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The blurb is a bit misleading. This is a project that's been under way since last year; what's new is that they're moving under the Linux Foundation umbrella for various non-technical suoport purposes. By sometime this summer, encrypting web site data and broadcasting it over https is  slated to become a two-click process. Or on the linux command line: $ sudo apt-get install lets-encrypt $ lets-encrypt example.com This is a project that grew out of public disgust with NSA surveillance, designed to flood the NSA (and other bad actors) with so much encrypted data that they will be able to decrypt only a tiny fraction (decryption without the decryption key takes gobs of computer cycles).  The other half of the solution is already available, the HTTPS Everywhere extension for the Chrome, FIrefox, and Opera web browsers by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the TOR Project that translates your every request for a http address into an effort to connect to an https address preferentially before establishing an http connection if https is not available. HTTPS Everywhere is fast and does not noticeably add to your page loading time. If you'd like to effortlessly imoprove your online security and help burden NSA, install HTTPS Everywhere. Get it at https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

Is this the wrath of Sutor?  Last week he threw the Linux desktop under the bus.  And now this?  No wonder @rcweir  has shut down the slime machine. excerpt:  IBM has essentially declared war on the technical standards process. The words seem supportive enough, but when you read between them, you can see that a systematic round of arm-twisting is likely about to happen. Anyone who knows tech is used to the dance that standard setting is. Experts from various companies serve on the committees, each with a sense of what ought to work "best" and trying to wrangle decisions in their direction. This is competitive dominance in action and the stakes are high. That's what makes Big Blue's more-collegial-than-thou stance so amusing, with the following "tenets":

transclusion of hypertext documents. Transclusion is technically defined as "when you put that one thing in that other thing". In its current implementation, Twitter has declared that media which is shown within the Twitter interface comes from selected partners. But actually, the technology to allow embedding of rich media from almost any site already exists, using a system called OEmbed. Geeky stuff, but it's made by nice people who are pretty smart, and it lets any site say, "Hey, if you want to put our thing in your thing, do it like this". It works. Lots of sites do it. Nobody's getting rich off of it, but nobody's getting sued, and in between those two extremes lies most of what makes the Web great.

The General Services Administration made a bold decision to move its email and collaboration systems to the cloud.  This is a huge win for cloud-computing, but perhaps should have been expected since last week the Feds announced a new requisition and purchase mandate that cloud-computing had to be the FIRST consideration for federal agency purchases.  Note that the General Services Administration oversees requisitions and purchases for all Federal agencies!  This is huge.  Estimated to be worth $8 billion to cloud-computing providers. The cloud-computing market is estimated to be $30 Billion, but Gartner did not anticipate or expect Federal Agencies to embrace cloud-computing let alone issue a mandate for it.   In the RFP issued last June, it was easy to see their goals in the statement of objectives: This Statement of Objectives (SOO) describes the goals that GSA expects to achieve with regard to the 1. modernization of its e-mail system; 2. provision of an effective collaborative working environment; 3. reduction of the government's in-house system maintenance burden by providing related business, technical, and management functions; and 4. application of appropriate security and privacy safeguards. GSA announced yesterday that they choose Google Apps for email and collaboration and Unisys as the implementation partner. So what does this mean? What it means (WIM) #1: GSA employees will be using a next-generation information workplace. And that means mobile, device-agnostic, and location-agile. Gmail on an iPad? No problem. Email from a home computer? Yep. For GSA and for every other agency and most companies, it's important to give employees the tools to be productive and engage from every location on every device. "Work becomes a thing you do and not a place you go." [Thanks to Earl Newsome of Estee Lauder for that quote.] WIM #2: GSA will save 50% of the cost of email over five years. This is also what our research on the cost of email o

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

wow.  Six years and all they have migrated are 2,500 out of 14,0000 desktops!  The curse of the Microsoft Productivity Environment strikes again as legacy workgroups, workflows and the mesh of compound documents that drive them prove to be very stubborn.  The funny thing is that, as Munich struggles with this 1995 level desktop transition, Microsoft is preparing to move those very same legacy productivity environments to a proprietary Web Productivity Platform.  I wonder what Munich's Web plans are? excerpt: Schießl says the transition required enormous background effort which involved eliminating many IT dependencies created by individual vendors over the years. More than 20,000 templates had to be consolidated and converted into new templates, macros or web applications. Most templates and text blocks are now managed via the WollMux program, which was released in 2008. Schießl said that the developers also had to adapt a number of corporate applications such as SAP for use with ODF. According to the review, another achievement in 2009 was the establishment of Linux client pilot areas as a step towards the final aim of migrating all twelve of the city administration's departments to Linux. Schießl says this was the last fundamental step required to enable general client migration in the coming years. Although only 2,500 of around 14,000 workstations have been converted to the custom-built basic LiMux client, the hardest part was to get them all up and running, which required going over inconsistent IT infrastructures that had developed over the years and training the IT staff for the technical switch. As Robert Pogson observes in his blog, six and a half years after the decision was made to switch to free software, the Munich Linux pioneers have completed about 80 per cent of the project's total workload.

EU settlement will alter Microsoft's stance on interoperability By Kurt Mackie Dec 21, 2009 Microsoft provided more details about its settlement with the European Commission (EC), particularly with regard to interoperability agreements. In a blog post on Thursday, Dave Heiner, Microsoft's vice president and deputy general counsel, claimed that the company has pledged to implement a threefold approach to interoperability that EC Commissioner Neelie Kroes outlined in past speeches. Heiner summarized that approach: companies should disclose technical information, provide a remedy if the information is inadequate and charge equitable royalty rates for associated intellectual property. Kroes had also specifically called for companies to follow open standards as one of the best ways to achieve interoperability. However, Heiner omitted the word, "open," from his comment. He said that "products from different firms can work well together when they implement common, well-designed industry standards." Microsoft's interoperability pledge announced this week appears to continue ideas the company put forth in February 2008. At that time, the company announced broad interoperability principles as well as APIs for software developers working with Microsoft's mainline products, including Windows client and server operating systems, Exchange, Office and SharePoint, among others. Microsoft has been releasing documentation for that purpose, with "hundreds of Microsoft developers" devoted to the effort, according to Heiner. The new elements to Microsoft's interoperability pledge appear to be warranty and patent-sharing templates. Those documents, and more, can be accessed at the end of a statement about the settlement by Brad Smith, Microsoft's senior vice president and general counsel.

Bingo!  Took five years, but finally someone gets it: excerpt:  Great question. After 10 years, OpenOffice hasn't had much traction in the enterprise - supported by under 10% of firms, and today it's facing more competition from online apps from Google and Zoho. I'm not counting OpenOffice completely out yet, however, since IBM has been making good progress on features with Symphony and Oracle is positioning OpenOffice for the web, desktop and mobile - a first. But barriers to OpenOffice and Web-based tools persist, and not just on a feature/function basis. Common barriers include: Third-party integration requirements. Some applications only work with Office. For example, one financial services firm I spoke with was forced to retain Office because its employees needed to work with Fiserv, a proprietary data center that is very Microsoft centric. "What was working pretty well was karate chopped." Another firm rolled out OpenOffice.org to 7,00 users and had to revert back 5,00 of them when they discovered one of the main apps they work with only supported Microsoft. User acceptance. Many firms say that they can overcome pretty much all of the technical issues but face challenges around user acceptance. One firm I spoke with went so far as to "customize" their OpenOffice solution with a Microsoft logo and told employees it was a version of Office. The implementation went smoothly. Others have said that they have met resistance from business users who didn't want Office taken off their desktop. Other strategies include providing OpenOffice to only new employees and to transition through attrition. But this can cause compatibility issues. Lack of seamless interoperability with Office. Just like third-party apps may only work with Office, many collaborative activities force use of particular versions of Office. Today's Web-based and OpenOffice solutions do not provide seamless round tripping between Office and their applications. Corel, with its

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For those that needed just a little more proof, Gartner (news, site) has confirmed cloud computing is hot. In fact, cloud technology is so hot that it topped Gartner's 2011 CIO Agenda. Even if you managed to resist the siren of prime time TV beckoning, "To the cloud!", it's unlikely you'll want to ignore the voices of over 2,000 CIOs . The Cloud Gartner released its survey of 2,014 CIOs representing more than US$ 160 billion in spending across 50 countries and 38 industries. Cloud computing, virtualization and mobile led the list of technical priorities.

This white paper will give you a small planning toolset and a few tips to help get you oriented. I'd like you to get a Drupal 7 website planned and online today, and the fastest way to get there is Drupal Gardens (drupalgardens.com). It saves you from the technical overhead and lets you dive into how Drupal works, exploring the administrative interface and learning how to organize content. Download - 10 pages.  How to set up Drupal 7, May 2011.  Acquia

Review of SharePoint-Office 2010 integration.  MSOffice access and integration with SharePoint "content" has been improved and expanded.  Templates, forms and reports have been moved to the SharePoint center.  Or should i say "the many possible SharePoint centers".   There is also an interesting integration of the tagging system, with smart-tags becoming Bing enriched.  Good-bye Google.  Good-bye RDF - RDFa. excerpt:  Many enterprises buy into Microsoft's integrated vision of collaboration because they assume their products work well together. While in the case of SharePoint and Office this is technically true (more so with the 2007 versions), many of these integrations are either not used by or not visible to the average Office user. However, integrations introduced in SharePoint and Office 2010 may change this perception because they are exposed in menus and dialogs used by nearly every Office user. Perhaps supporting SharePoint Online and having SharePoint provide the basis of Office Live Workspaces is encouraging the SharePoint and Office planners to take a more user-centric perspective. In any case, here are some of the new integrations between SharePoint and Office 2010 that you should look for.

This new technical committee IPR mode may not make much sense to the legally-inclined without reading the new section 2.7 definition of "Covered Product." There we learn that the patent covenant extends only so far as the implementation is conformant with the standard. I count that as a good thing, curing a defect in the Sun Covenant Not to Sue in regard to ODF, which at least arguably extended far enough to confer immunity on those who embrace and extend a standard. But the reciprocity provision allowing contributors to counter-sue for infringement if sued clashes with many definitions of an "open standard" adopted by governmental entities for procurement purposes. So a question remains as to who must bend, government or OASIS members.

Microsoft has announced the next generation of MSOffice, and it turns out to be SharePoint at the center of the deep connected MSOffice "rich client" desktop productivity environment, and, an online Web version of MSOffice. Who would have guessed that one of the key features to MOSS would be universal accessibility to and collaboration on MSOffice documents - without loss of fidelity? No doubt the embedded logic that drive BBP's (Bound Business Processes) is also perfectly preserved. Excerpt: "Office Web Applications, the online companion to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications, allow you to access documents from anywhere. You can even simultaneously share and work on documents with others online," Microsoft says on its Office 2010 Technical Preview site. "View documents across PCs, mobile phones, and the Web without compromising document fidelity. Create new documents and do basic editing using the familiar Office interface."

wikiWORD and SPoint get the go ahead!

HTML5 development company appMobi is releasing a new browser today called MobiUs that will give mobile Web apps the same type of functionality that now is currently only enjoyed by native apps for platforms like iOS and Android. AppMobi thinks of MobiUs as the replacement for Flash in mobile - it renders mobile websites like a Flash extension would and gives developers device access in ways previously unavailable to in HTML5. MobiUs is technically a mobile browser. That is not the way appMobi thinks it will be used though. The company expects it to be function more like a browser extension. Like Flash, users will be prompted to download it once and from then it will just run in on the device.

I'm informed that Comey will also call for legislation outlawing communication by whispering because of technical difficulties in law enforcement monitoring of such communications. 

Tucked into a budget authorization act in December without press notice. Section 309 (the Act is linked from the article) appears to be very broad authority for the NSA to intercept any form of telephone or other electronic information in bulk. There are far more exceptions from the five-year retention limitation than the encrypted information exception. When reading this, keep in mind that the U.S. intelligence community plays semantic games to obfuscate what it does. One of its word plays is that communications are not "collected" until an analyst looks at or listens to partiuclar data, even though the data will be searched to find information countless times before it becomes "collected." That searching was the major basis for a decision by the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. that bulk collection of telephone communications was unconstitutional: Under the Fourth Amendment, a "search" or "seizure" requiring a judicial warrant occurs no later than when the information is intercepted. That case is on appeal, has been briefed and argued, and a decision could come any time now. Similar cases are pending in two other courts of appeals. Also, an important definition from the new Intelligence Authorization Act: "(a) DEFINITIONS.-In this section: (1) COVERED COMMUNICATION.-The term ''covered communication'' means any nonpublic telephone or electronic communication acquired without the consent of a person who is a party to the communication, including communications in electronic storage."