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Paul Merrell

Web Browser Supports Time Travel (Library of Congress) - 0 views

www.digitalpreservation.gov/...24news_article_mementofox.html

Web search Web archive search digital preservation

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • September 24, 2010 -- For those who use the Mozilla Firefox browser, you now have the option to time travel through the web.  MementoFox  is a free extension that users can add-on to their browsers. The extension implements the Memento protocal , which the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Old Dominion University are developing to enable capture of and access to older versions of websites. 
  • have the option to time travel through the web.  MementoFox  is a free extension that users can add-on to their browsers. The extension implements the Memento protocal , which the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Old Dominion University are developing to enable capture of and access to older versions of websites. 
  • Memento allows a user to link resources, or web pages, with their previous versions automatically.  The term Memento refers to an archival record of a resource as well as the technological framework that supports the ability to discover and browse older versions of Web resources.  One of the challenges of researching older versions of Internet resources is searching for them in web archives. With the Firefox add-on, users can easily view older versions in the same browser without having to search across archives. After a URL is specified in the browser, the newly released extension allows users to set a target day, using the slider bar (the "add-on").  The protocol will search archives across the web for previous versions of the URL.   As long as those archives are available on a server accessible across the web, MementoFox will return the previous targeted version. MementoFox is available for download  and developers interested in working with the protocol can join the development group .
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The Memento project receives support from the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.
Paul Merrell

WG Review: Internet Wideband Audio Codec (codec) - 0 views

www.ietf.org/...msg06848.html

IETF wideband audio codec

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Jan 10
     
    A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Real-time Applications and Infrastructure Area. The IESG has not made any determination as yet. The following draft charter was submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send your comments to the IESG mailing list (iesg at ietf.org) by January 20, 2010. ... According to reports from developers of Internet audio applications and operators of Internet audio services, there are no standardized, high-quality audio codecs that meet all of the following three conditions: 1. Are optimized for use in interactive Internet applications. 2. Are published by a recognized standards development organization (SDO) and therefore subject to clear change control. 3. Can be widely implemented and easily distributed among application developers, service operators, and end users. ... The goal of this working group is to develop a single high-quality audio codec that is optimized for use over the Internet and that can be widely implemented and easily distributed among application developers, service operators, and end users. Core technical considerations include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following: 1. Designing for use in interactive applications (examples include, but are not limited to, point-to-point voice calls, multi-party voice conferencing, telepresence, teleoperation, in-game voice chat, and live music performance) 2. Addressing the real transport conditions of the Internet as identified and prioritized by the working group 3. Ensuring interoperability with the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), including secure transport via SRTP 4. Ensuring interoperability with Internet signaling technologies such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Session Description Protocol (SDP), and Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP); however, the result should not depend on the details of any particular signaling technology.
Gary Edwards

Interview: Paul Cotton on Microsoft Participation in the W3C HTML Working Group - W3C Blog - 1 views

www.w3.org/...view_paul_cotton_on_micro.html

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Mar 10 - Cached
  • As part of a series of interviews with W3C Members to learn more about their support for standards and participation in W3C, I'm talking to Paul Cotton from Microsoft and co-Chair of the W3C HTML Working Group.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 10 Mar 10
       
      There's the W3C version of HTML5.  And then there's the WebKit version.  WebKit HTML5 is pushed forward by Google and Apple.  The methodology is that the WebKit developers submit innovations and advances back to the W3C HTML5 groups as "proposals".  The key is that WebKit does not wait for approval.  They make the submission and move on. The problem is that waiting for a snake pit of corporate competitors to approve your proposals and include them in the next rev of the specification does not make business sense.  Especially if the competitors are legacy burdened monopolist like Microsoft and IBM.   Google and Apple have to push WebKit HMTL5 forward.  Even Mozilla is now on the WebKit band wagon!  Nokia (QT), the RiMM Blackberry and Palm Pilot webOS are also on board.  The key to WebKit HTML5's success is the incredible marketshare of mobile-smartphone computing, and the pushback across the greater Web mobile-web computing devices are having. Does FaceBook wait for W3C HTML5?  Or do they chase the iPhone with a WebKit HTML5 website configuration and enhancement? That's a rhetorical question :)
Paul Merrell

U.S. Says It Spied on 89,000 Targets Last Year, But the Number Is Deceptive | Threat Le... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...foreigners-targeted-for-spying

surveillance-state NSA FBI stats 2013

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • About 89,000 foreigners or organizations were targeted for spying under a U.S. surveillance order last year, according to a new transparency report. The report was released for the first time Friday by the Office of the Director of Intelligence, upon order of the president, in the wake of surveillance leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. But the report, which covers only surveillance orders issued in 2013, doesn’t tell the whole story about how many individuals the spying targeted or how many Americans were caught in the surveillance that targeted foreigners. Civil liberties groups say the real number is likely “orders of magnitude” larger than this. “Even if it was an honest definition of ‘target’—that is, an individual instead of a group—that also is not encompassing those who are ancillary to a target and are caught up in the dragnet,” says Kurt Opsahl, deputy general counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
  • The report, remarkably, shows that the government obtained just one order last year under Section 702 of FISA—which allows for bulk collection of data on foreigners—and that this one order covered 89,138 targets. But, as the report notes, “target” can refer to “an individual person, a group, an organization composed of multiple individuals or a foreign power that possesses or is likely to communicate foreign intelligence information.” Furthermore, Section 702 orders are actually certificates issued by the FISA Court that can cover surveillance of an entire facility. And since, as the government points out in its report, the government cannot know how many people use a facility, the figure only “reflects an estimate of the number of known users of particular facilities (sometimes referred to as selectors) subject to intelligence collection under those Certifications,” the report notes.
  • “If you’re actually trying to get a sense of the number of human beings affected or the number of Americans affected, the number of people affected is vastly, vastly larger,” says Julian Sanchez, senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “And how many of those are Americans is impossible to say. But [although] you may not think you are routinely communicating with foreign persons, [this] is not any kind of assurance that your communications are not part of the traffic subject to interception.” Sanchez points out that each individual targeted is likely communicating with dozens or hundred of others, whose communications will be picked up in the surveillance. “And probably a lot of these targets are not individuals but entire web sites or companies. While [a company like the Chinese firm] Huawei might be a target, thousands of emails used by thousands of employees will be swept up.” How many of those employees might be American or communicating with Americans is unknown.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Also revealed in today’s report is the number of times the government has queried the controversial phone records database it created by collecting the phone records of every subscriber from U.S. providers. According to the report, the government used 423 “selectors” to search its massive phone records database, which includes records going back to at least 2006 when the program began. A search involves querying a specific phone number or device ID that appears in the database. The government has long maintained that its collection of phone records isn’t a violation of its authority, since it only views the records of specific individuals targeted in an investigation. But such searches, even if targeted at phone numbers used by foreigners, would include calls made to and from Americans as well as calls exchanged with people two or three hops out from the targeted number.
  • In its report, the government indicated that the 423 selectors involved just 248 “known or presumed” Americans whose information was collected by the agency in the database. But Opsahl says that both of these numbers are deceptive given what we know about the database and how it’s been used. “We know it’s affecting millions of people,” he points out. But “then we have estimated numbers of affected people [that are just] in the three digits. That requires some effort [on the government's part] to find a way to do the definition of the number [in such a way] to make it as small as possible.”
  • One additional figure today’s report covers is the number of National Security Letters the government issued last year to businesses to obtain data on accountholders and users—19,212. NSLs are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, credit companies, financial institutions and others to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, websites visited, and more. These letters are a powerful tool because they do not require court approval, and they come with a built-in gag order, preventing recipients from disclosing to anyone that they have received an NSL. An FBI agent looking into a possible anti-terrorism case can self-issue an NSL to a credit bureau, ISP, or phone company with only the sign-off of the Special Agent in Charge of their office. The FBI has merely to assert that the information is “relevant” to an investigation into international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.
  • The FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs over the years and has been reprimanded for abusing them. Last year a federal judge ruled that the use of NSLs is unconstitutional, due to the gag order that accompanies them, and ordered the government to stop using them. Her ruling, however, was stayed pending the government’s appeal.
  • According to the government’s report today, the 19,000 NSLs issued last year involved more than 38,000 requests for information.
Paul Merrell

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes calls for the company to be broken up - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...e-company-to-be-broken-up.html

Facebook regulation antitrust Hughes Zueckerberg

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 May 19 - No Cached
  • show chapters Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes calls for the company to be broken up    15 Hours Ago Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes issued a forceful call for regulators to break up the company he helped build in a New York Times op-ed published Thursday. Hughes, who left Facebook to work for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, said that from his own experience building and working inside the company, Facebook now has more power than a private sector entity is due. While emphasizing his belief that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has good intentions overall, he said the executive has far too much unchecked power, aided by his majority voting stake in the company.
Gary Edwards

The End of the Battery - Getting All Charged Up over Supercapacitors - Casey Research - 0 views

www.caseyresearch.com/cdd

Casey-Research Technology Alex-Daley SuperCapacitors

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Apr 13
     
    Very interesting article describing the near market ready potential of "supercapacitor" batteries.   This is truly game changer stuff, and very interesting to me since i've been following the research and development of "graphene technologies" for some time.  The graphene superconductor targets the future of both energy and computing.  But graphene is also at the cutting edge of "faster, better, cheaper" water desalinization!  Nor does it take a rocket scientist to see that a graphene nano latice will have an enormous impact on methods of separating water (H2O) atoms to create an electical current - a cost free flow of electons.   Very well written research! excerpt: "an article in the recent issue of Nature Communications on a novel way to mass-produce so-called superconductors on the super-cheap - using no more equipment than the average home CD/DVD burner. Hacked together by a group of research scientists at UCLA, the ingenious technique is a way of producing layers of microscopically nuanced lattices called graphene, an essential component of many superconductor designs. It holds the promise of rapidly dropping prices for what was until now a very expensive process. You see, we've known about the concept of supercapacitors for decades. In fact, their antecedent, the capacitor, is one of the fundamental building blocks of electronics. Long before the Energizer Bunny starting banging its away around our television screens, engineers had been using capacitors to store electrical charge - originally as filters to help tune signals clearly on wireless radios of all sorts. The devices did so by storing and releasing excess energy, but only teeny amounts of it... we're talking millions of them to hold what a simple AA battery can. Over the years, however, scientists worked on increasing their storage capacity. Way back in 1957, engineers at General Electric came up with the first supercapacitor... but back then there were no uses for it. So, the technology
Paul Merrell

Mozilla-backed Stop Watching Us blows past 100,000 signatures to fight NSA surveillance... - 0 views

thenextweb.com/...corches-past-100000-signatures

surveillance state NSA petition

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The legal battle over PRISM and the NSA’s phone records program is only getting under way, but advocacy groups are striking while the issue is hot. Stop Watching Us, a website that encourages citizens to digitally sign a letter that will be emailed to their elected representatives, today passed the 100,000 signature mark. That milestone, passed this morning, comes less than 48 hours after the start of the program. Currently Stop Watching Us has collected 112,279 total signatures
Gary Edwards

The top 20 HTML5 sites of 2012 | Feature | .net magazine - 0 views

www.netmagazine.com/...top-20-html5-sites-2012

HTML5 Oli-Studhlme NetMagazine

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Dec 12
     
    Excellent review of great HTML5 Web Sites.  Includes quick reviews of tools and developer services for HTML5, CSS3, Canvas/SVG, and JavaScript.  (No JSON :()  Includes sites offering tutorials and demonstrations of how advanced, even spectacular, HTML5 builds.  This is clearly the kind of resource anyone involved with advancing HTML5 would like to return to and reference as the Web pushes forward.  Good Stuff Oli!!!! "2012 in review: HTML5 Doctor Oli Studholme nominates the websites that made best use of HTML5 this year, including a range of useful developer tools and online resources Another year has flown by, bringing the requisite slew of major changes. HTML5 is on track to be a recommendation in 2014, with W3C appointing four new editors to manage the W3C's HTML5 spec and putting the HTML5 spec on GitHub; and WHATWG focusing on the HTML Living Standard. Responsive design and Twitter Bootstrap went mainstream, IE10 was released (along with seven versions of Chrome and Firefox), and browser support continues to improve. It's impossible to pick only 20 ground-breaking sites from the thousands that did truly advance our collective game, but here's my attempt. For convenience, I've grouped them according to the way in which they use HTML5."
Gary Edwards

Crocodoc's HTML Document Viewer Infiltrates the Enterprise | Xconomy - 0 views

www.xconomy.com/...wer-infiltrates-the-enterprise

crocodoc HTML5

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Dec 12
     
    Excellent report on Crocodoc and their ability to convert MANY different document file types to HTML5.  Including all MSOffice formats - OOXML, ODF, and PDF. " Crocodoc, and took on the much larger problem of allowing groups to collaborate on editing a document online, no matter what the document type: PowerPoint, PDF, Word, Photoshop, JPEG, or PNG. In the process, they had to build an embeddable viewer that could take apart any document and reassemble it accurately within a Web browser. And as soon as they'd finished that, they had to tear their own system apart and rebuild it around HTML5 rather than Flash, the Adobe multimedia format that's edging closer and closer to extinction. The result of all that iterating is what's probably the world's most flexible and faithful HTML5-based document viewer: when you open a PDF, PowerPoint, or Word document in Crocodoc, the Web version looks exactly like the native version, even though it's basically been stripped down and re-rendered from scratch. When I talked with Damico in February of 2011, the startup had visions of building on this technology to become a kind of central, Web-based clearinghouse for everyone's documents-a cross between Scribd, Dropbox, and Google Docs, but with a focus on consumers, and with prettier viewing tools. In the last year, though, Crocodoc's direction has changed dramatically. Damico and his colleagues realized that it would be smarter to partner with the fastest growing providers of document-sharing services and social business-tool providers than to try to compete with them. "The massive, seismic change for us is that we had a huge opportunity to partner with Dropbox and LinkedIn and SAP and Yammer, and let them build on top of Crocodoc and make it into a core piece of their own products," Damico says. In other words, every time an office worker opens a document from within a Web app like Dropbox or Yammer, they're activating a white-label version
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Office to get a dose of OpenDocument - CNET News - 0 views

news.cnet.com/...2100-1013_3-6069188.html

ODF daVinci MSOffice-productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 May 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 May 13
     
    While trying to help a friend understand the issues involved with exchanging MSOffice documnets between the many different versions of MSOffice, I stumbled on this oldy but goody ......... "A group of software developers have created a program to make Microsoft Office work with files in the OpenDocument format, a move that would bridge currently incompatible desktop applications. Gary Edwards, an engineer involved in the open-source OpenOffice.org project and founder of the OpenDocument Foundation, on Thursday discussed the software plug-in on the Web site Groklaw. The new program, which has been under development for about year and finished initial testing last week, is designed to let Microsoft Office manipulate OpenDocument format (ODF) files, Edwards said. "The ODF Plugin installs on the file menu as a natural and transparent part of the 'open,' 'save,' and 'save as' sequences. As far as end users and other application add-ons are concerned, ODF Plugin renders ODF documents as if (they) were native to MS Office," according to Edwards. If the software, which is not yet available, works as described, it will be a significant twist to an ongoing contest between Microsoft and the backers of OpenDocument, a document format gaining more interest lately, particularly among governments. Microsoft will not natively support OpenDocument in Office 2007, which will come out later this year. Company executives have said that there is not sufficient demand and OpenDocument is less functional that its own Office formats. Having a third-party product to save OpenDocument files from Office could give OpenDocument-based products a bump in the marketplace, said Stephen O'Grady, a RedMonk analyst. OpenDocument is the native format for the OpenOffice open-source desktop productivity suite and is supported in others, including KOffice, Sun Microsystems' StarOffice and IBM's Workplace. "To the extent that you get people authoring documents in a format that is natively compatible with
Paul Merrell

'Manhunting Timeline' Further Suggests US Pressured Countries to Prosecute WikiLeaks Ed... - 0 views

shadowproof.com/...cute-wikileaks-editor-in-chief

surveillance state NSA Wikileaks

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • An entry in something the government calls a “Manhunting Timeline” suggests that the United States pressured officials of countries around the world to prosecute WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, in 2010. The file—marked unclassified, revealed by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and published by The Intercept—is dated August 2010. Under the headline, “United States, Australia, Great Britain, Germany, Iceland” – it states: The United States on 10 August urged other nations with forces in Afghanistan, including Australia, United Kingdom and Germany, to consider filing criminal charges against Julian Assange, founder of the rogue WikiLeaks Internet website and responsible for the unauthorized publication of over 70,000 classified documents covering the war in Afghanistan. The documents may have been provided to WikiLeaks by Army Private First Class Bradley Manning. The appeal exemplifies the start of an international effort to focus the legal element of national power upon non-state actor Assange and the human network that supports WikiLeaks. Another document—a top-secret page from an internal wiki—indicates there has been discussion in the NSA with the Threat Operations Center Oversight and Compliance (NOC) and Office of General Counsel (OGC) on the legality of designating WikiLeaks a “malicious foreign actor” and whether this would make it permissible to conduct surveillance on Americans accessing the website. “Can we treat a foreign server who stores or potentially disseminates leaked or stolen data on its server as a ‘malicious foreign actor’ for the purpose of targeting with no defeats?” Examples: WikiLeaks, thepiratebay.org). The NOC/OGC answered, “Let me get back to you.” (The page does not indicate if anyone ever got back to the NSA. And “defeats” essentially means protections.)
  • GCHQ, the NSA’s counterpart in the UK, had a program called “ANTICRISIS GIRL,” which could engage in “targeted website monitoring.” This means data of hundreds of users accessing a website, like WikiLeaks, could be collected. The IP addresses of readers and supporters could be monitored. The agency could even target the publisher if it had a public dropbox or submission system. NSA and GCHQ could also target the foreign “branches” of the hacktivist group, Anonymous. An answer to another question from the wiki entry involves the question, “Is it okay to query against a foreign server known to be malicious even if there is a possibility that US persons could be using it as well? Example: thepiratebay.org.” The NOC/OGC responded, “Okay to go after foreign servers which US people use also (with no defeats). But try to minimize to ‘post’ only for example to filter out non-pertinent information.” WikiLeaks is not an example in this question, however, if it was designated as a “malicious foreign actor,” then the NSA would do queries of American users.
  • Michael Ratner, a lawyer from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) who represents WikiLeaks, said on “Democracy Now!”, this shows he has every reason to fear what would happen if he set foot outside of the embassy. The files show some of the extent to which the US and UK have tried to destroy WikiLeaks. CCR added in a statement, “These NSA documents should make people understand why Julian Assange was granted diplomatic asylum, why he must be given safe passage to Ecuador, and why he must keep himself out of the hands of the United States and apparently other countries as well. These revelations only corroborate the expectation that Julian Assange is on a US target list for prosecution under the archaic “Espionage Act,” for what is nothing more than publishing evidence of government misconduct.” “These documents demonstrate that the political persecution of WikiLeaks is very much alive,”Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish former judge who now represents the group, told The Intercept. “The paradox is that Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks organization are being treated as a threat instead of what they are: a journalist and a media organization that are exercising their fundamental right to receive and impart information in its original form, free from omission and censorship, free from partisan interests, free from economic or political pressure.”
Paul Merrell

Save Firefox! | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views

www.eff.org/...save-firefox

W3C web-standards CDM encrypted-media-extensions EME DRM

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 May 16 - No Cached
  • The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), once the force for open standards that kept browsers from locking publishers to their proprietary capabilities, has changed its mission. Since 2013, the organization has provided a forum where today's dominant browser companies and the dominant entertainment companies can collaborate on a system to let our browsers control our behavior, rather than the other way. This system, "Encrypted Media Extensions" (EME) uses standards-defined code to funnel video into a proprietary container called a "Content Decryption Module." For a new browser to support this new video streaming standard -- which major studios and cable operators are pushing for -- it would have to convince those entertainment companies or one of their partners to let them have a CDM, or this part of the "open" Web would not display in their new browser. This is the opposite of every W3C standard to date: once, all you needed to do to render content sent by a server was follow the standard, not get permission. If browsers had needed permission to render a page at the launch of Mozilla, the publishers would have frozen out this new, pop-up-blocking upstart. Kiss Firefox goodbye, in other words.
  • The W3C didn't have to do this. No copyright law says that making a video gives you the right to tell people who legally watch it how they must configure their equipment. But because of the design of EME, copyright holders will be able to use the law to shut down any new browser that tries to render the video without their permission. That's because EME is designed to trigger liability under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which says that removing a digital lock that controls access to a copyrighted work without permission is an offense, even if the person removing the lock has the right to the content it restricts. In other words, once a video is sent with EME, a new company that unlocks it for its users can be sued, even if the users do nothing illegal with that video. We proposed that the W3C could protect new browsers by making their members promise not to use the DMCA to attack new entrants in the market, an idea supported by a diverse group of W3C members, but the W3C executive overruled us saying the work would go forward with no safeguards for future competition. It's even worse than at first glance. The DMCA isn't limited to the USA: the US Trade Representative has spread DMCA-like rules to virtually every country that does business with America. Worse still: the DMCA is also routinely used by companies to threaten and silence security researchers who reveal embarrassing defects in their products. The W3C also declined to require its members to protect security researchers who discover flaws in EME, leaving every Web user vulnerable to vulnerabilities whose disclosure can only safely take place if the affected company decides to permit it.
  • The W3C needs credibility with people who care about the open Web and innovation in order to be viable. They are sensitive to this kind of criticism. We empathize. There are lots of good people working there, people who genuinely, passionately want the Web to stay open to everyone, and to be safe for its users. But the organization made a terrible decision when it opted to provide a home for EME, and an even worse one when it overruled its own members and declined protection for security research and new competitors. It needs to hear from you now. Please share this post, and spread the word. Help the W3C be the organization it is meant to be.
Gary Edwards

Asus shows off ARM-based Windows 8 tablet - Computerworld - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...off_ARM_based_Windows_8_tablet

Cloud-Productivity-Platform Visual-Productivity MS-Business-Productivity-Platform Compat-Interop

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 12
     
    Is Intel right?  Is there a "compatibility-interoperability" problem between Windows RT Office (ARM) and legacy (x86) Windows MS Office productivity environments?  It seems to me that the entire reason iPAD, Android and other ARM based tablet systems want MSOffice and MSOffice Visual Document Viewers is exactly because they want and expect a high level of compat-interop with legacy Windows productivity workgroups and client/server systems. What's the truth?  And is there anything x86 providers like Intel and AMD can do about compat-interop and the unstoppable cloud-mobility revolution? excerpt: The Asus tablet has a quad-core Tegra 3 processor from Nvidia. Windows RT comes preloaded with Office 15, a group of widely used productivity applications. Microsoft has said it had to re-engineer Windows RT to deal with expectations for ARM based devices, which include all-day connectivity and low power consumption. The tablet also has an 8-megapixel camera at the rear with LED flash, and a 2-megapixel camera at the front. It has 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. Intel has already started the war of words against ARM around Windows 8, with Intel's CEO Paul Otellini saying that ARM devices will be incompatible with existing Windows applications and drivers. But analysts have said that Windows RT devices will likely be attractive to users who have few ties with legacy Windows PCs. Low prices could also attract users to Windows on ARM devices.
Gary Edwards

Free CloudOn app puts your iPad to work | How To - CNET - 0 views

howto.cnet.com/...301-11310_39-57452038-285.html

MSOffice Cloud-Productivity CloudON QuickOffice

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Jun 12
     
    The free CloudON app for iPAD provides a very nice ribbon interface for viewing and editing MSOffice XML documents.  Supports important workgroup features like "change tracking", show or hide markup, make and view comments, restrict editing, and compare and combine versions.  Very cool. Lacks support for custom add-ons, templates, auto-correct settings, and other advanced features may limit the program's usefulness.  Time to do some testing.  Hope Florian catches this post :) excerpt: Support for Office XML file types, and a ribbon to boot ...... Speculation continues as to whether -- most say when -- Microsoft will release a version of Office for the iPad. (CNET blogger Zack Whittaker cites sources predicting a November arrival.) It's not like you have to wait months to create and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on your iPad. Last June I described how to use Google Docs and Google Cloud Connect to edit Word and Excel files on an iPad for free. The end of that story noted the likely arrival of iPad apps supporting Office file formats. One of the most popular of these is the $15 Quickoffice, a program that was recently acquired by Google. But before you shell out for an Office alternative, check out the free CloudOn app, which now connects to Google Drive and Box accounts as well as Dropbox accounts. Other new features in the latest release let you send files as e-mail attachments and open PDFs. (See Lance Whitney's post on the Internet & Media blog for more on the program's PDF features.) CloudOn's ribbon is a big departure from the Quickoffice interface, which look nothing like Office. (Of course, many people will prefer the clean, clutter-free look of Quickoffice.) None of the Office extras, but all the essentials: In a group setting CloudOn's lack of support for custom add-ons, templates, auto-correct settings, and other advanced features may limit the program's usefulness. Still, the word processor lets you track and accept changes, show or
Paul Merrell

Federal smartphone kill-switch legislation proposed - Network World - 0 views

www.networkworld.com/...switch-legislation-278760.html

smartphone kill=switch legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Pressure on the cellphone industry to introduce technology that could disable stolen smartphones has intensified with the introduction of proposed federal legislation that would mandate such a system.
  • Pressure on the cellphone industry to introduce technology that could disable stolen smartphones has intensified with the introduction of proposed federal legislation that would mandate such a system.
  • Senate bill 2032, "The Smartphone Prevention Act," was introduced to the U.S. Senate Wednesday by Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat. The bill promises technology that allows consumers to remotely wipe personal data from their smartphones and render them inoperable. But how that will be accomplished is currently unclear. The full text of the bill was not immediately available and the offices of Klobuchar and the bill's co-sponsors were all shut down Thursday due to snow in Washington, D.C.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The co-sponsors are Democrats Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii. The proposal follows the introduction last Friday of a bill in the California state senate that would mandate a "kill switch" starting in January 2015. The California bill has the potential to usher in kill-switch technology nationwide because carriers might not bother with custom phones just for California, but federal legislation would give it the force of law across the U.S. Theft of smartphones is becoming an increasing problem in U.S. cities and the crimes often involve physical violence or intimidation with guns or knives. In San Francisco, two-thirds of street theft involves a smartphone or tablet and the number is even higher in nearby Oakland. It also represents a majority of street robberies in New York and is rising in Los Angeles. In some cases, victims have been killed for their phones. In response to calls last year by law-enforcement officials to do more to combat the crimes, most cellphone carriers have aligned themselves behind the CTIA, the industry's powerful lobbying group. The CTIA is opposing any legislation that would introduce such technology. An outlier is Verizon, which says that while it thinks legislation is unnecessary, it is supporting the group behind the California bill.
  • Some phone makers have been a little more proactive. Apple in particular has been praised for the introduction of its activation lock feature in iOS7. The function would satisfy the requirements of the proposed California law with one exception: Phones will have to come with the function enabled by default so consumers have to make a conscious choice to switch it off. Currently, it comes as disabled by default. Samsung has also added features to some of its phones that support the Lojack software, but the service requires an ongoing subscription.
Gary Edwards

No Jitter | Post | Cisco Or Microsoft? Who Wins the Line-of-Business War? - 0 views

www.nojitter.com/...ho-wins-the-lineofbusiness-war

Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • The multitude of services gives Microsoft an early edge when it comes to cloud, but the channel-enablement model for Cisco can create much greater scale than a direct to line-of-business model. The key is ensuring its resellers are fully trained in selling to line-of-business, which isn't a simple undertaking. Bottom line: With regard to cloud, Microsoft has a faster route to market, but Cisco's should give it an advantage over time.
  • Putting cloud aside, Cisco and Microsoft have markedly different approaches in selling to lines of business. For Microsoft, the key lies in its developer community. Developers build applications that business people use and buy. Many of these applications use Microsoft as an underlying technology without the purchaser really even being aware of that fact. Microsoft gets pulled through with really no involvement from Microsoft, providing a low- to no-cost sales model for the company. The only down side is that the application brand often overshadows the underlying brand.
  • Microsoft has made a living off selling products, many of them sub-par, into business because of its developer relationships. Does anyone really think Microsoft gained monopoly-like share with desktop operating systems because of quality of product and ease of use? Hardly. Windows became the de facto standard for developers because of the quality of the developer program. Microsoft does a good job of meeting the needs of its large software vendors, but does an even better job of making sure those millions of small ISVs have access to Microsoft platforms and developer support.
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  • Cisco has been trying to build its own "Cisco Developer Network" (CDN) for the better part of a decade. The company kicked off this initiative way back in the early 2000s when it bought a company called Metreos that had some interesting VoIP applications and a slick developer interface. Back then, the program was known as CTDP, Cisco Technology Developer Program, and was run by VoIP people, not individuals that understand software and how to build a developer environment. Since then the program has undergone a number of facelifts and Cisco appears to have some real software people running the group, so there is some potential.
  • With regards to UC, as this market transitions away from products to platforms, services will play a significant role. Cisco's services plays a role similar to IBM services. IBM's consulting group works with its top tier customers to understand how to solve business problems through compute-centric solutions. Cisco services works with its customers to create solutions through networking- and communications-related products. As more and more organizations look to leverage UC strategically, I would expect Cisco services to target its top-tier customers. The key for Cisco then is to take these solutions and push them down through its channel for scale and market share gains.
  • So developer-led or services-led?
  • Microsoft should get an early advantage, as many in-house developers will look to Lync; but the services strategy by Cisco should create longer, more sustainable value, as it has for IBM.
  • The key for Microsoft is being able to adapt its developer environment faster as market trends change. Obviously, compute is moving away from the traditional desktop to mobile clients and the cloud, and there are far more single-use, purpose-built applications being built in the consumer world. I think Microsoft's Developer Network is oriented towards more old-school developers.
  • The key for Cisco is having the patience to work with its lead customers and find those unique, game-changing applications and use cases that it can then push down into the channel. It's the right strategy for Cisco, but it might take a bit more time to bear some fruit.
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Jul 13
     
    excerpt: "Developer-led or services-led? Microsoft should get an early advantage, but the services strategy by Cisco should create longer, more sustainable value, Last month I wrote a blog outlining how the line-of-business manager holds the key to winning the Cisco versus Microsoft war. A number of you commented that this was obvious and both companies are already doing it. I'll agree that this is something both companies are trying to do, but neither is doing a great job. Microsoft is a company with high appeal to IT pros and Cisco to network managers, with high brand familiarity to line of business managers but low appeal beyond this."
Gary Edwards

http://www.sdtimes.com/lgp/images/wp/What's%20next%20for%20HTML5.pdf - 0 views

www.sdtimes.com/...hat's%20next%20for%20HTML5.pdf

HTML5 Visual-Productivity Visual-Documents Cloud-Computing

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Oct 13
     
    White paper from Intel discusses HTML5 and the future of computing. Intro: Computer programmers have been grappling with cross-platform issues since there was a second platform. Since then, the number of issues has rapidly increased. Today's developers can target at least four operating systems (plus their fragments), running on devices with all shapes, sizes, resolutions, persistence levels, input methods, carrier networks, connection speeds and states, UI conventions, app stores, deployment and update mechanisms, and on and on. Many of the world's developers once looked to Java* as the shining knight of cross-platform development. Indeed, the structured language of Sun* (and now Oracle) continues to solve many cross-platform issues. But it also introduces obstacles, not the least of which is a class structure that heavily burdens even the tiniest of program functions. Java's heft grew still more burdensome as developers turned to the browser for app delivery; Java applets are black boxes that are as opaque to the browser as the language is closed to the developer (with all due deference to the JCP). Around the same time Java was fuelling the browser wars, a like-named interpreted language was beginning to emerge. First called Mocha, later LiveScript, and finally JavaScript*, the language proved more useful than Java in some ways because it could interact with the browser and control content display using HTML's cascading style sheets (CSS). JavaScript support soon became standard in every browser. It is now the programming language of HTML5, which is currently being considered by the World Wide Web Consortium as the next markup-language standard. To better understand HTML5-why it is where it is and where it's going- Intel® Software Adrenaline turned to Moh Haghighat, a senior principal engineer in the Developer Products Division of Intel's Software and Services Group. Moh was the technical lead from Intel's side on the first JavaScript
Paul Merrell

The US is Losing Control of the Internet…Oh, Really? | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5354119

surveillance state internet-freedom U.S. NSA-blowback ICANN IETF IAB W3C Internet-Society

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • All of the major internet organisations have pledged, at a summit in Uruguay, to free themselves of the influence of the US government. The directors of ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society and all five of the regional Internet address registries have vowed to break their associations with the US government. In a statement, the group called for “accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing”. That’s a distinct change from the current situation, where the US department of commerce has oversight of ICANN. In another part of the statement, the group “expressed strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of Internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance”. Meanwhile, it was announced that the next Internet Governance Summit would be held in Brazil, whose president has been extremely critical of the US over web surveillance. In a statement announcing the location of the summit, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff said: “The United States and its allies must urgently end their spying activities once and for all.”
Paul Merrell

Testosterone Pit - Home - The Other Reason Why IBM Throws A Billion At Linux ... - 0 views

www.testosteronepit.com/...billion-at-linux-with-nsa.html

surveillance state NSA Linux Linux-backdoor Solaris FreeBSD Darwin

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • IBM announced today that it would throw another billion at Linux, the open-source operating system, to run its Power System servers. The first time it had thrown a billion at Linux was in 2001, when Linux was a crazy, untested, even ludicrous proposition for the corporate world. So the moolah back then didn’t go to Linux itself, which was free, but to related technologies across hardware, software, and service, including things like sales and advertising – and into IBM’s partnership with Red Hat which was developing its enterprise operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “It helped start a flurry of innovation that has never slowed,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. IBM claims that the investment would “help clients capitalize on big data and cloud computing with modern systems built to handle the new wave of applications coming to the data center in the post-PC era.” Some of the moolah will be plowed into the Power Systems Linux Center in Montpellier, France, which opened today. IBM’s first Power Systems Linux Center opened in Beijing in May. IBM may be trying to make hay of the ongoing revelations that have shown that the NSA and other intelligence organizations in the US and elsewhere have roped in American tech companies of all stripes with huge contracts to perfect a seamless spy network. They even include physical aspects of surveillance, such as license plate scanners and cameras, which are everywhere [read.... Surveillance Society: If You Drive, You Get Tracked].
  • Then another boon for IBM. Experts at the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (BIS) determined that Windows 8 is dangerous for data security. It allows Microsoft to control the computer remotely through a “special surveillance chip,” the wonderfully named Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and a backdoor in the software – with keys likely accessible to the NSA and possibly other third parties, such as the Chinese. Risks: “Loss of control over the operating system and the hardware” [read.... LEAKED: German Government Warns Key Entities Not To Use Windows 8 – Links The NSA.
  • It would be an enormous competitive advantage for an IBM salesperson to walk into a government or corporate IT department and sell Big Data servers that don’t run on Windows, but on Linux. With the Windows 8 debacle now in public view, IBM salespeople don’t even have to mention it. In the hope of stemming the pernicious revenue decline their employer has been suffering from, they can politely and professionally hype the security benefits of IBM’s systems and mention in passing the comforting fact that some of it would be developed in the Power Systems Linux Centers in Montpellier and Beijing. Alas, Linux too is tarnished. The backdoors are there, though the code can be inspected, unlike Windows code. And then there is Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), which was integrated into the Linux kernel in 2003. It provides a mechanism for supporting “access control” (a backdoor) and “security policies.” Who developed SELinux? Um, the NSA – which helpfully discloses some details on its own website (emphasis mine): The results of several previous research projects in this area have yielded a strong, flexible mandatory access control architecture called Flask. A reference implementation of this architecture was first integrated into a security-enhanced Linux® prototype system in order to demonstrate the value of flexible mandatory access controls and how such controls could be added to an operating system. The architecture has been subsequently mainstreamed into Linux and ported to several other systems, including the Solaris™ operating system, the FreeBSD® operating system, and the Darwin kernel, spawning a wide range of related work.
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  • Among a slew of American companies who contributed to the NSA’s “mainstreaming” efforts: Red Hat. And IBM? Like just about all of our American tech heroes, it looks at the NSA and other agencies in the Intelligence Community as “the Customer” with deep pockets, ever increasing budgets, and a thirst for technology and data. Which brings us back to Windows 8 and TPM. A decade ago, a group was established to develop and promote Trusted Computing that governs how operating systems and the “special surveillance chip” TPM work together. And it too has been cooperating with the NSA. The founding members of this Trusted Computing Group, as it’s called facetiously: AMD, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, and Wave Systems. Oh, I almost forgot ... and IBM. And so IBM might not escape, despite its protestations and slick sales presentations, the suspicion by foreign companies and governments alike that its Linux servers too have been compromised – like the cloud products of other American tech companies. And now, they’re going to pay a steep price for their cooperation with the NSA. Read...  NSA Pricked The “Cloud” Bubble For US Tech Companies
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