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Gary Edwards

Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek - Multimedia Feature - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...snow-fall

Snow-Fall Visual-Documents Visual-Productivity Cloud-Compound-Document

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 13
     
    Incredible project exploring new methods of story telling that make full use of an emerging interactive, graphical and multimedia rich, extraordinarily visual Web platform.  Awesome use of Web technology and a great story to boot!   While the Snow Fall Project is hardly the first Visual Document, it's truly a landmark effort.  Hopefully the business process and systems editing tools for Web based Visual Productivity will not be far behind simple Visual Web publication tools. Marbux viewed the source code and pointed out the great efforts that the NY Times had gone to to provide cross browser compatibility.  That in turn reminded me just how close the world came to having Microsoft seize the Web and take control of its future.  A very close call if ever there was one.  Many thanks to Marc Andresssen and the Netscape investors for their heroic efforts to stop Bill Gates and his Microsoft monopoly.
Gary Edwards

Diary Of An x264 Developer » Flash, Google, VP8, and the future of internet v... - 0 views

x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292

flash-html5-VP8

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Feb 10
     
    In depth technical discussion about Flash, HTML5, H.264, and Google's VP8.  Excellent.  Read the comments.  Bottom line - Google has the juice to put Flash and H.264 in the dirt.  The YouTube acquisition turns out to be very strategic. excerpt: The internet has been filled for quite some time with an enormous number of blog posts complaining about how Flash sucks-so much that it's sounding as if the entire internet is crying wolf.  But, of course, despite the incessant complaining, they're right: Flash has terrible performance on anything other than Windows x86 and Adobe doesn't seem to care at all.  But rather than repeat this ad nauseum, let's be a bit more intellectual and try to figure out what happened. Flash became popular because of its power and flexibility.  At the time it was the only option for animated vector graphics and interactive content (stuff like VRML hardly counts).  Furthermore, before Flash, the primary video options were Windows Media, Real, and Quicktime: all of which were proprietary, had no free software encoders or decoders, and (except for Windows Media) required the user to install a clunky external application, not merely a plugin.  Given all this, it's clear why Flash won: it supported open multimedia formats like H.263 and MP3, used an ultra-simple container format that anyone could write (FLV), and worked far more easily and reliably than any alternative. Thus, Adobe (actually, at the time, Macromedia) got their 98% install base.  And with that, they began to become complacent.  Any suggestion of a competitor was immediately shrugged off; how could anyone possibly compete with Adobe, given their install base?  It'd be insane, nobody would be able to do it.  They committed the cardinal sin of software development: believing that a competitor being better is excusable.  At x264, if we find a competitor that does something better, we immediately look into trying to put ourselves back on top.  This is why
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

What to expect from HTML 5 | Developer World - InfoWorld - 0 views

www.infoworld.com/...what-expect-html5-611

html5 openweb OpenWeb-Standards w3c neil-mcallister

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Mar 10
     
    Neil McAllister provides a good intro to HTML5 and what it will mean to the future of the Web.  It's just an intro, but the links he provides are excellent resources for deep dive. excerpt:  "Among Web developers, anticipation is mounting for HTML 5, the overhaul of the Web markup language currently under way at the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C). For many, the revamping is long overdue. HTML hasn't had a proper upgrade in more than a decade. In fact, the last markup language to win W3C Recommendation status -- the final stage of the Web standards process -- was XHTML 1.1 in 2001. In the intervening years, Web developers have grown increasingly restless. Many claim the HTML and XHTML standards have become outdated, and that their document-centric focus does not adequately address the needs of modern Web applications. HTML 5 aims to change all that. When it is finalized, the new standard will include tags and APIs for improved interactivity, multimedia, and localization. As experimental support for HTML 5 features has crept into the current crop of Web browsers, some developers have even begun voicing hope that this new, modernized HTML will free them from reliance on proprietary plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, and Silverlight."
Paul Merrell

Exploring HTML 5's Audio/Video Multimedia Support - 0 views

www.devx.com/43324

HTML 5 audio video multimedia

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Because HTML 4.0 essentially was a "frozen" version, the specific mechanism for displaying content has been very much format dependent (e.g., Apple QuickTime Movies and Flash video) and usually relies upon tags with varying parameters for passing the relevant information to the server. As a result, video and audio embedding on web pages has become something of a black art . Its perhaps not surprising then that the <audio> and <video> tags were among the first features to be added to the HTML 5 specification, and these seem to be the first elements of the HTML 5 specification that browser vendors implemented. These particular elements are intended to enable the browser to work with both types of media in an easy-to-use manner. An included support API gives users finer-grained control.
  • Theoretically, the <video> and <audio> elements should be able to handle most of the codecs currently in use. In practice, however, the browsers that do currently support these elements do so only for the open source Ogg Vorbis and Theora standards.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Nov 09
     
    Kurt Cagle digs into audio and video support in HTML 5. As always, his view is revealing.
Gary Edwards

Needlebase - 2 views

www.needlebase.com

flipboard qwiki wikiWORD Needle sports-illustrated immersive-content

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Apr 11 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Apr 11
     
    Move over FlipBoard and QWiki and meet Needle.  The emerging market space for automating the process of collecting Web information to analyse, re-purpose and re-publish is getting crowded.   Needle is designed to: acquire data from multiple sources:  A simple tagging process quickly imports structured data from complex websites, XML feeds, and spreadsheets into a unified database of your design.merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needle uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record.  Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needle uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record.  Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. build and publish custom data views: Use Needle's visual UI and powerful query language to configure exactly your desired view of the data, whether as a list, table, grid, or map.  Then, with one click, publish the data for others to see, or export a feed of the clean data to your own local database. Flipboard is famous for the slick republishing / packaging process focused on iOS devices.  Allows end users to choose sources. QWiki takes republishing to the extreme, blending voice over (from wikipedia text) with a slide show of multimedia information.  Edn user does not yet have control and selection of information sources with QWiki. The iOS Sports Illustrated app seems to be the starting point for "immersive webzines", with the NY Times close behind.  Very very slick packaging of basic Web information. Flipboard followed the iOS re-publishing wave with an end-user facing immersive webzine packaging design.  And now we have Needle. Still looking for a business document FlipBoard, where a "project" is packaged in a FlipBoard immersive container.  The iPack would be similar to an iPUB book with the added featur
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Apr 11
     
    Note: On April 12th, 2011 Needle was acquired by Google.
Gary Edwards

Push Pop Press: About Us - 0 views

pushpoppress.com/about

visually-immersive visual-publications flipboard

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 11
     
    iOS visual eBooks and magazine "immersive media" category.  Push Pop Press seeks to provide a platform for digital eBooks that are more multimedia content than text.  It's more like writing in powerpoint or Flash than Word.  Think flipboard.  Another interesting term used by Push Pop Press is that this is a "layout platform" for rich content. features:  A demo of the first book powered byPush Pop Press, Al Gore's Our Choice.A New Digital Publishing Platform Easy to PublishLayout and publish interactive digital books without writing codeMixed MediaTell rich stories using text, images, audio, video, maps and interactive graphicsInteractive GraphicsEmbed interactive graphics that use the microphone, accelerometer and moreMulti-Touch User InterfaceEdge-to-edge content without any distracting toolbars or buttonsVisual Table of ContentsBrowse through hundreds of pages quickly and easilyPages Load InstantlyPages load as fast as your finger can swipeStart Reading ImmediatelyStart reading the first chapter as the rest of the book downloads in the backgroundUpdatable ContentUpdate your content without having to update the appiPad, iPhone & iPod TouchPublish one universal app that can be read on an iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch
Paul Merrell

ChronoZoom: A deep dive into the history of everything - 0 views

newscenter.berkeley.edu/...into-the-history-of-everything

timeline ChronoZoom Microsoft

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Imagine a timeline of the universe, complete with high-resolution videos and images, in which you could zoom from a chronology of Egypt’s dynasties and pyramids to the tale of a Japanese-American couple interned in a World War II relocation camp to a discussion of a mass extinction that occurred on Earth 200 million years ago – all in seconds. Based on an idea from a University of California, Berkeley, student, ChronoZoom – essentially a zoomable timeline of timelines augmented with multimedia features –- is coming to life.
Paul Merrell

Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet - The In... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...sh-spies-seek-control-internet

surveillance state GCHQ dirty-tricks

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, “amplif[y]” sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be “extremist.” The capabilities, detailed in documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even include an old standby for pre-adolescent prank callers everywhere: A way to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call.
  • he “tools” have been assigned boastful code names. They include invasive methods for online surveillance, as well as some of the very techniques that the U.S. and U.K. have harshly prosecuted young online activists for employing, including “distributed denial of service” attacks and “call bombing.” But they also describe previously unknown tactics for manipulating and distorting online political discourse and disseminating state propaganda, as well as the apparent ability to actively monitor Skype users in real-time—raising further questions about the extent of Microsoft’s cooperation with spy agencies or potential vulnerabilities in its Skype’s encryption. Here’s a list of how JTRIG describes its capabilities: • “Change outcome of online polls” (UNDERPASS) • “Mass delivery of email messaging to support an Information Operations campaign” (BADGER) and “mass delivery of SMS messages to support an Information Operations campaign” (WARPARTH) • “Disruption of video-based websites hosting extremist content through concerted target discovery and content removal.” (SILVERLORD)
  • • “Active skype capability. Provision of real time call records (SkypeOut and SkypetoSkype) and bidirectional instant messaging. Also contact lists.” (MINIATURE HERO) • “Find private photographs of targets on Facebook” (SPRING BISHOP) • “A tool that will permanently disable a target’s account on their computer” (ANGRY PIRATE) • “Ability to artificially increase traffic to a website” (GATEWAY) and “ability to inflate page views on websites” (SLIPSTREAM) • “Amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (Youtube)” (GESTATOR) • “Targeted Denial Of Service against Web Servers” (PREDATORS FACE) and “Distributed denial of service using P2P. Built by ICTR, deployed by JTRIG” (ROLLING THUNDER)
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • • “A suite of tools for monitoring target use of the UK auction site eBay (www.ebay.co.uk)” (ELATE) • “Ability to spoof any email address and send email under that identity” (CHANGELING) • “For connecting two target phone together in a call” (IMPERIAL BARGE) While some of the tactics are described as “in development,” JTRIG touts “most” of them as “fully operational, tested and reliable.” It adds: “We only advertise tools here that are either ready to fire or very close to being ready.”
Paul Merrell

From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users' Online Identities - 0 views

theintercept.com/...ck-web-users-online-identities

surveillance state GCHQ Black-Hole

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • HERE WAS A SIMPLE AIM at the heart of the top-secret program: Record the website browsing habits of “every visible user on the Internet.” Before long, billions of digital records about ordinary people’s online activities were being stored every day. Among them were details cataloging visits to porn, social media and news websites, search engines, chat forums, and blogs. The mass surveillance operation — code-named KARMA POLICE — was launched by British spies about seven years ago without any public debate or scrutiny. It was just one part of a giant global Internet spying apparatus built by the United Kingdom’s electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The revelations about the scope of the British agency’s surveillance are contained in documents obtained by The Intercept from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Previous reports based on the leaked files have exposed how GCHQ taps into Internet cables to monitor communications on a vast scale, but many details about what happens to the data after it has been vacuumed up have remained unclear.
  • Amid a renewed push from the U.K. government for more surveillance powers, more than two dozen documents being disclosed today by The Intercept reveal for the first time several major strands of GCHQ’s existing electronic eavesdropping capabilities.
  • The surveillance is underpinned by an opaque legal regime that has authorized GCHQ to sift through huge archives of metadata about the private phone calls, emails and Internet browsing logs of Brits, Americans, and any other citizens — all without a court order or judicial warrant
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • A huge volume of the Internet data GCHQ collects flows directly into a massive repository named Black Hole, which is at the core of the agency’s online spying operations, storing raw logs of intercepted material before it has been subject to analysis. Black Hole contains data collected by GCHQ as part of bulk “unselected” surveillance, meaning it is not focused on particular “selected” targets and instead includes troves of data indiscriminately swept up about ordinary people’s online activities. Between August 2007 and March 2009, GCHQ documents say that Black Hole was used to store more than 1.1 trillion “events” — a term the agency uses to refer to metadata records — with about 10 billion new entries added every day. As of March 2009, the largest slice of data Black Hole held — 41 percent — was about people’s Internet browsing histories. The rest included a combination of email and instant messenger records, details about search engine queries, information about social media activity, logs related to hacking operations, and data on people’s use of tools to browse the Internet anonymously.
  • Throughout this period, as smartphone sales started to boom, the frequency of people’s Internet use was steadily increasing. In tandem, British spies were working frantically to bolster their spying capabilities, with plans afoot to expand the size of Black Hole and other repositories to handle an avalanche of new data. By 2010, according to the documents, GCHQ was logging 30 billion metadata records per day. By 2012, collection had increased to 50 billion per day, and work was underway to double capacity to 100 billion. The agency was developing “unprecedented” techniques to perform what it called “population-scale” data mining, monitoring all communications across entire countries in an effort to detect patterns or behaviors deemed suspicious. It was creating what it said would be, by 2013, “the world’s biggest” surveillance engine “to run cyber operations and to access better, more valued data for customers to make a real world difference.”
  • A document from the GCHQ target analysis center (GTAC) shows the Black Hole repository’s structure.
  • The data is searched by GCHQ analysts in a hunt for behavior online that could be connected to terrorism or other criminal activity. But it has also served a broader and more controversial purpose — helping the agency hack into European companies’ computer networks. In the lead up to its secret mission targeting Netherlands-based Gemalto, the largest SIM card manufacturer in the world, GCHQ used MUTANT BROTH in an effort to identify the company’s employees so it could hack into their computers. The system helped the agency analyze intercepted Facebook cookies it believed were associated with Gemalto staff located at offices in France and Poland. GCHQ later successfully infiltrated Gemalto’s internal networks, stealing encryption keys produced by the company that protect the privacy of cell phone communications.
  • Similarly, MUTANT BROTH proved integral to GCHQ’s hack of Belgian telecommunications provider Belgacom. The agency entered IP addresses associated with Belgacom into MUTANT BROTH to uncover information about the company’s employees. Cookies associated with the IPs revealed the Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn accounts of three Belgacom engineers, whose computers were then targeted by the agency and infected with malware. The hacking operation resulted in GCHQ gaining deep access into the most sensitive parts of Belgacom’s internal systems, granting British spies the ability to intercept communications passing through the company’s networks.
  • In March, a U.K. parliamentary committee published the findings of an 18-month review of GCHQ’s operations and called for an overhaul of the laws that regulate the spying. The committee raised concerns about the agency gathering what it described as “bulk personal datasets” being held about “a wide range of people.” However, it censored the section of the report describing what these “datasets” contained, despite acknowledging that they “may be highly intrusive.” The Snowden documents shine light on some of the core GCHQ bulk data-gathering programs that the committee was likely referring to — pulling back the veil of secrecy that has shielded some of the agency’s most controversial surveillance operations from public scrutiny. KARMA POLICE and MUTANT BROTH are among the key bulk collection systems. But they do not operate in isolation — and the scope of GCHQ’s spying extends far beyond them.
  • The agency operates a bewildering array of other eavesdropping systems, each serving its own specific purpose and designated a unique code name, such as: SOCIAL ANTHROPOID, which is used to analyze metadata on emails, instant messenger chats, social media connections and conversations, plus “telephony” metadata about phone calls, cell phone locations, text and multimedia messages; MEMORY HOLE, which logs queries entered into search engines and associates each search with an IP address; MARBLED GECKO, which sifts through details about searches people have entered into Google Maps and Google Earth; and INFINITE MONKEYS, which analyzes data about the usage of online bulletin boards and forums. GCHQ has other programs that it uses to analyze the content of intercepted communications, such as the full written body of emails and the audio of phone calls. One of the most important content collection capabilities is TEMPORA, which mines vast amounts of emails, instant messages, voice calls and other communications and makes them accessible through a Google-style search tool named XKEYSCORE.
  • As of September 2012, TEMPORA was collecting “more than 40 billion pieces of content a day” and it was being used to spy on people across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, according to a top-secret memo outlining the scope of the program. The existence of TEMPORA was first revealed by The Guardian in June 2013. To analyze all of the communications it intercepts and to build a profile of the individuals it is monitoring, GCHQ uses a variety of different tools that can pull together all of the relevant information and make it accessible through a single interface. SAMUEL PEPYS is one such tool, built by the British spies to analyze both the content and metadata of emails, browsing sessions, and instant messages as they are being intercepted in real time. One screenshot of SAMUEL PEPYS in action shows the agency using it to monitor an individual in Sweden who visited a page about GCHQ on the U.S.-based anti-secrecy website Cryptome.
  • Partly due to the U.K.’s geographic location — situated between the United States and the western edge of continental Europe — a large amount of the world’s Internet traffic passes through its territory across international data cables. In 2010, GCHQ noted that what amounted to “25 percent of all Internet traffic” was transiting the U.K. through some 1,600 different cables. The agency said that it could “survey the majority of the 1,600” and “select the most valuable to switch into our processing systems.”
  • According to Joss Wright, a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, tapping into the cables allows GCHQ to monitor a large portion of foreign communications. But the cables also transport masses of wholly domestic British emails and online chats, because when anyone in the U.K. sends an email or visits a website, their computer will routinely send and receive data from servers that are located overseas. “I could send a message from my computer here [in England] to my wife’s computer in the next room and on its way it could go through the U.S., France, and other countries,” Wright says. “That’s just the way the Internet is designed.” In other words, Wright adds, that means “a lot” of British data and communications transit across international cables daily, and are liable to be swept into GCHQ’s databases.
  • A map from a classified GCHQ presentation about intercepting communications from undersea cables. GCHQ is authorized to conduct dragnet surveillance of the international data cables through so-called external warrants that are signed off by a government minister. The external warrants permit the agency to monitor communications in foreign countries as well as British citizens’ international calls and emails — for example, a call from Islamabad to London. They prohibit GCHQ from reading or listening to the content of “internal” U.K. to U.K. emails and phone calls, which are supposed to be filtered out from GCHQ’s systems if they are inadvertently intercepted unless additional authorization is granted to scrutinize them. However, the same rules do not apply to metadata. A little-known loophole in the law allows GCHQ to use external warrants to collect and analyze bulk metadata about the emails, phone calls, and Internet browsing activities of British people, citizens of closely allied countries, and others, regardless of whether the data is derived from domestic U.K. to U.K. communications and browsing sessions or otherwise. In March, the existence of this loophole was quietly acknowledged by the U.K. parliamentary committee’s surveillance review, which stated in a section of its report that “special protection and additional safeguards” did not apply to metadata swept up using external warrants and that domestic British metadata could therefore be lawfully “returned as a result of searches” conducted by GCHQ.
  • Perhaps unsurprisingly, GCHQ appears to have readily exploited this obscure legal technicality. Secret policy guidance papers issued to the agency’s analysts instruct them that they can sift through huge troves of indiscriminately collected metadata records to spy on anyone regardless of their nationality. The guidance makes clear that there is no exemption or extra privacy protection for British people or citizens from countries that are members of the Five Eyes, a surveillance alliance that the U.K. is part of alongside the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “If you are searching a purely Events only database such as MUTANT BROTH, the issue of location does not occur,” states one internal GCHQ policy document, which is marked with a “last modified” date of July 2012. The document adds that analysts are free to search the databases for British metadata “without further authorization” by inputing a U.K. “selector,” meaning a unique identifier such as a person’s email or IP address, username, or phone number. Authorization is “not needed for individuals in the U.K.,” another GCHQ document explains, because metadata has been judged “less intrusive than communications content.” All the spies are required to do to mine the metadata troves is write a short “justification” or “reason” for each search they conduct and then click a button on their computer screen.
  • Intelligence GCHQ collects on British persons of interest is shared with domestic security agency MI5, which usually takes the lead on spying operations within the U.K. MI5 conducts its own extensive domestic surveillance as part of a program called DIGINT (digital intelligence).
  • GCHQ’s documents suggest that it typically retains metadata for periods of between 30 days to six months. It stores the content of communications for a shorter period of time, varying between three to 30 days. The retention periods can be extended if deemed necessary for “cyber defense.” One secret policy paper dated from January 2010 lists the wide range of information the agency classes as metadata — including location data that could be used to track your movements, your email, instant messenger, and social networking “buddy lists,” logs showing who you have communicated with by phone or email, the passwords you use to access “communications services” (such as an email account), and information about websites you have viewed.
  • Records showing the full website addresses you have visited — for instance, www.gchq.gov.uk/what_we_do — are treated as content. But the first part of an address you have visited — for instance, www.gchq.gov.uk — is treated as metadata. In isolation, a single metadata record of a phone call, email, or website visit may not reveal much about a person’s private life, according to Ethan Zuckerman, director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Civic Media. But if accumulated and analyzed over a period of weeks or months, these details would be “extremely personal,” he told The Intercept, because they could reveal a person’s movements, habits, religious beliefs, political views, relationships, and even sexual preferences. For Zuckerman, who has studied the social and political ramifications of surveillance, the most concerning aspect of large-scale government data collection is that it can be “corrosive towards democracy” — leading to a chilling effect on freedom of expression and communication. “Once we know there’s a reasonable chance that we are being watched in one fashion or another it’s hard for that not to have a ‘panopticon effect,’” he said, “where we think and behave differently based on the assumption that people may be watching and paying attention to what we are doing.”
  • When compared to surveillance rules in place in the U.S., GCHQ notes in one document that the U.K. has “a light oversight regime.” The more lax British spying regulations are reflected in secret internal rules that highlight greater restrictions on how NSA databases can be accessed. The NSA’s troves can be searched for data on British citizens, one document states, but they cannot be mined for information about Americans or other citizens from countries in the Five Eyes alliance. No such constraints are placed on GCHQ’s own databases, which can be sifted for records on the phone calls, emails, and Internet usage of Brits, Americans, and citizens from any other country. The scope of GCHQ’s surveillance powers explain in part why Snowden told The Guardian in June 2013 that U.K. surveillance is “worse than the U.S.” In an interview with Der Spiegel in July 2013, Snowden added that British Internet cables were “radioactive” and joked: “Even the Queen’s selfies to the pool boy get logged.”
  • In recent years, the biggest barrier to GCHQ’s mass collection of data does not appear to have come in the form of legal or policy restrictions. Rather, it is the increased use of encryption technology that protects the privacy of communications that has posed the biggest potential hindrance to the agency’s activities. “The spread of encryption … threatens our ability to do effective target discovery/development,” says a top-secret report co-authored by an official from the British agency and an NSA employee in 2011. “Pertinent metadata events will be locked within the encrypted channels and difficult, if not impossible, to prise out,” the report says, adding that the agencies were working on a plan that would “(hopefully) allow our Internet Exploitation strategy to prevail.”
Paul Merrell

Last Call Working Draft -- W3C Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0 - 0 views

www.w3.org/ATAG20

accessibility authoring tools web standards W3C

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Jul 10 - Cached
  • This is a Working Draft of the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) version 2.0. This document includes recommendations for assisting authoring tool developers to make the authoring tools that they develop more accessible to people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, motor difficulties, speech difficulties, and others. Accessibility, from an authoring tool perspective, includes addressing the needs of two (potentially overlapping) user groups with disabilities: authors of web content, whose needs are met by ensuring that the authoring tool user interface itself is accessible (addressed by Part A of the guidelines), and end users of web content, whose needs are met by ensuring that all authors are enabled, supported, and guided towards producing accessible web content (addressed by Part B of the guidelines).
  • Examples of authoring tools: ATAG 2.0 applies to a wide variety of web content generating applications, including, but not limited to: web page authoring tools (e.g., WYSIWYG HTML editors) software for directly editing source code (see note below) software for converting to web content technologies (e.g., "Save as HTML" features in office suites) integrated development environments (e.g., for web application development) software that generates web content on the basis of templates, scripts, command-line input or "wizard"-type processes software for rapidly updating portions of web pages (e.g., blogging, wikis, online forums) software for generating/managing entire web sites (e.g., content management systems, courseware tools, content aggregators) email clients that send messages in web content technologies multimedia authoring tools debugging tools for web content software for creating mobile web applications
  • Web-based and non-web-based: ATAG 2.0 applies equally to authoring tools of web content that are web-based, non-web-based or a combination (e.g., a non-web-based markup editor with a web-based help system, a web-based content management system with a non-web-based file uploader client). Real-time publishing: ATAG 2.0 applies to authoring tools with workflows that involve real-time publishing of web content (e.g., some collaborative tools). For these authoring tools, conformance to Part B of ATAG 2.0 may involve some combination of real-time accessibility supports and additional accessibility supports available after the real-time authoring session (e.g., the ability to add captions for audio that was initially published in real-time). For more information, see the Implementing ATAG 2.0 - Appendix E: Real-time content production. Text Editors: ATAG 2.0 is not intended to apply to simple text editors that can be used to edit source content, but that include no support for the production of any particular web content technology. In contrast, ATAG 2.0 can apply to more sophisticated source content editors that support the production of specific web content technologies (e.g., with syntax checking, markup prediction, etc.).
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Jul 10
     
    Link is the latest version link so page should update when this specification graduates to a W3C recommendation.
Gary Edwards

The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash - Charlie's Diary - 1 views

www.antipope.org/...hy-steve-jobs-hates-flash.html

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe's goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps."
  • he really does not want cross-platform apps that might divert attention and energy away from his application ecosystem
  • This is why there's a stench of panic hanging over silicon valley. this is why Apple have turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP have just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it's why everyone is terrified of Google: The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone's trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Apr 10
     
    Excellent must read!  Best explanation of what is currently driving Silicon Valley.  Charlie puts all the pieces in context, provides expert perspective, and then pushes everything forward to describe a highly probable future.  MUST READ stuff! excerpts:  I've got a theory, and it's this: Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future - the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn - on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here's why ... We have known since the mid-1990s that the internet was the future of computing.  With increasing bandwidth, data doesn't need to be trapped in the hard drives of our desktop computers: data and interaction can follow us out into the world we live in. .....Wifi and 4G protocols will shortly be delivering 50-150mbps to whatever gizmo is in your pocket, over the air. ......  It's easier to lay a single fat fibre to a radio transciever station than it is to lay lots of thin fibres to everybody's front door.... Anyway, here's Steve Jobs' strategic dilemma in a nutshell: the PC industry as we have known it for a third of a century is beginning to die. PCs are becoming commodity items. The price of PCs and laptops is falling by about 50% per decade in real terms, despite performance simultaneously rising in real terms. The profit margin on a typical netbook or desktop PC is under 10%.  At the same time, wireless broadband is coming. As it does so, organizations and users will increasingly move their data out into the cloud (read: onto hordes of servers racked up high in anonymous data warehouses, owned and maintained by some large corporation like Google). Software will be delivered as a service to users wherever they are, via whatev
Paul Merrell

MPEG-LA Considering Patent Pool for VP8/WebM | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThi... - 0 views

digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/...y-not-be-royalty-free-for-long

WebM VP8 patent Google H.264

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 May 10 - No Cached
  • A new era of Web video without the patent-encumbered formats that have defined the Internet to date. That seems ideal. But like many ideals, it may prove to be unattainable. As a number of observers have already noted VP8 isn’t free from patent liability. And now that Google has open-sourced it as part of WebM, that liability is likely to become an issue. And quickly, too. Indeed, Larry Horn, CEO of MPEG LA, the consortium that controls the AVC/H.264 video standard, tells me that the group is already looking at creating a patent pool license for VP8.
  • It would seem, then, that VP8 may end up subject to the same licensing issues as H.264. If MPEG LA does create a patent pool license for the standard, the free lunch Google promised yesterday may not be free after all.
Paul Merrell

U.S. Is Said to Scrutinize Apple's Online Music Tactics - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...26apple.html

antitrust Apple Flash multimedia market share

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 May 10 - Cached
  • The Justice Department is examining Apple’s tactics in the market for digital music, and its staff members have talked to major music labels and Internet music companies, according to several people briefed on the conversations.
  • But people briefed on the inquiries also said investigators had asked in particular about recent allegations that Apple used its dominant market position to persuade music labels to refuse to give the online retailer Amazon.com exclusive access to music about to be released.
  • The inquiry is one of several by the federal government involving Apple. The Federal Trade Commission is moving ahead with a separate investigation of Apple’s rules for developers who create applications for the iPhone operating system, according to a person familiar with that discussion. That inquiry, initiated by complaint from Adobe Systems, the maker of the Flash format for Internet video, is said to be in its early stages as well.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The Justice Department has also reportedly been investigating the hiring practices at Apple and other top technology companies, including Intel, I.B.M. and Google, asking whether the companies have improperly agreed to avoid hiring each other’s employees.
Paul Merrell

Opera: Web standards could eclipse Flash - ZDNet.co.uk - 0 views

news.zdnet.co.uk/...0,1000000121,39655473,00.htm

html5 Opera flash Adobe

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 May 09 - Cached
  • The next revision of the HTML web language will make Adobe's Flash technology largely redundant, according to the chief executive of browser company Opera. The open web standards included in HyperText Markup Language version 5 (HTML 5) provide a viable alternative to Adobe's proprietary Flash for the delivery of rich media web content, Jon von Tetzchner told ZDNet UK on Wednesday.
  • Von Tetzchner said that HTML 5's handling of rich media meant that Flash — Adobe's ubiquitous, proprietary multimedia platform for the web — is becoming largely unnecessary. "You can do most things with web standards today," von Tetzchner said. "In some ways, you may say you don't need Flash."
Gary Edwards

HTML5 Will Transform Mobile Business Intelligence and CRM - 0 views

www.enterpriseappstoday.com/...business-intelligence-crm.html

HTML5 OpenWeb OpenWeb-Productivity-Platform Cloud-Productivity-Platform Cloud-Compound-Document

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • "HTML5 is a big push forward, especially considering how it handles different media as well as cross-device portability," said Tiemo Winterkamp, senior vice president of global marketing at business intelligence (BI) vendor arcplan
  • one big benefit of HTML5 is that browsers will be able to integrate additional content like multimedia, mail and RIA with enhanced rendering capabilities. And plans have been made to allow future HTML5 browsers to securely access sensor and touch information, which makes HTML5 a viable alternative to native application development for such functions.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 18 Oct 11
       
      The browser becomes the compound document container, but HTML5 is clearly the document format.  Any application or Office Suite capable of creating HTML5 documents, or connecting, linking and embedding information and application services in another apps HTML5 document would be cloud productivity platform ready.  Similar to a local Windows workgroup, the database and transaction processing servers can be in the cloud, connecting to browser based apps and interfaces where the essence of the new compound document is created or interactively expressed.  Kind of cool having GPS built into the information stream instead of having to type in a zip code, and refreshing a legacy compound document or compound chart.
  • With HTML5, nearly every piece of internet content we can envision today will be able to be coded in HTML, Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and therefore automatically portable to all environments and browsers supporting HTML5.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "This approach is very attractive for BI vendors who aim to provide business critical information anywhere, anytime and on any device," said Winterkamp. "The result is an attractive, multi-functional user interface with as little design and deployment effort as possible. And more importantly, you only need to develop these apps once for all devices."
  • Gary Edwards on 18 Oct 11
     
    Good article on the increasing use of HTML5 for business apps.  The focus is on mobile devices, even though HTML5 clearly targets anything capable of running a WebKit class browser.  The article also demonstrates, albeit unwittingly, the use of HTML5 as a cloud platform "Compound Document" model.  Something far more important than the comparatively limited focus of BI and CRM mobility apps.   A Cloud Producitvity Platform will replace the legacy Desktop Productivity Platform anchored on Microsoft's Windows-MSOffice workgroup networking.  Just as Compound Documents were the fuel of desktop productivity apps and services, a new breed of compound documents will fuel cloud productivity based workgroups.  The article even demonstrates the basics of embedding charts, interactive feeds, media  and database streams in HTML5 document interfaces.  Still missing real time messaging between apps, but clearly the HTML5 cloud compound document model has arrived. excerpt: HTML5 will lead to richer mobile BI and CRM apps that can be used across browsers and devices. HTML has evolved considerably since it was first mapped out by Tim Berners-Lee more than 20 years ago. Now we're up to HTML 5.0, which could have a significant effect on the business intelligence and CRM landscape.
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