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Paul Merrell

Surveillance scandal rips through hacker community | Security & Privacy - CNET News - 0 views

  • One security start-up that had an encounter with the FBI was Wickr, a privacy-forward text messaging app for the iPhone with an Android version in private beta. Wickr's co-founder Nico Sell told CNET at Defcon, "Wickr has been approached by the FBI and asked for a backdoor. We said, 'No.'" The mistrust runs deep. "Even if [the NSA] stood up tomorrow and said that [they] have eliminated these programs," said Marlinspike, "How could we believe them? How can we believe that anything they say is true?" Where does security innovation go next? The immediate future of information security innovation most likely lies in software that provides an existing service but with heightened privacy protections, such as webmail that doesn't mine you for personal data.
  • Wickr's Sell thinks that her company has hit upon a privacy innovation that a few others are also doing, but many will soon follow: the company itself doesn't store user data. "[The FBI] would have to force us to build a new app. With the current app there's no way," she said, that they could incorporate backdoor access to Wickr users' texts or metadata. "Even if you trust the NSA 100 percent that they're going to use [your data] correctly," Sell said, "Do you trust that they're going to be able to keep it safe from hackers? What if somebody gets that database and posts it online?" To that end, she said, people will start seeing privacy innovation for services that don't currently provide it. Calling it "social networks 2.0," she said that social network competitors will arise that do a better job of protecting their customer's privacy and predicted that some that succeed will do so because of their emphasis on privacy. Abine's recent MaskMe browser add-on and mobile app for creating disposable e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and credit cards is another example of a service that doesn't have access to its own users' data.
  • Stamos predicted changes in services that companies with cloud storage offer, including offering customers the ability to store their data outside of the U.S. "If they want to stay competitive, they're going to have to," he said. But, he cautioned, "It's impossible to do a cloud-based ad supported service." Soghoian added, "The only way to keep a service running is to pay them money." This, he said, is going to give rise to a new wave of ad-free, privacy protective subscription services.
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  • The issue with balancing privacy and surveillance is that the wireless carriers are not interested in privacy, he said. "They've been providing wiretapping for 100 years. Apple may in the next year protect voice calls," he said, and said that the best hope for ending widespread government surveillance will be the makers of mobile operating systems like Apple and Google. Not all upcoming security innovation will be focused on that kind of privacy protection. Security researcher Brandon Wiley showed off at Defcon a protocol he calls Dust that can obfuscate different kinds of network traffic, with the end goal of preventing censorship. "I only make products about letting you say what you want to say anywhere in the world," such as content critical of governments, he said. Encryption can hide the specifics of the traffic, but some governments have figured out that they can simply block all encrypted traffic, he said. The Dust protocol would change that, he said, making it hard to tell the difference between encrypted and unencrypted traffic. It's hard to build encryption into pre-existing products, Wiley said. "I think people are going to make easy-to-use, encrypted apps, and that's going to be the future."
  • Companies could face severe consequences from their security experts, said Stamos, if the in-house experts find out that they've been lied to about providing government access to customer data. You could see "lots of resignations and maybe publicly," he said. "It wouldn't hurt their reputations to go out in a blaze of glory." Perhaps not surprisingly, Marlinspike sounded a hopeful call for non-destructive activism on Defcon's 21st anniversary. "As hackers, we don't have a lot of influence on policy. I hope that's something that we can focus our energy on," he said.
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    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. 
Gary Edwards

Furious Over End Of Google Reader - Business Insider - 1 views

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    "Gary Edwards on Mar 15, 8:25 PM said: There are only three apps i load at boot-up: gMail, gReader, and gWave. Ooops! Google Wave was cancelled over a year ago. Owning the end-users attention at boot-up proved to be an essential factor to the Microsoft monopoly. They built an iron fisted empire out of owning the point of boot-up. So it's very strange to see Google give up the very thing other cloud platform contenders would no doubt kill for. Very strange. Even stranger though is the perception that Google + will somehow now move to center stage? The only reason i use Google+ is because it's easy to point to an article and post a comment from Google Reader to my + circles. Other than that i have no use for +. Nicolas Carr posted an interesting comment on Google's cancellation of gReader yesterday. He tried to argue that there is a difference between "tools" and "platforms", and Google was more interested in building a platform than maintaining "tools" like gReader. So, Google+ is now essential to the Google Platform? Unfortunately, the otherwise brilliant and cosmic insightful Mr. Carr, fails to make that case. Microsoft became a platform when they succeeded in positioning their OS as the essential factor bridging an explosively innovative and rapidly commoditiz'ing Windows hardware reference platform, and, he equally rapid and innovative Windows software application platform. Both software and hardware were being written and developed to the Windows OS, with features doubling and costs being halved at a rate that even Moore's Law envied. Microsoft fully cemented the emerging hardware - OS - application platform with a business productivity environment that necessitated the use of the MS Office suite of servers and apps. That lock on business productivity has yet to be broken. And even though the mighty Google Apps has made some progress convincing businesses to rip-out-and-replace their legacy business productivity systems and re write to the Google Cloud P
Gary Edwards

Rich Karlgaard: The Future Is More Than Facebook - WSJ.com - 0 views

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    Very interesting article from WSJ on the eve of the FaceBook IPO.  Karlgaard claims that in Silicon Valley, social networking is last years story.  The innovators have moved on to really important stuff, "big stuff", like transportation, energy, electricity, food production, water delivery, health care and education. Killer quote: In Silicon Valley, investing in social-media companies is already passé. Last year, as private investors were bidding up Facebook's valuation to $100 billion, the veteran Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee said "the next 500 social-media companies will lose money." He's broadly right. The time to make big returns in Facebook and in social media has passed.......... Karlsgard argues that the future belongs to the algorythm engineers, and the magic they make.  He sights the incredibly rapid development of the Google Car, concluding that "This rate of progress is normal in the algorithmic world, but it is new in the physical world."  Silicon Valley is where the great algorithms engineers put their genius to the test.  It's still where money meets magic, and algorithms get to whip saw reality. first up: Manufacturing and Energy. excerpts: Social media is already passé in Silicon Valley. America's innovation engine is now focused on transportation, energy and manufacturing. In March 1986, Microsoft ended its first day as a public company with a market capitalization of $780 million. Its value grew more than 700 times that over the next 13 years and made Bill Gates, in 1999, the richest man ever with a net worth of $101 billion. When Facebook goes public this Friday its market cap could easily hit $100 billion, bringing founder Mark Zuckerberg's net worth to more than $18 billion. That's about 50 times what Mr. Gates was worth after Microsoft's IPO. Facebook's big payday should be cause for celebration in a liberal democracy. Instead it has provoked two kinds of anxiety. Both imply America's best days are over.
Gary Edwards

Top 10 Enterprise Products of 2010 - 0 views

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    Good overview of 2010 products and trends. This post is part of our ReadWriteEnterprise channel, which is a resource and guide for IT managers and technologists in the Enterprise. As you're exploring solutions for your enterprise, check out this helpful ReadWriteWeb report provided for FREE courtesy of HP: The Age of Exabytes This year enterprise 2.0 went from being a fringe idea to being mainstream as CIOs started asking "how?" instead of "why?" Big name vendors entered the marketplace with new products and existing vendors released new versions with innovative new features. We chose to break up the enterprise products of the year up into categories: new product, e-mail, mobile, development tool, database, social software suite, social CRM, microblogging, conferencing and CMS. Products were evaluated based on market performance, innovation, utility, impact on the spa
Gary Edwards

Are the Glory Days of IT Gone? Thomas Siebel thinks so. Are the Glory Days Long Gone ... - 0 views

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    In a recent speech to Stanford students, Siebel system's Thomas Siebel argues that the 20 sweet years of IT spending growth between 1980 and 2000 has ended.  IT growth no longer outpasses the growth of the economy.  In 2000 IT spending fell from a compounded annual growth rate of 17% to 3%, and has languished there since. Shane Greenstein, an economist at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management who has written extensively about the computer industry, to take a look at the raw data upon which those numbers were supposedly based: the annual I.T. spending estimates published by IDC.  He found that the hay day of IT spending was actually between 1961 and 1980, where the rate was upwards of 35.7% growth!!! One thought i had is that IT spending today is very focused on the problem of connecting legacy business systems to the Web.  It's not focused on replacing those systems. One very interesting excerpt:  "when one company dominates a certain area of technology, it can be a bottleneck along the road to innovation - an obstacle to the technology of others. Mr. Bresnahan says that this has happened with Microsoft in the PC side of corporate information technology, and in earlier times with I.B.M. in computers and AT&T in telecommunications. But he said that entrepreneurial companies of those earlier days - like Siebel Systems - ultimately invented around bottlenecks and "innovation-led growth picked up again."
Paul Merrell

Bankrolled by broadband donors, lawmakers lobby FCC on net neutrality | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • The 28 House members who lobbied the Federal Communications Commission to drop net neutrality this week have received more than twice the amount in campaign contributions from the broadband sector than the average for all House members. These lawmakers, including the top House leadership, warned the FCC that regulating broadband like a public utility "harms" providers, would be "fatal to the Internet," and could "limit economic freedom."​ According to research provided Friday by Maplight, the 28 House members received, on average, $26,832 from the "cable & satellite TV production & distribution" sector over a two-year period ending in December. According to the data, that's 2.3 times more than the House average of $11,651. What's more, one of the lawmakers who told the FCC that he had "grave concern" (PDF) about the proposed regulation took more money from that sector than any other member of the House. Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) was the top sector recipient, netting more than $109,000 over the two-year period, the Maplight data shows.
  • Dan Newman, cofounder and president of Maplight, the California research group that reveals money in politics, said the figures show that "it's hard to take seriously politicians' claims that they are acting in the public interest when their campaigns are funded by companies seeking huge financial benefits for themselves." Signing a letter to the FCC along with Walden, who chairs the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, were three other key members of the same committee: Reps. Fred Upton (R-MI), Robert Latta (R-OH), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). Over the two-year period, Upton took in $65,000, Latta took $51,000, and Blackburn took $32,500. In a letter (PDF) those representatives sent to the FCC two days before Thursday's raucous FCC net neutrality hearing, the four wrote that they had "grave concern" over the FCC's consideration of "reclassifying Internet broadband service as an old-fashioned 'Title II common carrier service.'" The letter added that a switchover "harms broadband providers, the American economy, and ultimately broadband consumers, actually doing so would be fatal to the Internet as we know it."
  • Not every one of the 28 members who publicly lobbied the FCC against net neutrality in advance of Thursday's FCC public hearing received campaign financing from the industry. One representative took no money: Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV). In all, the FCC received at least three letters from House lawmakers with 28 signatures urging caution on classifying broadband as a telecommunications service, which would open up the sector to stricter "common carrier" rules, according to letters the members made publicly available. The US has long applied common carrier status to the telephone network, providing justification for universal service obligations that guarantee affordable phone service to all Americans and other rules that promote competition and consumer choice. Some consumer advocates say that common carrier status is needed for the FCC to impose strong network neutrality rules that would force ISPs to treat all traffic equally, not degrading competing services or speeding up Web services in exchange for payment. ISPs have argued that common carrier rules would saddle them with too much regulation and would force them to spend less on network upgrades and be less innovative.
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  • Of the 28 House members signing on to the three letters, Republicans received, on average, $59,812 from the industry over the two-year period compared to $13,640 for Democrats, according to the Maplight data. Another letter (PDF) sent to the FCC this week from four top members of the House, including Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and Republican Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), argued in favor of cable companies: "We are writing to respectfully urge you to halt your consideration of any plan to impose antiquated regulation on the Internet, and to warn that implementation of such a plan will needlessly inhibit the creation of American private sector jobs, limit economic freedom and innovation, and threaten to derail one of our economy's most vibrant sectors," they wrote. Over the two-year period, Boehner received $75,450; Cantor got $80,800; McCarthy got $33,000; and McMorris Rodgers got $31,500.
  • The third letter (PDF) forwarded to the FCC this week was signed by 20 House members. "We respectfully urge you to consider the effect that regressing to a Title II approach might have on private companies' ability to attract capital and their continued incentives to invest and innovate, as well as the potentially negative impact on job creation that might result from any reduction in funding or investment," the letter said. Here are the 28 lawmakers who lobbied the FCC this week and their reported campaign contributions:
Paul Merrell

Protocols of the Hackers of Zion? « LobeLog - 0 views

  • When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Google chairman Eric Schmidt on Tuesday afternoon, he boasted about Israel’s “robust hi-tech and cyber industries.” According to The Jerusalem Post, “Netanyahu also noted that ‘Israel was making great efforts to diversify the markets with which it is trading in the technological field.'” Just how diversified and developed Israeli hi-tech innovation has become was revealed the very next morning, when the Russian cyber-security firm Kaspersky Labs, which claims more than 400 million users internationally, announced that sophisticated spyware with the hallmarks of Israeli origin (although no country was explicitly identified) had targeted three European hotels that had been venues for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
  • Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, one of the first news sources to break the story, reported that Kaspersky itself had been hacked by malware whose code was remarkably similar to that of a virus attributed to Israel. Code-named “Duqu” because it used the letters DQ in the names of the files it created, the malware had first been detected in 2011. On Thursday, Symantec, another cyber-security firm, announced it too had discovered Duqu 2 on its global network, striking undisclosed telecommunication sites in Europe, North Africa, Hong Kong, and  Southeast Asia. It said that Duqu 2 is much more difficult to detect that its predecessor because it lives exclusively in the memory of the computers it infects, rather than writing files to a drive or disk. The original Duqu shared coding with — and was written on the same platform as — Stuxnet, the computer worm  that partially disabled enrichment centrifuges in Iranian nuclear power plants, according to a 2012 report in The New York Times. Intelligence and military experts said that Stuxnet was first tested at Dimona, a nuclear-reactor complex in the Negev desert that houses Israel’s own clandestine nuclear weapons program. While Stuxnet is widely believed to have been a joint Israeli-U.S. operation, Israel seems to have developed and implemented Duqu on its own.
  • Coding of the spyware that targeted two Swiss hotels and one in Vienna—both sites where talks were held between the P5+1 and Iran—so closely resembled that of Duqu that Kaspersky has dubbed it “Duqu 2.” A Kaspersky report contends that the new and improved Duqu would have been almost impossible to create without access to the original Duqu code. Duqu 2’s one hundred “modules” enabled the cyber attackers to commandeer infected computers, compress video feeds  (including those from hotel surveillance cameras), monitor and disrupt telephone service and Wi-Fi, and steal electronic files. The hackers’ penetration of computers used by the front desk would have allowed them to determine the room numbers of negotiators and delegation members. Duqu 2 also gave the hackers the ability to operate two-way microphones in the hotels’ elevators and control their alarm systems.
Paul Merrell

6 Anti-NSA Technological innovations that May Just Change the World | StormCloudsGathering - 0 views

  • Rather than grovel and beg for the U.S. government to respect our privacy, these innovators have taken matters into their own hands, and their work may change the playing field completely.
  • People used to assume that the United States government was held in check by the constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and which demands due process in criminal investigations, but such illusions have evaporated in recent years. It turns out that the NSA considers itself above the law in every respect and feels entitled to spy on anyone anywhere in the world without warrants, and without any real oversight. Understandably these revelations shocked the average citizen who had been conditioned to take the government's word at face value, and the backlash has been considerable. The recent "Today We Fight Back" campaign to protest the NSA's surveillance practices shows that public sentiment is in the right place. Whether these kinds of petitions and protests will have any real impact on how the U.S. government operates is questionable (to say the least), however some very smart people have decided not to wait around and find out. Instead they're focusing on making the NSA's job impossible. In the process they may fundamentally alter the way the internet operates.
  • People used to assume that the United States government was held in check by the constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and which demands due process in criminal investigations, but such illusions have evaporated in recent years. It turns out that the NSA considers itself above the law in every respect and feels entitled to spy on anyone anywhere in the world without warrants, and without any real oversight. Understandably these revelations shocked the average citizen who had been conditioned to take the government's word at face value, and the backlash has been considerable. The recent "Today We Fight Back" campaign to protest the NSA's surveillance practices shows that public sentiment is in the right place. Whether these kinds of petitions and protests will have any real impact on how the U.S. government operates is questionable (to say the least), however some very smart people have decided not to wait around and find out. Instead they're focusing on making the NSA's job impossible. In the process they may fundamentally alter the way the internet operates.
Gary Edwards

Op-Ed Contributor - Microsoft's Creative Destruction - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Dick Brass, former VP at Microsoft (1997-2004) unloads.  He describes how legacy product groups, like the Windows OS and MSOffice groups, conspire to defeat smaller groups focused on emerging and innovative solutions.  Excellent read. excerpt:  Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It's not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft's music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left. As a result, while the company has had a truly amazing past and an enviably prosperous present, unless it regains its creative spark, it's an open question whether it has much of a future.
Gary Edwards

Silicon Valley Guru Steve Blank Welcomes The New Bubble And Says Microsoft Is Doomed - 0 views

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    Great interview. Interesting statements about Microsoft's future (or lack thereof).    excerpt: Steve Blank is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a guru. The serial entrepreneur turned writer and professor has a big theory: entrepreneurship is a skill that can be taught. At Stanford and Berkeley, Blank teaches scientists to get out of their labs and find real customers for their ideas -- without getting bogged down in the traditional MBA weeds of spreadsheets and revenue models. There are two major strategies. You either build, or you buy. What do you buy? You can buy IP, you buy teams and people, product lines, companies, P&Ls, bottom line. I think Google has tended to focus on teams and products. If you look at their most innovative counter to disruption, Android, it had nothing to do with the company, they bought it. Not only did they buy the technology, they bought the individual who's the driving force between what might keep them in business. The one thing they haven't figured out how to either build or buy is to counter Facebook. You look at Microsoft going through this -- Microsoft is the living dead. Microsoft is a standing joke now in the technology business. The one game you could see playing out is they buy Skype, they buy Nokia, Steve Elop finally injects some life into the company and replaces Ballmer and Microsoft reinvents itself. Elop is a great politician and a great IT guy, and maybe they could reinvent themselves along that axis. But it wil never happen as long as Steve Ballmer is Bill Gates's best friend. Microsoft is the new Wang. Remember Wang?.....................
Gary Edwards

The Real Meaning Of Google Wave - Forbes.com - 0 views

  • Wave is a new way to build distributed applications, and it will open the door to an explosion of innovation.
  • So, if Wave is not just the demo application, what is it? Google Wave is a platform for creating distributed applications. Each Wave server can be involved in a number of conversations involving Wavelets, what most people would think of as a document. Wavelets are actually a much more powerful and general because they are based on XML, which means you can have lots of depth of content, like headings and subheadings of a book, but on steroids. Adding a document repository to XMPP is just revolutionary.
  • The XMPP protocol manages the communication between the Wave servers so that all the Wavelets can synchronize as they are changed. Then Google finished the job by making Wavelets tag-able, searchable and versioned, so you can play back changes. But Google Wave goes beyond just managing the content--it also manages the programs that act on the content. At any level, a program can be assigned to a Wavelet to render it, that is, show it to a user and help manage the conversation. Google Wave also manages the distribution and management of these programs. The idea of a platform that combines management of the data and the code is really powerful.
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    Good article.  One of the first to go beyond the demo, recognizing that Wave is application platform - a wrapper for the convergence of communications and content. Excerpt: Wave is a new way to build distributed applications, and it will open the door to an explosion of innovation. What the Wave demo showed is support for a continuum from the shortest messages to longer and longer forms of content. All of it can be shared with precise control, tagged, searched. The version history is kept. No more mailing around a document. This takes the beauty of e-mail and wikis and extends it in a more flexible way to a much larger audience. Google Wave is a platform for creating distributed applications. Each Wave server can be involved in a number of conversations involving Wavelets, what most people would think of as a document. Wavelets are actually a much more powerful and general because they are based on XML, which means you can have lots of depth of content, like headings and subheadings of a book, but on steroids. Adding a document repository to XMPP is just revolutionary. The XMPP protocol manages the communication between the Wave servers so that all the Wavelets can synchronize as they are changed. Then Google finished the job by making Wavelets tag-able, searchable and versioned, so you can play back changes. But Google Wave goes beyond just managing the content--it also manages the programs that act on the content. At any level, a program can be assigned to a Wavelet to render it, that is, show it to a user and help manage the conversation. Google Wave also manages the distribution and management of these programs. The idea of a platform that combines management of the data and the code is really powerful.
Paul Merrell

FCC Turns Itself into a Deregulatory Agency - WhoWhatWhy - 0 views

  • Since taking office, President Donald Trump has wasted no time in proposing rollbacks to Obama-era federal regulations. So, it should come as no surprise that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted last month to propose changes to current regulations on Internet service providers. Spearheaded by Ajit Pai — the Trump-appointed FCC chairman and former lawyer for Verizon — the 2-1 vote is the first step in dismantling the Open Internet Order. The lone FCC Democrat, Mignon Clyburn, was overruled by Pai and fellow commissioner Michael O’Reilly. The 2015 order classified broadband internet as a utility under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. Opponents of the current state of net neutrality argue that the rules are archaic and place unnecessary — even harmful — restrictions on internet service providers (ISPs), leading to lack of innovation and investment. While it’s true that policies conceived in the 1930s could hardly anticipate the complexities of the modern Internet, a complete rollback of Title II protections would leave ISPs free to favor their own services and whichever company pays for upgraded service. Considering relaxed FEC rules on media ownership and lack of antitrust enforcement, some could argue that a rollback of net neutrality is even more toxic to innovation and affordable pricing. That is, fast lanes could be created for companies with deeper pockets, effectively giving them an advantage over companies and individuals who can’t pay extra. This approach effectively penalizes small businesses, nonprofits and innovative start-ups. Today’s Internet is so vast and so pervasive that it’s hard to grasp the impact that an abandonment of net neutrality would have on every aspect of our culture.
  • While the FCC’s proposed change will touch most Americans, net neutrality remains a mystifying concept to non-techies. To help our readers better understand the issue, we have compiled some videos that explain net neutrality and its importance. The FCC will be accepting comments from the public on their website until August 16, 2017.
timothypeverhart

Google Chrome for PC Latest Version - 0 views

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Google Chrome

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Gary Edwards

Is Microsoft On The Verge Of A Sudden Collapse Predicted By Catastrophe Theory? - Forbes - 1 views

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    Forbes magazine has a doom and gloom Microsoft article that "ends on a note of doom".  They lampoon Windows 8 using the reviews of other bloggers like Charlie Demerjian, "Microsoft has failed". http://goo.gl/H4mZc The end of Microsoft though comes from the inability of Microsoft to change course.  In short, Microsoft has fallen into a death spiral consistent with Catastrophe theory (http://goo.gl/6CWwY). No comment or mention of Microsoft Cloud efforts:  Azure, Live.com, or SkyDrive. excerpt: In the end, the death spiral for Microsoft is in full effect, and management is expending a lot of effort to speed it up. Anyone who dares point out that the entire system is collapsing, or worse yet suggests an alternative, gets Sinofsky'd. Or was it Guggenheimer'd? In any case, Microsoft is unwilling to change, and that is very clear. Even if they wanted to, they are culturally far beyond the point of being able to. What was a slow bleed of marketshare is now gushing, and management is clueless, intransigent, and myopic. Game over, the thrashing will continue for a bit, but it won't change the outcome. Microsoft has failed. I hope this isn't true. Microsoft has been a stabilizing force in the market and many users are very attached to its products. For the first time, however, businesses can look to Google and to Apple and see plausible, battle-tested alternatives to the products they have used from Microsoft-for much less money. And in a bizarre way, Microsofts spasm of innovation has made the company now a destabilizing factor for IT departments and Google Docs is looking an awful lot like the old guard. The big question is how fast Microsoft might collapse if businesses began to defect en masse. Like other phenomena of global instability, extreme change seems to come quicker now. For Microsoft, the window is closing fast."
Paul Merrell

Hey ITU Member States: No More Secrecy, Release the Treaty Proposals | Electronic Front... - 0 views

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    The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) will hold the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) in December in Dubai, an all-important treaty-writing event where ITU Member States will discuss the proposed revisions to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR). The ITU is a United Nations agency responsible for international telecom regulation, a bureaucratic, slow-moving, closed regulatory organization that issues treaty-level provisions for international telecommunication networks and services. The ITR, a legally binding international treaty signed by 178 countries, defines the boundaries of ITU's regulatory authority and provides "general principles" on international telecommunications. However, media reports indicate that some proposed amendments to the ITR-a negotiation that is already well underway-could potentially expand the ITU's mandate to encompass the Internet.
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    The ITU Member States should urgently lift restrictions on sharing the preparatory materials and ITR amendments, and release the documents. The current preparatory process lacks the transparency, openness of process, and inclusiveness of all relevant stakeholders that is the hallmark of Internet policy-making. A truly multi-stakeholder participation model requires equal footing for each relevant stakeholders including civil society, the private sector, the technical community, and participating governments. These principles are the minimum that one could expect following commitments made at the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS). The ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun I. Touré reiterated these commitments last year at the Internet Governance Forum in Kenya: In its own words, the "ITU remains firmly committed to the WSIS process," and it considers itself to have "made considerable progress in many areas in advancing the implementation of the WSIS outcomes." And in practice? Not likely. This is why EFF, European Digital Rights, CIPPIC and CDT and a coalition of civil society organizations from around the world are demanding that the ITU Secretary General, the WCIT-12 Council Working Group, and ITU Member States open up the WCIT-12 and the Council working group negotiations, by immediately releasing all the preparatory materials and Treaty proposals. If it affects the digital rights of citizens across the globe, the public needs to know what is going on and deserves to have a say. The Council Working Group is responsible for the preparatory work towards WCIT-12, setting the agenda for and consolidating input from participating governments and Sector Members.
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    We demand full and meaningful participation for civil society in its own right, and without cost, at the Council Working Group meetings and the WCIT on equal footing with all other stakeholders, including participating governments. A transparent, open process that is inclusive of civil society at every stage is crucial to creating sound policy. Respect the multi-stakeholder process Civil society has good reason to be concerned regarding an expanded ITU policy-making role. To begin with, the institution does not appear to have high regard for the distributed multi-stakeholder decision making model that has been integral to the development of an innovative, successful and open Internet. In spite of commitments at WSIS to ensure Internet policy is based on input from all relevant stakeholders, the ITU has consistently put the interests of one stakeholder-Governments-above all others. This is discouraging, as some government interests are inconsistent with an open, innovative network. Indeed, the conditions which have made the Internet the powerful tool it is today emerged in an environment where the interests of all stakeholders are given equal footing, and existing Internet policy-making institutions at least aspire, with varying success, to emulate this equal footing. This formula is enshrined in the Tunis Agenda, which was committed to at WSIS in 2005:
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    83. Building an inclusive development-oriented Information Society will require unremitting multi-stakeholder effort. We thus commit ourselves to remain fully engaged-nationally, regionally and internationally-to ensure sustainable implementation and follow-up of the outcomes and commitments reached during the WSIS process and its Geneva and Tunis phases of the Summit. Taking into account the multifaceted nature of building the Information Society, effective cooperation among governments, private sector, civil society and the United Nations and other international organizations, according to their different roles and responsibilities and leveraging on their expertise, is essential. 84. Governments and other stakeholders should identify those areas where further effort and resources are required, and jointly identify, and where appropriate develop, implementation strategies, mechanisms and processes for WSIS outcomes at international, regional, national and local levels, paying particular attention to people and groups that are still marginalized in their access to, and utilization of, ICTs.
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    Indeed, the ITU's current vision of Internet policy-making is less one of distributed decision-making, and more one of 'taking control.' For example, in an interview conducted last June with ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Touré, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin raised the suggestion that the union might take control of the Internet: "We are thankful to you for the ideas that you have proposed for discussion," Putin told Touré in that conversation. "One of them is establishing international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)." Rights to online expression are unlikely to fare much better than privacy under an ITU model. During last year's IGF in Kenya, a voluntary code of conduct was issued to further restrict free expression online. A group of nations (including China, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) released a Resolution for the UN General Assembly titled, "International Code of Conduct for Information Security." The Code seems to be designed to preserve and protect national powers in information and communication. In it, governments pledge to curb "the dissemination of information that incites terrorism, secessionism or extremism or that undermines other countries' political, economic and social stability, as well as their spiritual and cultural environment." This overly broad provision accords any state the right to censor or block international communications, for almost any reason.
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    We urge the ITU Secretary General et al to ensure that the outcomes of the WCIT and its preparatory process truly represent the common interests of all who hold a stake in the future of our information society. If your government is a member of ITU, demand transparency and tell them to open the process and disclose the WCIT preparatory documents and Treaty amendments.
Gary Edwards

Your Open Web, documented · WebPlatform.org - 0 views

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Apr 13 - No Cached
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    "Your Open Web, documented. Opening the Web Platform We are an open community of developers building resources for a better web, regardless of brand, browser or platform. Anyone can contribute and each person who does makes us stronger. Together we can continue to drive innovation on the Web to serve the greater good. It starts here, with you. Hot topics HTML5CSSCANVASWEBGLSVGTRANSFORMSVIDEOAUDIOANIMATIONSMEDIA QUERIESINDEXEDDBFILE API Web Platform Stewards WebPlatform.org is convened by W3C and is made possible by the support of the Web Platform stewards. "
Gary Edwards

Citi: Disruptive Innovation - Business Insider - 0 views

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    "In a massive new research report, analysts at investment bank Citi take a close look at 10 technologies they say will disrupt the way we do business.  They've dipped into practically every sector you can think of: energy, entertainment, IT, manufacturing, and transportation among them. Some of these technologies have been with us for awhile, but are poised to get better or cheaper. Others have only recently surfaced, but will be ubiquitous in a matter of years. This is what they say the future is going to look like."  (Slide Deck of Disruptive Technologies with Titles listed below) .... 3-D Printing .... e-Cigarettes .... Genomics and Personalized Medicine .... Mobile Payments (idiots didn't include Dwolla - the most disruptive technology in this sector .... Energy Exploration Technology .... Oil to Gas Switching  (Compressed Natural Gas - CNG - for Vehicles) .... Streaming Entertainment .... The SaaS Opportunity - Software as a Service (Check out the Graph! Projected to be an $18 Billion market led by Google Apps, Microsoft 365 and Amazon Web Services (?) .... Software Defined Networking -SDN-  a projected $3.7 Billion market .... Solar Photovoltaics  -Semiconductor generated electrical current within solar panels  
pranetorweb

UX Designing Services in Hyderabad - 0 views

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