearly impossible to roll out products that cut across, say, Mail, Homepage, Finance, IM, Search, and Flickr, because each instance required custom integration and coding. Yahoo was literally broken underneath, even as it looked consistent at the UI layer. Add in the issues of internationalization, and you went from nearly impossible to "not even worth considering." That mean stagnation, and on more than one axis. For one, it means it's very hard to find leverage between your internal resources, or to roll out new products that build on more than one stack. For another, it means it's next to impossible to open your company's resources up to third party developers (there's that word) who might want to add value to the ecosystem you've created.
Open Web Group Members at Diigo - 6 views
Google Wave expands, in search of a clear use-case scenario | Web Apps News - Betanews - 0 views
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Excellent Wave coverage from Scott M. Fulton III. The Hollywood Movie industry use case scenario is very interesting. But Scott is one of the few people to draw an analogy between Google Wave convergence of concurrent communications and collaborative content and the early days of the Microsoft Office Productivity Platform where we saw DDE, OLE and MAPI rise and rule. Excerpt: Today, Google is expected to invite as many as 100,000 more participants into the private beta of its concurrent communications system, called Wave. As that happens, many more participants will be able to not only communicate with one another in a more granular form of real-time, but potentially collaborate on work and projects. It's that latter part of the program that's supposed to congeal at some point into a collective sense of purpose. But this time, unlike Microsoft's first experiments with Dynamic Data Exchange between applications on the same computer three decades ago, there isn't yet a clear, single purpose for the system. No question it could bring individuals as close together as people separated by indefinite distance could become; but as to the question of what they do with one another once they do get together, Google is hoping this question -- like so many others it puts out there in the open -- resolves itself. Yesterday, Google offered links to a number of different independent assessments of the possible, eventual purpose of Google Wave, though it offered them as use-case scenarios rather than projections of possible goals for the product...which is what many actually were.
OpenStack Open Source Cloud Computing Software - 0 views
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OpenStack: The 5-minute Overview What the software does: The goal of OpenStack is to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware. OpenStack Compute is software for automatically creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers. OpenStack Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data. Why open matters: All of the code for OpenStack is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license. Anyone can run it, build on it, or submit changes back to the project. We strongly believe that an open development model is the only way to foster badly-needed cloud standards, remove the fear of proprietary lock-in for cloud customers, and create a large ecosystem that spans cloud providers. Who it's for: Institutions and service providers with physical hardware that they'd like to use for large-scale cloud deployments. (Additionally, companies who have specific requirements that prevent them from running in a public cloud.) How it's being used today: Organizations like Rackspace Hosting and NASA are using OpenStack technologies to manage tens of thousands of compute instances and petabytes of storage. Timeline: Openstack was announced July 19th, 2010. While many components of OpenStack have been used in production for years, we are in the very early stages of our efforts to offer these technologies broadly as open source software. Early code is now available on LaunchPad, with an inital release for OpenStack Storage expected in mid-September and an initial release for OpenStack Compute expected in mid-October.
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